Keeping the City Transparent and Honest–Falea’Ana Meni Run for Carson’s City Clerk

Falea’Ana Meni ran for mayor of Carson in 2020 against three candidates with greater name recognition and resources. Furthermore, she was a vociferous Trump-supporter, a quality that should have made her anathema for Democrats in the city to support. But her reputation as an organizer and community activist and the endorsement of city council candidate and Democrat Brandi Murdock seemed to outshine her support for the former president. Meni still placed last in that race, but garnered more than 5,000 votes or 12 percent of the electorate. This year, she is running for city clerk.

Random Lengths News recently interviewed Meni, a longtime city staffer and former president of Local 809 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, about her desire to hold public office in Carson. Her answer was quite simple: she believes the current members of the city council pose an existential threat to the city residents via cronyism and sheer incompetence.

This past month, however, Meni has been most visible organizing demonstrations and pressuring the elected officials in Carson and Los Angeles County for action and transparency regarding the stench from the Dominguez Channel.

Meni believes that city officials is to service the community. She said it was beyond frustrating to live a half-mile from the channel and get the runaround from elected leaders, who put up their hands and say, “It’s not us;it’s the county.

“I had to tell them it doesn’t matter if the city is not responsible for the maintenance of the channel, you have responsibilities to us,” she said. “Anything that happens within these incorporated borders, is your responsibility.”

Meni noted that the city didn’t take resident complaints about the stench seriously. When the subject started bubbling up, Carson responded with social media pages on Facebook. People who don’t live close to Dominguez Channel and thus weren’t exposed to the full intensity of the stench accused her of using the issue to criticize the sitting members of the city council. This led to the creation of a separate Carson page focused on concerns about the Dominguez channel but also other issues specific to fourth district residents.

Meni was appalled that the city didn’t more quickly to establish an Emergency Operations Center and instead treated the stench as a nuisance.

“They should have called a special meeting the first week and declared an emergency to kick off the process,” Meni said. “They didn’t call their first meeting until Oct. 11 and even then they wouldn’t declare it an emergency. The stench began Oct. 4. “[This created a] domino effect within the business community. They couldn’t even send their workers home because according to their company’s guidelines from the Department of Public Health, the city has only declared it a nuisance. Therefore, they should still work. We weren’t getting any help.”

Regarding mayoral race in 2020, Meni said the final straw was when the city council decided not to use the reserve funds to cover the deductible to defend an $80 million lawsuit lodged against the city over the 157 acres project by Cam-Carson, a joint venture of Simon Property Group and Macerich, which accused the city of “gross financial and project mismanagement.” The developers claim Carson had not fulfilled its pledge to utilize $27 million to clean up the site which was previously a toxic landfill. Instead of dipping into the reserves to pay the deductible, Meni said, the city took the money from the operating budget (which pays the salaries of city hall staffers and supplies).

“We were already strained with staffing,” Meni explained. “This was the case] ever since 2002-2003 when we had a mass exodus after a golden handshake, an arrangement in which experienced city staffers were given a severance package to retire early in an effort to trim the city budget.

Meni said the city never balanced the workforce with the workload, but through attrition and modernization after a staff person resigned or retired, a reassessment of whether or not to fill the position or to reorganize would occur. As a result, Meni explained, the city was able to avoid laying off workers. But she cautioned that could change if the council makeup remains the same.

“The general public doesn’t know because of the way the City Council would buffer [attrition rates] by not filling budgeted positions,” Meni said. “It was very stressful the last five-plus years [for] the work force.”

But the work wasn’t going away. If anything, [the work] was increasing.

Meni said she sensed that eventually the city was going to begin talking to city workers about potential layoffs.

“It had nothing to do with something catastrophic like the housing crash, [which] we went through with furloughs and everything,” she said.

She said her bargaining unit asked her to restructure departments, find cost savings, and institute furloughs so that everyone’s jobs remained secure.

Meni has worked at Carson’s City Hall for 17 years, starting first under the tutelage of the late great city clerk Helen Kawagoe. During that time, Meni has amassed a near encyclopedic knowledge of Carson and during the course of the interview, demonstrated that knowledge.

Meni had been working in City Hall right up to January 2021 when she was let go.

She started off as a summer youth worker in the city clerk’s office under Kawagoe and worked there for many years before she was promoted into the finance department.

The Sitting Council’s Big F#@* You to Fourth District Residents
Meni is happy that the city has turned district voting. In fact, she was one of the plaintiffs alongside Vera Robles DeWitt in the lawsuit filed by the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project

She said she agreed to the lawsuit because change would not come to her side of town otherwise.

“I live in the patch area… We’re sandwiched between the channel and the commercial district and refineries. We’re ignored year after year. Yet the money comes in right through our area. But it doesn’t stay here whatsoever. I wanted accountability,” she said.

Like most of the candidates, Meni didn’t like the final maps that were drawn. She described a the shape of the fourth district as being shaped as a penis, but the reality looked more like big “fuck you” to fourth district residents.

“It was very clear, the gerrymandering. They …. even got another demographer, because they did not like what the [the first] demographer was [drawing],” Meni said.

She noted that with her district being on the east side of the city, the fourth district is geographically separated from everybody.

“They literally cut the very north tip around [Councilman] Cedrick Hick’s block, his house, and they included it with the whole east side. So he went from there, the refinery lands, which are the largest parcels of land in the city and on the east side of the city, east of the patch in the Dominguez area.. And for [Mayor] Lula, they carved around her block. Meni said the fourth district map looks like a dick.

She said she’ll never be able to unsee the dickmove that literally cuts around Mayor Davis-Holmes neighborhood and goes straight down and it has the base.”

The gerrymandering, however, isn’t the most egregious part of the whole mapmaking process. The egregious part for Meni has been that the city has been terrible about educating Carson’s residents about districting and the making of the maps.

“To this day, I still have residents who don’t understand why going down to Anita {Street], why they are in two separate districts when they’re the same neighborhood,” Menis said. “But they had to snip it off so that they could create a [contiguous] that includes [Mayor Davis Holmes’] residence.”

Hitting the Ground Running
She said fourth district residents should know that she is the only candidate who understands the function of the city clerk’s office aside from Vera DeWitt, who is also running for City Clerk. She said she wouldn’t need an elections consultant to show her the ropes due to her tenure working in the city clerk’s office and overall tenure at city hall.

Meni noted that with the exception of DeWitt, none of the other candidates understand that the city clerk’s office is a fully operating department and that in order to do its job, from the record-keeping and legislative action, the city clerk has to know what all the departments do.
This special election is to fill a seat for one year. That means the city clerk coming in will immediately be behind doing all the paperwork, the resolutions and all the legislative actions leading up to the next election in 2022, Meni explained.

Meni said she is the only candidate who would have a good understanding of the job of city clerk and the different state mandates that has to be followed.

“The other three candidates have no idea with the voters rights act that is being implemented under our provision,” Meni said. “We don’t want to end up like the city of Compton, where they have a [multi-]million dollar budget deficit.”

Meni continued, explaining that non of the remaining candidates for city clerk have knowledge of the various financial components that need to be addressed with the job. She predicted that city could wind up needing to hire an election consultant firm to help, them.

Meni argues that council should have done that to help the interim deputy city clerk, John Carroll, a hired city clerk with allegedly no prior experience other than in his home state of Mississippi.

“They could have done that,” Meni said of the city council. “But they were adamant about no, no, no. This is our guy. We don’t have the luxury to sit there and play this wait-and-see game for these other individuals to come around the learning curve.”

Meni was referring to the fall out of interim city clerk John Caroll who was hired to fill in after Donesia Gause-Aldana resigned this past April to take a similar position in the city of Riverside.

In the run up to the November special election there have been a number of complaints by candidates about Caroll’s handling of deadlines and campaign filings. Meni said she is in the process of submitting all her documentation of the Caroll’s alleged mishandling of the filings.

It should be noted Carson’s elections are still conducted by Los Angeles County.

Meni noted the fact that many of the candidates didn’t show up for all of the candidate forums if any, should be a disqualifying factor.

“These individuals can’t even show up for a forum because they are afraid to face people. So as a resident, I’m bothered by that,” Meni said. “This is what happens when you hire elected officials. When the time comes when we need them, you end up suffering and that’s where we’re at right now and that’s the image that a lot of us residents really view all of our elected officials.”

Meni said the city council has failed Carson residents, but the failure now is impacting residents’ health and their is no forgiveness for the city council.

The video at the very top begins at the beginning of the interview. This video is the second half of the interview with Falea’Ana Meni.