Future Beclouded

Sad. Grim. Ridiculous. Embarrassing. Pointless, Hapless. Irrelevant.

These are some of the adjectives that come to mind as I try to process what went on at the city council meeting on August 10, when our city leaders virtually lost control of the proceedings and, in the course of the session, two things became unmistakably clear:

One is that the city council, attending principals and city staff, including the chiefs of Downey Police and Fire Departments, plus those audience members who come to see how important city decisions are made, are still subject to the lunatic behavior of Armando Herman, whose wild gesticulations, obscene shouts, crazy outbursts, and vile, unconscionably rude insults toward our public servants in the room dominated, indeed commandeered, the meeting and made it next to impossible to conduct city business.

This has been going on for several years now and has become a predictable experience for anyone who shows up expecting a civilized exchange between the council and anyone invited for public comment (this includes any Downey citizen). Whatever the agenda item, you can depend on Herman to jump to the lectern, often holding up a sign that makes no reference to the issue, begin incoherent shouting, swear like a drunken sailor at the end of a miserable leave, issue lewd insults to the females on the dais, calling them c—ts, or Mommy, and conduct a long, loud, angry rant that at one time or another vilifies and harasses every official on the dais, and some who aren’t.

Now Herman is joined by several other blustering soreheads who seem to be as unhinged as he is. They stand and shout. They make poor arguments for their case, or don’t connect them. Intimidated, unable to exert control or engage with the speakers, or even insist on civility from them, the council members merely sit, waiting for the moment to pass. After an hour or so of this, you begin to wish that drinks were served.

How is it that rudeness, incivility, anger and hostility have become a national, and now a local, norm? Flight risk has now become fight risk. People get killed at peaceful protests. Schoolkids watch their parents fight over face masks. The culture of narcissism has now apparently collided with the politics of rage.

In a recent New Yorker article, Louis Menand cited a 1958 University poll that found that 73% of the American public trusted the federal government. A Pew survey in April of this year reported that the number had dropped to 24%. What happened in the interim? Lots of things. The War in Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Reagan administration’s insistence that government was the enemy of the people (plus his Iran-Contra scandal). Monica Lewinsky; 9/11; the duplicitous run-up to the invasion of Iraq; 2008; Trump; the January 6 insurrection; cellphones; Covid-19. Had enough? We all have. That’s the point. We’re all on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Can you blame a small town city council for averting its gaze from a bunch of crazies who yell at them in the name of free public comment? It’s almost as if they feel the same way, but can’t yell back.

Herman has been written about in the pages of The Downey Patriot and elsewhere before, and apparently makes part of his living harassing, and suing, city councils in places like Norwalk, Pasadena, Bellflower, Cerritos, and Los Angeles, sometimes wearing a Batman suit (and once, in Los Angeles, thrown out for carrying a box cutter). L.A. is said to have settled a six-figure award on Herman (he denies this), after he provoked Councilman Herb Wesson to remove his jacket on camera and threaten to beat him up. He has also successfully sued Downey to the tune of $5,000. He considers himself a First Amendment champion, which makes officials leery of antagonizing him. In person he’s soft-spoken, somewhat fragile and not always coherent. But in public he’s emotionally unbalanced, devoid of social conscience and indifferent to being such a pain in the prat that he ignores other annoyed audience members who object to his foulmouthed outbursts.

Photo by Alex Dominguez

Question: If Herman’s speech and actions demonstrably violate the Downey City Charter’s clear prohibition of disruptive behavior, why doesn’t Downey’s mayor, or mayor pro tem, have him removed from the chamber? Haven’t they read the city charter? Can’t they reference L.A’s effort to deal with him? Apparently not. How can we expect our leaders to lead when they can’t even control a public meeting?

The second item of concern to me is that, with the extension (by a 4—0 vote, with no public discussion) of VenueTech’s contract to manage the Downey Civic Theater, it’s clear now that Downey is never going to rid itself of the greediest parasite that’s ever clamped its suckers on to the city’s body politic.

This is a terrible decision. VenueTech, hired in 2010 to help stem the city’s annual $470,000 loss on the theater, has done nothing to make it a regular must-see stop for a large Downey audience. It doesn’t produce plays. It doesn’t produce musicals, which the Downey Civic Light Opera was doing with increasing joyfulness and skill when VenueTech came in and was instrumental in the DCLO’s 2013 demise. It hasn’t given the theater an identity or even, in modern parlance, a brand.

All it does is book various traveling acts (some of them very good, like Arturo Sandoval and Al Jarreau), and play them for a single performance. The theater is dark for most of the rest of the time—right now it won’t stage a professional show again before October. In the meantime, it collects $15,215 a month, a labor reimbursement for direct costs plus 30% overhead, a “research” fee of $882 per month, and a contractual fee of $7,166 to cover extensions like the one they just signed. That will cost the city a reported $258,443.70 for the next fifteen months. That’s approaching $230,000 a year. If the fee adds to the original $470,000 annual operating cost of the theater, which surely is a lot more now, no one is saying. I doubt if it was even discussed. (DCLO executive director Marsha Moode reports that her organization contributed $900,000 to the city in its last ten years of operation, and charged next to nothing to operate.)

That place should be jumpin’. Kids should be crawling all over and through it, in dance classes, theater classes, voice and acting lessons, music performance and appreciation, costume, set and lighting design, all held in portable classes set up in the theater’s unusually large backstage space. A large number of Downey High students gravitate over to the library at the end of the day to continue their studies or get picked up by their parents. There’s no reason musical theater scenes, or fight scenes from a Shakespeare play, can’t be conducted in the theater’s patio space nearby. Downey is rich in garage bands. Why can’t the theater host a Downey’s Got Talent night, with a panel of professional judges on hand to rank every conceivable performance art, from standup to storytelling to a Lorine Parks poetry night.

In short, the theater is not vitally connected to the community in any meaningful way. There’s no reason Downey can’t enjoy public street performances by musicians, or flash mobs tied in with shows scheduled for the theater. VenueTech has mismanaged the site. Their negligence cost Henry Silva of “Los Lonely Boys” a large piece of his health and professional earnings when a blown light cue caused him to topple off the stage and into the orchestra pit, which was filled with musical instruments. The group filed a rumored million dollar lawsuit, spurred by the event. The settlement is not a matter of public record. We’ll never know the outcome.

What we do know is that we’ve been had by a northern California corporation that has no interest in Downey beyond the revenue it provides. The truly sad part is that if VenueTech decides to quit the theater, the city still won’t know what to do with it. And VenueTech may well be stuck with us too.

It’s heartening to see councilman Sean Ashton sincerely try to reason his way through issues, as it is to see the unfailingly smart and pragmatic advice offered by city manager Gilbert Livas. But both these developments—near anarchy in council meetings, awarding expensive contract extensions to a management group that bleeds money through the largest civic building in Downey--point to the continuing decline, years long in its trajectory, of the city of Downey’s ability to control its own destiny. Future Unlimited is our adopted motto. But look at who we have among our elected leaders: one a convicted thief and perjurer, another who can’t speak a grammatical sentence of any length, and others who don’t seem to know exactly why they’re there and don’t offer explanatory depth and background on issues.

But it’s not just this bunch. A few years ago the wise Joan Niertit wrote in these pages, “The city has a master plan, but does it have a master strategy?” For the past ten years or so, the answer has been clearly No. City services are exemplary. Downey remains a relatively peaceful, secure place to live. Most people seem pretty nice to each other. But only a quarter of the population has an undergraduate degree. The per capita income is less than $25,000—a poverty wage. Abraham Lincoln liked to quote the biblical line, “Without a vision, the people perish.”

Downey is not likely to perish anytime soon. But vision is normally entrusted to leadership, and is the one thing our mayors and councilmen and women have failed to demonstrate, particularly in their steady practice of awarding newly available space to commercial developers. The city is becoming more corporatized, less imaginatively reconceived. The distinctive and memorable places reminisced over in the FaceBook site “Good Times in Downey” are no longer here and won’t be back.

But there’s one hope for improvement, if we can ever snap out of our civic lethargy: it’s called term limits.