Political Anorexia or Justified Anger?
The guy in the Chargers jacket was the coach from Tom Falls’ old high school--and he was joking around with him outside the polling place after they both voted. So that was a good sign.
A woman he knows, and who knows him, wouldn’t meet his eye when she came in to vote. So that wasn’t a good sign.
Tom Falls has two speeches ready for tonight when he meets with volunteers to set up a youth program in Covina: the “There’s no money, the utility tax is gone” speech, and the “The tax is in place, let’s get to work” speech. Which one he delivers depends on which news he wakes up to this morning: Did voters in his city, Covina, pass Measure M on Tuesday, or defeat it?
Measure M, pass or fail, has a longer reach than just keeping or chucking out an 8.25% city utility tax that drops to 7% at the end of this month--and maybe won’t be needed at all once the new Wal-Mart gets up and running. There was more to Measure M than “pass it or lose the library, a fire station, the parks and recreation department,” and one needn’t go as far as Washington or Sacramento to find it.
Covina is home to 44,000 people, nine parks, an anytown-looking downtown that doubled for Wayne and Garth’s Midwest burg in “Wayne’s World,” and a volcanic brand of civic anger that is opening up branch offices all over the country.
Covina made national news two years ago for the astonishing recall of the entire City Council over the utility tax they passed to stretch across the maw of the deficit. A Florida man came out, eager to see how they did it, with a mind to doing the same thing at home.
The usual sticky web of local personality and politics--did some recallers really go after the mayor just to get him off the AQMD board?--is not enough to explain such anger.
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Tom Falls the deputy district attorney for 5 1/2 years--four of them without so much as a cost-of-living raise--wonders what the hell the county supervisors are doing with all that money, when he has to buy his own glue to put up murder scene photos in court.
Tom Falls the Covina city councilman for two years--elected after the last council was recalled, and not exactly Mr. Popularity among the same crowd now--is willing to admit now that when he was campaigning, “the person I picked on most was the parks and recreation director” and her salary of something under $70,000. “Now I can tell you she’s not paid half of what she’s worth.”
He can say absolutely that in any organization of any size, there is fat--and then defend every dollar and every program in the Covina budget, down to the shirts they bought for the citizen patrol volunteers.
Fran Delach, the city manager, calls it political anorexia: “No matter how thin things are, they look in the mirror and they still see fat.” Someone came up to him at the new Farmer’s Market and told him to cut the city salaries and staff by 10% a year for 10 years. The deficit would be gone, along with the staff, “and we don’t need them anyway.”
When neighbors are that angry in eminently livable places like Covina, we are in a bad way. Since he was 5, Tom Falls has played in Covina’s parks, studied in its schools, been shushed in its library. He bought a house here because he wanted the same things for his three boys--parks, cops, library. And he remembers with clarity now, half his life later, something that as a teen-ager he hardly noted at all: Proposition 13. “I remember my parents--this was the greatest thing ever to come down the road for them, and my dad was a deputy marshal. Everybody thought for today and nothing for tomorrow.”
Like the headwaters of a river, you can talk illegal immigrants or public servants or the public trough and it all starts at one point: Proposition 13. It is either the great rock of democracy holding back the floodwaters of tax-and-spend government, or it is, to Tom Falls’ way of thinking, a knife stabbed between the generations, a rock shoved in front of the path of change, a fun-house mirror distortion of responsible government, a civic death wish. Howard Jarvis “is taking the state with him into his grave.”
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And then there is Linda Sarver, a woman of echt San Gabriel Valley stock--the Pasadena-born daughter of a Rose Parade princess and a Rose Bowl gridiron star, a Covina mom from way back, who believed in Proposition 13 like another commandment just so long as the paramedics came when she picked up the phone. That anorexia mirror Fran Delach spoke about--it hung on her wall.
Then she got drawn into the recall over the utility tax, and elected to the City Council, and she whirled 180 degrees. “I am the first one to admit I was very wrong. I thought from what I had seen of the Covina budget there was more than enough money they hadn’t cut.”
She voted for a bigger utility tax than the one she campaigned against. And if Measure M fails, the citizens who call her a traitor may not have to recall her, as they’ve been trying to do for the fifth time in two years. She might just move her three boys out of Covina altogether, although where in no-guns-no-butter California that might be, who can say?
