In a field of City Council hopefuls teeming with colorful personalities, Cary Anderson, the blue collar candidate, presents a unique calculation:
He is the antithesis of the candidate who promises practically everything.
Mr. Anderson is a hard-nosed, plain-talking challenger who is running on his relatively low-key record of neighborhood activism.
As a television news camera operator and engineer, he is in the company of celebrities more often than any of his rivals. He is running in part because of a conversation with the late Johnny Grant, who died last month.
But blue-collar is the image he prefers.
Mr. Anderson’s roots and his heart are attuned to the working man, an approach seldom seen in City Council elections.
More Esoteric
No grandiose promises about putting a Lexus in every Culver City garage. “Quality of life is my motivation,” he says.
Headquarters for the ultimate bootstrap campaign is the Anderson family’s dining room table, “which my wife has allowed me to take over,” understandable since Tina Anderson is her husband’s campaign manager.
Accompanied at all times by his personal video camera, to support his running list of contentions, he frets over graffiti, broken curbs, traffic congestion, drivers who wink at Stop signs in residential neighborhoods, downed tree branches — the kind of annoyances that often escape the view of City Councilmen.
“My campaign is about preserving the quality of life in Culver City, the reason that many people moved here,” he says.
Arranging Priorities
A champion of the Residents First philosophy, Mr. Anderson said that builders and city officials should be required to meet with directly affected residents/businesses before taking a project can be launched.
From the time the new Skateboard Park opened last autumn, Mr. Anderson became a regular community commentator at weekly City Council meetings.
Backed by video accounts that he said proved his claims, he criticized the Council and Police Dept. for failing to sufficiently monitor dozens of daily equipment rules violations by skaters.
Nobody at the time dreamed he would mount a campaign for Council, least of all the last candidate to sign up.
“I am running,” said Mr. Anderson, “because a perfect-storm situation happened. Just before Thanksgiving, my Mom (Ginny) thought she had ovarian cancer. So I was not thinking about running. I usually work Thanksgiving. But I took it off because I thought this was going to be her last one.
“We later found out the diagnosis was wrong, and that was quite a relief.”
A Magical Date
And then came Jan. 9, a date that sparks two of his favorite stories.
Mr. Anderson’s increasingly demonstrated bulldog persistence came into play on a Monday night in December. Stealthily, he tracked the trail of a tagger down Venice Boulevard as the young man sprayed graffiti on 16 different properties.
It took three calls to police by Mr. Anderson before the 19-year-old suspect was apprehended. Facing 16 years in jail, according to Mr. Anderson, the tagger plea bargained his sentence down to one year on Jan. 9.
The same day, Johnny Grant, one of Hollywood’s most durable ambassadors, was found dead, and that jogged Mr. Anderson’s memory. He said he used to tell Mr. Grant that since Culver City truly is the Heart of Screenland, motion picture premieres should not just be staged in Hollywood but here, too.
“If you ever get on the City Council,” Mr. Grant told Mr. Anderson, “we’ll talk about it.”
Mr. Grant died just ahead of the registration deadline for City Council candidates.
This gave Mr. Anderson a sudden idea. Half an hour before closing time, he was the last of the nine contenders for the three open seats to file for the April 8 election.
Graffiti’s Critical Role
As a centerpiece, the importance of graffiti to Mr. Anderson’s campaign can almost not be overemphasized. It is the leadoff subject in his campaign brochure, and ubiquitous in his daily life.
“Cary will work to purchase and use GPS digital cameras for the mandatory documentation of all graffiti,” the brochure promises.
“Doing this will result in the proven ability to track down, arrest and successfully prosecute taggers and gang members who vandalize our beloved city with ugly graffiti. Gangs marking their territories with graffiti leads to gang murders over turf.”
Four photos frame the main page of Mr. Anderson’s brochure. One, he says, shows graffiti by the notorious Venice 13 gang, two are from his latest campaign, regarding skateboard violators, and the fourth is intriguing. It shows Mr. Anderson with 97-year-old John Wooden, UCLA’s Hall of Fame basketball coach. The caption says he follows Mr. Wooden’s code of ethics.
In the agenda for his campaign, Mr. Anderson branches out into “8 Easy Steps to a Better Culver City.”
These include a third rescue ambulance for the Fire Dept., preserving Ballona Creek by screening the city’s storm drains, localizing animal control, a plan for anti-gridlock zones to speed traffic through town during rush hours, and implementing a school drop-off scheme to expedite safe delivery of children while reducing neighborhood traffic congestion.
Curbing a Problem
Six years ago, Mr. Anderson was smarting over the broken curbs in his neighborhood, and he was miffed because he couldn’t attract City Hall’s attention.
“Back in the ‘90s,” he said, “they built a $22 million City Hall in 22 months. Something like that, and here we had all of these broken curbs. It felt like they had built the castle while we peasants were living in squalor.
“So I took it to the city. They said, ‘You’re on a 5-year plan. There are places worse than this.’ I go, like, ‘Worse than this? Where? Show me?’ They said, ‘We can’t tell you.’
“I took a video of the curbs, I brought it to the City Council and basically embarrassed them. Then they fixed the curbs.”
Winning Formula?
Why does Mr. Anderson think he can ride the modest wave of neighborhood activism to a seat on the City Council when his rivals are focusing on bigger-picture subjects?
“Quality of life is a bigger-picture subject,” he says.
This was a signal to return the discussion to the state of graffiti. He began listing landmarks around the community scarred with graffiti, starting with the sculpture of the founder, Harry Culver, in front of the Culver Hotel.
Should a listener doubt Mr. Anderson’s claims, he will produce a stack of large photos as evidence.
“I have an easy explanation for why our graffiti is not cleaned up,” he says.
“Lack of will. That should not be the case. I hope to change that attitude, and a lot more.”
