On most evenings you can find South El Monte Mayor Blanca Figueroa in her wood-paneled City Hall office, which is crowded with her personal touches -- figurines, plants, plaques, photographs, three flags, a tattered Bible, a refrigerator, a microwave and two fish tanks housing Ricky, Lucy, Fred and Ethel, her four betta fish.
"It's my home away from home," said Figueroa, who admits she's often there until the wee hours doing city work. "I put on my slippers, put my hair up. It's comfortable."
Her fellow City Council members, however, think it's too comfortable. They contend that Figueroa is living in the office because her own home is not fit to be occupied.
"The mayor has been living at City Hall for the last eight months," said City Councilman Hector Delgado, who added of her office, "Does it look like a professional office or does it look like somebody's bedroom?"
Delgado has been leading an effort to limit the amount of time Figueroa can spend at the office. He says he has surveillance video that shows Figueroa there at night, kicking back, cooking dinner and watching Mexican soap operas.
That's because her own house, he says, lacks heat and air conditioning.
Delgado's charges this week are the latest salvo in a public battle that has drawn international attention since he and his fellow council members voted last week, with Figueroa in mind, to prohibit all city workers from being in City Hall after 11 p.m.
Figueroa, 53, calls the allegations "ridiculous and preposterous," and says Delgado has never been to her "absolutely livable" home. Besides, she says, "There's no place to sleep at City Hall, and it's too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter."
Since the council's curfew vote Dec. 9, reporters from all over the world have been calling, and the City Council has been barraged with hundreds of e-mails from far and wide.
Residents in the city of 20,000 hardly seem to have noticed.
"I haven't talked to my neighbors about it, and I'm not really interested," said Jody Bush, 74, who has lived in the city for more than half a century. "I saw CNN was doing it. I was surprised by the interest in it."
South El Monte is a tight-knit, no-fuss, blue-collar town, and people's minds are on the ailing economy, which has hit local families and industry hard. And even though it has changed a lot over the years, it's still the sort of place where people have known each other for years.
