Council Candidates Share Their Visions for L.A.

By her own admission, Angela Reddock straddled two worlds growing up.

Reddock moved to Compton when she was 9, but traveled across town to Brentwood, where she attended private school. It was a long commute -- even by Los Angeles standards -- but the drive showed her the many different faces of Los Angeles.

The experience, Reddock says, is helping fuel her campaign for the 11th District seat on the Los Angeles City Council.

“I can make better decisions for the greater good, not just one group of people,” Reddock says. “Going to Brentwood not only meant a good education, but it opened my eyes to a whole new world.”

A labor attorney with a Century City firm and the co-owner of a limousine company, Reddock has been touting her skills as a businesswoman. She argues that a businesslike sensibility is exactly what’s needed to fix the Westside’s considerable development, traffic and infrastructure problems.

Reddock, 35, is the underdog in the three-way race.

Council races, like most elections, are driven by money that can be converted to campaign mailers. She has brought in about $58,650, while Bill Rosendahl has received about $250,000 and Flora Gil Krisiloff about $249,000, according to campaign sources.

Reddock is African American and is running in a district that is nearly 60% white and has relatively few black voters.

Yet, Reddock insists that she’s in the race to win -- and not just to earn name recognition for a future campaign. “I’m anticipating a runoff, and I plan to be in it,” she says.

Reddock, who lives in Westchester, says her race shouldn’t matter. She hopes the good press she has gotten in local papers on the Westside and her diligent appearances at candidate forums will bring in votes.

Reddock’s father was in the military, and she was born in Germany, before moving to Birmingham, Ala., as a child. It was the 1970s, and her grandmother, who was an organizer with a nurses union, often took Reddock to demonstrations.

“Her grandmother was a rebel with a cause,” recalls Nadine Gills-Ward, Reddock’s aunt. “At that time, Angela was a small person, and my mom had her out there walking the picket line with everyone else. She saw at an early age what happens when citizens mobilize.”

After high school, Reddock went to Amherst College in Massachusetts, St. Catherine’s College in Oxford, England, and UCLA School of Law. She practices labor law with Collins, Mesereau, Reddock & Yu in Century City, working mostly on harassment and discrimination cases.

Her political experience is limited to serving on commissions with little power: the city’s Transportation Commission, a Los Angeles County commission on small business development and a state board on barbering and cosmetology.

Reddock, like her competitors, believes that gridlock is at a crisis level, that there is no sane plan for development in the district and that the modernization of LAX -- which would expand the airport -- must be halted.

She has spent countless minutes talking about the traffic gripping the district. All three, in fact, share similar plans -- backing light rail and the greater use of synchronized signals.

Reddock says the Westside desperately needs a strategic plan. “I want to focus on the little things -- delivering basic city services -- but the problem is there is no strategic vision for doing something like fixing all the sidewalks.”

She continued: “I think the city too often goes for the Band-Aid approach. We need more police, so let’s have a new tax. But how do we really put some strategic plan in place to effectively deal with the housing shortage?”

She says she can lead the district to such a vision because she’s a consensus-builder. She has mediated cases and says she can bring politicians together to form policy.

As a teen, Reddock and her supporters say, she thrived while navigating the different worlds of Compton and Brentwood.

“People are focusing on her positive personality,” said Seth Jacobson, who attended high school with Reddock. “What hasn’t been emphasized is that beneath the personality is someone who is extremely intelligent and has repeatedly set big goals and achieved them.”