In Torrance, Every Day Is Independence Day

The police still respond to an occasional barking dog call. The mayor is a special education teacher. The city of Torrance is so quintessentially, so peacefully suburban, the Department of Justice, it seems, cannot have known it would put up such a fight.

Anyone who has followed local politics for any length of time might have warned the U.S. attorneys: Torrance--which gave the government a sound legal flogging last week in the first phase of a lawsuit alleging racist hiring practices--has a very long streak of conservative independence. And the South Bay city of 135,000 has taken on giants before.

For decades, Torrance has been turning down government grants--millions of dollars worth--that officials felt came with too many restrictions. It sued one of its largest taxpayers, Mobil Oil, because the city claimed that the petroleum giant was not operating safely. The city has at times spent years tussling over even obscure issues and relatively tiny sums of money.

Critics contend that city government can be so blindly provincial it sometimes ends up punishing its own residents, and that some local policies work in effect to keep minorities out of the community, which is 66% white.

Officials say it’s all about local control, about keeping Torrance distinct from the other 87 cities in Los Angeles County, and keeping the ills of some of those cities at bay.

“We’re realists,” said Mayor Dee Hardison. “Sometimes we don’t fight even when we’re right. But the city fights when we’ve been wronged.”

In 1993, Torrance believed that it had been wronged when the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit alleging racist hiring practices in its police and fire departments and a racially hostile work environment at the police station.

The federal government sued a total of four Los Angeles-area cities for similar reasons. Three settled. Torrance fought.

It will pony up $3 million in legal fees before the trial ends later this summer--several times what Pomona, El Monte and Alhambra combined paid to settle.

On Tuesday, however, U.S. District Court Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer delivered Torrance its latest victory. In the first phase of the case, Pfaelzer said, the government had “wholly failed” to show that Torrance gave police and fire candidates racially biased tests.

Although the tests did indeed result in an inordinate number of minorities being excluded, Pfaelzer said, the U.S. offered no alternatives at all.

“I don’t know whether Torrance’s willingness to take on this fight . . . was because they are a don’t-mess-with-us kind of town” or whether officials felt they had to stop a bureaucratic “witch hunt,” said Wayne S. Flick, one of the attorneys representing the city. (Justice Department officials could not be reached for comment.)

Both, say Torrance city officials.

This closely guarded autonomy--reminiscent in some ways of the recently resurging “states’ rights” movement--is not new. It can be traced back at least to 1921, when the city incorporated “so it wouldn’t get swallowed up by L.A.,” said former Mayor Jim Armstrong.

Torrance has its own library and bus systems--services that relatively few cities offer on their own.

“From Day 1, we’ve always made our own rules,” Hardison said.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. Department of Labor contended that the city had allowed ineligible people into a federally funded work training program, said longtime Assistant City Atty. William G. Quale. It wanted Torrance to pay back perhaps $200,000. Phooey, said the city, and it fought. In 1980, a federal administrative law judge ruled in Torrance’s favor.

In the early 1990s, Torrance stopped applying for federal grants for the local airport because continuing to receive the dollars meant, among other things, that the airport might have to fuel noisy jets.

Asked if he could remember the last time Torrance lost an intergovernmental scrabble for control, Quale, in the city attorney’s office for 21 years, said simply: “No.”

Not all the city’s moves have been popular, however, especially with some outside observers.

In 1980, city officials grew unhappy with the “strings” attached to federal community development block grants for low-income housing and stopped applying for the money--forgoing as much as $20 million in the years since.

Torrance officials then and now contend that the federal government was trying to force the hand of a city it knew nothing about.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development insisted that a sizable chunk of the grant go toward building and repairing single-family and single-room occupancy units. City officials wanted to fund more housing for senior citizens and the handicapped.

Fair housing advocates and civil rights activists have long contended that the city has given up the grants because low-income housing--especially family and single-room occupancy dwellings--tend to attract minorities from poorer communities.

“With housing discrimination, the city of Torrance is out of control,” said Barbara Shull, executive director of the Long Beach-based Fair Housing Foundation. “The city has basically said . . . we’re willing to lose money rather than follow anyone’s regulations or federal law.

“It’s like a child getting their allowance,” she said. “You get your allowance every week because you clean your room, you do the dishes, you empty the trash. Torrance is saying: I’m not going to clean my room, I’m not going to do the dishes, and I don’t want anyone telling me to. So keep your allowance.”

Steve Sturla of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California said Torrance was the only Los Angeles County city he knew of that accepted no community development block grant money.

The Police Department, the third largest in Los Angeles County, is also no stranger to allegations of racism. Last year, the city settled a civil rights lawsuit by three Latino men who alleged that officers not only roughed them up but then escorted them to the city limits. When the Justice Department filed its lawsuit in 1993, local leaders of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and American Civil Liberties Union cheered, even though the suit addresses only allegations within the department.

In the second part of the lawsuit, which will begin sometime this summer, the government alleges that the Police Department discriminates against minorities during background checks and fosters a racially hostile work environment. When the suit was filed, 27% of rookies were minorities. Police officials say that today nearly 50% of hires are minorities.

Katy Geissert, who was mayor when the suit was filed, said Torrance is becoming “a more tolerant city perhaps than it was in the past.” And the lawsuit “was such a travesty. We felt very strongly that we were right on this one.”

Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Rolling Hills), who said she admired Torrance’s “grit” in defending itself against the suit, suggested that if both the federal government and the city were a bit more flexible, costly, long-running battles might be averted--to the benefit of both.

“There needs to be a partnership between federal and local governments,” Harman said. “As that comes about, maybe Torrance’s attitude toward the federal government will change.”