Redondo’s commission vacancies a sign of electoral dysfunction
You need only four people to run a Redondo Beach commission meeting. That’s the minimum of appointed members to form a quorum on those boards, which exist largely to give advice to the city’s elected leaders and staff. On Oct. 9, only three members of the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission were in attendance to start the meeting, which was promptly cancelled.
It’s unusual, but not that weird. Sometimes, for whatever reason, commissioners can’t make it. Life happens, right? But if life happens to at least two members of Rec and Parks on the wrong night, the body won’t meet for at least another month, a 60-day gap between meetings. Unlike most of Redondo’s commissions, which are either full or have only one hole, Rec and Parks currently has only five sitting members from a total of seven available seats.
The Redondo Beach City Council is responsible for appointing volunteers to fill those seats, alongside all of Redondo’s largely advisory commissions — only the Harbor and Planning commissions have the authority to issue entitlements. But the ideological schism between the mayor and five council members has made the process a grueling affair even for those lighter boards. Picture Congressional fights over the U.S. Supreme Court, with way lower stakes. And both sides of the issue think the others are digging their heels in to hold political leverage. Those caught in the middle — the actual residents who either are, or aspire to be, commissioners — are increasingly tired of the whole thing.
“I think this process isn’t good for the residents. No one is going to remember what the fight is about, but they’ll see residents who put themselves out there and have been denied repeatedly,” said Planning Commissioner Matthew Hinsley at the Council’s Nov. 19 meeting.
The issue stems from what Mayor Bill Brand would call “balance,” dating back to well before his time as a councilman, when believes elected officials would “wheel and deal,” trading favors and support for commission appointments.
“Big commissions, Planning and Harbor, were stacked with people with overdevelopment philosophies not consistent with what Redondo residents wanted to see,” Brand — a low-development “slow growth” philosopher — said in an interview. “So I was trying to bring some balance…but the way I saw to bring balance to the commissions was being mayor.”
In recent months, at the end of a meeting, Brand will run down a list of people he wishes to appoint, the boards he wishes to appoint them to, then call for a vote. (Lately, it’s been a short list of two commissioners.) One of two Council members, usually Nils Nehrenheim or Todd Loewenstein, will move to confirm the mayor’s appointments, and the other will offer his support. There’s usually very little discussion. The vote will be 2 to 3, with Council members Christian Horvath, Laura Emdee and John Gran blocking the confirmation.
From there, the steps will vary. Some nights, the Council collectively shrugs and moves on. Other nights, there are fireworks. Nehrenheim will call the blocking side “three little mayors,” Brand will comment with varying degrees of outrage and demand the three explain themselves, often to be met with silence. Except for the nights when Horvath or Emdee decide they’ve had enough.
Both will note that they’ve approved many of Brand’s appointments in the past, and both have had the same problem with this most recent round of appointments: The last cycle of appointees included a stack of late-coming applications, many of whom were connected to Brand in some way, and many of whom ended up on his final list of recommended appointees. “Doesn’t that look suspicious?” Emdee said, arguing that “they didn’t go through the process” of lengthy public interviews, yet still wound up on Brand’s list of appointees. (Of Brand’s 21 total commission appointees in August, only 13 attended the Council’s July public interview meeting.)
Horvath views Brand’s approach as very much like what the mayor accused his predecessors of: giving favorable appointments to friendly faces.
“That smelled bad to me, so I decided to call a spade a spade,” Horvath said.
Horvath will continue to vote against Brand’s appointees, should the mayor continue to list them as his appointments. He also sees Brand’s repeated appointment attempts as a political strategy, being brought up “week after week after week to create some distraction or turmoil.”
Brand said that he has compromised, declining to appoint candidates he felt were well-qualified but divisive, including activists that worked to block or change the Waterfront or South Bay Galleria development projects. Their presence, Brand feels, would prevent those commissions from “rubber stamping” oversized projects without thorough review — a stamp which Brand feels the “overdevelopment” bloc is protecting.
“But I don’t get why they’re blocking advisory commissions with no power,” Brand said, positing that they’ve strategized to make the city “look like it’s not functioning” for political purposes.
Leslie Chrzan, one of those repeatedly-blocked appointments, is frustrated. She acknowledges that she procrastinated on her application, but that she had trouble finding the deadlines to begin with. She also feels that she’s the kind of “fresh face” that the Council suggested it was looking for in its appointments. Chrzan, an engineer and avid outrigger canoer, chafes at being labeled a crony, describing herself as apolitical, and that she only knows Brand from living in his district.
“It doesn’t make sense why they’re blocking me with no reasons given — I don’t know how I can offer my volunteerism to the city,” Chrzan said. “It feels very frustrating as a citizen to see them obstruct government from doing their work by not filling the positions the city needs filled.”
Planning Commissioner Hinsley has appointed himself as a “mirror” to the Council’s actions, chiding them at meetings after the appointment dance has ended. “The six of you have created this,” Hinsley said on Nov. 19, imploring the mayor and his council members to talk offline in an attempt to reach consensus. He feels that, out of respect, public figures should ideally discuss private people privately. (Horvath said he’s reached out to Brand and been rebuffed; Brand said he’ll discuss his appointments in public correspondence or not at all.) But Hinsley warned that this cycle can only hurt the city.
“No one is going to understand the undertones” of the rejections, Hinsley said. “But they’ll see people being rejected repeatedly, and I think that discourages people from participating in the process.”
Note: This story originally ran in the Nov. 28, 2019 print edition of Easy Reader.