Second in a series
Re “Tunnel Vision Expert: Blame Centers on One Person”
[img]1979|right|Mark Ridley-Thomas||no_popup[/img]Fidgeting, County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas impatiently shifted from foot to foot at yesterday’s downtown meeting.
He was upset because three colleagues ardently were pursuing the details of massive cost overruns at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, widely seen as the legacy centerpiece of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s career.
He accused his fellow supervisors of “quibbling,” his term, over a little, ol’ $54 million construction overrun that he aggressively did not want to publicly examine.
Reopening the South Los Angeles hospital – in a year and a half – has been Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s premier priority since he was elected to the County Board of Supervisors five years ago. He is determined not to permit any cost, any watchdog, any colleague from interrupting his sprint to the target date.
“We are in the weeds,” he acidly complained as three other supervisors played the role of a doctor probing a patient who cannot quite identify what is ailing him. “I think it’s time to move. Point blank.”
Meanwhile, supervisors persisted in probing for reasons that the reconstruction costs have spiraled from $237 million to $281 million.
So far.
Mostly What He Wanted
Muscularly, Mr. Ridley-Thomas fended off the resistance and won $29 million in new spending by the County to cover real and potential costs in hurrying toward an artificial deadline. This is $3 million less than sought. But considering the opposition, it was a clear Ridley-Thomas triumph.
Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s critics in the Crenshaw District – starting with CEO Damien Goodmon and the Crenshaw Subway Coalition ¬– believe his ethics and values become more slippery when the subject is light rail and a mile-long tunnel on Crenshaw Boulevard.
They are mad at him for not even putting up a peanut-sized fight to find money to build the tunnel, trading in his usual feistiness for enthusiastic retreat.
Mr. Goodmon believes Mr. Ridley-Thomas has become confused over whether he – “the most powerful black elected official in Los Angeles” – is to be an adversary or an advocate.
In the early innings of the Crenshaw community’s 2½-year ferocious fight with Metro to build a tunnel instead of ground-level tracks through the one-mile heart of the fragile, last surviving commercial district of black-owned businesses, Mr. Ridley-Thomas took regular bows as a savior-in-waiting.
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Damien Goodmon
Exit Superman, Enter Villain
In the interim, doffing his cape as a rescuer, he has turned villain and parked himself permanently in a shoulder-shrugging, immobile Wait mode.
His extremely uncharacteristic timidity, his sudden passivity, have infuriated Crenshaw community leaders. They have not, however, even remotely surrendered hopes of winning a tunnel, though stolid Metro hardly is encouraging such optimism.
With deliberation, Mr. Goodmon drops the weight of full-on blame on the otherwise cheery personality of Mr. Ridley-Thomas, who turns dour at the prospect of tunnel vision.
Scratching surfaces to understand what causes the volatile changes in Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s temperamental political engine, Mr. Goodmon judged the longtime politician as harshly as he ever has been publicly.
“I think what motivates him is public perception,” Mr. Goodmon said.
“He doesn’t put his back into a topic until he is clear he can come out on the right side. He does not like being embarrassed. It is a sorry excuse for failing to engage. His attitude is, ‘I don’t know I am going to win, so I am not even going to ask the question. I am not going to be engaged.’”
(To be continued)
