This summer, the small city of Maywood made national headlines when it laid off most of its workers, disbanded the Police Department and contracted most city services to the neighboring city of Bell.
Maywood's move was quickly overshadowed by the salary scandal in Bell, which resulted in the indictments of eight current and former city officials on charges of public corruption. Now Maywood is working to extricate itself from Bell and rebuild its own city government.
But an examination into how Maywood found itself in this position offers a window into the struggles of this group of small, largely working-class communities that straddle the 710 Freeway southeast of downtown L.A.
Maywood's problems have their roots in an effort seven years ago to provide police services to another neighboring city, Cudahy.
The cities agreed upon a fee of $261 per officer hour, enough to cover Maywood's costs.
But in the ensuing years, rising costs of policing Cudahy quietly drained Maywood of more money every year.
By 2009, its $5-million reserves were gone and the budget was in deficit. A city consultant discovered that the contract was actually losing Maywood $1.1 million a year.
Maywood's insurer, and its city staff, urged the council to sign a more lucrative contract with Cudahy that would have rebuilt its reserves. But the council delayed. Members wanted to study forming a regional police force with Bell and other cities.
Instead, Maywood lost its insurance, forcing the city to hand over the reins to Bell.
"It's an incredible story if you think of a community with a small budget throwing away" money like that, said Paul Philips, Maywood's interim city manager in 2009 who noticed the contract's problems and left when the City Council ignored his warnings.
Today, Maywood struggles to remain a city at all.
Interim city officials don't have a clear idea how much the city has in reserve, though they say it's sure to be minuscule.
"It's a scary place we're in right now," said Gerardo Mayagoitia, a 34-year resident of Maywood, at a recent City Council meeting.
The saga — which started with that one ill-conceived police contract in 2003 — has led to questions about the economic viability of some southeastern Los Angeles County cities, where the tax base has withered along with the manufacturing that once supported the towns' incorporation. Formerly home to Bethlehem Steel, Maywood now counts an Arco AM PM, King Taco and a McDonald's among its largest sales-tax generators.
But the Maywood police contract story suggests these cities' viability is threatened more by a dysfunctional political culture that undermines their economic progress.
Cities have thin budgets and frail civil service. Media coverage and political involvement are anemic, and civic organizations — Maywood has no chamber of commerce, for example — are scarce.
In this vacuum, individuals — at times city council majorities — have amassed remarkable power in cities such as Bell, South Gate and Bell Gardens.
Professional administrators have been ignored, undermined or fired in political tugs-of-war. Friendly consultants and loyalists with little expertise have often been hired in their places. The result is municipal improvisation, scandals and blunders that struggling cities can ill afford.
In five years, Maywood had three regular elections, a recall election and a special election. Three finance directors and three city attorneys came and went; so did three police chiefs. For parts of 2008 and 2009, the city had six additional interim managers.
But this chaos was just brewing when the Cudahy police contract was signed in 2003.
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For years, Maywood was home to white factory workers in a bustling manufacturing economy. Today it is 98% Latino, California's densest city and one of its poorest.
In 1999, voters elected a young majority to the City Council. Every council member was a graduate of Bell High School, where Maywood students attend high school — a first since the city became predominantly Latino.
"We said, 'We are what you wanted us to be': Go to college, stay in the community — we represented that," said Sam Pena, a leader of the new council majority.
Slim budgets forced the new majority to keep city salaries low, Pena said. Maywood didn't often seek the best talent, but hired from within: city managers, police chiefs and others. Many employees did several jobs at once; turnover was high.
All this created an atmosphere, Pena said, in which city councils often took outsize roles in running Maywood.
Concerned with making city government work on a small budget, the young council majority used state grants to start sobriety checkpoints.
Pena said the checkpoints were intended to make the streets safer and winnow out the cars that choked Maywood.
