Ethnic Tensions, Corruption Charges Tangle Town Politics

By JOHN JOHNSON

Aug. 12, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ARVIN, Calif. — Petty corruption and bureaucratic incompetence are not exactly unknown in the far-flung farm towns of the southern San Joaquin Valley. But the rap sheet against officials in this small town is setting a new standard for roguishness.

The mayor of this community of 10,000 at the foot of Bear Mountain is facing a recall over allegations of corruption. To make sure the election isn’t stolen Tuesday, the state is sending special monitors. Another member of the council, a minister, has been indicted on charges of stealing child-care money. The police chief pleaded guilty to charges of hijacking funds meant for a police awards dinner. (He paid off a loan on his truck.) The city manager left amid allegations that he had installed a secret videotaping system to spy on the mayor.

In this town, Barney Fife might roll the local drunk for pocket change. Things have gotten so bad that the newspaper in Bakersfield editorialized that the city is “just one flush away from disappearing altogether.” Said Dist. Atty. Ed Jagels of Bakersfield: “We have had some bad [city governments] in Kern County, but this one takes the cake.”

All the intrigue has divided Arvin into two warring camps. Its City Council meetings devolve into name-calling sideshows that the local TV news covers like an ongoing soap opera.

Who’s to blame is a matter of vigorous debate from La Mexicana market to Taps bar, but all sides agree that the feud is charged with ethnic tension. Some say an interloper from Los Angeles, a Latino, is stirring up racial hostilities. Others say the strife is nothing more than the last gasp of a white political machine that refuses to recognize that the world has changed.

“There’s always been a good-old-boy syndrome in this city,” said Lonnie Ferguson, a 58-year-old minister at the Gospel Tabernacle. “Those in power for years are losing it. Us white folks don’t like that.”

Surrounded by some of the richest agriculture in the world, this pinprick on the map holds a special place in California history. It was an organizing center for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union and one of the UFW’s so-called five martyrs was shot and killed in the fields here.

That history hangs over Arvin as it manages its transition from white to Latino control in a town that is now 95% Latino.

Which brings us to Juan M. Olivares, a 40-year-old pest control operator from Los Angeles who moved to town four years ago. A frequently smiling, bombastic man who favors Superman T-shirts and blue jeans, Olivares has said he decided to run for office after running into bureaucratic roadblocks when he tried to open a video store.

“It cost me $400 to paint the building and $1,200 for a permit,” he said. “I complained. The mayor said ‘If you don’t like it, run for mayor.’ ”

He did and won handily. That was in 2000. He said the approximately 1,500 votes cast, three times the usual number, proved that the Latino community had been waiting for someone with a vision. Opponents said the numbers proved nothing but Olivares’ skill at stealing elections by trucking in noncitizens to vote.

Michael Wraceburn of the district attorney’s office headed an investigation into charges of vote fraud, but “we didn’t develop enough for a case,” he said. Still, concerns about the fairness of Tuesday’s election are strong enough that the D.A.’s office requested the state monitors.

Once in office, Olivares wasted little time making his mark. After learning that the police were giving tickets to kids who were not wearing bike helmets, he started giving helmets away free. He handed out business cards to motorists who complained about moving violations.

“I think a lot of our officers need to take a course in racial sensitivity,” he said. When the police chief balked at the new mayor’s policies, the chief was fired.

The city also hired J. Arnoldo Beltran as city attorney. In 1999, The Times reported that Beltran was part of a team that allegedly had used the threat of recall elections against city councils in the Los Angeles area to win contracts to represent the cities. Olivares called Beltran a “great individual” who sponsors medical clinics in Mexico.

A widely circulated story, which Olivares has denied, has him boasting that he would drive all the whites out of town.

To critics, the final straw was Olivares’ decision to name the old county library building for the farm labor organizer Dolores Huerta, who helped Cesar Chavez create the UFW. Irritating the white farm families even more, the night he announced his intentions, Olivares showed up at the council meeting in a red UFW shirt.

“I think this guy figures, ‘We’re taking over. You whites are old. Now it’s our turn,’ ” said Mike Kovacevich, whose family has farmed 1,000 acres in the area since 1954.

Kovacevich presented the council with 65 signatures of people opposed to the name change, but he got nowhere. “Mayor Olivares used that meeting as a forum to humiliate me,” Kovacevich said. “He said, ‘What have you done for Arvin?’ ”

The library name change honoring Huerta went through, but the meeting galvanized opponents, who began planning a recall.

Joet Stoner, a 25-year-old substitute teacher, put her name in opposition to Olivares. She criticized his micromanaging style and called him racially divisive.

The lines of ethnicity in Arvin vanished long ago, except in Olivares’ mind, she said. “In every family in this city there are interracial marriages,” she said. “We aren’t picky. We love everybody.”

Stoner is an example. Her mother is white and her father is a Latino farm laborer who worked all his life in the fields, she said, while Olivares showed up recently. If anyone is the phony, she said, it’s the mayor.

Olivares countered that he toiled in the fields outside Arvin when Cesar Chavez was active, but Stoner said nobody in town remembers him.

A cheerful woman with broad features, the candidate takes personally the attacks on Arvin as a town that has neglected and abused minorities. Citing herself as an example of how it cares for the poor, she said she could not have afforded her college education at Cal State Bakersfield without donations and scholarships from local civic groups.

“This used to be a quaint little town,” she said. But she said Olivares has tried to run it like a dictator, taking “the 19th-century boss model of government and applying it in the 21st century.”

Stoner is so angry at Olivares that she raided her vacation savings to pay the $400 to print her candidate’s statement.

Olivares contended he is the true representative of an oppressed Latino community. The people trying to get rid of him are just a bunch of good old boys, he said.

Olivares said his unscrupulous opponents “know if I get my way, everybody goes to jail.”

Nobody has yet landed behind bars, but the Kern County Grand Jury has handed down three indictments in its ongoing corruption investigation. City Councilman Julio Perez has been indicted on a charge of misusing day-care funds. His first trial ended in a hung jury.

A city electrical contractor has pleaded guilty to improperly diverting about $20,000.

And former Police Chief Rande Eighmy was convicted of misdemeanor theft for taking $3,000 set aside for a police awards dinner. Coincidentally, Eighmy was the one who first called the D.A.’s office to report corruption in Arvin.

“I want to emphasize we have not completed what we are doing in Arvin,” said Dist. Atty. Jagels.

He refused to say whether Olivares is a target, but both sides can hardly wait for the next shoe to drop, so convinced are they that it will squash their opponents.

Councilman Robert Brennan said the mayor had used a city credit card to hire a private investigator to look into Brennan’s past, a charge the mayor denies.

Brennan himself once spent 18 months in prison for writing a bad check to support his drug habit. Now he says that “getting locked up was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The former city manager, Tom Payne, was accused of using city money to buy and install surveillance equipment in City Hall. Payne, the owner of Taps bar, said he had installed the equipment to spy on the mayor.

He said he had done it at the request of the police chief and the district attorney’s office.

Payne interrupted a phone interview to say Olivares had just pulled up behind his bar in his pickup truck. “Can you hear him revving his engine?” Payne said. “He’s giving me the finger now.”

Not so, said Olivares, adding: “I choose not to drive by him, because he had a gun. And he threatened to kill me.” Olivares said the mud slung at him would not stick. His only excesses, he said, are his 29 cars, among them a classic Corvette.

He also admitted to plastering the inside of his house with happy faces.

“I try always to be happy,” he said.

But he’s not through nettling the good old boys. “I’m going to make sure Mr. Kovacevich names a peach after Dolores Huerta.”