Commentary: Gloria Gray is the Wrong Dist 62 Choice

INSIDE INGLEWOOD-Gloria Gray is a career politician whose musical chairs approach is best known for the empty chairs she has left in her wake. She has long lived in Morningside Park, a middle class community in Inglewood that is predominantly Black. 

Gloria Gray has been in politics in her community since my wife was a child. My wife was raised in Inglewood and her parents owned the house for a long time prior to that. 

Throughout her uneventful decades as a politician, Gray has sat by as her library was closed down, her streets were allowed to crumble, discount stores flourished, her YMCA was shut down, blight bloomed like rot on Crenshaw, Manchester, Florence, Century and Van Ness—five major streets that define her neighborhood—and her friends in office were increasingly investigated and in a number of cases convicted. 

Gray is friends with former Inglewood Mayor Dorn and current Inglewood Mayor Butts. Dorn, a former judge who knew better, was convicted of corruption and loan fraud to obtain said loan. Butts has had a number of run-ins with the District Attorney and police regarding child abuse, molestation, wife abuse and “domesticity” issues similar to recently convicted felon Senator Rod Wright—who has an office in Inglewood’s city hall three floors down from Butts. 

Even though she has been on the boards of several organizations, e.g. the IUSD school board, the Inglewood Airport Area Chamber of Commerce (in the mid-1990s), the Inglewood YMCA board and even KCET, she has not used those boards to make her community better. She claims 30 years with SEIU Local 720 and so much more in her campaign materials. 

Her community, however, is not a few black business people—which she implies whenever she speaks these days. Her community is where she lives, and she has done nothing for decades even as it has been intentionally allowed to deteriorate. 

She has done nothing to make her community where she lives better.

She has done nothing to promote her community where she lives. 

In fact it seems as if she’s hidden the beautiful community where she has lived for most of her career. One of her campaign staff said, “There is more to the 62nd than Inglewood.”

Which is true, but if you don’t have enough common sense to protect your own community then why should anyone trust you to take care of theirs? 

Gray says she raised her children here, but who are they?

She had her birthday party in View Park because the beautiful community and beautiful house she lives in is not good enough. 

And her house is beautiful. Gray lives by the beautiful Circle Park which boasts a wonderful Art Nouveau fountain. When the City of Inglewood published a pamphlet on Inglewood public art, the massive fountain was curiously left out of it, and Gloria Gray said nothing to make sure her friends at Inglewood City Hall included it in future revisions. 

She allowed the historic Morningside Park Library to be closed, she allowed Morningside Park’s elementary school to be closed, she allowed Inglewood’s YMCA to be closed, and she allows the junky retail justice, grimy discount stores and fast food joints that line the business district of her middle class residential community. (There is currently a fourth fast food place being built at a major intersection that already has three such businesses as well as a small restaurant.) 

Her pleasant, quiet smile is nothing but complicity to corruption. 

She has never lent her voice to help this community. She wouldn’t even open her mouth to save her brothers and sisters on the SEIU jobs because her friendship with the Butts—who endorsed her opponent, Autumn Burke—is more important that standing up for good jobs that quite a few black people. Butts ending up laying off an entire department of SEIU employees and replacing them with consultants from an Orange County-based firm. 

Drive around the business corridor of Morningside Park—a community in Inglewood that should be a thriving middle class enclave of culture—and look at the 99-cent stores, check-cashing and anti-union businesses that line the streets. Look at the proud achievement of the Century Village—an environmental nightmare of traffic, trash and poor planning. One of the front-end businesses, Red Lobster, is owned by Darden Restaurants—a company that reduced hours to protest Obamacare. 

This is what Gray and her friends are proud of. 

If this is how she advocates for her community of fewer than 10,000, how much will she really be able to accomplish for 500,000 people? 

How will she stand up against fracking, water waste, pollution, civil rights violations and corporations who want to do whatever they want to our people and our air for the 10 years of tax breaks they are given? And when those companies decide that they don’t want to pay real taxes after their 10-year incentives have expired and they refuse to get involved with the community and move their plant to Texas—like Toyota recently did, taking 7,000 jobs—will she Gloria Gray also be packing up to move onto some other new seat, some as-yet-unsat music chair? 

To be sure, Gloria Gray is unable or unwilling to even advocate for her own neighborhood despite living in it for decades. How can she be trusted to work for Assembly District 62 when she won’t even protest her streets being unpaved, her library being closed and her own union colleagues being laid off?

 

(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 at www.MorningsideParkChronicle.com. Mr Fleming’s views are his own and do not reflect the views of CityWatch.) 

 -cw

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 44

Pub: May 30, 2014