Behind the Rose Curtain
City manager accused of too much secrecy in police chief selection process to meet with Northwest residents
By André Coleman 03/18/2010
NAACP Pasadena Branch President Joe Brown said the process used by City Manager Michael Beck to select a replacement for former Police Chief Bernard Melekian was anything but inclusive of the community.
“I am extremely disappointed,” Brown said of the people chosen by Beck, which included Pasadena and other top police officials, a former City Council member, and even City Attorney Michele Beal Bagneris, who were all sworn to secrecy and all signed confidentiality agreements so they could not speak about their work or their selection.
“This is not what he promised to do,” Brown said of Beck. “This does not represent us or our community.”
Left off the list of possible committee members were members of the NAACP, representatives of the ACLU, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), El Centro Social de Accion, the homeless service agency Passageways, the AIDS Service Center and every standing city committee and homeowner group in Pasadena.
In fact, it was not until last week — when Brown and former Mayor Bill Paparian filed separate formal requests for the names of those committee members — that Beck relented and released their identities.
Along with Bagneris, committee members include: Pasadena police officers Gena Persons, Diego Torres, Jan Faulkner and Robert Mercado; former District 1 Councilwoman Joyce Streator, a former member of the council’s public safety committee; Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District, which contracts services with local police; developer Jaylene Moseley and local Realtors Alfredo Mejia and Bill Podley; Hall Daily, Caltech’s director of government relations and a former editor at the Pasadena Star-News; Pasadena Finance Director Andrew Green; Sierra Madre Police Chief Marilyn Diaz, a former Pasadena police commander; Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer, Anaheim Police Chief John Welter and Beverly Hills Chief David Snowden.
This week, the Pasadena Weekly filed a Public Records Act request for the identities of the final 10 candidates for Melekian’s roughly $210,000-a-year job, a candidate pool that has since been winnowed down to three by Beck’s once secret committee.
Beck referred all calls to city Public Information Officer Ann Erdman.
“I definitely don’t think it would have hurt if he had shared some of this with us,” said Councilwoman Jacque Robinson. “We’re professionals and would have kept in mind this is his choice and his process. I disagreed with him not releasing the names of his appointees and I conveyed that to him, but I respect his decision as city manager. At the end of the day, the City Council is responsible for assessing [Beck’s] performance and this process will definitely be part of this assessment.”
Beck and Councilman Chris Holden have agreed to meet with members of the Fair Oaks Project Area Committee (PAC) at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Jackie Robinson Center, 1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, to discuss the process used last week to choose the three finalists for the vacant post.
The remaining three candidates will undergo extensive background checks and visits to their departments by Beck before a final choice is made in May. The cost of the background check and name of the agency conducting it also has not been revealed.
“We just want to discuss the process,” said Fair Oaks PAC Chair Ishmael Trone. “We are not interested in the names of any candidates that applied for the job. We are definitely aware we had three community meetings, but he made promises that he would bring the results back to the Fair Oaks PAC and the Lincoln Avenue PAC and that we would take suggestions for the committee. That never happened. Now we want to know how these finalists were chosen.”
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As with all city managers within California, these public "servants" increasingly depend upon the "Punitive Tax" as a premier revenue source allowing them to cover their own financing of wages and benefits.
Currently, as with every other publicly incorporated city within the state, the City of Pasadena is now taking full advantage of (criminally inacted) CALIFORNIA VEHICLE CODE SECTION 40200-40230, which is a blatantly unConstitutional abortion of state legislation that allows the city's parking enforcement administration the power to deny judicial due process to ANY automobile owners who are accused by the city of violating city and state parking regulations.
Without a doubt, the City Manager realizes this. But also as a consequence, he must make damn sure that his subordinate police chief also know that he must turn a blind eye to this particularly perverse version of law-enforcement criminality ... at the very top. Ultimately? Choice is everything when you need to choose a co-conspirator.
It really is no different whatsoever with what's happening in the County of Los Angeles, and its currently complicit sheriff, Leroy Baca. The County's "Parking Enforcement Detail" also hires a quasi-rentacop brand of enforcer who actually gets to wear what looks like a Sheriff's Deputy uniform AND SHIELD (how that must burn for real deputies) while also committing their own punitive tax frauds against the greater Los Angeles County population.
Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, the new Al Capones of California's government criminal class!
DanD