Council Won’t Investigate Official’s Remark : Burbank: The dispute involving a police commissioner’s use of the term wetback fails to make the meeting agenda. Some Latinos vow to press the issue.

Prompting protests from Latino onlookers, the Burbank City Council opted Tuesday night not to investigate a controversy involving a city police commissioner who used the term wetback during a public meeting.

“I don’t think it would serve any useful, constructive purpose for the city to undertake an investigation,” Vice Mayor George Battey Jr. said.

The dispute centers on comments made by Ron Shively, a member of both the Police Commission and the city’s FOCUS committee and a candidate for City Council.

Councilman Tim Murphy tried to add the dispute to the council agenda, which would have resulted in a council discussion and public debate on the issue at a later meeting, but the other council members all opposed him.

Three of the five council members must agree to add an item to the agenda before it can be discussed.

Murphy said he decided to try to initiate a discussion after he received numerous calls from people offended by the word who wanted the council to take action against Shively.

“I think our silence to this point has been misinterpreted by the public,” Murphy told the council.

The vote came one day after a Latino group demanded that the City Council denounce Shively’s word choice and immediately remove Shively from the Police Commission and the FOCUS committee, a body appointed by the mayor to find ways of cutting city costs with a minimal reduction of services.

But members of the council have alleged that the calls for Shively’s removal are politically motivated by those who oppose his council candidacy. The council members called the letter from the Latino group “hateful.”

On Tuesday night, council members described Shively as a fair-minded individual whose integrity has been impugned by the controversy. “I know there’s not a bigoted, prejudiced bone in his makeup,” said Mayor Robert Bowne, adding that Shively’s best friend is “a Hispanic fellow that he’s known for many, many years.”

Councilman Thomas E. Flavin said Shively had made many positive contributions to the community in recent years. “I judge people on their deeds in the community,” Flavin said.

In a heated public session, Latinos angrily denounced the council’s decision, with speakers recounting for the council incidents of past discrimination and mistreatment of Latinos in Burbank.

The controversy surrounding Shively began Jan. 6 at a FOCUS meeting. During a discussion on the idea of contracting out city services, Shively said if gardening services were contracted out to a private firm, the jobs would not go to “wetbacks.”

Shively has acknowledged using the term, saying he did so only after another member of the committee, Lew Stone, asked if city workers would be replaced with “wetbacks.”

Shively said he “used his term to answer his challenge.”

Stone and several others denied Shively’s allegation.

In a public statement, Shively said he would “speak with greater sensitivity in the future.”

In spite of Tuesday night’s failed attempt, some in the Latino community vowed to continue to press the issue.

“They say that this is all politically motivated,” said Gus Corona, the only Latino member of the FOCUS group. “They fail to see that by protecting this guy their actions are political.” Corona said he would continue to press the issue at future council meetings.

Ted McConkey, one of those who asked Murphy to bring up the issue, said: “They just don’t get it. They don’t get that they’ve wounded thousands of people in this community, not only Hispanics. Suddenly, the victims have been turned into the offenders.”

What happens next, Councilman Murphy said, will depend “on the community and how they feel.”

“The next step would be for people who felt offended by it to take some kind of action . . . picketing, letter writing, whatever they feel is appropriate to turn up the heat. The obvious thing is to not vote for the man.”