Carson Holds a Fight Night at Its City Hall

It was a bad night at Carson City Hall on Tuesday, with so much council discord and staff disarray that a resident scolded officials for setting young people a bad example.

A trash contract, gang troubles, labor negotiations, ceiling tiles, traffic engineering and even as innocuous an event as a dinner dance for employees all managed to create flaps.

Council members complained of not being clued in by staff and asked questions that staff members could not answer, resulting in further squabbles.

Mayor Apologizes

Although there were no major blow-ups or walkouts--as have occasionally erupted at Carson council meetings--Mayor Kay Calas finally apologized to the audience in exasperation.

“I’m sorry it’s not Monday night,” she said tartly. “We could substitute for ‘Laugh-In.’ ”

The most serious issue concerned labor negotiations with Local 809 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

To fulfill a long-delayed promise, the council has promised pay raises that will bring underpaid Carson employees to parity with other cities. In addition, employees will get a 4.3% cost-of-living increase, and those with above-average evaluations will get raises from a 5% merit raise pool.

Employees are understandably anxious that the raises, which could wind up being the largest ever approved by the city, go through without a hitch.

Just before the meeting, they had unanimously approved a proposed contract furnished to them by the city personnel department.

“I am sure you are not going to believe this,” Councilwoman Sylvia Muise said to union spokesman Nancy Severtson at the podium, “but no council member has seen the contract.”

The contract also had not gone through City Atty. Glenn Watson, who said it needed work. And Councilman Michael Mitoma said later that the city staff had not yet calculated the precise cost of bringing Carson employees into parity with other cities.

“I have never seen anything like this before,” said Severtson, who has been involved with city-employee labor negotiations in Carson for years. “Once again, I guaranteed people (pay increases) would be in their paychecks.”

Council members attempted to mollify employees with promises that the contract’s salary increases would be retroactive to July 1. The issue is scheduled to return before the council July 26.

Trash--a sensitive issue in Carson, where trash contracts have led to indictments and recalls that ended the political careers of four council members in the last 20 years--generated another dispute.

Over the protests of Muise, the council voted 4 to 1 to increase trash-pickup fees from $9.27 a month to $10.50 and to extend the city’s contract with Western Waste Industries, which was to expire July 31, 1989, by another five years.

A spokesman for Western Waste said the trash fees now amount to about $1.9 million a year. The firm has not had an increase for two years.

Muise objected to the contract’s extension, saying the city should seek bids before extending such a large contract.

“This is like a bad nightmare,” she said.

In interviews after the vote, Mitoma and Calas said the city was paying about the same for twice-weekly pickups as nearby municipalities were paying for trash collection once a week.

“If we put it out for proposals, we would lose money,” Calas said.

When it came to a contract for a firm to provide traffic-engineering services, it was Mitoma’s turn to be angry.

He said pointedly that only one out of 10 firms responded to a city request for proposals. The one that responded--Greiner Engineering of California, based in Santa Ana--intended to use Salem Spitz, the traffic engineer now employed by the city on a month-to-month basis, to do the work.

Mitoma questioned whether the city’s specifications had been designed to fit one firm. The matter was sent back to the staff.

When it came to gang problems and ceiling tiles in the basement of City Hall, the issue was the adequacy of staff work.

Mitoma criticized the staff for taking months to produce a report on solutions to gang problems without finding out where the money would come from for some of its proposals. The report was approved in principle, with further staff work required.

And as part of a renovation of City Hall that has been going on since an arson there 18 months ago, the staff recommended replacing the existing tiles with bigger ones. They were at a loss, however, when asked if the nearly $20,000 price tag included the cost of redoing the grids the tiles would hang from. The council sent that back to staff too.

Council members had personal complaints as well.

Muise was annoyed that staff members had not told her what happened at an emergency meeting that she missed last week. At another point, Councilwoman Vera Robles DeWitt and Muise argued over the accuracy of minutes from another meeting.

Calas complained when she found out at the council meeting that the city employees had been planning a July 22 dinner dance for several months, but had not bothered to tell council members. She said staff and council needed to work out procedures to prevent a similar succession of flubs.

As the meeting closed, Joyce Claxton, a Carson resident who had attended to hear a report on the city’s task force on gangs, rose to chastise officials for “pettiness” and being “rude to each other.”

“You are the models for youth,” she said. “If they were sitting here tonight, it would be no wonder that they would go out and demonstrate the gang behavior.”

Acting City Administrator Bill McKown said after the meeting: “To explain tonight, no one can.”