The small Gateway Cities of southeastern Los Angeles County are mostly gateways not geographically to the rest of us but to massive fraud by their elected officials, taxpayer rip-offs of their mostly poor, working-class and immigrant residents.
In the last 25 years more than a dozen officials in Bell, Cudahy, South Gate and Lynwood were convicted of corruption-related crimes. As the premier California political columnist Dan Walters has written, “Poverty, low voter involvement and a lack of civic organizations make them ripe targets for takeovers by corrupt political figures who help themselves to lavish salaries and expense accounts and hand out fat contracts to their pals.”
It’s not some Anglo suit who coined the term that best defines the city governments there — it’s former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who used to represent part of the area, who calls it “a corridor of corruption.”
Why do these cities even exist? In theory, small municipalities can serve their unique citizenries better than some megalopolis. That theory is not working in the C of C. Los Angeles — hardly a paragon of virtue in its electeds, but with more accountability — ought to absorb them all.
Meanwhile, as our staff writers Scott Schwebke, Andrea Klick and Jason Henry reported last week, “The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office executed search warrants Wednesday at Huntington Park City Hall, the home of Mayor Karina Macias and nine other locations as part of a public corruption probe involving a controversial $23 million aquatic center slated for the city’s Salt Lake Park.”
You have to love what DA investigators dubbed the probe: Operation Dirty Pond.
Because there is no “30,000-square-foot, two-story, state-of-the-art aquatic center with an Olympic-size pool,” as the City Council promised. There’s nothing but an empty lot, which used to be a landfill. The vice mayor, not among the pols being investigated, says that millions of taxpayer dollars connected to the non-pool are unaccounted for. In a lawsuit, four former city employees say officials used the “coffers of Huntington Park as their own personal piggy bank.” This city, and so many of its neighbors, should cease to exist.
