Mayor’s ‘boy’ insult triggers complaints
Tensions are heightened at a Pasadena City Council meeting after the mayor, who is white, calls a Hispanic councilman “boy,” further driving a racial wedge into the heart of city politics.
The campaign to succeed termlimited Pasadena Mayor Johnny Isbell has drawn seven candidates of varying backgrounds, but it’s challenging to identify a universal theme other than the desire to win.
Yet certain sentiments emerged repeatedly as I sifted through the public statements of the five men and two women vying to succeed the controversial Isbell, who has been in power on and off for four decades. These ideas, expressed mostly in standard campaign platitudes, focus on uniting the city and moving past recent events that brought an unusual degree of public attention — much of it unfavorable — to the industrial suburb of Houston.
“It’s a new day in Pasadena,” says a message on the campaign website of San Jacinto College trustee John Moon Jr. “Let’s get beyond bad headlines and get back to basics that made our city strong.”
Another candidate, former state Rep. Gilbert Peña, struck a similar note in a recent interview with my colleague Kristi Nix, promising to bridge gaps between the city’s older, predominantly Latino north side and the mostly Anglo south side: “It’s my hope that if I win, I would work to unify Pasadena as one city, and not just north and south.”
And here’s Councilman Jeff Wagner on his mayoral campaign website: “Decades of good planning, innovative thinking and community building have created a great place to call home. But not every area of our city has access to the best this city has to offer.”
Over the past two years or so, Pasadena has been in the news more often than at any time since the “Urban Cowboy” craze of the 1980s. But the critical coverage — in outlets ranging from this column to an investigative public radio program to the New York Times magazine — has been in sharp contrast to the lighthearted accounts of city slickers struggling to stay mounted on thrashing mechanical bulls.
Instead, recent accounts have depicted Pasadena as a place where top city officials sought to suppress the influence of a growing Latino electorate, a city of glaring inequities in public
services based on ethnicity and geography. The drumbeat of bad press continued Monday with a front-page Chronicle story examining problems within Pasadena’s economic development agency.
Wagner is a consistent Isbell ally, so his acknowledgment that some parts of Pasadena have been neglected indicates that clinging to the status quo is no longer regarded as a winning political strategy. Moon’s admonition to “get back to basics” suggests that the long dispute over a change in the council structure initiated by Is- bell has been a distraction from providing essential services.
With Isbell moving to the sidelines and the city under federal court order to return to its previous district council election system for now, there’s a sense of renewed focus on the nuts and bolts of city government.
“I’m looking forward to it,” says Don Harrison, a longtime Pasadena politician who is running unopposed for a council position in the May 6 election. “We’ll be going back to building roads and drainage.”
Yet the issues that have created the recent distractions will not simply go away. On May 7, Pasadena will still be a city where 62 percent of the roughly 150,000 residents are Latinos concentrated mostly in neighborhoods lacking in infrastructure and services.
The new mayor will have much to overcome.
In response to a lawsuit that successfully challenged the new council structure as discriminatory, U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal found that city officials lavished grant funds on the south side, at the expense of older north-side neighborhoods, to gain support from Anglo voters seen as more likely to go to the polls.
And that’s just one example of a local culture, described in trial testimony and officially recorded in Rosenthal’s opinion, that hasn’t quite shed the reputation for prejudice it acquired when it once served as the home of the Ku Klux Klan’s Texas headquarters.
This legacy is a source of embarrassment to residents like Robbie Lowe, a real estate agent who has lived in Pasadena since 1982. At a council meeting in January, Lowe scolded Isbell for having brought “an ugly part of our history back to the forefront” by persisting with the new council scheme.
When I called Lowe on Monday morning to ask for her thoughts on the mayor’s race, she was fuming about another embarrassment: Isbell, during a council meeting just moments before we spoke, had referred to Latino Councilman Cody Ray Wheeler as “boy.”
“Maybe he meant it as ‘my youthful companion,’ but it doesn’t play well in terms of that image we’re trying to overcome,” Lowe said.
Whoever succeeds Isbell will have to do more than refrain from racially insensitive rhetoric.
Those bad headlines reflect real problems rooted in the policy choices and governing tone of the city’s leadership.
If I lived in Pasadena, I’d vote for the candidate who had a realistic plan to start building a city that stands for equity and inclusiveness rather than discrimination and division.