Fighting City Hall Takes on New Meaning in This Town : Politics: Multiple recall petitions, personal attacks and voter apathy are business as usual in this small, poverty-stricken community.

By Cudahy standards, it’s politics as usual these days.

Recall petitions against three of the five City Council members are in the works. Four of the council members are trying to oust the fifth, while a jilted council candidate is trying to oust two of those four. The political air is thick with personal attacks, bickering and furious charges and countercharges of mis-, mal- and nonfeasance in office.

Partisans are burning up the phone lines and pounding the sidewalks to line up support in what they describe as an epic struggle for the soul of this small, poverty-afflicted city southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

No one would describe the current level of Cudahy political dialogue as “high road.”

“They’re nothing but a bunch of kids,” Councilman John O. Robertson, 51, an engineer, says of his four colleagues, all of whom are sponsoring an effort to oust him from office. “They want to kill a voice of the people, that’s their intent.”

“This is nothing but a low-down power play” by Robertson, says Mayor Jack Cluck, 72, a retired truck driver who is the target of one recall petition and a sponsor of the recall drive against Robertson. “He never votes for anything that’s good for the city. He even called me a crook. This time we’ve made up our minds to get rid of him.”

A majority of Cudahy’s 23,000 residents seem to be either unaware of what is going on in local politics or know what is going on and are thoroughly disgusted with it.

“It just goes to show you,” said one 25-year resident of the city who identified herself only as Alyce. She said she is so fed up with the antics of the local pols that, like 97% of Cudahy residents, she does not vote in local elections anymore.

“You can take a perfectly nice, decent, honest person and put him in elected office, and what have you got? You’ve got a politician is what you’ve got. This City Council is a joke.”

Even Cudahy City Manager Jack M. Joseph, who is both an arbiter and an issue in the fights among the city’s elected officials, seems grimly resigned to the bitter and seemingly constant, internecine political warfare.

“Unfortunately, it’s typical,” said Joseph, noting that the city has had half a dozen political recall efforts in as many years. None of them garnered enough legitimate voter signatures to make it to the ballot.

“We’re a small city, and we really don’t need these kinds of shenanigans,” Joseph said.

Cudahy is one square mile in size and has a per-capita income just under $6,000, making it “the second-poorest suburb in America,” according to one study. Homes in the city generally range from modest to exceedingly modest; crime, gangs and graffiti are constant problems. The city is primarily residential and light commercial, without the industrial tax base required to provide revenue for many government services.

The stage for the current battle was set in April in City Council elections, in which two of the five at-large seats were at stake. In that election, Larry Galvan, 47, a youth services coordinator and political newcomer, ran against Robertson, a council member for 16 years.

It was a typical Cudahy campaign, complete with allegations of political sign stealing, slander and a startlingly low turnout. Of Cudahy’s 23,000 residents, only about 2,800 were registered to vote. Of those, only about 600--about 2.5% of the population--made it to the polls. Many of them were senior citizens, who constitute the most powerful political faction in the city by virtue of being registered to vote.

When the smoke cleared, Galvan had missed getting on the council by 18 votes, while Robertson had won another term. Since then, Robertson has disagreed with the other council members on virtually everything, from the city manager’s $76,000-a-year salary to whether a McDonald’s restaurant should be invited into the city, to whethe the City Council members should attend a conference in Palm Springs.

“He (Robertson) votes against everything we want to do,” Cluck said.

One of the major contentions between the factions is the city’s utility-users tax, which places a 4% tax on natural gas, electricity and telephone bills of city residents and businesses. Robertson and his ally, Galvan, say the tax places an undue burden on poor people in the city. Their opponents--council members Cluck, Joseph Graffio, David M. Silva and Alex F. Rodriguez--say the tax is necessary to pay for services such as police protection and parks.

Earlier this year, Galvan circulated a petition to repeal the utility-users tax and said he gathered 1,000 signatures. But the council refused to accept the petition, saying it was legally worthless. After that, Galvan started drawing up a recall petition against two non-Latino members of the council, Cluck and Graffio, charging that they were “insensitive to the needs of the people.”

Galvan’s opponents say that Galvan is a puppet for Robertson, a charge Galvan angrily denies.

“These guys can say whatever they want about me,” Galvan said, “but we need balanced representation on the council. Not all of us are stupid in the city of Cudahy.”

At the September council meeting, minutes after Galvan served the notice of intent to circulate a recall petition on the two council members, Rodriguez pulled out his own recall petition notice against Robertson, which the other council members promptly signed. That petition charged, among other things, that Robertson had displayed “insensitivity to the wishes and needs of Cudahy residents.”

“I didn’t want to do this,” Rodriguez said. “But that (recall petition) was the last straw. We’ve reached the point where the man has got to go.”

Robertson’s official response, an angry document with lots of italics and large blocks of capital letters, said the other members were trying to create what he called a “DICTATORSHIP IN CUDAHY.”

The anti-Robertson petition is being circulated. If one-fourth of the city’s registered voters, about 700, sign the recall petition, the matter will go on the ballot.

Galvan is redrafting his recall petitions against Cluck and Graffio because his notices to circulate petitions were thrown out on technical grounds by Joseph, leading to charges by Galvan that Joseph is in the political pocket of the council majority.

So Cudahy voters may soon have an opportunity to sign opposing recall petitions involving their elected leaders.

Joseph, who will have to count and verify the signatures on the petitions, says: “I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people signed both of them.”