Opinion: Home, Sweet City Hall Home

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

So what if the mayor of South El Monte might be burning the midnight oil -- and the 2 a.m. oil, and the 5 a.m. oil -- right there in City Hall?

Some city council members are accusing the mayor, Blanca Figueroa, of having moved -- lock, stock and pet fish -- into her City Hall office, donning her cozy slippers and putting up her hair and settling in for the night. So they’ve adopted an 11 p.m. curfew for City Hall to keep all workers -- including the mayor -- from settling in overnight, much in the way that ‘no overnight parking’’ signs keep four-wheeled squatters out of swanky neighborhoods.

Mayor Figueroa has, her colleagues say, been videotaped cooking dinner and watching Mexican soap operas into the wee hours, in offices that they are used to sharing among themselves, not surrendering to one person. They say the mayor’s actual home, where her family moved in 1960, has no heating or air conditioning. Figueroa scoffs at that assertion. Her house is just fine, she says, but she needs to stay late to get the mayoral work done.

What’s so funny about this is that voters are constantly griping that elected officials put in too little time on the job.

Congress got slagged when it started its work-week late and ended it early to craft a three-day weekend. Whenever California’s legislature fusses and futzes and can’t get the budget together, its leadership threatens to make it stay in Sacramento, work late, and skip holidays and weekends until it delivers.

And for goodness’ sake -- at least Mayor Figueroa is living in the city that elected her.

In recent years, the LA County DA’s office has prosecuted public officials for fraud and perjury, among them cases of officials not even living in the districts they represent, or using sham houses they’d never lived in as proof of ‘’residency.’’

The same question arose years ago about then-LA city councilman Nate Holden, who was spending a good bit of time at his condo in Marina del Rey, which is not within city limits. He said he was laying low because of threats on his life. And last month, the DA’s office said it saw no wrongdoing by departing LA County supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke; The Times reported in 2007 that she was spending many nights at a large Brentwood home, and not in her townhouse in her political district. The DA said it was satisfied that the remodeling work being done on the townhouse was evidence enough to show that she intended to keep the townhouse and live there.

And now we’re complaining that Mayor Figueroa is living way too close to the job site?

Still, if she starts doing her laundry in the ladies’ restroom, and drying it on those blower hand-dryers, then maybe a council agenda item about charging room and board is in order....