INSIDE INGLEWOOD-The City of Inglewood’s mayors (Ed Vincent, Roosevelt F. Dorn, Danny K. Tabor and James T. Butts) and city council members have long rested on playing dumb to the world—but District 1 council member George Dotson may have lowered the bar to below ground level.
A town hall meeting that had been planned months in advance was canceled at the beginning of May because “it conflicts with Mother’s Day weekend.” The quoted excuse was published in Inglewood Today—a former promotional magazine owned by Willie Brown who was a major financial supporter of Dotson’s 2013 political campaign. Seems the councilmember forget Mother’s Day.
According to the History Channel, the “American incarnation of Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914.” So, it’s not as though the holiday was spring on these folks.
Dotson has been known to spew significant ignorance.
In one of his earliest public appearances as an elected council member, he confessed that he did not know a “fiscal year.”
Dotson was asked by a resident at a July, 2013 block club meeting in Inglewood, “Are you telling me you don’t know what a fiscal year is?” Dotson—who claims to have owned for 40 years a business named Washington Interiors—could not tell a lie: “I don’t know.” The incident was captured on video tape before a crowd that was silenced by the seeming idiocy of their newly minted council member.
These are the kind of people that Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts who, according to California campaign disclosure forms filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission in 2012/2013, supported with nearly $500,000 for a $60,0000 annual salary.
Willie Brown is a paid political consultant to Butts and in 2004 had an annual contract that paid his then-monthly magazine $123,000 annually to promote certain politicians in Inglewood. He has been financially friendly with all of the four aforementioned mayors despite their respective cocaine habits, judicial convictions, short terms and domesticity challenges.
(Randall Fleming is a veteran journalist and magazine publisher. He has worked at and for the New York Post, the Brooklyn Spectator and the Los Feliz Ledger. He is currently editor-in-chief at the Morningside Park Chronicle, a weekly newspaper based in Inglewood, CA and on-line atwww.MorningsideParkChronicle.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 39
Pub: May 13, 2014
