It’s a long night when workers’ fate is pitted against tourism in one vote
About three Cokes into Tuesday night’s Anaheim City Council meeting, I had a strong desire to time-travel forward. I was thinking maybe 10, 15 years. And no, it had nothing to do with the session trudging toward the midnight hour and the speakers’ remarks tending toward, shall we say, some redundancies.
My sole reason for wanting immediate transport to 2020 was to find out who was right and who was wrong: Has the city’s resort district around Disneyland suffered with the infusion of some 1,500 residential units, including 225 for low-income residents? Were tourist-related features, like hotels and restaurants and shops, what were needed to keep the district vibrant and competitive with other resort towns?
Or has the housing come to be seen as no big deal? And, in fact, as a good and sensible thing for the city to have done on behalf of people looking for housing?
In so many words, those seemed to be the questions Tuesday night as a parade of some 50 speakers squared off on the housing proposal for more than five hours. Along about midnight, the council voted 3 to 2 to set the wheels in motion for the project.
But if those were the questions, nobody in 2007 knows the answers.
Not that there wasn’t plenty of certainty on both sides. But the twain didn’t meet because of a large language gap.
It wasn’t the gap between English and Spanish. Only one speaker used Spanish.
Rather, it’s the gap that opens wide when one side argues public policy and the other argues for its sense of self.
Both arguments can be made forcefully and with passion, as they were Tuesday night. But when one side says that a policy makes sense and the other says that adequate housing is a basic human need, you have trains moving on parallel tracks.
The policy people can support housing (as many of the speakers emphasized), but they can’t fully grasp how crucial it is to people who have trouble affording it. The other side can support economic health for Anaheim but can’t fully grasp why that would ever trump building homes for people.
A couple of conversations I had at opposite ends of the evening -- bookends to the remarks from council members and the public -- clarified that for me.
Before the meeting began and when daylight still reigned, Miguel Hernandez was standing outside the council chamber with a small group of hotel workers who had come to support the housing proposal. He’s a 35-year-old member of the cleaning crew at the Disneyland Hotel.
“That’s what we’re fighting for,” Hernandez says, “to make sure this passes and for Disney to think of the workers as human beings, not instruments for them to make money.”
If he’s angry, he isn’t showing it.
“Disney knows the wages workers make aren’t enough to pay rent, so we need affordable housing,” Hernandez says. “They want to build another park and a hotel. It’s good they create jobs, but they have a responsibility to help the workers, because the workers are the ones who make the profits for them.”
Despite his own outer calm, Hernandez thinks workers are “mad and disappointed” with Disney. “We’re doing our part and hoping they get the message to open their hearts for the workers.”
Six hours later, as Tuesday had turned into Wednesday, a disconsolate Larry Slagle was leaving the council chamber. The board chairman of the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor & Convention Bureau, Slagle saw the 3-2 vote as a crusher. He had argued before the council that amending the city’s zoning to allow for housing in the resort district might threaten its image as a world-class tourist destination.
Mayor Curt Pringle had framed his opposition to the amendment as protecting the fiscal security of the city for years to come.
In the cool night air, I ask Slagle if he attaches that same historical perspective. “I do,” he says. “It just cuts our window of opportunity and designates that this is as big as we’re going to get. I see it as the beginning of the end.”
To him, it’s absurd to risk the revenues that an enhanced resort district could bring. “What do we have?” he asks. “We have Disneyland. We need some other attractions, we need some synergy here. We’re competing with San Diego, Long Beach and Las Vegas.”
I’m struck by how even-keeled Slagle is while describing what had minutes earlier become a sour evening. Without reading too much into it, he’s every bit as calm and accommodating on a matter of immense importance to him as Miguel Hernandez had been hours earlier.
Two well-meaning men, speaking from the heart but in a different language. One talking about a chance to afford decent housing and build a better life. Another talking about protecting a city’s financial well-being and its residents’ well-being.
I ask Slagle if this is as low as he’s been over a policy issue. “The feeling, you mean?” he says. “It’s the equivalent of -- “ but before he can finish the sentence, he shakes his head and breaks it off.
“Not a good night?” I say, realizing he’s tired of talking about it.
“No,” he says, tired and turning away slowly to head home.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
