Anaheim’s Ethical Cesspit is SO Much Worse Than Ashleigh Realizes

[Author’s note: I’ve been working on a piece on Councilmember Steve Faessel’s somewhat bonkers speech at Tuesday’s Anaheim City Council meeting, and was nearly done when Chairman Vern noted that I had omitted mention of Mayor Ashleigh Aitken’s response to his speech — which indeed I had because I hadn’t realized that that she had responded to him. So I watched that reply and then set down my initial story: Vern will write about Faessel today and I’ll follow up with a version of that story in the days following. But we have some setting of the table to do first.]

1. Ashleigh Aitken at War

I’d been more supportive of Ashleigh before and since her election than most other reform activists I know, probably because I recognize the constraints under which she’s operating. There will be limits on what she can accomplish, given her being deeply in the minority, but I appreciated that she seemed basically honest, decent, and ethically centered. What she can do, then, is to speak the truth, model what’s right, not become part of the problem, and do what she can to hold feet to the fire. All of that is a significant improvement over the past 20 years of Mayors, save for Tom Tait! But while she may feel that she’s done those things to her satisfaction — and she’s better positioned to judge than I am — I have still been a little disappointed that she heating up her colleagues feet as much as warranted.

Then I saw her reply to Faessel. Now I feel proud to have been, and vindicated in being, among her enthusiastic supporters. She is coming into her own. But the next step will be even harder: I don’t think that she full appreciates the nature of the problem she faces. It’s not a member of Councilmembers dissing her, or making some ethical breaches, or failing to act when they should. The problem is systematic. And she’s right that the Council’s problems might be more a matter of mere ethics rather than criminality — which she notes did exist if people withheld their relevant private emails related to City business — but that’s relatively small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

Anaheim’s governance problems are WAY bigger than that.

One thing that Ashleigh doesn’t seem to fully appreciate is that she is now at war with the Disney Corporation, the Angels, and their well-compensated supporters. This is not a war of her own initiation or choosing, any more than Ukraine made started the war with Russia. In fact, the rationale for the war being made against her is pretty much the same as Putin’s rationale for the war against Ukraine: He thinks that Ukraine belongs to him, and he is only willing to respect its nominal independence so long as it remains docile. Well, like Ukraine, Ashleigh is no longer docile — and she will be punished for that.

So it is with Disney and the Angels: they think that the City of Anaheim’s government belongs to them, although they are willing to respect a Councilmember’s nominal independence so long as they remain docile. By speaking some unpleasant truths, Ashleigh’s just wanting things not to go bad becomes an act of war. But really, they can’t do much more to her than make her a one-term Mayor — and better to live in glorious dissent than to become a comfortable collaborator in perfidy. (Tait, with whom I sure hope she’s in touch, can give her some tips on how to stay cool under fire and even enjoy yourself much of the time.)

One other thing that I should mention before moving on: if she hasn’t seen Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance as Alonzo in “Training Day,” she should find a way to get ahold of it. In a famous scene from that movie, Alonzo tells his trainee, Ethan Hawke’s Jake, that: “In this business you got to have a little dirt on you for anybody to trust you.” This is what I suspect was behind the invitation to the charity luncheon where she was one of the majority of the council in attendance — which raised the possibility of a Brown Act violation but, due in part to seating arrangements, did not likely constitute one. Ashleigh was not getting dirt onto herself, so the agents of the Cabal tried to get some onto her. (My suspicion is that she was somewhat embarrassed by the whole setup, which is why she did not mention it from the dais — which itself became an issue for some.) Ashleigh has to realize that, simply by being a decent and ethical person, she is at war with those who aren’t — and she’ll have to turn down some invitations.

2. The ‘Majority Leader’ Way of Circumventing of the Brown Act

Ashleigh mentioned the Brown Act in relation to the machinations of the Council majority in the “Mock Meetings” (that may or may not have taken place) plans to win a big vote and slime Former Council Member Dr. Jose Moreno, but she noted it as more of an ethical than a legal problem. That may be because she noted, as I have, that the rehearsals were careful limited to just three members — aka “not a majority” — of the past City Council. So long as the contents of those meetings were not conveyed to other members of the majority faction — and, as I’ll note below, there was no reason why they’d have to be told. They knew what their (non-speaking, except as an echo) roles were anyway.

Disney (with the Angels riding in tow) has a majority of seats on the Council because they bought them. Now if the councilmembers they elected simply thanked Disney for the money but then decided to speak publicly and make decisions based on their independent estimate of the merits after listening to public comment, there would be no Brown Act problem, even ethically. But they don’t — any more than a new member of the California State Assembly does that on issues of import to the party. Generally, especially if they care about re-election, they just watch what happens in the chamber and do what their leaders do. Generally, this is not a problem for them — but the Brown Act doesn’t apply to the Legislature anyway and playing literal “follow the leader” — perhaps speaking for the cameras and reporters back home about how good or bad a piece of legislation is for their own district — is the most obvious way to get ahead and be treated well. (It’s different if one can be a deciding vote in an evenly split body or in on questions requiring a supermajority: then each member potentially has immense power — though taking advantage of that power can have some unpleasant repercussions. I’m omitting any discussion here of actions in committees and people getting a “free pass” to vote against the leader’s wishes when their vote isn’t needed and their constituency would oppose it.)

In this case, members of a partisan political body don’t need to be instructed on every single vote. They just need to be told — at the outset — how to decide how to vote, and that takes care of the vast majority of cases. (That’s one reason you see members of a voting body hanging back on some votes to see if someone else will pass the anti-constituency vote that they’ve been chosen to have to support, releasing them from that burden.)

What follows from this is that the decision of who will vote on a given bill can be both spontaneous (in the sense that people don’t need to have discussed it) and determined in advance (in the sense that the desired result will occur anyway, without such discussion. This is because council members have been selected ahead of time by the donor interests precisely for their willingness and ability to play this game of “follow the leader.” Ten years ago, they might have been instructed at some point to “just watch what Kris Murray says and does and (this might or may not be explicit) follow suit.” Until last year, the “Majority Leader” may have been Harry Sidhu; today it may be Natalie Rubalcaba (or Meeks). This has the effect of generating decisions without considering public comment or other general input, going against the spirit of the Brown Act — even though an individuals intent to vote may not exist before the vote itself! Yet it has been determined ahead of time, by explicit or implicit agreement.

I know of no case where what I’m calling the “Majority Leader” model — because Vern said he doesn’t know who the “Borg Queen” or the “Night King” were, and they were my other options — has been applied to the Brown Act, let alone tested in court. But my sense is that it probably is one of the more commonly used ways to rig the game of local politics, especially in a town whose funding is dominated by a single or coordinated group of major campaign donors.

I was among those who rolled my eyes a bit at Ashleigh using the ballot designation “Former Federal Prosecutor” in her run for Mayor — but I have to admit that her experience seems to be coming in useful now. So I hope that perhaps she and some of her current and former associated might game out the question of whether a Brown Act violation could be found in this situation under current law. I would think that among the likeliest considerations that might apply might be:

• A city has a great proportion of its campaign funding coming directly or indirectly through a single or several coordinated sources
• Those candidates with the support of these sources are substantially more likely to win
• Those candidates tend to vote in unison, or close to so, on matters of interest to the donors; or, in the case of multiple-round votes such as some appointments, they do so on the final vote
• The donors receive substantial gain — in direct monetary donations and in rules that favor them — from the actions of the political body in question
• There are losers as well as winners: various political priorities supported by non-donors routinely get lip service or short shrift
• No countervailing major exercise of non-donor political organizing serves as a countervailing factor, at least not one sufficient to deny the donor-supported majority its power

And looking at that list, I can think of one extremely good fit for this means of circumventing the intent of the Brown Act — and its name is Anaheim. I’d love to see Avelino Valencia or Sharon Quirk-Silva start a discussion of how the Brown Act might be amended to prevent this abject capture of a government body by monied interests — but perhaps it would be better coming from some portions of the Assembly more insulated from the Wrath of the Mouse. Disney is far and away most to blame for Anaheim’s present cesspit of corruption — and they should be made to answer for it.