10-17-2011 CRC RPT Public Comments

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RECEIVED Presentation to the City Charter Review Committee Made by Alan Curl on 10/17/2011 ou 2 4 2011 City of Riverside City Cleat's Office Councilman MacArthur heard a talk that I gave to his Rotary Club a few weeks ago and wanted me to share with you the circumstances under which our City Charter was changed in 1929 relative to the powers of the mayor. The City had just gone through a political crisis in which the mayor had been removed from office and tried for criminal libel, all five councilmen had been subjected to recall elections (which they survived), and City government had become emblematic of incompetence and corruption ... not on a par with Bell in 2010, but you would not have known it from the headlines in the Los Angeles papers. The first step in the City getting into this fix was the election of the mayor without a majority vote of the electorate. While three other candidates split what we might call the mainstream vote, a fringe candidate won the most votes with 37% and took office without a run -off. There was a 70% voter turnout at the 1927 municipal election. The fringe candidate was a downtown grocer named Edward Dighton. Dighton ran as a reformer opposed to "business as usual" and captured huge majorities in the thinly populated agricultural precincts while the other candidates split the vote in the densely populated downtown. The precincts that Dighton won were areas of small scale citrus production, where small growers had sustained significant financial losses in the 1926 freeze. It is also believed that the precincts that Dighton won represented the membership of the local Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had formed in Riverside in 1924, run ads in The Daily Enterprise soliciting membership, and had well - publicized rallies in support of "law, order, decency, right - living and unadulterated 100% Americanism." In 1977, 1 conducted a series of interviews with Riversiders who remembered Ed Dighton and support by the Ku Klux Klan was a common memory. Of my interviewees, only Judge John Gabbert still lives. Dighton was a strong prohibitionist who appointed an aggressive police chief to pursue bootleggers. Within six months, Chief John Franklin was arrested in Colton, in a damaged automobile, for drunkenness after stealing confiscated prescription whiskey from the police evidence locker. In an apparent effort to deflect attention from his appointment of Franklin and other episodes of poor judgment, the mayor went to the Los Angeles newspapers with a story of embezzlement of City funds. Two subsequent, and expensive, outside audits showed that the City's finances were sound. In his first year, the mayor was such an embarrassment to the citizens that petitions for his recall were presented to the City Council and a new draft City Charter was completed calling for a majority vote for the election of the mayor and for more clearly defining the mayor's authority for appointing and removing City officers.