New Pasadena mayor faces critical challenge in unifying city

Unity is a worthy goal for any leader, but it can’t be achieved by pretending divisions don’t exist.

Pasadena Mayor Jeff Wagner seems to understand this.

“Some of our neighborhoods really felt that they had been ignored for years,” Wagner said during an interview in his office Monday, describing feedback he got from voters during his campaign last spring. “I stressed that if I became mayor, Pasadena was Pasadena to me. … What I meant was, we’re all in it together.”

Wagner’s predecessor, longtime Mayor Johnny Isbell, had expressed similar sentiments. Isbell told a New York Times reporter in 2015 he aspired to lead “one Pasadena,” Latino and Anglo, north and south.

Yet Isbell used every bit of his considerable political muscle to pursue a City Council election system that would become one of the most divisive issues in recent city history. His tactics — funding ads that demonized a Latino council candidate who threatened the mayor’s fragile majority, for example — contributed to the sense that Pasadena was a city of warring camps.

Now Wagner, 53, a retired Houston police officer, is vowing to unify the industrial Houston suburb despite the dramatic demographic and cultural change it has experienced over the past 20 to 30 years. Some of his administration’s actions in his first three months in office suggest he understands what it will take to bridge the city’s gaps of ethnicity, income and culture.

One of his early official acts was to appoint Pasadena Police Department veteran Al Espinoza as the city’s first Latino police chief.

His plan to restore the bus service dropped by Isbell — city officials are working out details with Harris County Transit — is likely to benefit many of the same low-income residents who told him their neighborhoods were not getting a fair share of city services.

These disparities were documented last May by Chronicle reporter Susan Carroll, whose reporting debunked officials’ claims that Pasadena’s economic development agency had spent most of its funds for projects on the older, predominantly Latino north side. In reality, about threequarters of the money was spent

on the mostly Anglo south side, Carroll reported.

It would take years, of course, for any administration to rectify inequities of that magnitude. In the short term, the biggest test of Wagner’s commitment to unity will be his handling of a lawsuit that challenged the new City Council system created in a 2013 charter change election initiated by Isbell.

Ongoing legal matter

A federal judge ruled in January that the new system, which added two at-large council seats and removed two district positions, intentionally diluted Latino voting strength. To comply with the judge’s order, the May city elections were conducted under the earlier system of eight single-member district positions.

Before leaving office, Isbell instructed Pasadena’s outside lawyers to appeal the ruling. Wagner has not said publicly whether he intends to continue the appeal, and during our interview he said he couldn’t discuss ongoing legal matters.

But during a council meeting last week, Wagner answered a question about a payment to the law firm handling the case with a cryptic remark about “discussions with the other side.” And Councilman Don Harrison previously said he understood the attorneys were negotiating with plaintiffs’ lawyers toward a settlement over payment of legal fees.

As I discussed in a previous column, Pasadena would only be liable for the plaintiffs’ legal costs if the city drops or loses its appeal. So the discussions with the plaintiffs’ attorneys suggest that Wagner wants to put the lawsuit behind the city with as little additional expense to its taxpayers as possible.

City Council questions

When I asked Wagner which council system better served the city — legal questions aside — he was noncommittal.

“I believe both systems work,” he said. “We’re not getting rid of a position; as long as there are eight people there, and eight people want to do the best for the city, either way is going to work. I mean I have no opinion one way or another.”

It might seem surprising that the mayor has no opinion on an issue that brought national attention to his city, which was widely portrayed as an emblem of efforts to suppress Latino voting rights. But the point will be moot if the city stops fighting the lawsuit, pays a reasonable settlement and moves on.

Wagner’s challenge won’t end there, however. Testimony during the trial of the voting rights suit showed that powerful forces in Pasadena are determined to resist the political change represented by the city’s growing Latino majority. Navigating that landscape, while fulfilling his promise to serve all neighborhoods equally, will continue to test the new mayor’s ability to achieve the goal of unifying his city.

I reported incorrectly in previous columns that Wagner, as a Pasadena councilman, voted in favor of a new council election system pushed by Isbell. Wagner was not yet on the council when the relevant votes were taken.