The lessons of Vernon’s disincorporation fight

Even the residents and business owners of Vernon concede by now that their municipal government is a scandal unto itself, with public officials who have treated themselves to exorbitant salaries and luxury travel. The officials also ensured they wouldn’t have to clean up their act because they owned and controlled the industrial town’s tiny reservoir of housing and handpicked the city’s 110 or so residents.

Yes, Vernon is a place that makes people seethe over the injustice of it all. But as long as its leaders aren’t breaking the law, its problems are its own. (And when its leaders do break the law, as they have multiple times, we have prosecutors to deal with that.)

A bill by Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) overstepped by proposing to disincorporate Vernon and place it under the county of Los Angeles. The state has rules to protect cities from disincorporation from above, though Perez’s bill would have gotten around this by banning cities with fewer than 150 residents, with Vernon the only one fitting the description. What bill might be written in the future to pick off other cities that legislators don’t like for reasons valid or not?

After sailing through the Assembly, the bill failed in the Senate, but for unfortunate reasons. Los Angeles County officials balked at taking on Vernon’s newly revealed financial woes (up to that point the city had appeared to be a cash cow). Democratic lawmakers feared alienating unions, which claimed jobs would be lost if Vernon disincorporated. In other words, most lawmakers opposed the bill out of deference to political allegiances and campaign contributions rather than recognizing the overriding issue of legislative abuse of power. Sen. Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar) was among the few to see the bigger picture, saying, “It becomes a slippery slope when you start to change the rules to disincorporate one city.”

But if most legislators haven’t learned anything from this exercise, perhaps Vernon has. The threat of disincorporation led officials there to vow reforms, including restrictions on their own pay and a commission to run the housing more independently of City Hall. We’ll see. From its inception, Vernon has never acted in a way that inspires trust. Ultimately, the real catalyst for change could be Vernon’s own unchecked spending: Problematic investments have landed the city in fiscal trouble, and the Internal Revenue Service is auditing the issuance of more than $400 million in bonds. Business leaders who once bragged about the city being in the black — as if that were the only virtue municipal leaders were required to model — might rethink their support for a City Hall where almost anything goes.