Re: “Council Upstages Dear by Seating New Member”
Dateline Carson – Soft-speaking, long-retired Charles Davis, 30 years the city clerk of Compton, was the perhaps unlikely person briefly at the wheel last weekend of a purported Carson electoral emergency designed by the mayor of Carson and a City Council member.
Was this a case of shenanigans galore or a valid disagreement?
At the peak of this scalding hot controversy between City Clerk Jim Dear and his former teammates on the City Council, Mr. Davis today has accused Mr. Dear of calling him the n-word in an unprovoked exchange in the presence of one other person who may not have heard the remark.
What will come of that? Not clear.
As for the drama that has monopolized community attention for six days, Mayor Al Robles and City Councilperson Lula Davis-Holmes contended that Mr. Dear, as chief elections official, was taking too much time to certify the results of a June 2 special election.
Mr. Davis said the mayor contacted him last Wednesday or Thursday. Mr. Robles asked him to stand in for the allegedly lagging Mr. Dear as he had done last March when the previous city clerk was running for election.
The objective of Mr. Robles and City Councilman Lula Davis-Holmes was to seat the probable-but-not-yet-official winner of the special election ahead of a state-mandated June 26 deadline that would have forced the seat into a November election. However, if the presumptive winner, Pastor Jawane Hilton – 141 votes ahead with 1200 to be counted (today, as it turned out) – were seated by last night’s Council meeting, Pastor Hilton would serve out the remaining two years of the term originally won by Mike Gipson, now a member of the state Assembly.
For all of the political thunder, a Dear lawsuit and lawsuit threats that have erupted from Carson City Hall in the last six days, Mr. Davis said today he did not perform any city clerk-type duties, did not lift a finger, emotions of others notwithstanding. He also said he does not believe he was set up as a fall guy in this dispute among the city’s most outspoken politicians.
Why Mr. Davis did not execute clerk duties is at the nexus of this intricately designed story that is further complicated by legal posting requirements.
Mr. Robles had contacted him about standing in as the election official because he and Ms. Davis-Holmes, by pre-arrangement, were going to hold a meeting inside closed City Hall at 9 Friday morning, outvoting the only other member of the Council, a Dear supporter, 2 to 1, to deploy Mr. Davis to complete the June 2 election process by certifying a count intended for Monday.
Mr. Davis picks up the narrative:
“On Friday, I went into the clerk’s office with the chief deputy city clerk. You also have to do a hand-count. The law says if you have a machine count, you have to hand-count 1 percent. We did that notice. That is the one that Jim did not do. That is a five-day notice before you can do it. I notified the mayor, the city manager and the city attorney of what had been done.
“Saturday morning, I get a call from the city manager. He told me the city attorney said the (Council) meeting on Friday was defective because the notice that said where the meeting was, did not happen.
“When (the city manager) called me, that was my notice that I had no authority. That was all right because the action, procedurally, was null-and-void. So I had nothing to do with this election.
“Friday, somebody asked me if I needed keys (to the city clerk’s office). I said no because the chief deputy (city clerk) was there. She and I worked together for the election back in March.”
Mr. Davis said that Friday’s Council meeting, when one of the three members connected by telephone, “was a procedurally valid meeting. No one had any way of knowing (third member Elito) Santarini’s wife was going to take ill six hours before the meeting.
“We all thought Jim Dear was going to count the (last 1200) ballots on Monday. I was going there as an observer.
“Next thing I know, at 8:45, I get an email from Jim Dear’s attorney. I have been named as principal in a court case they were trying to get before a judge Tuesday morning.
“Monday morning, I went to City Hall to look for the city attorney to see if the city was going to represent me. The city attorney and I were walking down toward her office, and Jim Dear comes up behind me and calls out my name. I turned around. He said, ‘You have been served,’ and as he turns back around, under his breath, he says ‘nigger,’ and takes off toward his office. He said he said something else. The city attorney may or may not have heard it.”
Mr. Davis said that Mr. Dear was needlessly prolonging the closure of the special election, saying:
“He was taking control of the Council’s will. He was not giving the Council an opportunity to make a decision by doing what he was doing. Legally, though, he could do it. He could stall,” said Mr. Davis, “by just saying ‘it takes me more time to process.’
“The will of the people was being circumvented. They have a right to know.”
