The Rhome city council voted to censure Mayor Patricia Mitchell.
Madeleine Cook
mcook@star-telegram.com
Rhome
The Rhome city council voted unanimously last week to censure Mayor Patricia Mitchell after investigating an employee’s complaint alleging that Mitchell behaved in a rude, abusive manner and failed to sign important documents.
The censure resolution accused Mitchell of violating the city’s ethics code and directed city administrator Amanda DeGan to publish the resolution on the city’s web site and in the newspaper of record to inform the community.
On April 18, the council met, and Mayor Pro Tem Michelle Tye read the resolution calling for the mayor’s censure.
“This resolution is put forth due to rude, discourteous, and unprofessional conduct of Mayor Patricia Mitchell which is beneath the dignity of the Office of Mayor of the City of Rhome and in violation of the City’s Code of Ethics.”
Mitchell declined to comment on details of the investigation because she said it was discussed in executive session.
However, she said, “the allegations are false.”
Mitchell said she wasn’t at the meeting when the vote was taken because she did not feel well and added that the resolution was voted on several days before early voting got underway for the May 4 municipal elections.
Mitchell is running for her second term, saying more needs to be done to bring change to city hall..
Kenneth Crenshaw is running against Mitchell.
Complaints against Mitchell
On Feb. 28, city secretary Shaina Odom filed a complaint against Mitchell, alleging that the mayor was rude and abusive toward employees on several occasions.
In her complaint, obtained by the Star-Telegram, Odom stated that Mitchell bullied and intimidated employees. Odom cited examples of Mitchell’s behavior, including when Mitchell told Odom she was not following proper procedures in drawing for places on the ballot for the May 4 election.
The complaint also described an incident after the Feb. 8 council meeting when Odom asked Mitchell to sign two of the 13 ordinances that the council approved. The two ordinances were necessary for the upcoming elections, and Odom stated that she needed to send them to Wise County the next day.
Odom said, “Mayor Mitchell, I know you don’t like signing these right after the meeting, however, I have two for elections that need to go to Wise County tomorrow morning. Could you please sign these two before you leave tonight.” Mitchell, according to the complaint, replied, “Quite interesting that you have an emergency for me tonight, but you couldn’t even be bothered to come to work last week so that I could sign checks.”
Odom wrote in her complaint that the city administrator signs checks.
Odom described another incident involving Mitchell that occurred shortly after the 2022 election, when Odom asked Mitchell to sign a consent agenda for executive session. She signed the document and later requested a copy of the document. Odom said she explained that the certified agenda was the only document that the mayor could not have by law.
Odom’s complaint alleged that Mitchell tried making “secret copies” of the agenda on several occasions.
“These are not the only things that have happened,” Odom said in her complaint. “The continuing abuse of City Staff is absolutely out of control. Since I have started working in Rhome in 2019, we have lost at least 8 Staff/Council members due to the constant abuse/ Hostile work Environment.”
Mitchell faced similar accusations in 2022 involving the departure of city administrator Cynthia Northrop, who also complained of a hostile work environment. Northrop “separated” from the city and was payed $125,000.
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Mary Hall-Rayford is one of four plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against Eastpointe Mayor Monique Owens.
A group of First Amendment attorneys reached a unique and powerful settlement with the city of Eastpointe after its then-mayor shouted at residents and refused to let them speak during a public meeting in September 2022.
As part of the lawsuit settlement, the city agreed to designate Sept. 6, the day that Eastpointe Mayor Monique Owens shouted down residents, as “First Amendment Day.”
On Tuesday, the council also voted to apologize to the residents — Mary Hall-Rayford, Karen Beltz, Karen Mouradjian, and Cindy Federle — and entered into a consent decree prohibiting the city from enforcing unconstitutional limitations on the public criticizing elected officials.
Each of the plaintiffs also received $17,910 in addition to attorneys’ fees.
“The First Amendment protects every American’s right to criticize government officials,” FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick tells Metro Times. “With this settlement, Eastpointers can have confidence their voices will be heard and local governments can be left with no doubt there are serious consequences for violating the First Amendment.”
The first-term mayor, who was later convicted of fraudulently applying for a $10,000 COVID-19 grant, prevented residents from speaking during the September 2022 meeting, insisting they had no right to criticize her. As the meeting descended into chaos, with Owens berating a resident for explaining the First Amendment, the council’s four other elected members walked out of the meeting and didn’t return.
It wasn’t the first time Owens prevented residents from criticizing her during the council’s public comment period. According to the lawsuit, Owens frequently used her authority “to suppress dissent and criticism by interrupting and shouting down members of the public who criticize her or raise subjects she finds personally embarrassing.”
Fitzpatrick says the settlement is a victory for free speech rights everywhere in America.
“Regular Americans should feel comfortable going to their local government or school board meeting and make their views heard,” Fitzpatrick says. “This is what American democracy is about. There are some countries where you can be put in jail for criticizing a public official or asking the wrong question. Luckily that is not the case in the United States of America, and the U.S. Constitution makes sure that is not the case.”
At the September 2022 meeting, residents were questioning Owens’s actions after she alleged that Councilman Harvey Curley, who is in his 80s, assaulted her by yelling and putting his hands in her face during the open ceremony for Cruisin’ Gratiot in June 2022. Owens was trying to speak at the event, but Curley was opposed, explaining that he didn’t want to politicize the event since it was operated by a nonprofit.
The Macomb County Sheriff’s Office dismissed the case, and the Macomb County Circuit Court denied Owens’s request for a personal protective order.
Hall-Rayford, a community activist, school board member, and former chaplain, was the first to speak at the September meeting, but she didn’t get far.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Owens said as soon as Hall-Rayford began to speak. “We’re going to stop the council meeting because I’m not going to let you speak on something that has to do with police.”
City attorney Richard S. Albright informed Owens that she didn’t have the right to prevent a resident from speaking.
As part of the lawsuit in December 2022, the city agreed to prohibit Owens from interrupting or shutting down speakers during public comment periods.
Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Sr. is charged in connection with abusing his teenage daughter, according to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey.
Getty Images/istockphoto
The mayor of Atlantic City, New Jersey, is accused of beating and emotionally abusing his teenage daughter on multiple occasions, according to officials who said he also made “terroristic threats” toward her.
Mayor Marty Small Sr.’s wife La’Quetta Small, the city’s school district superintendent, is also accused of abuse. They’re both facing charges stemming from incidents involving their daughter throughout December and January, when she was 15 and 16, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office announced in an April 15 news release.
Small’s attorney, Ed Jacobs, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on April 15. Information regarding his wife’s legal representation wasn’t immediately available.
During one incident of physical abuse, Small repeatedly hit his teenage daughter in the head with a broom, and she lost consciousness, the prosecutor’s office said. In another incident, he’s accused of punching her legs, leaving bruises.
In an argument with his daughter, Small also made violent threats, according to the prosecutor’s office.
He “continuously threatened to hurt her by ‘earth slamming’ her down the stairs, grabbing her head and throwing her to the ground, and smacking the weave out of her head,” the news release said.
La’Quetta Small is accused of physically abusing her daughter, leaving visible injuries, on three separate occasions, according to the prosecutor’s office.
She repeatedly punched her daughter in the chest, causing bruises, “dragged her daughter by her hair then struck her with a belt on her shoulders leaving marks,” and also punched the teen in the mouth, the prosecutor’s office said.
Atlantic City Public Schools, the district La’Quetta Small oversees as superintendent, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on April 15.
Atlantic City spokesman Andrew Kramer declined to provide a comment to McClatchy News.
Small and his wife are both charged with second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, according to the release.
Small is separately charged with third-degree terroristic threats, third-degree aggravated assault and disorderly persons simple assault, the prosecutor’s office said. La’Quetta Small is separately charged with three counts of disorderly persons simple assault, according to officials.
Mayor previously denied ‘rumors’ of abuse
The charges against Small and his wife come after authorities executed search warrants at their residence on March 28, the Press of Atlantic City reported. At the time, Jacobs declined to comment on why authorities were at the home, according to the newspaper.
At an April 1 news conference, Small commented on “rumors” about the search, which he said was personal and related to his family, WPVI-TV reported.
He denied being involved in corruption, and shot down rumors that his daughter was pregnant and that he and his wife beat her, according to the TV station.
“The other rumor is, that they said came from an Atlantic City police officer, that said my daughter got knocked up by a drug dealer in Stanley Holmes village, that my wife beat the bleep out of her while my son recorded the whole thing, and I just stood there. False,” Smalls said, WPVI-TV reported.
“The most egregious rumor today is that my daughter was pregnant with twins. And I beat the (expletive) out of her so bad that I killed the babies. And I’m going to be charged with double, double murder,” he added. “And the other one, during the raid, that they were looking for evidence of a miscarriage in my home.”
The Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office’s Special Victims Unit investigated Small and his wife in connection with their daughter, according to the office’s release.
“The charges were placed on summonses for both defendants,” the office said.
Julia Marnin is a McClatchy National Real-Time reporter covering the southeast and northeast while based in New York. She’s an alumna of The College of New Jersey and joined McClatchy in 2021. Previously, she’s written for Newsweek, Modern Luxury, Gannett and more.
DURHAM, N.C. (WTVD) — The sounds of NCCU’s marching band ushered in the Bull City’s newly elected leader, Mayor Leo Williams, who was eager to take the stage, but not without a special acknowledgment of his wife and son.
He dived headfirst into public safety and told the audience he hopes that Durham becomes the most progressive city of public safety in America, but it won’t happen without money.
“We need resources that bolster city staff and employees to be the best at their job from competitive market pay to cutting edge technology,” Wiliams said.
The mayor delivered his first State of the City address on Tuesday night and spoke on such topics as strengthening the city’s relationship with one of its largest employers, Duke University, and announcing mentorship programs connecting at-risk youth with jobs.
“The data speaks for itself. There’s a crucial need for more support for young Black men and boys. Simply put: we just have to do more,” he said.
Williams touted that the GoDurham bus system is the second largest in the state. He also spoke of economic development and safer streets. Perhaps one of the biggest talkers was affordable housing.
“Oftentimes, we talk about affordable housing,” he said. “I want to focus on affordable living.”
Durham Housing Authority Director Anthony Scott approved.
“I love the new phrase of it because we need to get out of this market rate..affordable lingo. We need to build solid communities for everybody involved,” Scott said.
The mayor told the crowd those are the pillars that define the Bull City. That optimism was felt by residents.
“A blueprint for the rest of the country on how a small town can come from the rubble in hard times and become something beautiful,” said Durham resident Davit Melikian.
“Leonardo’s style is different. The people can feel him and his genuine persona,” said Durham resident Sandra Battle.
Mayor Leonardo Williams to lay out his vision for the Bull City when he gives his first State of the City on Tuesday, April 9.
Beverly Makhubele has seen firsthand the transformation of east Durham into a flourishing hotspot.
“It’s given the area new life,” Makhubele said. “We’ve seen businesses, particularly black-owned businesses increase in the last three or four years.”
Williams was just elected to lead the Bull City after serving two years as the City Councilman representing Ward 3.
Williams told ABC11 back in November when he was running for the position that he wanted to capitalize on Durham’s growth, while also making longtime locals feel like they are a part of the growth.
(FOX40.COM) — The race to be the next mayor of Sacramento is so close that a winner still cannot be projected days after the 2024 primary election.
As of 4 p.m. on Friday, mayoral candidate Richard Pan had a marginal lead over five other contenders. Pan had 12,495 ballots counted toward him which is 23.93% of the votes, according to election results.
Dr. Flojaune Cofer, who started off the mayoral race in fourth place, was elevated to second place with 23.26% of the votes. 12,146 ballots have been counted in her favor.
Right after Cofer is Steve Hansen who accounts for 22.89% of the total votes counted so far. That’s 11,790 ballots.
Kevin McCarty is not far behind with 22.58% of the votes which amounts to 11,790 ballots counted at the time of this publication.
The two candidates with the most votes after all ballots have been counted will head to a runoff election on Nov. 5.
A federal judge wants an independent accounting of homelessness programs in Los Angeles — including Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe initiative.
The alliance said it wants the city to pay it $6.4 million in monetary sanctions.
Carter, who has not yet issued a ruling or spelled out the parameters of such an audit, raised concerns about how public money to fight homelessness is being spent. He requested a more detailed accounting of the work performed by nonprofit homeless service providers — including those participating in Inside Safe, which has been moving unhoused Angelenos into hotels, motels and other facilities.
“Which provider is producing results out there?” he asked. “We have no benchmark, and we have no accountability at this point. It’s just as simple as that.”
Carter also asked whether City Controller Kenneth Mejia has the authority to audit homeless programs run by the mayor’s office. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who advises the mayor and council, testified that the controller could not but said there are other ways the city can conduct audits.
Mejia disputed that notion Friday, telling the judge on the second day of the hearing that his office can audit mayoral programs.
“When it comes to a city program, especially those housed under elected officials, we have disagreements with the mayor and the city attorney’s office, but we believe there’s nothing in the charter that prohibits the mayor or the City Council from voluntarily submitting themselves to an audit, so we disagree.”
Hours later, Mejia announced on X that he is launching a “focused audit” on Inside Safe, which received $250 million in this year’s city budget.
Bass, who is in France with a delegation of city officials examining preparations for the Olympics, could not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michele Martinez, special master for Carter, said Bass and City Council President Paul Krekorian had spoken to the judge and offered an independent auditor chosen by the court and paid for by the city.
Mejia said he intends to follow through with his audit.
“Our office welcomes an external, independent auditor to aid in that ongoing litigation,” he said in a statement to The Times. “However, the issues at play in the federal litigation are specific and unique to that case. As the City’s Chief Auditor, it is my responsibility to bring transparency and accountability to specific components of Inside Safe.”
The L.A. Alliance, a group of businesses and residents, alleges that the city repeatedly missed deadlines and negotiated in bad faith over terms of a settlement agreement to shelter at least 60% of people living on the streets in each council district.
Elizabeth Mitchell, the group’s attorney, said the city promised last March that it would come into compliance and provide the alliance with plans to build beds and address homeless encampments in each district.
“We were promised … that if we held off bringing this to the court for just six months, that they would have a full evaluation of each district. That, to my knowledge, has never been done,” Mitchell said. “Even the numbers that were finally agreed upon by the council members were not fully vetted.”
Scott Marcus, chief assistant city attorney, said the city did not breach the agreement when it comes to bed creation but that it did fail to communicate with the alliance when it sought a citywide program to clean up encampments, as opposed to doing so district by district.
“We could have done a better job keeping the alliance in the loop and communicating with them when our circumstances changed,” Marcus said.
Carter said he would delay a ruling while city officials and lawyers for L.A. Alliance discuss details of the audit and Bass is abroad.
However, the judge said he plans to rule that the city acted in bad faith.
The demands for increased oversight of homeless services are not limited to Mejia and the judge. On Friday, the council voted to seek a separate performance evaluation of services being provided to the city by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who drafted the proposal and sits on the homelessness committee, said the city provides tens of millions of dollars each year to that city-county agency.
“We have all known that LAHSA can be opaque at times and, frankly, downright deceptive in terms of how they secure funding from this city,” he said.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, LAHSA’s chief executive officer, said she looks forward to the assessment.
“I welcome the passage of the motion from Councilmembers Blumenfield and [Monica] Rodriguez,” she said, “and look forward to working with the city on developing a framework that provides greater insight into program performance.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
When Mayor Karen Bass laid out her budget proposal for the Los Angeles Police Department last year, she had big plans for rebuilding the size of that agency’s workforce.
The mayor’s budget called for the LAPD to end the 2023-24 budget year with about 9,500 police officers — a target that would require the hiring of nearly 1,000 officers over a 12-month period.
Now, a new assessment from City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo — the city’s top budget analyst — shows the department is falling well short of its staffing goal. By June 30, the end of the fiscal year, the department is expected to have 8,908 officers, according to Szabo’s projections.
That would leave the LAPD with its lowest sworn staffing levels in over two decades.
Szabo’s report, issued Tuesday, is likely to fuel calls for the council to scale back the LAPD’s hiring goal. Even before it was released, some at City Hall had begun arguing that the annual budget calls for hundreds of officer positions that have little to no chance of being filled.
“I do not think 9,500 is realistic,” Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said Wednesday. “We can’t be in denial about this. It is not realistic. And the reason it’s not realistic is because … people who are entering the workforce do not want to be police officers.”
Soto-Martínez has long argued for the idea of shifting certain duties out of the LAPD and into agencies with unarmed responders. He asked for the LAPD’s 12-month hiring projections last month, just as the council began the process of cutting an as-yet-unknown number of civilian city positions — part of a larger effort at reining in a budget shortfall.
Meanwhile, police staffing is continuing its year-to-year slide.
The LAPD had about 10,000 officers in 2019, the last full year before COVID-19. In June 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, the City Council voted to scale back the deployment to about 9,750.
Bass took office in 2022. By the time her first budget went into effect, the number of officers had fallen to 9,027. In an attempt to reverse those trends, she negotiated a four-year package of pay increases and higher starting salaries.
That deal, approved in August, is now a major contributor to the city’s budget shortfall, which could reach as much as $400 million in the coming fiscal year.
De’Marcus Finnell, a spokesperson for Bass, said Wednesday that the salary agreement with the police officers’ union is producing results, helping to spur recruitment and lower attrition.
“According to conversations with LAPD, retirement rates could’ve been much higher if we hadn’t taken the action we did,” Finnell said in an email.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who voted against the salary agreement last year, has been offering a different assessment, calling the police contract financially irresponsible. Raman, now running for reelection with support from the mayor, has repeatedly warned that the police raises will leave the city with insufficient funds for other government programs.
“I thought that the size of the raise would be so much that it would create significant budget deficits going forward,” she told an audience last month, adding: “So far, the data has proven me correct.”
Others on the council say they still support the police raises.
Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, in an interview, said attrition has “slowed significantly” at the LAPD since the contract was approved. The contract, she said, is “doing what we needed it to do.”
Bass, as part of her budget, had been hoping to hire 780 new officers during the current fiscal year. She also had been looking to bring 200 retirees back to the department.
So far, only 15 retirees have come back, Szabo said.
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The decrease in LAPD staffing is producing at least one benefit — cutting costs in the city budget.
The city’s financial analysts are currently projecting an $82-million shortfall in the LAPD’s sworn salary account this year. Had the department had been successful in reaching the mayor’s hiring goals, that number would have grown to more than $118 million, Szabo said in his report.
Meanwhile, some categories of crime continue to fall.
Homicides have decreased by nearly 6% compared with the prior year, according to LAPD figures covering the period ending Jan. 27. Burglaries decreased by nearly 7% over the same time frame.
Other types of crime are on the rise. Assaults have gone up by 12% compared to the same period last year, according to LAPD figures. The number of shooting victims is up 29% so far this year.
For as long as people have watched tents take over sidewalks and RVs deteriorate under freeways, politicians have been making promises about solving homelessness in Los Angeles.
And for just as long, those same politicians have been breaking them.
This is undoubtedly why, back in March, as Mayor Karen Bass was approaching her first 100 days in office, only 17% of Angelenos believed her administration would make “a lot of progress” getting people off the streets, according to a Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Far more — 45% — predicted just “a little progress” would be made.
I was thinking about this deep well of public skepticism while listening to Bass, all smiles in a bright green suit on Wednesday morning, enthusiastically explain why the progress she has actually made is a reason for renewed optimism.
Flanked by members of the L.A. City Council outside a school in Hollywood, she announced that her administration had, in its first year, moved more than 21,694 people out of encampments and into interim housing. That’s an increase of 28% over the final year of former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, taking into account the work of various government programs, including Bass’ signature one, Inside Safe.
In addition, the majority of those directed to motel and hotel rooms, congregate shelters and tiny homes have decided to stay, rather than head back out onto the streets.
“We have tried to set a new tone in the city. This is an example of that new tone. Forty-one people used to sleep here, and now it’s clear,” Bass said Wednesday over the shrieks of schoolchildren. “Students and parents don’t need to walk around tents on their way to school, and the Angelenos who were living here do not need to die on our streets.”
It was a convincing message, backed up by a thick packet of numbers distributed to reporters at City Hall a few hours later.
But numbers are funny. They can be crunched in many ways and interpreted to mean many different things.
As my Times colleague David Zahniser pointed out, all of the people who now live in interim housing are still considered homeless by the federal government. And while Bass had originally thought most of them would be there for only three to six months, it’s now looking more like 18 months to two years. Permanent housing is that scarce.
So, numbers-wise, don’t expect a decline in the next annual homelessness count, which is scheduled for January. There might even be an increase, thanks to the expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections. As of the last count, there were more than 46,000 unhoused people living in the city, mostly in encampments.
But again, numbers are funny. They tend not to mean half as much as what people see and experience for themselves, just like the disconnect between public perceptions of crime and actual crime data.
So, when Bass declares at a news conference that “we have proved this year that we will make change,” and she talks about the encampment that used to be where she’s standing, and all the encampments that her administration has cleared, even if a few more tents have popped up down the street, skeptical Angelenos just might believe her.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing.
“What I see most powerfully is increased hope,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, told reporters on Wednesday. “Hope among the folks who are living in those encampments who had given up and [thought] they’ll always live in that level of despair. Hope that the community now believes that we could possibly get out of this terrible crisis.”
Kellie Waldon, 54, cries near what’s left of her encampment, left, as Skid Row West is dismantled under the 405 Freeway along Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles in October. Waldon was hoping to receive housing through the city’s Inside Safe program, like others in the encampment had. “You get your hopes up and you don’t know what to believe,” Waldon said.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Hope is a thing difficult to quantify, especially among people who have been homeless for years, and have suffered so much and have been let down so often by government.
I’ve talked to some who took a chance and decided to leave their tents and RVs, and are now thrilled to be in a motel room with a door, running water and air conditioning. Others have had it with curfews and jail-like rules, and are getting tired of waiting on promised permanent housing.
I’ve also talked to those who have been booted out of interim housing for one reason or another, and are back on the streets. They are feeling hopeless, like many cash-strapped Angelenos who are on the verge of an eviction.
But peak hopelessness? That’s what we saw on the first days of December.
At a hastily called news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced that officers were searching for a man who had fatally shot three homeless people — one sleeping on a couch in an alley and another while pushing a shopping cart.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
Moore and Bass didn’t know then, but their suspect, Jerrid Joseph Powell, had already been arrested by Beverly Hills police after a traffic stop in which his $60,000 BMW was linked to a deadly follow-home robbery.
Police have yet to elaborate on Powell’s alleged motive, but Bass brought up the horrific case several times on Wednesday — and with good reason. Violence and acts of cruelty against people living on the streets are increasingly common not just locally, but nationally.
Advocates blame this trend of nastiness on the pandemic-era surge in homelessness, particularly in unsheltered homelessness, and the subsequent spike in interactions between housed and unhoused residents. Fear and frustration can lead to dehumanization and that, in turn, can lead to violence, said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.
“I do really worry that it’s become normalized in public discourse to speak about people experiencing homelessness as, like, a problem for those who are not homeless — as opposed to fundamentally a massive societal failure that’s left usually older, vulnerable people terrified and totally unprotected,” she told me. “And I do think that there is a connection, like the more we dehumanize people, the less protected they are.”
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer has watched this happen in real-time as president and CEO of L.A. Family Housing. The seeming permanency of encampments, and the trash, fires and unsanitary conditions they often generate, have led to what she describes as widespread impatience.
“I don’t mean big, systemic impatience, like ‘I wish we could end homelessness faster,’” she said. “It’s the ‘I’m just sick of seeing you in front of me’ kind of impatience.”
On some level, she gets it, though. As does Kushel. As do I.
“It has to be OK to say, ‘Yeah, this sucks that I’m walking my kids to school and I’m walking over people in tents,’” Kushel told me. “But there has to be a way to hold that with being able to recognize how we got to this position and also how we’re going to get out. And to sort of restore [our] collective humanity.”
For Klasky-Gamer, this has meant focusing on what has changed since Bass became mayor.
“I know how much good is getting done,” she told me. “The frustration I may feel at seeing the tent every day I turn the corner, at least I can temper it knowing that 10 people yesterday moved into an apartment. These three people haven’t. But these 10 did.”
RVs in an encampment along West Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The mayor has told me many times that getting people off the streets isn’t just a humanitarian imperative — and, as a serial killer reminded us, a safety imperative. It’s also a demonstration to a fed up public that progress is possible.
“What distresses Angelenos the most are encampments. That’s where people were dying on the street,” Bass told reporters. “And to me, what was clear, was that we come up with a way to get people out of the tents.”
Some will dismiss that. They’ll insist that all her administration is doing is reducing visible homelessness to score easy political points. And that instead of doing the hard work of actually helping L.A.’s most vulnerable residents get back on their feet, the mayor is hiding them so that they’ll be forgotten and abandoned in interim housing.
In this city, defined by its haves and have nots, I understand the cynicism and skepticism. But that’s why what Bass does next, namely expanding and stabilizing the city’s crumbling supply of permanent housing, will matter even more than what she has done thus far.
“We’ve got to somehow make people believe again that this is solvable,” Kushel told me, “and it is solvable.”
Hope can be elusive. But Annelisa Stephan was looking for it anyway when she came to the Ballona Wetlands on a recent Saturday morning.
She and more than 100 other volunteers — many of them from the nearby neighborhoods of Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — had descended on the Westside ecological reserve to dig holes, spread soil, and put in plants and trees.
Just a few months ago, RVs had been parked here along Jefferson Boulevard, bumper to bumper in a sprawling encampment that dozens of unhoused people had come to call home.
They built a close-knit community, looking out for one another and mourning one another after deadly fires. But they also decimated the Ballona Wetlands’ freshwater marsh with everything from battery acid to trash to human waste, and scared off nearby residents who once walked the trails.
And then one day, after almost three years, the encampment was gone, replaced by concrete barricades and metal fencing. The residents were mostly sent to interim housing and the RVs were mostly towed away.
“It’s like, hard to know what to think or feel,” Stephan told me. “I’m happy that the land is being stewarded, but just sad about the suffering that so many people face.”
She lamented the “fervent, anti-homeless mania” that she has heard from some of her neighbors.
“It’s just been really a painful time,” Stephan said.
Not far away, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, whose Westside district includes the Ballona Wetlands and got elected on promises to aggressively crack down on homeless encampments, was more circumspect.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, which is to get folks off the streets and into safe settings and connected to the help that they need,” she said. “There’s a lot of different points of view about how we get there. And I think that’s where a lot of the conflict and the division lie.”
She paused, as traffic whizzed by on Jefferson Boulevard.
You’ve probably never heard of Indiana state Sen. Eddie Melton.
But you may be familiar with Gary, Indiana, the small Rust Belt city once known as the birthplace of Michael Jackson, but it’s better known nowadays for its shocking degree of blight due to the contraction of the U.S. steel industry.
Melton is the guy who wants to make these videos go away.
“We’re not going to allow YouTubers to come to our city and run through a couple of abandoned buildings and let the algorithm dictate our future,” Melton said not long before he was elected mayor of Indiana’s ninth-largest city, just 40 miles southeast of Chicago on Lake Michigan. The 42-year-old Democrat won this month’s mayoral race in what could conservatively be called a landslide with 95% of the votes.
YouTube’s urban explorers have even discovered Melton’s alma mater, Horace Mann High School, one of 33 abandoned schools in Gary. It’s a husk of a building with a gigantic crumbling auditorium and dark hallways lined with lockers that hang off their hinges like broken teeth — a haven for people seeking out decay.
“They care so little about this place, I guess, that everything just sits open nowadays,” remarked one YouTuber, Jared Coker Urbex, after visiting the building, which hasn’t seen a class of students in almost 20 years.
State Sen. Eddie Melton, shown here in the Gary State Bank Building, was elected the mayor of Gary on Nov. 7 with 95% of the votes and will be sworn in on Jan. 1. He’s the third consecutive Democrat to oust an incumbent mayor in a primary.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
If being mayor is one of the hardest jobs in America, then being the mayor of Gary, Indiana, a deeply challenged blue city in a deeply red state, is its toughest assignment. It’s a fact that hasn’t been lost on Melton or any of his recent predecessors, who were ousted in contentious primaries over the almost nonexistent pace of revitalization and the obvious signs of it across the city. Roughly 20% of homes sit empty, the highest percentage of any city in the country.
Gary is the story of how one deindustrialized, majority-Black city, despite vows from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to revive elements of domestic manufacturing — one by bringing steel and coal plants roaring back to life, the other by historic investments in clean energy — has been almost immune to sustained improvement. The reasons for this range from systemic racism at the state level to Gary’s own decades of shitty luck.
“Once you start a downward spiral, unless you can get a major new employer or major news event or major new project, then it just feeds on itself,” said Paul Helmke, who teaches law and public policy at Indiana University and is a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, which managed to diversify its economic base while Gary fell further behind other cities. He cited Gary’s inability to annex neighboring communities, a strategy other deindustrialized Indiana cities used to grow their tax bases, and property tax caps that hit the city especially hard as reasons for the decline.
A view of a building for sale in downtown Gary on Oct. 31. Melton has vowed to revitalize the city as mayor.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
Gary’s Miller Beach is one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, but the lakefront area isn’t immune to the city’s epidemic of abandoned homes.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
Gary, in northwest Indiana’s Lake County, has long been viewed as an area of the state “where political corruption happens … where African Americans live,” Helmke said. “It’s always sort of been the stepchild of the rest of the state.” Helmke also pinned Gary’s woes on “latent racism on the part of the legislature.”
All of that makes the job of actually running this city in a way that spurs development almost impossible. Gary’s remaining residents are quick to trust new leaders but even quicker to toss them aside when they don’t produce results, as evidenced by the fact that Gary hasn’t reelected a mayor since 2015.
Karen Freeman-Wilson, the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League and the last mayor reelected here, likened the persistent forces that Gary is up against to a “really extreme weather event … like a hurricane or tornado.”
She called the job a “labor of love — but it was definitely a lot of labor.”
Jerome Prince, the mayor whom Melton beat in the May Democratic primary — the de facto general election in a city this blue — said he has no regrets about taking on the job but seemed almost a little relieved to be moving on after a single term.
“It’s the toughest assignment I’ve ever had in my life,” Prince said. “There’s always a rollover political dynamic to things — that’s human nature, I get it. But I’m honored to have served.”
Gary was founded as a company town by U.S. Steel, which at one time employed 25,000 people in the city. Now it’s down to 4,300 employees at the Gary Works mill.
HUM Images via Getty Images
Gary’s steel mill as seen from the beach at Indiana Dunes State Park.
Patrick Bennett/Corbis via Getty Images
Gary was founded as a company town for U.S. Steel in 1906, but the offshoring of steel manufacturing in the latter half of the 20th century decimated the city. It has lost more than 60% of its population since it topped 178,000 in 1960 — largely in the form of “white flight” to the suburbs. The population has continued to decline, dipping below 68,000, according to the most recent census estimates. Gary, once Indiana’s second most-populous city, is no longer even the biggest city in its county.
Gary earned the title of “murder capital” in 1994 for having the highest rate of homicides per capita in the nation, beating Washington, D.C. Thirty years later, crime has gone down, but the reputation sticks. “What rubs me the wrong way is this perception — and I guess that started some years ago — that Gary is this incredibly dangerous place,” said Prince, who added that a big focus of his administration was policing.
“That was a very tough era for a lot of us,” said Melton, who credits his successful path in life with playing high school football and securing an athletic scholarship to Kentucky State University, a historically black university, before returning to Gary to work in the nonprofit sector. “The life expectancy at that time was very low for a young Black male.”
U.S. Steel still operates its flagship North American plant in Gary, employing 4,300 people — down from 25,000 decades ago. In 2019, the Fortune 500 company sought city and state tax breaks to modernize the plant and keep it in Gary, even though the upgrade could ultimately cost jobs. Meanwhile, 32% of Gary residents live below the poverty line.
For a time, Gary had the nation’s largest percentage of Black residents relative to its total population, turning it into a hub of Black political activism. Gary was one of the first major American cities to elect a Black mayor, Richard Hatcher, in 1967. It also hosted the first National Black Political Convention in 1972, a milestone event for a rising class of Black political leaders, including Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi.
Thompson, who was back in Gary over the summer at Melton’s request, described the city to HuffPost as a “diamond-in-the-rough kind of community. You can’t look at it for what it is now. You look at it for what the potential can be going forward,” he said.
Left: Richard Hatcher looks at an advertisement in the Aug. 24, 1967, New York Times asking for contributions to his campaign for Gary mayor. Hatcher became one of the nation’s first Black mayors. Right: Hatcher and his campaign staff cheer after learning he had won on Nov. 7, 1967.
Gary has been almost untouched by the political realignment that’s happened across much of the Midwest over the last decade. In 2016, when Trump vowed to fight for the “forgotten men and women” of the Rust Belt and bring back manufacturing that had long since gone abroad, Gary’s majority-Black population shrugged — as did many of the Black voters who helped put Biden in the Oval Office four years later. And even with polls showing Trump narrowing the gap in Black voter support if he faces Biden in a 2024 rematch, although still that phenomenon doesn’t seem to extend to Gary, which is dominated by one-party rule.
“I think a lot of [Republicans] have just completely given up,” said Andrew Delano, a 31-year-old real estate investor and Gary Republican who ran against Melton to bring attention to housing and tax issues. Delano, the first Republican to run for Gary mayor in almost a decade, came away from the election with 314 votes to Melton’s 6,376.
“I do think there are people that would fall more on the center-right political spectrum in the city than what the votes would otherwise show,” he said. “A lot of them don’t turn out because there aren’t actually [GOP] candidates on the ballot.”
Delano praised Trump for attempting to get tougher on China with steel tariffs but said too many in the GOP are ignoring the problems that continue to plague the middle of the country.
“They spent trillions on wars in the Middle East, and cities in the Midwest can’t fill potholes, and they have stoplights that don’t work,” he said.
Eddie Melton speaks to Gary residents about their concerns and ideas for the city at the Adam Benjamin Jr. Metro Center in downtown Gary on Oct. 31. Melton supported a state Senate bill to fund revitalization of the train station.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
Melton’s primary focus is stabilizing the city’s population by improving public schools, which are coming out of a state takeover caused by fiscal insolvency due to dwindling enrollment. He wants to tear down many of Gary’s 6,000 vacant homes and 300 abandoned commercial buildings. He wants to take better advantage of the city’s proximity to Chicago and the small international airport it has within its city limits. He wants people to know that Gary, located on Lake Michigan, has a national park with miles of trails winding through protected dunes.
But to do much of this, Melton will have to overcome Gary’s chilly relationship with Republicans in Indianapolis who’ve consolidated power from political realignment as much as from extreme gerrymandering.
Freeman-Wilson said Republicans tend to regard the city’s leaders as ill-intentioned and incompetent. In 2013, following an outbreak of violence, she wrote to then-Gov. Mike Pence asking for temporary state assistance to police the city. Pence responded by requesting information about how the assistance fit into the city’s “longer-term plans for self-sufficiency” following a tax hike — the implication being that Gary wasn’t using its own resources well enough to handle the problem.
“Any time something is financial, people assume you can manage your way out of it,” Freeman-Wilson said. “They assume there’s mismanagement. They assume there’s malfeasance. They assume there’s theft or corruption. And there’s an attitude that comes with that.”
The abandoned Genesis Convention Center in Gary is one of the places that Melton said he hopes to restore.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
Gary leaders hope that transit-oriented development can help revitalize the city.
Laura McDermott for HuffPost
The people who see promise in the coming Melton administration note that he’s worked with Republicans in the statehouse since 2017 to deliver on legislative priorities for Gary, like a 2019 law that allowed Gary’s casino to relocate from an industrial harbor to be closer to a major throughway. Melton was also behind legislation that will allow the city to rebuild its train station and potentially construct a convention center. This is actual progress that’s eluded his predecessors.
“That’s why I ran,” said Melton, who used the campaign slogan “Gary Deserves Better” to convince voters that it doesn’t have to be like this forever.
“I wanted to offer stable, solid leadership that’s been trusted and tested,” he said. “You can’t get anymore tested than being a Democrat in Indiana and still able to get things done for your community.”
Yet when Melton insists that Gary will be the nation’s “greatest comeback story,” it can seem naive considering the reality of what he’s up against. Thousands of abandoned buildings. Chronically low tax collection rates. Melton will be running a city that struggles with fixing broken streetlights and yet must plan its way out of a decades-long systemic decline.
But Melton doesn’t see another way forward. It’s now or never.
“If you’re still in Gary, either you want to be here or you had no other option,” he said. “But the people that want to be here, they want to see a turnaround.”
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Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to China was many things: A test of his skill in climate diplomacy. An opportunity to burnish his political image on the world stage. A demonstration of the risks of the indulgent photo op.
That danger played out during a visit to a school in Beijing on Friday where Newsom knocked a child down after stumbling while shooting hoops. They both fell to the ground and quickly sat up. Newsom patted the boy on the back several times before giving him a hug and asking if he was OK.
It was a cringey moment for the Democratic governor but didn’t cause injuries. Newsom, in dress shoes, a white shirt and slacks, proceeded to play with the 9- and 10-year-old children for several more minutes, spinning the basketball on his fingertip and swishing a few times.
Then the governor’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, stepped onto the court and took a few shots herself. The Newsoms handed out California-themed pins to the kids and moved on to visit a painting class and a school garden.
The school visit was meant to highlight Siebel Newsom’s interest in farm-to-school programs. In California, she works to get more fresh food into school meals through partnerships with local farms. The visit to the Beijing school was one stop on a jam-packed agenda in which Newsom visited five cities in seven days and met with President Xi Jinping.
Many of his events were formulaic meetings with government officials to discuss economic development and clean energy — important work toward his goal of advancing partnerships to thwart climate change, but not particularly photogenic. Other events were clearly designed as visual spectacles meant to enhance Newsom’s image as a leader.
In one case, Newsom’s office sent out a picture of him standing on the Great Wall wearing aviator-style sunglasses and a pensive expression as he looks toward the sun. The glamour shot quickly set the internet aflame with memes of Newsom in the same pensive pose with various fake backdrops. Among them: the Oval Office and a homeless encampment.
Newsom’s penchant for splashy photos emerged early in his political career when, as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, he and his then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle posed for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Newsom’s arms were wrapped around Guilfoyle as they lay on an opulent rug in the home of the wealthy Getty family. The image has endured over the years as a visual punchline for Newsom’s critics.
A very different photo from Newsom’s days as mayor re-emerged this week while he was in China. The mayor of Shanghai began a meeting with Newsom by presenting him with a framed photo of his visit to Shanghai in the early 2000s. Newsom was in a schoolyard, shooting hoops with local students.
CHICAGO — Brandon Johnson, a union organizer and former teacher, was elected as Chicago’s next mayor Tuesday in a major victory for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing as the heavily blue-leaning city grapples with high crime and financial challenges.
Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, won a close race over former Chicago schools CEO Paul Vallas, who was backed by the police union. Johnson, 47, will succeed Lori Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to be the city’s mayor.
Lightfoot became the first Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose her reelection bid when she finished third in a crowded February contest.
Johnson’s victory in the nation’s third-largest city topped a remarkable trajectory for a candidate who was little known when he entered the race last year. He climbed to the top of the field with organizing and financial help from the politically influential Chicago Teachers Union and high-profile endorsements from progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders appeared at a rally for Johnson in the final days of the race.
Taking the stage Tuesday night for his victory speech, a jubilant Johnson thanked his supporters. He recalled growing up in a poor family, teaching at a school in Cabrini Green, a notorious former public housing complex, and shielding his kids from gunfire in their west side neighborhood.
“Chicago, tonight is just the beginning,” Johnson told the crowd. “With our voices and our votes, we have ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city.”
He promised that under his administration, the city would look out for everyone, regardless of how much money they have, whom they love or where they come from.
“Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people,” Johnson said.
It was a momentous win for progressive organizations such as the teachers union, with Johnson winning the highest office of any active teachers union member in recent history, leaders say. It comes as groups such as Our Revolution, a powerful progressive advocacy organization, push to win more offices in local and state office, including in upcoming mayoral elections in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, Vallas said that he had called Johnson and that he expected him to be the next mayor. Some in the crowd seemed to jeer the news, but Vallas urged them to put aside differences and support the next mayor in “the daunting work ahead.”
“This campaign that I ran to bring the city together would not be a campaign that fulfills my ambitions if this election is going to divide us,” Vallas said.
He added that he had offered Johnson his full support in the transition.
The contest surfaced longstanding tensions among Democrats, with Johnson and his supporters blasting Vallas — who was endorsed by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat — as too conservative and a Republican in disguise.
Johnson and Vallas were the top two vote-getters in the all-Democrat but officially nonpartisan February race, which moved to the runoff because no candidate received over 50%. Both candidates have deep roots in the Democratic Party, though with vastly different backgrounds and views.
Johnson, who is Black, grew up poor and is now raising his children in one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. After teaching middle and high school, he helped mobilize teachers, including during a historic 2012 strike through which the Chicago Teachers Union increased its organizing muscle and influence in city politics.
Vallas, who finished first in the February contest, was the only white candidate in that nine-person field. A former Chicago budget director, he later led schools in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Bridgeport, Connecticut. He has run unsuccessfully for office multiple times, including a 2019 bid for Chicago mayor.
Among the biggest disputes between Johnson and Vallas was how to address crime. Like many U.S. cities, Chicago saw violent crime increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting a 25-year high of 797 homicides in 2021, though the number decreased last year and the city has a lower murder rate than others in the Midwest, such as St. Louis.
Vallas, 69, said he would hire hundreds more police officers, while Johnson said he didn’t plan to cut the number of officers, but that the current system of policing isn’t working. Johnson was forced to defend past statements expressing support for “defunding” police — something he insisted he would not do as mayor.
But Johnson argued that instead of investing more in policing and incarceration, the city should focus on mental health treatment, affordable housing for all and jobs for youth. He has proposed a plan he says will raise $800 million by taxing “ultrarich” individuals and businesses, including a per-employee “head tax” on employers and an additional tax on hotel room stays. Vallas says that so-called “tax-the-rich” plan would be a disaster for the city’s recovering economy.
Resident Chema Fernandez, 25, voted for Johnson as an opportunity to move on from what he described as “the politics of old.” He said he saw Vallas as being in line with previous mayors such as Rahm Emanuel, Lightfoot and Richard M. Daley, who haven’t worked out great for places like his neighborhood on the southwest side, which has seen decades of disinvestment.
“I think we need to give the opportunity for policies that may actually change some of our conditions,” Fernandez said.
