From Mustard to Myanmar, West Hollywood Has an Opinion

And then there was the great Grey Poupon controversy.

As West Hollywood Mayor Pro Tempore Steve Martin tells it, he became indignant two years ago upon learning that Nabisco Foods was allegedly denying female employees at its Oxnard food processing plant the right to go to the bathroom as frequently as they needed.

The plant, then the world manufacturer of Grey Poupon mustard, was well outside West Hollywood city limits. Not a problem. Martin co-introduced a resolution calling for West Hollywood residents to boycott Grey Poupon should Nabisco not alter its policies.

The boycott never went into effect. Faced with adverse publicity, union pressure and a class-action lawsuit by 30 employees, Nabisco gave up, issuing what a company spokesman called a “clarification of existing policy.”

Martin called it another victory for West Hollywood’s wide-ranging brand of activism.

Flowing out of West Hollywood city offices nearly every month--certainly more frequently and more volubly than the offices of most other city governments--are a slew of resolutions that have little or nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of local governance.

Among them:

* A resolution earlier this year preventing any company that does business with the city from also doing business with Myanmar (formerly Burma) because of that country’s human rights violations. (No such company was believed to exist.)

* A 1996 resolution demanding that the Japanese government stop violating international whaling agreements.

* Another 1996 resolution decrying the hanging of four opponents of the Nigerian regime.

In addition to the internationally focused resolutions, there are those focused on Washington, including:

* A resolution this year calling for termination of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater inquiry, which officials here call a “witch hunt” against President Clinton.

* A 1996 resolution urging repeal of a federal bill allowing clear-cut logging.

West Hollywood is not the only city to pass such resolutions. Berkeley, in particular, has long been mocked for having its own foreign policy.

But few other cities are as prolific or liberal as West Hollywood--and in few others do such resolutions raise so little controversy. This is, after all, a city whose 25,000 registered voters include only about 4,000 Republicans, notes Mayor Sal Guarriello.

West Hollywood is a city whose politics run so far to the left that Guarriello, a liberal Democrat, says he is sometimes labeled a conservative.

“We do have an extensive foreign policy in West Hollywood,” said Councilman Jeffrey Prang. Such policies, he said, “fill a need” for the city’s 36,000 residents to vent their feelings on global issues.

West Hollywood’s activist stance comes from its inception 13 years ago at the edge of Los Angeles city limits, said Councilman Paul Koretz. Early residents, many of them gay, moved to the city assuming that the Sheriff’s Department, which handles law enforcement on a contract basis, “would not be as tough as the LAPD,” he said. Koretz said LAPD officers had a propensity to “harass patrons in gay bars because they are gay.”

Because West Hollywood didn’t have the same building restrictions as Los Angeles, the city became overbuilt. Many apartments soon deteriorated into lower rent units, drawing in a large senior citizen population on fixed incomes. Many of those residents are concerned with national bread-and-butter issues.

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Thus, he said, the seniors and gay residents, who together make up nearly half the city’s population, provide a strong constituency for the human rights, environmental and economic issues underlying many resolutions, such as one this year calling for a softening of welfare reforms.

When city officials defend their esoteric policies, they point proudly to an ordinance two years ago that made the city the first in California to ban the sale of cheap handguns, also known as Saturday night specials.

The ban was “a largely symbolic gesture,” said Koretz, because anyone could walk over the city limits and buy guns.

Subsequently, however, 33 other California cities joined West Hollywood’s stance, setting a wave in motion that reached Sacramento, where the Legislature recently sent Gov. Pete Wilson a historic bill that would have outlawed the manufacture and sale of the cheap handguns statewide.

Although Wilson vetoed the bill Friday, passage of the legislation “only happened because West Hollywood took the chance and battled various interest groups,” Koretz said.

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Don Favioe, executive director for the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, says the chamber is generally supportive of the wide-ranging resolutions, but expressed concern that some policies, such as the ban on Saturday night specials, will cost money to defend against lawsuits by special interest groups. West Hollywood has spent $250,000 in legal costs defending its gun ordinance and advising other cities how to craft similar ordinances, according to a city spokesperson.

Favioe also criticized as ineffective a recent resolution calling for a boycott of California grapes and strawberries, passed in support of unionizing efforts by the United Farm Workers. “Pavilion and Ralphs still sell them,” he said. “But West Hollywood has always been a community which stirs the pot anyway.”

Ruth Williams, chairwoman of the Alliance of Citizens for the Eastside, a citizens group dedicated to cleaning up West Hollywood’s eastern half, said she is proud of the city’s stances.

“As a little city of 1.9 square miles, we can hold our head up on these issues,” she said. The council “is doing what residents want.”