Feuding in Bell Gardens Saps Once-Unified Force : Politics: First Latino majority City Council has been stalemated by name-calling, fights and inexperience.

Less than a year ago the victorious new City Council members of Bell Gardens--ordinary folks who overnight became more potent than they had ever dreamed--confidently pushed through a throng of well-wishers.

The winners in a historic landslide election the week before were surrounded by proud members of the Latino political Establishment--state senators and assembly members who had never heard of Frank B. Duran, Josefina Macias, Rodolfo Garcia or George T. Deitch before the election.

Even the Mexican ambassador waited his turn amid the banners, balloons and mariachi music to congratulate the first-ever Latino council majority in Bell Gardens.

Soon the hall was filled with a powerful chant: “The people united will never be divided.”

But that unity was short-lived.

Allegations of illegal hiring practices, verbal abuse of City Hall staff members, internal racism and conflicts of interest have dogged the new council members.

An ambitious plan to create more social programs--carefully mapped out during budget meetings last June--has been stalemated by a deeply divided council that cannot seem to agree on even the simplest proposal.

Finally, last week’s highly charged run-in between then-Mayor Macias and Councilman Duran, in which she threw a chair at him in closed session because she said she was fed up with his sexist attitude toward women, has forced many to wonder: What is going wrong in Bell Gardens?

Some point to the inexperience of the new council, saying that the problems are a symptom of growing pains that will be ironed out in time.

But others believe that the feuding has grown so bad that it will be virtually impossible for them to move on, creating a sort of lame duck council that will get little done.

Finally, there are those who say that no matter who controls the council--whether it is Anglos or Latinos--Bell Gardens has been polarized for so long that a harmonious City Council is only a dream.

“I suspect this is a community that is always going to have a problem getting along,” said Larry Berg, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

“Just because this was a Hispanic council doesn’t mean they weren’t going to succumb to the same downfalls that face other councils,” Berg said. “Whatever happens next, (the council) has to remember that what they did was revolutionary, and you can’t take that away from them.”

Members of the community said last week’s council reorganization--in which Macias was removed as mayor and replaced by Duran--was a first step toward harmony. The internal feuding is over, they insisted. It is time to move on.

“I think (appointing Duran mayor) is something very positive,” Councilwoman Rosa Hernandez said. “He is concerned about the immediate needs of the people in the city, like putting food on their tables. That is our main responsibility.”

But the revised roles on the council did not come without controversy. Garcia, who thought he was going to be appointed mayor pro tem, was chagrined when he was passed over for the title. Several sources said an offhanded remark made in a closed session last week cost him the title.

The tensions that created the recent feuding are in some ways similar to those that brought the four into the political arena in late 1991. A grass-roots coalition--which included Macias, a part-time school district employee and Deitch, a real estate developer--confronted the all-Anglo council, protesting a zoning plan that they thought was unfair to the city’s poorest residents, who are mostly Latinos.

“We had begged and pleaded with them, and they never listened to us,” Macias said at the time. “They ignored us too long and we couldn’t take it anymore.”

Within months, the No-Rezoning Committee had ousted four of the five council members, and had brought to power a new, Latino-led council. In addition to Macias and Deitch, the committee had recruited Duran, an accountant who reluctantly joined the coalition, and Garcia, a self-described community activist and director of the Willie C. Velasquez Center, a nonprofit agency that helps immigrants gain citizenship.

Their first action was to fire the city manager, Claude Booker, who had run Bell Gardens from various posts--councilman, mayor and city manager--for more than two decades. Days later, the city clerk was fired, and the city attorney, assistant city manager and police chief all quit.

The first-time politicians suddenly found themselves in a politically powerful but potentially dangerous situation: lack of expertise among themselves and in City Hall. “Those two dynamics have made it even harder for Bell Gardens,” said Xavier Hermosillo, who heads NEWS for America, a group of Latino business owners that closely watched the election. “Not only was there no experience, but the council inherited horrendous problems in a city that was overwhelmed with political friction and tension.”

To the council, the problems were obvious: The dilapidated, high-density neighborhoods were in dire need of maintenance, and affordable housing was sparse. Gang activity was soaring and the high school’s dropout rate was depressingly high. Unemployment neared 12%, and many of the city’s 42,000 residents remain very poor.

But as poor as the residents are, the city itself is flush. The successful Bicycle Club Casino adds more than $10 million a year to the city’s $19-million budget, giving Bell Gardens the resources to deal with its problems--if its council could agree on the solutions.

The council hired a new city manager, William Vasquez, who had never run a city. Vasquez brought with him a “management coach” who was supposed to teach the old, mostly Anglo City Hall staff how to get along with the new, mostly Latino council and administration.

In his first coaching sessions with the council, consultant Mel Lebarron discovered how tough his task would be.

“(The council) basically refused to listen to anything I was saying,” said Lebarron, adding that he had never seen divisions “quite this intense” in any of the dozens of cities where he has worked. “I could see early on that things could get pretty well out of control.”

Signs that the new government was unraveling began last fall, when Vasquez clashed with council members Duran and Garcia over pressure to hire their friends and campaign workers.

In one instance, Vasquez was told by Garcia to give a job to a Latino maintenance worker who had one of the lowest civil service test scores among potential hires, and in another he was asked to hire a Latino stucco contractor without putting the job out to bid. Vasquez refused.

The two councilmen were reprimanded about complaints by city employees that the two had berated them for such offenses as being late to work, or not giving top priority to the councilmen’s requests. “They were just big bullies,” Macias said at the time.

Vasquez said: “We’ve only been here six months and things are starting to fall apart at the seams.”

Duran fired back at the city manager, calling him incompetent and accusing him of “treating the council like idiots.” Duran also defended Garcia’s hiring requests, saying “for many years it was all Anglo in City Hall, and I think it’s time to even the scales.”

Even now, Duran is passionate about firing the city manager, but has not been able to get support from the council majority.

Divisions that at first were nuisances began to deepen by the end of last year.

Because of a bitter falling out two years ago, Macias and Hernandez--the only member of the former council not recalled--do not even look at each other, let alone speak to one another, at council meetings. Both refuse to vote for anything that the other one has suggested.

For instance, a proposal by the city to donate $50,000 to the Bell Gardens Boys and Girls’ Club was abandoned by Hernandez, who is on the club’s board of directors, when she was accused by Macias and others of attempting a political pay-back for help during her 1990 campaign.

Deitch said he has “come close to throttling” Garcia in closed sessions because of his single-minded approach to hiring only Latinos in City Hall, which Garcia admits is true. And when it was discovered that Garcia was voting on casino matters even though his nonprofit agency was taking contributions from it, Deitch pushed for an investigation by the city attorney.

Conversely, Duran and Garcia intently dislike Deitch--the council’s only Anglo--because, among other things, he supports hiring the interim police chief--another Anglo--as the permanent head of the department.

The five council members talk freely about their strong dislikes for one another, and blame each other for not being able to put their differences aside.

Now there are those in the Latino political Establishment reminding the council members of that powerful chant that filled the room on the night they were inaugurated, and asking them to unite once again.

“We are all entitled to our mistakes,” said Assemblywoman Martha Escutia, whose district includes Bell Gardens. “They came up against all odds and won once. I hope they can do it again.”