Editor’s note: Link to video of the entire council meeting has been added below.
People watching the City Council meeting at a conference room in the basement (Photo – Garrett Rowlan).
Normally at 6 pm, a half-hour before the meeting of the City Council opens, the seats in the City Hall chambers are sparsely occupied, if at all.
By Garrett Rowlan
Not so Monday night.
The crowd, at that hour, was already SRO, their numbers wrapped around the inner walls of the chambers, and the overflow was considerable, extending outside the chambers and, finally, down to a conference room in the basement where a monitor was hooked up and people could watch while sitting in high-backed chairs.
The reason for the turnout was the negative interaction—to use an anodyne term—of two members of the Pasadena police who beat Chris Ballew, an Altadena resident, while traveling on North Fair Oaks in Altadena.
The video of the incident, now having been viewed by millions, brought “tremendous emotion,” to quote Mayor Terry Tornek, who spoke at the end of two hours of heated public comment. It was the understatement of the evening, emotions having run the gamut from restrained seething to outright ranting, the reason for this venting not only the Ballew incident, but previous incidents between the Pasadena Police and the citizenry.
There were terms like “appalled” and “disgusted,” there were names dropped from Bull Conner to Martin Luther King Jr., and there were even mini-lectures touching on sociology and anthropology.
Demands from the public called for the two officers in the video to be fired, a public apology, and an alteration in the rules of engagement between the police and the public.
People lineup outside city council chambers (Photo – Garrett Rowlan).
In the end, the meeting was a classic example of a demand for action butting against a bureaucracy’s need for legal process, or what some suspected would be stonewalling. Many, fearing that result, called for the investigation to be outsourced to an independent investigator.
Many spoke, and toward the end of the public comment period, a few did not, most everything having been said.
It was the evening’s main event, and dwarfed by comparison the lesser-polarizing Council items.
Other issues
Those lesser issues included the area around Lincoln and Orange Grove, which was declared a nuisance area by general consensus, and the process to replace the liquor store at the corner with 794 units of affordable housing.
The issue between plurality voting format and the 50+1 option came up again, in what seems like a never-ending cycle. Choosing between the lesser of two evils, the Council voted to utilize the current 50+1 format.
A soccer game will be held at the Rose Bowl on Monday, May 28. Banner Bank acquisition was unanimously approved.
Finally, the council took up the language in the Airbnb agreement with the city. It was past ten, and this discussion, while valid in its own right, seemed not only like splitting hairs but like cracked fingernails, repressed yawns were in evidence.
> Click here to see the video of the entire council meeting.
[This article has been updated to add a video link of the meeting and to correct the residence location for Mr. Ballew, on Jan. 9, at 10:05 am]
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