Website Takes City Officials to Task
When Huntington Park Councilman Ed Escareno spent double his city-allotted travel budget for two years in a row, watchourcity.com asked him to pay it back.
When the City Council voted itself a $350-a-month raise, and hired its city attorney in closed session and without requesting competing bids from other attorneys, the website listed which council members had gone along with it all.
And when the council approved $50,000 in cash and in-kind services to help an influential business group put on a Mexican Independence Day celebration, while allocating $16,500 for a Fourth of July celebration and cutting preschool programs' funding, the website wisecracked, "It seems that the Budget Committee and the rest of City Council members do not have any close ties with the city's preschoolers."
Wrapping an old-style muckraking soul in new technology, the website, www.watchourcity .com is an experiment in public oversight that has been kicking the shins of Huntington Park elected officials since it went online in March.
In news story form, the website presents public-record data on who donated money to which council member, along with suggestions as to what the donor might want in return.
The site includes links to the budget and city contracts. Sprinkled through its pages are quotes on civic involvement from Abraham Lincoln, Plato and Pablo Picasso, together with barbed questions along the lines of: "What was Mayor Juan Noguez, Vice Mayor Ofelia Hernandez and council member Mario Gomez hiding from the public?"
Though the site regularly takes public officials to task, the founder has refused to make his own identity public. He would only tell The Times that he was a bilingual adult, born in Mexico and raised in the United States, a city resident though not a city employee, and that he worked on the site six to eight hours a week and made no money from it. He also said he'd never worked in journalism or with computers. He has communicated with The Times by e-mail and telephone.
"We receive a lot of whistle-blower e-mail," he said. "Everybody fears reprisal, everybody. Anonymity is paramount."
The site's founder said he was attempting to fill the void left by the decline of news coverage and civic participation in the city over the last 20 years.
