Why Melanie Lomax Deserves a Medal

If the city gave a medal for guts, Melanie Lomax would surely deserve it.

Lomax, you’ll recall, is the African-American attorney and civil rights activist whom the Los Angeles City Council refused to confirm last month as a Water and Power commissioner.

Rejection rather than reward was her pay-back for what has turned out to be a farsighted and gutsy effort.

With most of the City Council paralyzed, Lomax, then president of the Board of Police Commissioners, tried to force out Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Following that effort, Lomax was routed, dismissed from the Police Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. Gates remained in office, and we had a riot.

I’m not saying that another chief would have prevented the riots. But the city certainly would have been in better shape to withstand the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial if it had not suffered through Gates’ tense and argumentative last few months in office.

That’s why Lomax deserves a medal. But, as she told me Tuesday, “being right does not mean you win. That is a lesson that, at the age of 42, I have learned.”

But not before she got the ax.

After Lomax’s nomination was killed, Bradley chose another African-American woman, Constance Rice, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Rice supported Lomax and shares her goal of pushing the Department of Water and Power to hire and promote more minorities and to increase the number of minority contractors doing business with the city.

The council is expected to confirm Rice’s nomination. But let’s not put the Lomax controversy behind us, for it says a lot about the get-along, go-along brand of leadership at City Hall.

City Hall isn’t very complicated but it takes two analogies to describe it.

The first is that City Hall resembles a department store window. The top officials, as is the case with store window mannequins, look and think alike. They are important, in the sense that you need them around. But they don’t do very much.

The second analogy was suggested to me by Westside attorney Roger Diamond, who became a student of City Hall while fighting city efforts to drill for oil in the Pacific Palisades.

Diamond wonders why Bradley always appoints the same people to city commissions. “It’s like NBA teams choosing coaches,” he said. “They always choose the same guys, like Chuck Daly or Pat Riley. There are 3 million people in L.A. Can’t Bradley find anyone else?”

Into this sameness stepped Melanie Lomax.

She is a brusque woman with no taste for the small talk and mutual compliments so important to political life. Instead, she pursues her goals with a single-minded intensity that clashes with politicians’ eternal search for compromise.

I talked to a lot of people about Lomax. Some of the terms people use to describe her are: Hair-trigger temper. Rigid. Impatient. Insensitive. Spoiled brat. Also, smart, tough and courageous.

After she was forced to resign from the Police Commission, Lomax asked Bradley for another part-time commission post. Bradley, feeling an obligation to make it up to her for being removed from the Police Commission, mentioned that the term of Water and Power Commissioner Mary Nichols was expiring. Lomax said she’d like the job.

The City Council closed ranks against her, covering its path with excuses and obfuscations.

Lomax lost a couple of votes from environmentalists, who said her environmental experience was paltry compared to that of Nichols, a former chairwoman of the state Air Resources Board and a leader in the environmental movement.

I didn’t think much of that argument. A few months of meetings and after-hours reading would bring her up to speed with most of the board members, whose basic mission is to deliver water and power. Anyway, I’ve seen the council approve dozens of commissioners without asking about their qualifications. You don’t have to be a pilot or an air controller to serve on the airport commission.

One council member involved in the fight told me that Lomax’s prickly personality also cost her votes. That was a laugh. If you had to pass a personality test to be a city commissioner they’d never get a quorum at a commission meeting.

The heart of the opposition came from the old Gates supporters, still angry at Lomax long after the chief’s departure.

She was a fierce, unsmiling reminder of their months of inaction, of standing around like department store mannequins during one of the city’s greatest crises. No wonder the council didn’t want her around.