With one month to go in his increasingly torrid duel with Bernard Parks for an open seat on the County Board of Supervisors, state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas can voice a boast this afternoon he was unable to make just a week ago:
The entire City Council of Culver City endorses the senator, whose polling shows that he holds a wide lead over the former LAPD police chief.
Mayor Scott Malsin, Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger and three members who were installed last Monday night, Andy Weissman, Chris Armenta and Mehaul O’Leary stand in salute of their state senator.
Immediate past Mayor Alan Corlin, who stepped down as a Councilman last Monday, is one of Mr. Parks’s most enthusiastic boosters as is immediate past Vice Mayor Carol Gross, who also left on Monday night.
(For a list of the senator’s endorsers, check the following website:http://www.markridleythomas.com/)
Onto a Different Subject
And then there is the other news of the day:
Did he or didn’t he?
Body temperatures soared through the roof of the Westside Jewish Community Center at their sizzling debate on Thursday evening of last week when Mr. Parks charged that Sen. Ridley-Thomas advocated the closing of the King/Drew Hospital and Trauma Center.
Not only did he not seek the closure, said the senator, unless his rival could produce a damning piece of evidence, Mr. Parks owed a face-to-face apology to every member of the overflow debate audience.
Even if you have not been watching with either eye, you can see this noisy race for the seat Yvonne Brathwaite Burke is vacating after 16 years has turned into a spirited and increasingly bitter wrestling match.
Ready, Aim and Explode
Within the last hours, both camps loaded their cannons and fired off stormy declarations they say will prove their virtuosity and their drop-dead accuracy.
Before turning to their answers, it should be noted that the dominant mood in the community has made a U-turn.
Several years ago there was a broad and loud campaign to shut down heavily criticized and chronically troubled King/Drew because it was said to be causing more harm than good, not to mention being one of the most poorly operated hospitals in America.
The drive was successful in locking King/Drew’s doors.
Once shuttered, though, the healthcare pendulum swung the other way, with the present realization that a hospital is badly needed for the neighborhood.
The Parks camp issued a 500-word statement that called Sen. Ridley-Thomas “desperate to rewrite history” and purported to have evidence showing the senator made a false claim.
What follows is an exact reproduction of one section of the press release that Mr. Parks’s people say proves their case.
The Statement
“According to an article in the LA Times on September 14, 2004:
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Monday unexpectedly moved to shut down the trauma unit at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, immediately drawing the ire of physicians, politicians and community activists. Ridley-Thomas said, "It's about time that the Board of Supervisors faced up to their responsibility, and has chosen to take appropriate action. But Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), applauded the board's latest actions, saying they were long overdue. "It's about time that the Board of Supervisors faced up to their responsibility, and has chosen to take appropriate action, albeit unpopular," he said. "There's no expert in the area of public healthcare worth his or her salt who would deny that Martin Luther King hospital was in need of radical intervention." (Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2004)”
However, the out-take not only is unsound in grammar and punctuation, it appears to have been amateurishly patched together.
Does it validate Mr. Parks’s accusation?
From the Other Side
Sen. Ridley-Thomas countered with a 945-word declaration — headlined “Is Bernard Parks suffering from ‘trauma’ induced amnesia, is he willfully deceiving voters, or is he covering up again? — that he said refuted the charge:
“Ridley-Thomas NEVER called for King-Drew to be closed.
“In fact, in an attempt to save King-Drew, he supported the Board of Supervisors’ decision to temporarily close the trauma center in order to save the emergency room and the entire hospital. Unfortunately, poor management by the County forced the closure of the hospital several months later.
“Here is the documentation of Ridley-Thomas' position and public statements:
“The title of his editorial published widely throughout the Los Angeles media market (including the L.A. Daily News, 10/3/2004; Daily Breeze, 10/3/2004; L.A. Sentinel, 9/28/2004; ACC News, 10/8/2004) stated his position: "Time to act to ensure King-Drew's future."
“Ridley-Thomas stated very clearly in that piece that ‘faced with the closure of the entire medical center as an alternative, the Board of Supervisors has already decided to close its King-Drew trauma center, which serves 2,000 of the hospital’s 45,000 yearly emergency patients. THis is the same kind of life-or-death decision that triage doctors make every week — to bring the available resources to bear on those most likely to survive. In the case of King-Drew, with its extreme staffing problems and shortage of experienced physicians, the concentration of as many as 12 doctors and nurses on a single trauma patient deprives the majority of patients of adequate medical care. The idea is to stabilize a stricken hospital in the same way surgeons stabilize a serious trauma patient. The pressure is on public-sector decision-makers as one hospital after the next in the private sector announces impending closure — RFK Hospital being the most recent, literally eight miles from King-Drew Medical Center.’
“Ridley-Thomas went on to urge that ‘King-Drew be brought to a high level of performance within a specified period of time, and that the trauma center, if temporarily closed, be reinstated by January 2006.’
“Believe it or not, Parks shamefully is misrepresenting this editorial to claim that Ridley-Thomas supported closure of King-Drew Medical Center.”
Thinking It Over
If this did not sufficiently sweeten the debate to diabetes level going into
the weekend, the weekly newspaper of the black community, the Los Angeles Sentinel,unabashedly stated its own opinion — as it often has in past “news” stories — across the top of page 1 of this week’s edition:
“Debate Reveals Ridley-Thomas Supported Closing King Trauma Center.”
Early this afternoon, Sen. Ridley-Thomas responded to the Sentinel’s lead story:
“Bernard Parks should not only be ashamed for not telling the truth about my efforts to save King-Harbor, he should be ashamed for supporting a substandard trauma medical care system that endangered the public and destroyed the entire King-Harbor Medical Center, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without immediate, life saving emergency care for the most serious injuries imaginable, and placed tremendous undue strain on our fragile countywide hospital trauma care network that persists to this day.
“The difference between me and Bernard Parks is that I'm a problem solver who delivers leadership, while Bernard Parks tries to bury problems and blame others, which costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That's exactly what happened with the Rampart scandal on his watch. He simply cannot be trusted to be in a position of such responsibility.”
