A LITTLE ADVICE
By Andre Coleman and Margaret McAustin
Pasadena Weekly, CA
Feb 8 2007
Outgoing councilman offers some opinions on what candidates in the
race for his District 2 seat should be talking about
Before attending a forum tonight, candidates for the District 2
City Council seat being vacated by three-term Councilman Paul Little
should listen to what Little has to say, which, essentially, boils
down to this: Know the people and get some distance from the opinions
of your opponents.
"I worked really hard and had a really good core group of people
devoted to the campaign and there were a couple of issues where I was
the only one to take a position," Little said recently. "That seemed
to resonate with a lot of the voters."
Unfortunately the opposite seems to be happening as the three
candidates – Margaret McAustin, Stacy Lewis and Jim Lomako – all
seem to be taking similar stands on major issues such as development,
traffic and education.
"The biggest challenge is getting growth under control in the city as
a whole," said the 59-year-old Lomako, a longtime legal investigator
who is not a lawyer but served as a former president of the Pasadena
chapter of the ACLU, and served as a member of both the city’s
Community Development Committee and the Design Commission.
"I think the most serious problem is we have been building at a rate
that exceeds what the General Plan allows. I’m making it an issue
because other candidates have not been talking about it," he said.
But they are talking about it, and sometimes they sound almost
like Lomako.
"I think we’re nearing the limits of the growth allowed in the
district according to the 1994 General Plan," said McAustin, 53,
a member of the city’s Planning Commission who helped start two
neighborhood associations, serving as president of the Pasadena
Highlands Neighborhood Association.
"I think we need to evaluate the growth in terms of the number of
people the Pasadena infrastructure can support. We need a comprehensive
approach to growth that evaluates the totality of all growth. Not just
a project by project approach," said McAustin, an executive with the
Esteve Group, an International Commodities firm based in Dallas.
Last year, McAustin worked as a neighborhood outreach consultant
for the Ambassador West Project, a planned community of more than
200 senior citizen condos on the former Ambassador College campus,
where she dealt with three neighborhood associations in areas close
to the project, including the highly anti-development West Pasadena
Residents Association, WPRA.
McAustin said she was appointed to the Planning Commission after taking
the Ambassador job, and said she never participated in any commission
discussions regarding the Ambassador West Project, which was approved
by the commission and is scheduled for City Council consideration on
Feb. 26.
"I am proud of the work I did. I even got the WPRA to support the
project," she said.
Although Little praised all the candidates overall, he observed that
there are some things that are also important but aren’t being talked
about much by any of them.
For starters, District 2 boasts a strong Latino community and a
burgeoning Armenian-American population. Much of the district includes
central and eastern portions of the city, with District 2 covering much
of the city’s central core, including East Colorado Boulevard between
Wilson and Oak avenues, an area buzzing with residential development.
In the neighborhoods north of Colorado, the district contains two
historic landmark districts, and could gain one more, with both
representing more than 1,000 homes. Over the past few years, the
district has become a prime target for developers.
"Preserving open space and development issues are important, but we
have more important issues in Pasadena. There are too many people
who are poor and homeless and too few resources dealing with those
problems. We get sidetracked spending significant amounts of money on
other things, and they are worthwhile, but we have to look at other
issues like violence in the minority community, and the underlying
issues that cause these problems," Little said.
Last year, 93 of the 124 arr-ests made by Pasadena police for suspicion
of prostitution-related crimes were made in District 2.
When it comes to homeless people, it’s hard to quantify those
numbers on a district-by-district basis. However, as the city’s
population climbs, so too does its homeless community seem to grow,
with an estimated 1,500 homeless people now calling Pasadena home on
a given night.
But along with that, District 2 wrestles with its own issues of ethnic
diversity and cultural identity. Newly immigrated Armenian-American
kids, for instance, enter schools, pick up the fashions, the fads
and all the trappings, "and that creates some tensions," Little noted.
Several years ago, these types of tensions between Armenian-American
and African-American children turned into violence at Marshall
Fundamental School, located in the heart of District 2 on Allen Avenue,
forcing campus security to lock down the campus and the now-defunct
Pasadena Unified School District Police Force to book and cite nine
students.
Only Lewis, a 43-year-old telecommunications executive, mentioned the
cultural issues associated with those incidents in his interview with
the Weekly.
"There have been some cultural problems which I think can be addressed
by reaching across cultural barriers," said Lewis. "It’s something I am
engaged in doing right now. I have had discussions with the principals
at Marshall and Webster [Elementary School] and have spoken to other
residents about the problem."
Refuting claims that he sounds much like his opponents on some issues,
Lewis has his own take on what some view as runaway development.
"I’m not worried about sounding like everyone else," Lewis said. "I
have a different understanding of development and growth. There is
nothing wrong with development. It is how it is done in Pasadena. The
question is how growth is achieved. Is the community aware of what
is being planned is there transparency in that process? People are
adverse to change. If there is change, everyone should feel like a
stakeholder in it so that there are no surprises.
"It’s not a matter of should we grow," said Lewis, who served as
president of the Brigden Ranch Neighborhood Association. "It’s a
matter of effective growth."
The race generated some controversy last week when a letter to
the editor from a person named "Miriam Brandstedt" appeared in the
Pasadena Star-News, accusing Lomako of being a "dangerous candidate"
who bullied residents to sign a petition supporting a neighborhoods
petition for landmark district status.
According to the city planner, no one named "Miriam Brandstedt" signed
the petition and the address on the letter does not exist. The daily
paper has since apologized.
Little, who has been on the council for 12 years, is resigning
to devote more attention to his son, Cameron who will be attending
college in New York in the fall, and his daughter, Courtney, who is
currently in high school.
"Twelve years is a long time and you get a little bit jaundiced about
how you view things," Little said. "I think if I spent four more
years arguing about the merits of cell phone towers in a remote part
of the city I would go berserk. I have enjoyed working with people,
but I notice that my patience is shorter. I don’t know if I would do
as good a job. It’s time somebody else stepped up."