The Rose in Question
Armando Herman is evicted from a City Council meeting in 2017.
It’s the stuff of Russian farce, except it’s not funny. Armando Herman fights for free speech by abusing it. The Downey City Council defends its notion of free speech by cutting back the time the public can express it at council meetings.
Who suffers either way? In an increasingly regular occurrence, the citizens of Downey.
At its January 28 meeting, the council voted, 3-2, to reduce the time anyone can step up to the lectern and speak about city-related issues; or, as the meeting progresses, specific items on the agenda. The historic time allotment had been five minutes on a running clock. Now it’s three.
The council had been itching to make that cut for a while—these meetings do drag on. Now they had their excuse. For more than two years, Herman has appeared regularly to leap up at almost anything anyone on the council has to say, yelling, waving signs, shouting profanities and racial insults, making obscure and often unrelated assertions, even shooting his arms in the air when he’s not speaking. In short, making a spectacle of himself while council members sit stone-faced before his relentless barrages.
People in the audience shout out telling him children are present and his language is inappropriate. The council, with barely concealed irritation, cautions him about not sharing their respectful decorum, the rules of the game, if you will.
Nothing changes. He rants. They, and we in the audience, stew. Yet another miserably uncomfortable evening grinds on to a dispirited conclusion. As an observer, you wonder if all this is really about free speech, as Herman often contends. How many times does someone have to hammer home the same point before the argument reveals itself to be about something else?
In this case, with all his tics and outbursts, his coprolalia and compulsive rants, Herman seems clearly unhinged, somewhere on the Asperger’s or autism spectrum perhaps, or even paranoiac. No one wants to speculate for the record in an era where public officials tend to steer clear of direct address on mental health issues, sometimes with tragic results.
(Anyone who read Dennis MacDougal’s recent L.A. Times op ed piece about his schizophrenic daughter, a lawyer who cleverly outwitted concerned authorities only to be found murdered in Mexico, will feel the horrors that can result from official trepidation and haplessness.)
It may even have been illegal to inquire when, in 2017, he was awarded a $5000 settlement from Downey after being forcibly removed from a council meeting, and the city didn’t stipulate the award be given on the condition that Herman submit to a psychiatric evaluation.
In person, Herman is soft-spoken, diffident, fragile-seeming. He has an emotional support dog. He claims to be the victim of “visible and invisible” illnesses. The invisible is a PTSD condition suffered from an unspecified work accident. The visible, for which he receives disability benefits, is sciatica, which, he claims, is what causes him to jump up and down. He says he took on the mission of free speech after his father, who lived in Boyle Heights, was mistreated by the city of Los Angeles and could not find redress.
Herman takes his ostensible causes (the handicapped, the poor, the homeless, the marginalized) to various cities in the region, sometimes wearing a Batman costume. He’s smart and calculating about how far he can go without breaking the law, particularly in regard to disruption. He sued the City of Los Angeles in 2018 after council president Herb Wesson was caught on camera threatening to beat him up. The results of the suit are not publicly available, but an unconfirmed report has L.A. awarding him a mid-six figure settlement. Herman denies this.
That’s his story. The City of Downey’s is no better, and may in fact be worse, as, in this instance, it’s come to a futile, illogical and even embarrassing result. The 2017 award of $5000 satisfied no one except Herman, who, if anything, came back to council meetings emboldened.
Since the latter part of the 20th Century, the U.S. Supreme Court has been watering down curbs on free speech, culminating in Justice John Harlan’s famous line, in Cohen v. California, “one man’s obscenity is another’s lyric.” Rules of speech and conduct now rest pretty much with the subjective and sometimes ambiguous codes of community standards.
Still, Downey’s Municipal Code specifies, “All persons addressing the City Council shall speak in a civil and courteous manner and shall not yell, scream, or use foul language.” The Code also prohibits the public from bringing in signs and placards without prior approval from the mayor. Herman brings signs. At the opening of a council meeting late last year, no sooner had a warning about public profanity left Mayor Rick Rodriguez’ lips, when Herman leaped up and yelled “F---k You!!!” Rodriguez sat in angry silence.
So much for courteous and civil manner.
The city’s ineffectuality here is compounded by its arrogance. On what authority does Mayor Blanca Pacheco assert, “I believe that three minutes is more than sufficient to get your point across”? Where’s the research on what’s the fairest amount of time to get a point across? Many if not most of the people who stand up to comment are initially nervous and intimidated, both by the act of public speaking and the sight of a group of council officials that includes the city manager and city attorney, all looking down from an elevated height as if at a tribunal. It takes time to settle one’s nerves. And if the issue at hand is complex or requires any kind of reasoned development, five minutes zip by in a flash.
Alex Saab’s argument that holding a city of 113, 000 hostage to the rants of one person would seem sensible, logical, even incontestable. And Sean Ashton’s observation (paraphrased here) that the city can’t expect to know what people think if it doesn’t take ample time to listen to them, seems only reasonable. But not to Rick Rodriguez, Pacheco and Claudia Frometa. Our minds are made up; don’t confuse us with facts.
Besides, at some base level, the city of Downey doesn’t really seem to care what its populace thinks.
It didn’t ask for public opinion when it closed the Downey Art Museum and disbanded Downey’s citizen Arts Council. It didn’t ask for public opinion when it shut down the library for renovation. It closed fire stations and Furman Park without prior public discussion (and may well have created an angry dilemma over Furman’s reconfigured tennis courts, jamming three different sports facilities into one small space). It didn’t ask for public input before raiding the Art in Public Places fund for its own arbitrary ends, including the ludicrous makeover of the Avenue Theater Marquee. And if a public referendum might offer a democratic solution to the Rives Mansion crisis—as referenda did with the McMansion issue and the proposed scale of the Krikorian theater—you know one won’t be called now. As a knowledgeable city watcher told me, “Public participation isn’t really their thing.”
It seems odd that the city would recently reject the anxious pleas of a large group of desperate people, however coarse and rude they were, to suspend unlawful evictions in the dead of winter and just before Christmas, yet pass a measure that would still allow Armando Herman to be Armando Herman, swearing at city officials and poisoning the atmosphere of public discourse.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is when Pacheco concluded that if Downey’s surrounding cities can function with a three minute public commentary period, so can Downey. For the many decades I’ve lived here, one of the mantras concerning Downey is that it’s the step-up city for people in surrounding municipalities, “the rose in the toilet.” (I’ve heard the latter numerous times.)
Not any more, apparently. The rose isn’t smelling like it used to.