Swatting at the Gadflies

They show up all the time and speak on just about anything, from raising library fees to accusing a politician of corruption. Some are polite. Others growl. Some wear outlandish clothes. Others don’t.

They sometimes call themselves “civic watchdogs” or “community activists,” citizen guardians who are constant fixtures at public meetings to make sure the people’s business is being conducted efficiently, honestly and frugally.

But to others, they are gadflies--people who pester, annoy or irritate others.

A visitor to a Los Angeles City Council meeting will see one of the loudest in action. Leonard Shapiro of Canoga Park has harangued council members for years. There are some who would like to shut off the microphone whenever he approaches to address the council. Once, council President John Ferraro jokingly told Shapiro his three minutes to speak had already expired before he began speaking.

“Mr. President,” Shapiro shot back at Ferraro, “your time is up, too, but you don’t know it!”

These days, however, public bodies are growing increasingly weary of the gadflies and their propensity to talk and talk. In many cities, it’s not uncommon for evening City Council meetings to drag on into the wee hours of the morning, prolonged in part by gadflies.

Some of the concern also stems from the fact that some gadflies can get downright disruptive or intimidating.

Mindful that any member of the public is entitled under California law to speak at public meetings of virtually all elective and appointive bodies, some bureaucrats are exploring ways to speed up meetings by altering or limiting the public’s speaking time.

For example, when Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan was Metropolitan Transportation Authority board chairman earlier this year, he took the unusual step of banning two organizers for the Bus Riders Union from speaking at the MTA’s board meetings for three to six months.

In Garden Grove, the City Council voted recently to consolidate five public comment periods per meeting into one, hoping to curtail the interminable gab from the public.

At the weekly Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meetings, speakers are reminded of a law enacted in 1987 under which they can speak only once in a three-month period on any topic that isn’t on the supervisors’ agenda. There is no restriction on people who want to talk about an item on the agenda--as long as they can say their piece in three minutes.

“Some of them just love to talk,” one county official said.

Most public agencies allow members of the public to speak for three to five minutes apiece, depending on the subject and other considerations.

In the city of Los Angeles, members of the public are allowed to speak for a collective total of five minutes on each item on the City Council agenda and for a total of 10 minutes on items of general interest. When a hot issue is before the council, more speaking time for the public is usually granted.

That might cramp the style of some who believe each person deserves five or 10 minutes to speak.

Officials in San Bernardino have considered tough measures regulating the public’s right to speak since the mayor there obtained a restraining order against one man who cornered her after a meeting.

Last month, Jeff Wright “was six inches from [Mayor Judith Valles’] face, cursing at her, and witnesses thought he was going to hit her,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Wells Houser said.

Wright, 42, who is described by authorities as a transient, was arrested and faces a court date next month over the incident with Valles. He had previously been in trouble for disrupting meetings of the San Bernardino City Council, the city Planning Commission and the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.

Some cities have moved the public comment portion of their council meetings to the end of the agenda, hoping the gadflies will get tired and leave without speaking.

That didn’t work in Long Beach, however.

One Council’s Tactic Backfires

Recently, the council’s decision to put the public speaking segment at the end of its late-afternoon council meetings was met with loud protests. One outraged citizen, environmentalist Diana Mann, was arrested for refusing to leave the podium. A week after the council had given preliminary approval to the move, it faced two hours of condemnation from critics, who accused the lawmakers of being everything from fascists to rapists.

The councilman who proposed the move decided to table the item, saying that the 30 minutes that might be saved during the meetings wasn’t worth it, given the outraged responses.

A cast of regulars, in addition to Mann, goes to Long Beach council meetings. Tommy Tuchscher, who has been attending for 12 years, spoke on at least five issues at Tuesday’s meeting.

Another regular is 82-year-old Thomas Murphy, who says he has missed only one council meeting (when he “went on a fishing trip”) in the past seven years.

Murphy complains that the council does not value comments from citizens at the meetings. “They just don’t pay attention to us,” he said.

During Tuesday’s meeting, some of the nine members of the City Council occasionally looked down at papers, talked to each other and looked bored when members of the public spoke.

Long Beach has a long tradition of political gadflys. Years ago, a platform on the beach near downtown was a forum for anyone who wanted to vent. It conjured up memories of the cracker-barrel philosophers of old-time rural America. The local version was dubbed the Spit and Argue Club.

Former state Atty. Gen. Dan Lundgren, who ran for governor last year, grew up in Long Beach and says he learned how to debate by listening to the argumentative types who spoke on the beach.

The platform was eliminated when the modern harbor was built. But the remnants of the Spit and Argue Club can be heard at the Long Beach council meetings.

One council regular, Robert Edward Bastian, growled a vulgarity to express his displeasure Tuesday over the amount of city funds allocated to a substance abuse program. He was cut off by Councilman Ray Gabrinski, who was offended by the foul language. “You can either apologize at the microphone or walk away from it,” the councilman said.

Bastian apologized and sat down.

Cited for Singing, Playing Accordion

In San Bernardino, Marjorie Mikels is a unique critic of the county of Board of Supervisors. The Upland civil rights lawyer is the estranged wife of Supervisor Jon Mikels and regularly attends board meetings.

Last October, she was removed by sheriff’s deputies for belting out a song and playing her accordion.

Her lyrics did not address items on the agenda, county officials said. She was cited for disrupting a public meeting and for hindering an officer.

She said the song was a serious political statement about the dangers a proposed nuclear dump posed to children.

At the MTA, Riordan took action against two critics who the mayor said were being disruptive and too confrontational.

Martin Hernandez was banned from speaking for three months and Rita Burgos for six months, an MTA spokesman said.

Another critic, subway opponent John Walsh, has so far escaped punishment for his outspokenness. Among his more colorful observations was a comment that former Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi should chair the agency since the MTA was dead anyway.

There’s one thing the gadflies and their prey, the public officials who must listen to them, agree on. Gadflies are a unique bunch.

Jarvis’ Views Dismissed for Years

After all, Howard Jarvis was dismissed for nearly two decades as a bombastic anti-tax gadfly before he and Paul Gann authored California’s Proposition 13, which reduced personal and corporate property taxes to about 1% of appraised real estate values.

He was considered far out of the mainstream when he regularly appeared before Los Angeles County supervisors in the 1960s and ‘70s to threaten retribution against elected officials who he felt unfairly burdened taxpayers.

Most lawmakers thought his diatribes were meaningless.

But after the proposition’s landslide victory in 1978, which changed the way public agencies are funded, Jarvis, a retired businessman who lived in the San Fernando Valley, became a national celebrity. Politicians fell over themselves to jump on his anti-tax bandwagon. Jarvis even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

For nearly 20 years, self-described juvenile delinquent and former drug addict Jerry Rubin has been a fixture at Santa Monica City Council meetings. He has opposed the newly opened Hooters restaurant, crusaded against war toys and fought a city plan to limit the feeding of the homeless at a city park. He has expanded his protest repertoire to include toy-squashing steamrollers and hunger strikes.

Sporting his trademark Coppertone tan, threadbare T-shirt and faded gym shorts, Rubin, 55, infuriates officials with his antics and speeches. He admits he doesn’t have a job. When he isn’t battling City Hall, he’s selling political bumper stickers at the Third Street Promenade.

“I’ve never had a real job,” Rubin said with a laugh. “People always tell me to get a real job--I guess they’re right.”

But he has a serious side, too. On six occasions, he has taken the city of Santa Monica to court over 1st Amendment issues and has either forced a settlement from the city or beat it outright.

“I think he’s effective, absolutely,” said Carol Sobel, a lawyer who has represented Rubin in court. “You need the Jerry Rubins and people like him because most other people are intimidated. Jerry doesn’t get intimidated. In fact, sometimes I wish he’d get intimidated by me.”

Another gadfly who isn’t intimidated is Shapiro, an elderly gent described by some as the loudest man at L.A. City Hall.

“Am I being loud?” Shapiro asked recently when someone told him to pipe down. “I don’t think I’m that loud.”

Even his attire is loud. Recently decked out in a pink blazer with a red tie, the short, gray-haired Shapiro wanted to be sure he was noticed.

From his front-row seat at meetings, he routinely shouts about bus shelters, government waste and anything else that strikes him. To keep himself abreast of issues, Shapiro maintains at least five file cabinets jammed with newspaper clippings, council agendas and documents. He writes a column, “Observations of a Gadfly,” that appears in several local papers.

He rarely misses a council meeting and, for pleasure, he reads documents laden with official jargon.

“I get here early and read the agenda,” he said as he highlighted in yellow the items he wanted to speak on. “That’s all I need to do.”

What bothers Shapiro, a retiree who refuses to disclose his age, is how few people attend Los Angeles City Council meetings. He says more people would attend if the meetings were held at night instead of in the morning, when most are at work.

“I’ve been suggesting this for years,” Shapiro said, his voice getting ever louder.

A police officer on duty in the council chambers heard Shapiro and walked over to plead with him. “Mr. Shapiro, please,” the officer said. “I’m getting complaints. You’re talking loud. Can you please keep it down?”

Shapiro nodded. “I’ll try to remember to keep it down,” he said, his voice rising once again.

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Times staff writers Douglas P. Shuit, Monte Morin, Richard Winton and Eleanor Yang contributed to this story.