We're Lost in the 'Wood
Another shoe--or is that a bomb?--dropped in Inglewood last week when City Administrator Tim Wanamaker resigned just shy of two years of being on the job. That widens the civic leadership vacuum quite a bit. In January, embattled mayor Roosevelt Dorn surprised observers when he resigned mere hours before the start of a trial for misappropriation of public money, charges that stem from the fact that Dorn helped himself to a low-interest home loan the city offered to its high-ranking employees, not electeds, and certainly not the mayor. Since Dorn's abrupt departure, the remaining Inglewood council members have been rotating as mayor pro tem and gearing up to campaign for a shot at the real thing; voters will choose Dorn's successor on June 8.
Now Wanamaker is gone. Though his official sign-off was a lot more congenial than Dorn's, he had ongoing issues with the council that almost certainly drove him from the post. As a citizen, I had issues with the CA too, not just with Wanamaker but with his predecessors. Development-wise, Inglewood is a mess, a Frankenstein of a town that boasts about its big-box retail but lets its potential-rich downtown die on the vine. It has solidly middle-class, aspirational homeowners who do cultural battle with the city's many gang factions, and who's winning depends on what day of the week it is (and what the larger the economic climate is--the great recession isn't helping).
The CA is crucial in that battle. The mayor is the face of the city, but the city administrator is its heart, the ground-level leader in a high-rise who oversees a master plan and keeps the city's larger vision oxygenated on a daily basis. This Wanamaker failed to do, though he was hardly alone in having an anemic vision of Inglewood. Too bad. He was young, black, an east coast transplant who people hoped would bring new eyes and a new sensibility to a town long hemmed in by its reputation of 'urban' intransigence. Historian and writer Norman Klein once told me that L.A. is always convinced that it needs to hire outside people in key positions--police chiefs, musuem directors and the like--in order to give itself legitimacy it never quite feels. Inglewood is a case study in that lack of legitimacy, though it's a lack that in many ways is totally independent of who's actually running the place.
Oh, one other bit of bad news hit this week, though it was unsurprising: Inglewood paid out $2.45 million in civil cases brought by the families of Michael Byoune, Chris Larkin and Larry White. Byoune was the 19-year-old unarmed man killed by Inglewood cops nearly two years ago as he sat in a car at a Rally's drive-thru; the driver and a fellow passenger, Larkin and White, were injured. The Byoune shooting kicked off a run of five fatal officer-involved shootings in the city that year that are still reverberating. More settlements are surely coming; the city is already struggling with a multimillion-dollar budget deficit for the next fiscal year. Violence and brutality are but two things the city literally can't afford. Now would be a great time for some vision, alright.
This image was taken by flickr user JPhilipson. It was used under the Creative Commons license.
