Five miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles lies a unique, bustling little city, self-described as “exclusively industrial.” It faced accusations of political and ecological corruption so serious that a dozen years ago the State Legislature came within a hair’s breadth of abolishing it.

The city of Vernon survived that near-death experience, which would have seen it dissolved as an independent city and remade as an unincorporated area of L.A. County. Vernon’s survival was thanks to a huge lobbying campaign by its city government — as well as business interests anxious to preserve it as a sanctuary that offered firms substantial savings to locate there. Some labor unions joined the campaign, fearful that businesses might leave a disincorporated Vernon and take with them tens of thousands of jobs for blue collar commuters that included some union members.

Ultimately, these pro-Vernon forces cut a deal with a key legislator who persuaded colleagues to let the city survive in return for its promise to reform its governance and double the size of its extremely small residential population.

The 5-square-mile city made good on those promises, but remains dogged by environmental woes:

• The South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates that Vernon’s cancer-risk rate is 40% higher than Southern California’s generally.
• Nearly 600 of approximately 1,800 businesses, located throughout the city, handle or store hazardous chemicals, mostly at high volumes, according to a city report. Records show that nearly 40 of these businesses handle high volumes of extremely toxic chemicals regulated by the state, such as ammonia and chlorine gas, whose accidental release could impact large areas.
• Long known as a transportation hub, the city is home to very high levels of truck and rail traffic. Much of the city is crisscrossed by 130 miles of railroad tracks and much of that has been contaminated by herbicides and spilled chemicals. Vernon is also laced with underground pipelines, many of which carry potentially explosive materials, according to a city report.
• Three facilities have been identified as hazardous materials release sites by the California Department of Toxic Substance Control, 25 sites have been found to have had leaking underground storage tanks. A city map shows dozens of other locations with real or suspected soil contamination issues.

As the city put it in a report to the state last year, “serious environmental conditions [including] hazardous materials storage and processing, background contamination, noxious odors, noise pollution, and truck and railroad traffic generated by the City’s pervasive industrial land uses.…. render the majority of sites throughout Vernon unsuitable for residential development.”

Soil contamination risks in Vernon, included the large contamination zone left by the Exide lead battery plant.

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Courtesy City of Vernon

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Geotracker, Envirostor, Department of Toxic Substances Control, City of Vernon

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“Some people might say it’s still the same city,” said Fred MacFarlane, a media consultant who worked as the city’s spokesperson for five years during and after the disincorporation fight. MacFarlane was in this role as government reforms were being conceived and implemented.

“It is and it isn’t … The city is in much better shape from a governance standpoint.”

Former Assembly Speaker John Pérez, who led the attempt to disincorporate Vernon and is now on the board of regents for the University of California, acknowledged “positive steps” but added: “I don’t think anybody can look at this and say things have fundamentally changed.”

What has changed

Vernon is a mainly industrial area near Downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Since it headed off the effort led by Pérez, Vernon increased its decennial Census count from 112 residents to 222 with a new affordable housing project that opened in 2015. This added 45 new apartments to an existing total citywide housing stock of only 31 dwellings.

This summer, in a major break with tradition, the city council opened the door for developers to further expand the number of dwellings in the city dramatically — from 76 to more than 900 — by building along the city’s western edge, the area farthest removed from the heaviest industry.

Before the affordable housing project opened, Vernon’s electorate consisted mainly of city employees who were given heavily discounted rents for city-owned housing, according to court, legislative and city records. Since this was virtually the only housing in town, those in power were in a rare position to select nearly all the voters who could keep them in power and there was an expectation that those voters would do just that.

The way city officials operated had one Superior Court judge comparing Vernon to a fiefdom. The city effectively had a permanent local government with a mayor who served for decades while living most of the time in a mansion out of town. He and his wife were convicted of voter fraud and perjury for falsely claiming to live in Vernon.

Another top administrator lived in a wealthy enclave near San Francisco, flying first class to Southern California while earning $1.65 million in salary and consulting fees in a single year. Still another longtime administrator who was being paid as much as $900,000 per year pleaded guilty to misusing other public money for expenses that prosecutors said included golf outings and massages.

These extreme practices ended after the disincorporation fight. Term limits were imposed, administrators’ salaries that were once among the highest in the state were reduced to normalcy, and a lottery procedure was implemented to decide who got to move into city-owned housing when vacancies occurred.

For the first time, those holding elective office would not be able to choose their electors.

Over a decade later, city government, Vernon-style, remains unusual, dedicated to what its website calls “a public-private partnership” — meaning business plays an outsized role, with its own designated representatives serving on city commissions.

The leader of the business community says he is optimistic about the city’s ability to overcome its environmental problems. Steve Freed, a warehouse complex owner who holds the rotating chairmanship of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, said the city is “slowly and surely transitioning from heavy, heavy industry to businesses that are more environmentally friendly.”

He estimated that half of all businesses in the city now are involved with goods storage and distribution rather than manufacturing. He also said he believes the city’s polluted soils can be made safe: “I don’t know of a single site in Vernon that couldn’t be remediated.”

The outsized role of business

An aerial view of the since-shuttered Farmer John slaughterhouse and complex.

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David McNew

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Getty Images

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Vernon became an industrial mecca by welcoming businesses, including those that were unwelcome elsewhere, and offering them speedy government services and discounted fees, taxes and utilities compared to what they would pay elsewhere in the state.

During the disincorporation fight, Vernon’s Chamber of Commerce quantified these discounts, asserting that Vernon businesses saved up to 2,000% on local fees and taxes and anywhere from 20% to 40% on electric bills by buying power from Vernon’s municipal utility instead of from Southern California Edison. The discounts continue, but no estimates of their current value were available.

Following the disincorporation battle, the chamber has continued to play a dominant role in city politics through the financing of city elections. Five years of campaign contribution records reviewed by LAist show that political committees sponsored by the chamber have been the only reported source of funding for city council campaigns. These committees provided financial support for the campaigns of each of the five current part-time city council members, one of whom colleagues designate as mayor. None of the candidates’ campaigns reported receiving donations from anyone else.

The city’s highest stakes race (a pivotal election)

The chamber was especially active in 2021, in the most highly contested council races since the disincorporation threat passed. Business leaders who said they feared a return of corruption that could spark another disincorporation attempt backed the recall of two council members who’d pushed for a solar and wind project on land owned by the municipal utility — a main revenue source for the city. That set off alarms because some of the backers of that project were embroiled in a corruption probe in the City of Industry. Four men still face felony charges in that case, according to the L.A. District Attorney's office, with a preliminary hearing set for latest this week for three of the defendants.

A chamber-sponsored political committee raised $78,000 for the successful recall campaign, in which the two council members denied any wrongdoing. Of those funds, $50,000 came from the national headquarters of a labor union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. One of its local branches represents workers at the municipal utility.

The sums raised were extraordinary for a city with a total electorate of only 119. The council members were recalled and replaced by others whose candidacies received financial backing from the chamber.

The recall election appears to have invigorated efforts to expand further the city’s electorate by adding housing.

A larger residential population lies ahead

The city’s new expansion plan , approved by the city council at the beginning of August, envisions Vernon’s newest residents living in a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of mixed residential, commercial and light industrial uses on the city’s far western boundary — the area farthest removed from its heaviest industries. Most buildings in the area now are small warehouses.

Plans call for new housing in Vernon.

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Courtesy City of Vernon

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The city's report on expansion includes these preliminary concept drawings for residences on two privately owned lots.

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Courtesy City of Vernon

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City planners say they hope the new neighborhood would eventually mesh with other neighborhoods developing in the Arts District of Los Angeles a few miles to the north.

The city is billing the residential expansion idea in part as a good government move — a way to produce a more robust electorate better able to resist the influence of any would-be corrupters. City planners observed in the report to the state that the current population “is still inadequate to ensure good governance and to avoid the threat of disincorporation, as manipulation of a small number of voters by an individual or entity could allow for a relatively easy takeover of control of the city.”

In approving the plan, the city council took pains to assure businesses that Vernon would not be straying from its primarily industrial nature. The council voted to require future renters or condominium buyers to sign acknowledgements that they are aware of the risks of living “in an industrial area in which annoyances or inconveniences associated with proximity to industrial uses such as odors, truck traffic, vibrations, noise and other neighborhood impacts are likely to be present.”

Given the housing shortage in greater L.A., history suggests this will not be much of an obstacle. When just one of Vernon’s city-owned apartments became available this summer, the city reported that more than 170 people signed up for the lottery.

Despite the city’s moves toward government transparency, which include council meetings that are available to watch online, most of its part-time elected officials appear media-shy.

Four council members, including the mayor, did not respond to interview requests.

The fifth, Melissa Ybarra, 46, responded to questions in writing. Ybarra is the only council member who grew up in Vernon.

Asked how she dealt with the city’s environmental challenges, she wrote in an email: “As a resident, I always saw Vernon as a hub for endless economic growth and job opportunities. As a council member, I have encouraged and supported the city's direction on improving our environmental challenges.”

The backstory on the disincorporation attempt

At the time of the disincorporation attempt, it wasn’t Vernon residents who were complaining about Vernon’s corruption and pollution problems. It was people who lived in the residential cities that surround it, whose air and land its industries were also fouling.

John Pérez, pictured in a 2010 visit to Washington, D.C. when he was speaker of the California Assembly.

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Julie Small

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KPCC

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They got the attention of then-Assembly Speaker Pérez, who represented Vernon and the surrounding area, and in December 2010 Pérez took the bold step of introducing the bill that would have disincorporated the city and placed it under the jurisdiction of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors as an unincorporated area — the same status held by East Los Angeles.

His move set off a political firestorm that in turn launched a big payday for lawyers and lobbyists. The city spent about $9 million to fight disincorporation, while Vernon’s chamber mounted a smaller parallel campaign. Both predicted that disincorporation would lead to a regional economic catastrophe, with businesses choosing to leave once they no longer had their discounts, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs.

Although most of the workforce in the city was unorganized, major unions that represented slivers of the workforce, including the Teamsters, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, lined up with employers to make the same point.

The fight was bitter, and Pérez, a former union official himself, recalls being at odds with old friends from labor, confronted by strangers in restaurants, tailed wherever he went by private detectives presumably hired by the bill’s opponents, and followed by Vernon police every time he drove through the city. These experiences were painful enough that, when LAist recently asked for his recollections, he wise-cracked, “Are you willing to pay the therapist’s bills after I talk to you?”

Pérez’s legislation sailed through the Assembly. But it hit a roadblock in the state Senate, where a political rival who represented the same area objected. Then-state Sen. Kevin de León, who had lost a battle with Pérez to be Assembly Speaker before moving on to the Senate, recognized that Vernon had to change. But his method was to negotiate.

De León, now on the L.A. city council, did not respond to interview requests. De León recently decided to run for reelection despite calls for him to resign following his participation in a secretly recorded conversation that featured racist language.

To avoid disincorporation, the city agreed to de León’s demands that it make democratic reforms and agreed to hire the late John Van de Kamp, a former Los Angeles County district attorney and California attorney general, to advise it on ethics.

The result was a sea change in governance culture. In a few years, administrators’ salaries were reduced to normal ranges. The city’s top administrator, a position that once paid as much as $1.65 million annually, is now paid $349,000. Competitive elections were held. City employees were accorded job security. Term limits on elected officials were imposed. Public records became easy to obtain, a lottery was created for city-owned residences and the city agreed to create additional housing in the form of the affordable housing project on city-donated land.

Dilia Ortega, Youth Program Coordinator at Communities for a Better Environment, photographed near the now closed Exide plant. This is a stop in the "toxic tours" led by Ortega and other members of Communities for a Better Environment.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Unfortunately, the affordable housing project wound up being in the path of airborne lead contamination from Vernon’s now-shuttered Exide battery recycling plant. The state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control is attempting to remediate.

The city disavowed only one aspect of the deal it had made with de León. Vernon city officials had pledged to make $60 million in contributions over 10 years to neighboring cities — as a sort of unofficial penance for having allowed its industries to pollute them.

Once the city’s survival was assured, Vernon’s leaders backed away from that pledge, blaming a state action that restricted access to certain funds the city had counted on to fulfill its commitment. The city instead has doled out $10 million over 12 years, according to city spokesperson Margie Otto.

De León, who had statewide political ambitions at the time, didn’t publicly object and got a nice political plum out of the abridged deal. Not only was he hailed by Vernon’s business interests, he was also treated as a hero in the neighboring city of Huntington Park, where Vernon helped pay for new synthetic turf on the main public soccer field. When it was unveiled, that turf bore the politician’s name in big letters: “Hon. Kevin de Léon Campo de Fútbol.”