Human Relations Activist Westmiller Says She’ll Seek Council Seat in 1989

Community volunteer Robin Westmiller announced Tuesday she will run for Glendale City Council next April in an effort to clear the city’s “tarnished past” and end what she called “racial discrimination.”

Westmiller, 34, is a board director of Glendale’s Human Relations Council and was a member of a city-sponsored task force on racism that officials disbanded after three meetings.

At a task force meeting, Westmiller suggested that the city acknowledge its “infamous past” by erecting a plaque at the site of the American Nazi Party’s former Glendale headquarters and then try to purge the city of racism through education.

In a statement issued to the press on Tuesday, Westmiller criticized the City Council as “ordinance-happy” and accused council members of making citizens who speak before them feel “insulted, humiliated and ridiculed.”

Westmiller also criticized council members for wasting taxpayers’ dollars and permitting downtown growth without also providing for more housing and expanded water and sewage facilities.

Westmiller, a 10-year-resident of Glendale, graduated from Syracuse University in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in communications and a minor in political science. She is president of Westmiller & Associates, a professional speakers’ bureau she started in 1985.

Westmiller and her husband, William Westmiller, have three daughters, ages 6, 3, and 1.