BELL, Calif. — This little city was a pleasant place to be last Sunday morning. There are nice gardens around small bungalows and four-family apartment buildings. Hundreds of kids in snappy soccer uniforms, their parents behind carrying coolers of food and drink, were headed for the perfectly groomed turf near City Hall.
It’s a very nice City Hall, red brick, with a park and community center next door, along with the restored house of James George Bell, the founder of the town in 1876. Of course it’s changed a bit since then. More than 35,000 people live here now, 90 percent Latino, 53 percent foreign-born. Per capita income, less than $25,000, is two-thirds the national average. Men work on their cars in the street. The newspaper boxes on Gage Avenue, the main drag, are for La Opinion and Hoy, Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times, 10 miles north in downtown LA, was read by very few people here — at least until July 15. That was the day the Times reported that Bell’s city manager, Robert Rizzo, was making twice as much as President Barack Obama, about $800,000 a year. Police Chief Randy Adams was making more than Obama, too, a lot more than the police chiefs of Los Angeles and New York. He was getting $450,000.
City council members, as reported by Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives of the Times, were getting $100,000 each. Well, four out of five were. The fifth, Lorenzo Velez, appointed to fill a vacancy last October, apparently knew nothing about what was going on and was given a salary of just over $8,000 a year.
By Sunday afternoon, the parents I saw, hundreds of them, were back on the streets without their kids. They were marching and demonstrating, as they had been for days, demanding the resignations of Rizzo, Adams and the four councilmen. “BASTA,” the Spanish word for “stop,” is the newest game in town, an acronym for “Bell Association to Stop the Abuse.”
Only 9,000 Bell residents are Bell voters. Therein lies a problem. Four years ago, because of corruption in two of Bell’s neighboring cities — more than 80 separate cities make up what we call Los Angeles — the state Legislature passed a law capping municipal salaries. Bell’s city fathers called a special election to create a new city charter removing state salary restrictions. Of course, they didn’t put it that way. “Salaries” were never mentioned.
Fewer than 400 people voted. Of those, 336 voted “Yes.” And the race was on: Rizzo, who was hired in 1993 at $72,000 a year from Hesperia, a small city north of Los Angeles in high desert country, was awarded, secretly, a raise to $442,000. He hired Adams, the retired police chief of Glendale. He also built a nice home in Huntington Beach and a horse ranch in the state of Washington. He may be up there now. No one has seen him around town since the story broke.
The initial reaction to the Times piece by the city fathers was not what you’d call defensive. Rizzo, who has been nicknamed “Ratso” by Times columnist Steve Lopez, said: “If that’s a number people choke on, maybe I’m in the wrong business. I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I’ve done.”
“You get what you pay for,” said his deputy, Angela Spaccia, who is paid more than $375,000.
But the best reaction was from a council member, Rev. Luis Artiga of the Bell Community Church. “When I saw my first paycheck,” he said, “I considered it a gift from God.”
It is a gift that may keep giving. In their secret re-jiggering of Bell’s financing, which involved a lot of borrowing and laying off of city employees, the council voted those involved pensions (for life) that could be higher than their salaries. All of this may be legal — and “Ratso” Rizzo, who is 55 years old, might get as much as a million dollars a year. He, Adams and Spaccia resigned last Friday, but BASTA leaders, new to politics, vow they will fight City Hall until the four offending councilmen are driven out, too.
The original article can be read here.