Another ballot of low expectations

IT’S JANUARY, and another election is already upon us. Inglewood’s mayoral runoff, the first in a generation, is Tuesday. It’s hardly a major election, but it’s significant for what it says about leadership, accountability and civic self-determination not just in Inglewood, but in beleaguered black communities elsewhere in Southern California.

The runoff pits incumbent Roosevelt Dorn against City Councilwoman Judy Dunlap. Dorn is a former attorney and Superior Court judge. Dunlap is a longtime critic of the mayor. Dorn is black, Dunlap white.

Dorn got a nasty present when The Times reported on Christmas that he and the city treasurer are being investigated by the district attorney’s office for helping themselves to a low-interest loan program meant to encourage city employees to live in Inglewood. Inglewood’s City Council voted to expand the Residential Incentive Policy program, created in 1992, to include elected officials in 2004. (Dorn voted for the change; Dunlap was absent.) Dorn promptly got a $500,000 loan using the program, applying almost half to pay off his mortgage and putting the rest in the bank.

It all looks terribly suspicious, and Dorn has made news with his ethically questionable moves in the past. In 2004, for instance, he supported an ill-conceived ballot measure backed by Wal-Mart, a campaign contributor, despite community opposition.

Yet Dorn, like too many other black elected officials locally, has long enjoyed a kind of Teflon status. He sees himself as an all-powerful leader -- or at least as Inglewood’s chief executive. Even as chief executive, however, he’s been lousy. He should be fired. He sets a low bar for progress, touting Inglewood’s new chain stores as great successes but failing to mention its lack of industry, its troubled schools or its fallow downtown district.

Dunlap, meanwhile, paints herself as the anti-Dorn, a watchdog/reformer who can restore honesty and integrity to City Hall. But beyond that, at this point her plan for Inglewood is as lacking as the mayor’s. Scrutiny is well and good, but leadership requires vision.

Despite its politics, Inglewood is an experiment in black and Latino demographics that could still go right. Not to be flowery, but it could be a haven. It could stand in contrast to other places: South-Central, where blacks are simply holding on in the face of change; Harbor Gateway, where they’re under serious threat of attack from Latino gang members; or Compton, where poverty and internecine political battles always override ambition.

Ah, Compton. That city has also been repeatedly undone by the corruption of its black ruling class, and it is this fate that the more middle-class Inglewood fears most. Nor is it encouraging that so many black officials in the South Bay, from Compton to Lynwood to Carson, have been indicted by the D.A. in recent years for feeding at the public trough. Are Inglewood’s officials next?

A heightened uneasiness over the possibility may explain why there appears to be less, rather than more, interest than usual in the election. The primary was rough and tumble, but there’s been a deafening silence ever since, especially as the loan issue loomed larger. Cardboard signs have cropped up along major thoroughfares, but that’s about it. No doubt Dorn is quietly tapping his base and hoping turnout will be low. Dunlap is undoubtedly hoping those who do come out will be motivated by anger to vote against Dorn.

None of this adds up to a public sense that the greatest possibilities of Inglewood itself are at stake on Tuesday. Maybe January, a month known for holiday anticlimax and general inertia, is the right month for the runoff after all.

ekaplan@latimescolumnists.com