Another Gadfly From Hell

At any given moment in L.A. County, someone is hunched over a public report in the quiet of his home, smiling. Tiny drops of saliva edge their way from the corners of his mouth and splash on the report, lingering like diamonds on the areas of his interest.

It is after midnight, but the person has no intention of resting until he has read every word and has fixed every questionable portion of the document in his head. Only then will he cease his fevered study.

Who is this guy, you ask, and why does he drool with delight over excessive government spending and bureaucratic bungling?

Why do his adversaries perceive him as a man who, after the report is read and the drooling done, slinks into his yard and howls like a werewolf at the summer moon while mayors and city managers tremble in their beds?

I’ll tell you who he is. He’s a community activist, a City Hall watchdog, a beast in the night.

I’ve known the type for years, a gadfly from hell motivated by a primeval urge to find political sin in whatever public agency is nearest his home.

One I wrote about had to be carried from a council meeting by police. Another rose to prominence by accusing a woman mayor of being a flasher. A third became so abusive he ended up being committed to a psychiatric ward.

Now there’s a new one on the scene, striding toward a suburban City Hall, a beefy guy in a cowboy hat, with the manner of a bounty hunter. Everybody scatter. It’s Big Jim Brannan, and he’s hungrier than a junkyard hound.

Brannan is a retired IRS agent and appeals judge. When he opens a city report he knows exactly what it’s trying to say because anyone who’s an expert at federal income tax forms knows everything God intended the human species to know about governmental documents.

That’s one of the reasons he’s become a pain in the backside to almost every civic leader in the otherwise peaceful city of Walnut, just off the Pomona Freeway. He knows what’s going on.

Big Jim has got everybody in town so shook up, the City Council has advised its employees they don’t have to talk to him unless they want to. An assistant city manager has been assigned to deal with him personally.

The mayor says he respects a gadfly’s right to study public reports and question public workers, but wishes Big Jim weren’t so damned intimidating.

A farm boy from Indiana, Brannan has lived in Walnut since 1967 and loves its Old West history. The Butterfield stage, he’ll tell you, used to stop just down the road, and you get the feeling he can hear the hoofbeats of its horses in his head. Old guns and quivers of arrows hang on his wall.

“I’m no nut,” Big Jim says, smiling pleasantly. “I’m a model citizen and I’ve got a plaque to prove it.”

Sure enough, he does, signed by a former mayor in gratitude for the time Brannan helped catch a supermarket bandit. But it’s different now.

He got started gadflying last year when he heard they were going to build a second City Hall and began wondering why they needed a second City Hall when half of the first one was still empty?

He didn’t get a lot of coherent answers as far as he was concerned.

“Seems no one wanted the damned thing but they were going to build it anyway,” Jim says. “I decided I’d better start looking into things.”

Since then, he’s looked into a lot of things. He found property the city didn’t even know it owned and began asking questions about a consultant on the payroll whose job no one seemed really clear about.

Big Jim has spent hours before the City Council and has gathered mountains of reports from the city on just about everything.

But what has everyone really p.o.’d was his reaction to a proposal that the working hours of city employees be altered to allow for a three-day weekend every other week.

It would mean they had to come to work at 7:30 a.m. instead of 8. Big Jim wasn’t so sure they were on time as it was. So he began clocking them.

City Manager Linda Holmes called him “insensitive, abrasive and obnoxious.” A councilman referred to him as an anal passage, but not in those exact words.

That’s when the council said no one had to talk to him unless they wanted to. Holmes assigned an assistant to deal specifically with him.

Brannan laughs it off. He isn’t going to stop what he’s doing and is thinking of running for City Council. I hope he doesn’t. We need loners that snarl prowling City Hall.

I like the idea of mayors crossing themselves when a full moon rises and praying they’re not goin’ to become lunch for the likes of a Big Jim Brannan.