When Doug Willmore became Bell's city manager last June, one of his first questions was about the padded black chair behind his desk. Had it been occupied by the man he was replacing, Robert Rizzo?
No. To his relief, that one had been chucked.
"I'd sit on a folding chair instead of his chair, or a stool," Willmore said.
In the seat of power for 17 years, Rizzo became the face of a salary scandal in 2010 that sent the city to the edge of insolvency. Bell, just 2½ square miles in southeast Los Angeles County, became the butt of jokes everywhere and a rallying cry for reformers.
Now, six former Bell council members are facing trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court on corruption charges related to their lavish compensation during Rizzo's reign as city administrator. The council members made $100,000, mostly for sitting on boards that rarely, if ever, met.
The trial is expected to bring new attention to a scandal that former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley famously described as "corruption on steroids." But there has been significantly less focus on the small city's slow recovery from the scandal.
"Everybody suspected that the city of Bell would go under immediately, but we haven't two years later," said Ana Maria Quintana, a councilwoman who won office in the wake of the revelations.
The city's general fund has been slashed to $12 million from $16 million, largely because a handful of highly paid employees are now gone, and the budget is balanced. Council meetings are streamed online in a city where the workings of government were once opaque. The city has cut fees for trash pickup, building permits and business licenses that had ballooned under Rizzo.
But it is too soon to tell how well the city will ultimately emerge from the scandal. It faces a tangle of scandal-related lawsuits, with $1.5 million in legal fees a year, and the possibility of fiscal calamity.
"If all the litigation stuff were solved today, I'd tell you Bell has a bright future, and we can pay our bills," said Willmore, who estimates he spends a third of his time on lawsuits. "There are all these things that could happen that could bankrupt the city."
Among the worries, he said, is that Bell will be made to pay the legal fees of the former city leaders, who claim the city should foot the bill because their alleged misdeeds occurred as part of their official duties.
"That's probably $5 million easily," Willmore said.
Rizzo and the other officials have pleaded not guilty and deny any wrongdoing. James Spertus, Rizzo's attorney, described his client as "a good administrator who turned the city around," and attributed its financial woes to a bad economy. He said the city has refused to negotiate on Rizzo's legal fees.
"The public outrage creates a political environment where they can't compromise [on] anything, and that's economic disaster," Spertus said. "The city should be trying to conserve resources, heal and move forward."
Willmore said that when he arrived, the city hadn't reconciled a bank statement in two years. "Under Rizzo, the lack of accounting was just staggering," he said. "I've inherited scandals before, but certainly nothing like this." He said the city's handbook of ethics policies — which new employees are given — still bore Rizzo's name when he took office. He quickly changed that.
The city is also posting its audits online. The most recent, for the fiscal year that ended in June 2010, found widespread flaws in the city's financial bookkeeping under Rizzo, with shoddy documentation and a lack of clear policies regarding license fees and loans to employees.
Bell still has the second-highest property tax in Los Angeles County, after only Beverly Hills, and a 10% utility tax, about twice that of most cities.
In contrast to Rizzo, who made a salary of $800,000, Willmore earns $175,000 for the same job — now making him the city's highest-paid employee.
Drive the city's main streets — Gage, Florence and Atlantic avenues — and the sight of boarded-up storefronts is a common one. Willmore attributes that in part to the way Rizzo allegedly squeezed local businesses for fees. For years, the Chamber of Commerce was perceived as a bloc of Rizzo stooges and received $7,000-a-month payments from the city — a practice Willmore said he hasn't seen elsewhere. The new City Council has stopped the payments.
Jose Vazquez, a tire shop owner and head of the Bell Business Assn. — formed because the Chamber of Commerce was so distrusted — said the atmosphere for businesspeople is "100% better" than it was.
