Third in a series
Re “Parks Is Gathering Evidence”
[img]1436|left|Bernard Parks||no_popup[/img]Just as Bernard Parks has been predicting for months, when the Los Angeles City Council yesterday voted overwhelmingly to approve explosively controversial new redistricting lines, everyone else in Council Chambers – except Jan Perry and Mr. Parks – thought the drawings were a capital idea worthy of sustained applause.
The count, everyone knew as far back as last winter, was 12 to 2.
The contiguous 8th District (Mr. Parks), the 9th (Ms. Perry) and the 10th (Mr. Wesson) are the prime black neighborhoods among the 15 voting districts in the city of Los Angeles. Every 10 years the 15 are reconfigured, based on the latest census suspiciously spiced with heavy-handed political input.
Except for Mr. Parks and Ms. Perry, who lost precious chunks of their majority-black districts to what they regard as the conniving of Council President Herb Wesson, a smile dotted every other face in Chambers.
With rare power concentrated in both of Mr. Wesson’s hands, the Perry-Parks team contends that out-of-sight gremlins, controlled by the President, have worked to fatten his district at the expense of theirs.
Mr. Wesson, curiously, seems to have become invisible the more the fires of this dispute roar.
His longtime right-hand man, Ed Johnson, said that “race never was a dominant factor in our proceedings.”
If that is remotely true, says Mr. Parks, he wants to know why he and Ms. Perry, the only blacks on the Council outside of Mr. Wesson, are the only unhappy members.
Little for You and You
Everyone else got what he or she wanted. Mr. Parks believes this is because their districts are distant from Mr. Wesson’s.
“They are playing reverse Robin Hood,” Mr. Parks told the Los Angeles Times after the vote. “They are stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.”
USC was one of Mr. Parks’s major losses, and it happened to turn up in Mr. Wesson’s district.
For his part, the traditionally loquacious Mr. Wesson has gone mute in his new office. He has ignored telephone calls and requests for interviews.
Mr. Parks and Ms. Perry assert that once Mr. Wesson became President in January, he conspired to pluck choice plots from his two helpless foes.
Mr. Parks and Ms. Perry have threatened to sue the city over the way the drawings were executed, but that may be a longshot, say some observers.
Since they cannot institute a suit for awhile, Mr. Parks may be stranded on a street corner by himself, sources say. His intended partner is contending with other major dynamics in her life. Will she have the will later on? Ms. Perry is being termed out on the Council later this year and concurrently she is competing for Mayor.
(To be continued)
