‘It’s Just About Power’: Ian Patton tries to beat a ‘corrupt’ City Hall (again) with populist fervor
10 minute readDistrict Five candidate Ian Patton has been raging against Long Beach’s political machine for years, commonly in the form of acidic (sometimes tasteless, depending on who you ask) Facebook diatribes and, occasionally, as the founder of the Long Beach Reform Coalition (LBRC), in uphill campaigns and lawsuits.
“[Mayor] Robert Garcia, frankly, just doesn’t care,” Patton wrote in a recent post including an article about rising crime in downtown. “His ‘leadership’ hasn’t just failed us, it’s been nonexistent. Please consider before voting for his endorsed flunkies.”
Lots of ink has been spilled on his nonvirtual endeavors, some of which have almost been successful. The LBRC, a political action committee comprised of local groups critical of city hall, launched a campaign opposing Measure A in 2020, making permanent a sales tax increase, which passed by just 16 votes. Or LBRC candidate Robert Fox, a blustery landlord and longtime neighborhood activist, whose campaign, managed by Patton, lost to Councilmember Cindy Allen (a close ally of Garcia) by roughly 1,500 votes.
Most recently, the Riverpark Coalition, an environmental justice group that Patton is a board member of, won a legal victory in their fight to stop a self-storage center from being developed along the LA River with a judge ruling that the city violated state law by approving the project without delivering an environmental impact report, halting the project for the moment.
Throughout it all, Patton has remained steadfast in his commitment to obstructing the establishment’s anointed candidates and calling out chicanery as he sees it. Maybe he’s the Holden Caulfield of Long Beach politicos—snide swipes at City Hall phonies belying a deep yearning for authenticity. Maybe.
“You’re never gonna have a majority of people pay attention to every facet of local affairs because it’s just too complicated,” Patton said about the general public’s awareness of how local government actually works. “Once you see what’s going on [in Long Beach], you can never unknow what you know. And then there’s no way out of it.”
Now he’s in the driver’s seat of a campaign to represent the Fifth District, an unwieldy conglomeration after redistricting that traverses the city and includes the neighborhoods of Cal Heights, Lakewood Village, Los Cerritos, Bixby Knolls, and the Plazas.
You couldn’t have a better electoral foe for Patton’s brand of neighborhood populism than his opponent, Long Beach Unified School Board Member Megan Kerr. Kerr is a personal friend and early endorser (and endorsee) of Garcia, who Patton describes as a lynchpin for big business and big labor in City Hall.
It’s true that both business and labor are with Kerr. She’s received endorsements from both the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Los Angeles County Business Federation, along with a host of special interest groups ranging from the California Apartment Association to the California Nurses Association and the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce to the Long Beach Lifeguards Association.
The Long Beach Police Officers Association’s Political Action Committee threw down for a mailer supporting Kerr’s campaign (inaccurately titling her “councilmember”) and she also got a nod from the Long Beach Firefighters Association.
“The police officers in Long Beach are supporting me. They want to work with me to do the work of enhanced community policing,” said Kerr at a recent forum.
Patton calls himself the most pro-police candidate this cycle, arguing for 300 to 400 more officers but also more transparency, including an inspector general independent of the City Manager’s office with real-time access to police files.
The Los Angeles County Democratic Party and every Democratic club in the area have backed Kerr along with nearly every elected Dem in Long Beach, including Congressman Alan Lowenthal, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, state Senator Lena Gonzalez, Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, and LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn, as well as former Mayor (and Garcia mentor) Bob Foster.
Six of the nine current councilmembers, including Fifth District incumbent Stacy Mungo, have extended support to her bid.
Unlike other members of Patton’s cohort of anti-establishment, slow-growth, anti-tax civic activists, Patton is a life-long Democrat who has been front row to Long Beach’s transformation into a deep blue town beginning with his volunteer days for the late state legislator Betty Karnette and his first job in politics, a staffer for the late Congressperson Juanita Millender-McDonald.
In his East Village office sits an attack mailer sent by Evan Braude’s 2009 council campaign, which Patton worked on. Garcia won the seat, his first elected office, beating Braude by a few hundred votes in a low-turnout special election for District One.
Patton became a local political consultant, working for various candidates in surrounding cities, but says he hasn’t taken a dime for any of his notable Long Beach forays over the last four years. Garcia is likely headed to D.C. as Long Beach’s new congressperson.
Patton’s detractors have taken issue with his professional conduct over the years with former Councilmember Jeannine Pearce going as far as to describe him as “woman hating” in a recent tweet.
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Fragmented Reflection I, 2021
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During Patton’s failed recall attempt of Pearce, the campaign filed a letter with the court calling Pearce’s request for a restraining order against a former Chief of Staff a “political stunt.” He also encouraged a volunteer with Robert Fox’s campaign to surveil then-candidate Cindy Allen to determine whether or not she lived in Fountain Valley, in an attempt to disqualify her from holding office in Long Beach.
Patton says he does not regret interjecting the recall campaign into the restraining order proceedings, saying Pearce tried to “cast herself as the victim” after allegedly physically abusing a staffer with whom she was having an inappropriate relationship. He maintains that the restraining order must have been a political move, not a protective move by a woman scared of retaliation by a former lover as Pearce claimed, evidenced by the fact that it was not granted by the court.
Patton does regret not vetting the campaign volunteer in the Cindy Allen incident but maintains that verifying a candidate’s residence is above board and that, while “weird” in its execution, did not cause any serious harm.
He calls accusations of misogyny a “bullshit” deflection from what he alleges are the criminal behavior of two elected officials. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to charge Pearce with domestic violence or driving under the influence stemming from a detainment by law enforcement which was the initial basis for Pearce’s recall but she was censured for her actions by a unanimous council vote. Voting records showed that Allen voted in more than a dozen elections using the address of her one-bedroom Long Beach condo while also owning a residence in Fountain Valley.
In FORTHE’s primary questionnaire, Patton, a proud NIMBY whose primary income comes from owning and managing rental property, called caps on annual rent increases “disastrous.” He also believes the city’s minimum wage should “not be abused as a tool to attempt to raise wages above the market-rate wage for unskilled labor.”
We spoke with Patton about housing density, police accountability, public safety funding, and the racist conversation between a union boss and three LA councilmembers that have made ripples in the political waters of Long Beach.
Kerr was offered a similar sit-down interview but could not be reached after multiple email attempts.
Our conversation with Patton spanned multiple hours, both in person and over the phone, and has been edited for clarity and length. It is our hope that the reader will receive a digestible dialogue concerning the policy, politics, and personal histories that are animating this race. Below are some excerpts from the interviews highlighting the candidate’s positions on major issues, as well as a link to the full Q & A.
On special interests: “I may sometimes side with [special interests]. No matter what you decide [in] City Hall, somebody’s going to have more of an economic benefit from it than somebody else. But, they know that I’m not going to be doing it because they tried to buy me with some big independent expenditure campaign. That’s not what they like; they like people who they can count on because they’re dependent on them. And I would be only dependent on the fact that I got myself elected as a people’s candidate. That doesn’t work for them.”
On housing affordability: “We have a lot of resources that we squander on this affordable housing industrial complex where, much like with what I call the homelessness industrial complex, there’s a lot of people being enriched off of our grant dollars in the most obscene way for things that are supposed to be helping people. When you’re spending $900,000 a unit on “affordable housing,” somebody’s making an insane amount of money and hardly anybody is being helped. Instead of wasting money, I would take that money and put it into a section-eight-style rental assistance. I would prioritize seniors and the people most in need. But I would spread that money out as broadly as possible, instead of having a very tiny number of winners of the affordable housing lottery, on rental housing. Direct rental assistance.”
On police officer levels: “I’m probably the most pro-police candidate in the city when you get down to it. That’s all I do is talk about how we need to increase the size of our police force. And nobody talks about it in terms of the scale that I do, where we need to get actually over what we had before, so that would mean adding at least 300 to 400 officers.”
On police transparency and accountability: “I favor adopting the LA model, which is an actual Police Commission [with] an actual, independent inspector general that works for the Police Commission that has real-time access to everything. The department can do its own investigations and interviews. That system is not a cure-all. But it’s much more robust than what we do here. And it’s obviously the perfect model just sitting there waiting for us to adopt. We don’t have to devise anything. So we do need stronger police oversight.”
On increased housing density: “The most obvious place is where we’re already doing it, Long Beach Boulevard, along the blue line. If we’re gonna do that, we need to be serious about it. We need to add mass transit, we need to have a better bus system. And we need to add open space, we need to add public safety resources, we need to add emergency resources, sometimes you even have to deal with the size of the sewer line that wasn’t planned for that number of people. So if we’re not taking all those things into consideration, we’re not talking about density in a serious way.”
On his opponent: “[She is] a total aggregation of those downtown special interests. Endorsements and money [are going] towards her because she has been ID’d as a willing party to this system. Somebody who is going to completely sublimate herself as an individual actor to the larger interests, and is going to be perfectly happy doing that… she should [renounce her endorsement by the LA County Federation of Labor]. Of course, she didn’t have the courage to call on the head of the Federation of Labor to resign when he was caught in the scandal, condoning these horrifying, racist and corrupt remarks and participating in corruption overtly. He, eventually, was forced out. This was the real test of leadership, in my opinion: [Does] she [have] the courage to stand up to the money that’s backing her and say this is wrong?”
*This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Congressperson Juanita Millender-McDonald
joe@forthe.org
