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| Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2010, 6:00 am Editor, WatchOurCity.com Carrillo made a federal campaign contribution in 2000 listing home address behind Bell mayor Oscar Hernandez's Korner Store, now a city park Mayor's property sold to city of Bell Bell, CA - Pedro Carrillo was selected in a 4-1 vote by city council to a 1-year, $175,000 city manager contract in Bell, despite lacking any municipal experience whatsoever and without considering other more qualified candidates who don't have links to Rizzo, George Cole, or city council members. Carrillo was hired not only by George Cole at the Southeast Cities Schools Coalition and by Robert Rizzo in Bell, but is now connected to Bell mayor Oscar Hernandez going back to 2000. Bell mayor Oscar Hernandez was Carrillo's landlord in 2000. The property at 6644 Bear Avenue was listed by Pedro Carrillo as his address in campaign filing statements. That same property was later sold by mayor Hernandez to the city of Bell at a tidy profit. If you go looking for the house, you wont find it. It's not there any more. In its place is a state of the art urban pocket park tricked out with the latest bells and whistles. Right about this time, Carrillo was employed as a field rep for Congresswoman Lucille Royball-Allard representing southeast L.A. cities. Soon after that gig, he began to transition, going through a politician's chrysalis phase, shedding his congressional field rep skin to be reborn as municipal civil servant landing a sweet city job. George Perez, Cudahy's city manager hired Carrillo and gave him a lofty title: Redevelopment Director. We know this because in the same Campaign Money website, Carrillo donated more money to other candidates and listed himself as "Redevelopment Manager" for city of Cudahy. A casual one hour's drive around Cudahy gives one the impression that a redevelopment agency director's job is a do-nothing job. The city is a blighted community, statistically the poorest socio-economic city in L.A. County. Being a redevelopment director in Cudahy is like being a fantasy football league player. A website that tracks federal campaign donations (www.campaignmoney.com), reports that on March 7, 2000, Pedro Carrillo donated $200 to the congressional campaign of Mike Honda. Carrillo's wife, Sandra Pizzaro, also donated to Mike Honda's campaign. Carrillo's contribution amounts are really of no consequence. Exhibit "A" that Carrillo is not a big-time roller is the $200 amount. Of significance in this campaign filing statement, as reported by Mike Honda, is the address Carrillo listed as his home, which, once filtered through the lens of Bell's current corruption scandal on a scale unprecedented, raises huge red flags. Sandra Pizzaro, Carrillo's wife, also donated to Mike Honda's congressional campaign $250 on October 23, 2000. While Sandra listed her home on 4738 M Street, Sacramento, Pedro Carrillo listed his home on 6644 Bear Ave, Bell, zip code 90201 (not to be confused with 90210, with the latter having lower property taxes than the former). Google Maps shows that 6644 Bear Avenue is now a city park called "Little Bear Park", it pinpoints a parcel just north-adjacent to Korner Marker, the mayor's grocery store. Besides the property, mayor Hernandez also owns a liquor license there, a prized possession giving him the rare distinction of selling hard liquor directly across the street from Corona Elementary School, an LAUSD campus, 100 feet away. There are no structures on that parcel north of the mayor's joint where Carrillo called home for a while. Instead, one finds a heavily fortified public park, brand spanking new, with black paint still fresh on the 8-ft high metal fence bars along the perimeter. It is an awkward location for a park, cutting a pistol-shaped deep swath into a residential neighborhood, with the business end of the gun pointing west, hard book-ended by Orchard Avenue, and the gun's grip pointing North. The hammer is Oscar Hernandez's Korner Market grocery store. Any mom pushing a stroller through the new park would be hard pressed not to notice the high-end amenities and no-expenses-spared construction, evidenced by the carefully designed landscaping, mini-soccer field, Rio De Janeiro's Copacabana Beach-style curves and swirls of contrasting concrete ground patterns, a jungle-gym, shade shelter, raised amphitheater, parking, all anchored by a community house, discreetly placed far beyond the street, along the barrel of the gun. Besides mayor Hernandez's property abutting this new park, another of the mayor's properties a few parcels west on Bell Avenue is notorious as the famous "Super Meth Lab" site, which was raided by the Sheriff's department, without cluing in then Bell PD chief Randy Adams (to prevent Bell PD from tipping mayor Hernandez of any impending raids). WatchOurCity.com reported on June 9, 2009 about the raid on Mayor Hernandez's rental unit in which the back house was where the alleged super Meth lab operated from. Two of mayor Oscar Hernandez's kids live in the front house. Granted, from an urban planning perspective, challenges posed by Bell's dense 2-square mile urban domain do not allow many opportunities for creating much needed park space, pushing planning department officials to get creative in finding smart pockets and distribute them evenly across the city. One strategy city planners deployed was to partner with LAUSD. Opportunities for joint use with school facilities were not wasted, piggybacking on a public school's open playground requirements as mandated by the California Department of Education, playgrounds in Bell's new schools are designed by sharp school planners to perform double duty, serving as both public park and school open space. Locating two city parks in stone's throw proximity to each other, given city budget woes, in this economic climate, compounded by Bell's corruption scandals, gives cause to raise eye brows. In Bell, it should raise major red flags. The gun-shaped Little Bear Park meets the specific criteria of smart park planning because it was lavishly funded. But curiously fails to meet the other criteria of even distribution of green spaces. In fact, there is an off-balanced concentration of parks in Bell, which begs the question, why a park next to the mayor's property? The location of Little Bear Park is even more curious given that just seven parcels north, or half a block away, there is already a larger city park, listed as "Ernest Debs Park", which is tidy and densely packed, and just as heavily fortified as Little Bear. It is a joint use park shared by LAUSD's Martha Escutia Primary Center (perhaps Leo Briones, Owner of BASTA, thinks this gives him dibs on profit opportunities arising from Bell's tragic municipal fiduciary fail, given that Escutia is his ex-wife). Before Little Bear was a twinkle in the eyes of mayor Hernandez and Robert Rizzo's profit schemes, there were houses there, located both in the barrel and the grip parts of the parcel. Some of the properties of Little Bear were owned by mayor Oscar Hernandez. Pedro Carrillo can attest to this; he rented one of them from Oscar. According to a July 31, 2010 report by the Associated Press, "Bell's Housing Authority bought a house six years ago from now-mayor Oscar Hernandez and his wife, according to county records. The city has not released records that show the amount paid for the house, the reason it was purchased, whether Hernandez took part in the decision or what the city did with the property. Hernandez could not be reached for comment." City manager Pedro Carrillo is now in control of those records. Moreover, according to the D.A.'s office, "It is not illegal for cities to make business deals with elected officials. However, state conflict of interest laws require that the officials involved have no role in the decision-making and that the city not make deals that amount to a gift of public funds to the officials." Neither is it illegal for the mayor of a city to rent out a house, then later hire the tenant as the city manager, without any prior experience in managing any city, let alone a city under the gun like Bell. When news first broke out about Bell, the D.A.'s office publicly proclaimed that neither was it illegal for council members to pay themselves $100,000 a year for part time work or to elect to pay top city administrators millions of dollars in yearly salaries and benefits. It is not illegal to game the CalPERS system, as Vernon's former manager, a good friend to Rizzo and George Cole, has demonstrated, making $500,000 per year from the state retirement fund system, even after a felony conviction for egregious malfeasance while in public office. |