Pasadena Left Guessing About the Next Move of Councilman : Government: Isaac Richard, facing allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use, is hospitalized for treatment of a ‘chemical imbalance.’ Will he resign his seat or will he resume his council theatrics?

Once more, it seems, Isaac Richard has ‘em where he wants ‘em.

Everybody in Pasadena is wondering what the flamboyant city councilman--now in a desert medical facility being treated for an undisclosed “chemical imbalance”--will do next.

Will he resign his seat in the face of allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use? Or will he come back to the council again to, by his own description, keep the pressure on the city’s “racist” Establishment?

Richard came under investigation last month after an unidentified woman banged on the doors of his neighbors on Forest Avenue, yelling that the councilman had tried to attack her sexually after using cocaine.

The woman subsequently said she did not want to press charges, but police turned her statement over to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Rash said she expects to complete her investigation this week.

A lawyer representing Richard said the councilman suffered from a chemical imbalance. Two days after the March 21 incident, Richard, married and the father of a 3-month-old son, signed himself into a treatment facility.

“Mr. Richard has been under a lot of internal and external pressure and he has been suffering from extreme depression,” said Maria Baber-Smith, the councilman’s field representative. “He’s receiving medical treatment.”

Richard denied “unequivocally” that he used cocaine, Baber-Smith added. No other details have been released. Richard could not not be reached for comment.

The turmoil surrounding the 35-year-old investment banker may have escalated in the past two weeks, but his role at the center of an ongoing melodrama is nothing new.

And, as usual, the opinions on Richard are widely divergent. Backers say he will return soon, stronger than ever; detractors say he should step down.

During his two-year tenure, Richard has been the council member with the highest profile, fulminating, cursing, stomping his feet, storming theatrically out of meetings--all in the name of creating opportunities for his predominantly black and Latino constituents in Northwest Pasadena.

“I get the feeling that he likes the fact that people shudder when he turns on his microphone,” said Councilman Chris Holden, referring to the sound system that amplifies council members’ remarks in Pasadena’s somber council chambers.

Richard has pressed argumentatively for more city resources for Northwest Pasadena, threatened a voting rights suit to ensure that his district was controlled by a large black voting bloc, attacked the white-dominated Tournament of Roses as racially exclusionary, crossed swords with the police chief over the use of gang sweeps, and generally left a crater-pocked battlefield in his wake.

“I’m not a politician,” Richard frequently tells his constituents. “I’m an activist.”

But Richard, the holder of a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Business and a vice president at the Orange County firm of Whipple, Kinsell & Co., is no radical. He has been one of the council’s most staunchly pro-business members, particularly if an issue favors minority businesses.

“I appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism far better than some right-wing Republican who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” Richard said last year. He was the oldest of eight children in a family that was often on welfare.

The agenda, as Richard calls his list of priorities and issues, has generally played well with his constituents.

“He’s done 110% of what he said he’d do,” said mechanic Clinton Jackson, standing in a cluster of people watching a dominoes game in Jackie Robinson Park in Richard’s district. “If it wasn’t for him, Northwest Pasadena wouldn’t be up to standards.”

What about the charges of sexual assault and cocaine use? “Everybody has problems,” Jackson said with a shrug. “Who knows what goes on behind closed doors?”

Some of Richard’s colleagues say his in-your-face style gets in the way of the agenda.

“His style and delivery, I think, always overshadowed his message,” said Holden, who also represents Northwest Pasadena.

Richard has helped to define important issues for the council, Mayor Rick Cole said. But when it came to things like affordable housing for the city’s poor or affirmative action for minority city employees, Cole said, Richard has been more style than substance.

“Part of his view is that it’s not his job,” Cole contended. “His job is to yell and scream.”

Richard’s sudden absence from the city comes at a time of difficult budget sessions. Pasadena faces a $9.3-million revenue shortfall in the coming fiscal year, and the council is in the process of deciding what city programs to cut.

That worries some Northwest Pasadena residents.

“Some of the proposed cuts will heavily impact the northwest,” said Audrey Brantley, president of a coalition of area neighborhood associations. “It’s imperative to have everybody represented during these hearings.”

Friends say Richard will be back long before the maximum of 60 days that the City Charter says a councilman can be absent without being replaced. He may attend regularly scheduled council meetings as soon as April 20, they say.

But Richard’s critics contend that the councilman has now lost so much credibility that he must resign.

“I don’t see how he can come back from this episode,” said Councilman Jess Hughston, who has often criticized Richard for his behavior in the council.

Richard admittedly has within him a large reservoir of rage, which sometimes shoots to the surface like lava. The stories of Richard becoming confrontational began to accumulate a few months after he took office, when he angrily faced off with a Pasadena police lieutenant for impounding his motorcycle after the registration expired.

As Police Chief Jerry Oliver described the August, 1991, incident, Richard “sort of threatened” the officer’s job.

“He indicated to one of our lieutenants that this was a career-threatening move,” Oliver said.

Last year, Richard’s colleagues voted to censure him for cursing and threatening the city’s female housing administrator and for telling reporters that the censure motion was part of a campaign by a “white, racist City Council.”

In the midst of that controversy, Richard was arrested for allegedly brandishing a gun at some teen-agers during a street altercation and for illegally carrying a concealed weapon in his car. The charges were eventually dropped by the district attorney for lack of evidence.

“The most unacceptable thing,” said Councilman William Thomson, “is that, every time you disagree with him, whether he’s accosting a staff member or one of us, he accuses you of being a racist.”

More recently, Richard confronted a winning council candidate on the night of the election last month, saying he personally would lead a recall effort against him.

“You’re going to be miserable on the council,” Richard growled as went nose-to-nose with Bill Crowfoot, a white candidate who had edged out a Latino in a newly created, largely minority district. “You’re not going to last. You know damn well you have no right to represent a district that’s 83% minority.”

After he explodes, Richard is sometimes apologetic. In the midst of a council meeting last year, he turned to Housing Administrator Phyllis Mueller, with whom he angrily disagreed on the allocation of grants, and muttered, “I’ll get you for this.”

Richard apologized two weeks later, after Mueller filed a sexual harassment complaint against him.

“Sometimes I get frustrated, which is no excuse,” he said publicly.

Often the rage comes out in cutting remarks. Charging Cole last year with abandoning his liberal principles, he said, “You’ve cut your hair and started flying the Confederate flag.”

Contemptuously confronting a roomful of mostly white Tournament of Roses members, he said, “They could fit all their minority members into the trunk of one of their cars and still have room for the Republican elephant.”

The councilman says his anger is usually political.

“The same fire burns in my heart” as in those who protested during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney G. King case verdicts last year, he has said.

During similar, though less violent, civil disturbances in Pasadena last year, Richard was one of a group of civic leaders who patrolled the streets to calm angry youths after not guilty verdicts were returned against the four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating King.

The councilman defended the rioters against those who wondered why they were burning their own neighborhoods.

“It’s analogous to criticizing prisoners in a prison riot for burning their own mattresses,” he said.

So far, there has been no backlash against Richard among his constituents.

“I don’t believe anything of what I hear and half of what I see,” a recreation director in Richard’s district said last week.

But Richard may have burned his bridges on the council itself.

“I’d like to support him,” one council member said, “but he’s just a ball of energy with no focus.”