Inglewood Mayor Used Rent Stabilization Ordinance to Garner Favorable Publicity

INGLEWOOD- Today the Inglewood City Council benefitted from the ineptness of the city’s media team, who failed to livestream today’s unexpected council meeting. At the close of last week’s council meeting, Mayor Butts told residents there would be no council meeting today. There was a council meeting today and it featured a VERY important agenda item, that had no staff report attached to it.

Inglewood residents have been clamoring to find out if the city would extend the 45 day emergency rent stabilization ordinance to a full year, as outlined by Mayor Butts last month. The ordinance would limit rent increases on certain properties.

Related: Inglewood Mayor Sets Date for Rent Stabilization Ordinance to Be Made Public

Despite it being the mayor’s initiative, the item was agendized as an oral report from the city manager’s office. The public was not able to view the meeting as city staffer Yakema Decatur, who mans the city’s Facebook messaging system, stated there where “technical difficulties” which prevented the meeting from being streamed on the city’s Facebook page. They are always having technical difficulties when the mayor doesn’t want us to watch the meeting.

Prior to joining the city of Inglewood, Bunn was a staffer for a local Inglewood newspaper, in their media department. Bunn was also regularly paid by city hall to produce videos, for city events, under his company name Above the Grain. Occasionally, he received both city payroll and city vendor checks simultaneously.

Right around the time Inglewood resident Joe Texeira got into a legal battle surrounding him using the council meeting videos to portray Mayor Butts, as the unethical person he is accused of being, meetings stopped being videotaped all together. In fact, the city stated they had to upgrade the entire system and the company that was outsourced to handle the taping lost their contract.

Mayor Butts unsuccessfully sued Texeira, with city funds, to the tune of approx. $100,000 dollars.

Related: Inglewood must pay $117,741 for ‘meritless’ lawsuit against critic, judge rules

Bunn erred again when he edited out a recent city council meeting where Mayor Butts told Inglewood resident to “choke herself”.

Related: Inglewood mayor accused of telling an activist ‘go choke yourself,’ but video evidence disappeared

Bunn’s immediate supervisor, Yakema Decatur, is one of city manager Artie Fields’ deputies, who occasionally signs certain staff reports on his behalf.

Decatur’s son is an employee in the city’s Parks and Recreation department and Bunn is a married father with two small children.

Neither are in a position to go against Mayor Butts or they will find themselves on the same unemployment roster as many others who have went against him. 2UrbanGirls has heard first hand accounts of many former city of Inglewood employees and those placed on administrative leave.

Needless to say, Mayor Butts has squashed any participation by Inglewood residents to speak out in either support or objection to the emergency ordinance when he pretended there wasn’t a meeting this week, then changed his mind.

At the close of last weeks meeting, he mentioned that because of the Cesar Chavez holiday, there would be no council meeting, and also meant no one would be looking for the agenda. The public was alerted to today’s meeting via a Facebook post. The post said to join in at 2pm for the livestream that never happened.

2UrbanGirls was able to reach Dr. D’artganan Scorza, of Uplift Inglewood (UI), about the item on today’s agenda and he explained, that to his understanding the city would be extending the moratorium. But it isn’t concrete unless we hear from the council themselves.

Although Scorza claimed to have known that the ordinance would be extended, UI regularly posts the meeting dates so their members could attend and speak out. In this case, they didn’t make any social media posts, and most likely had no one in attendance at today’s meeting.

Hopefully Thomas Bunn and his team aren’t responsible for the streaming of the annual state of the city address or else these same technical difficulties would arise again. The State of the City could be in jeopardy as commenters on a recent 2UrbanGirls article indicates the Inglewood Chamber is represented by someone who is untrustworthy of accepting $10,000 sponsorship fees from donors.

Related: Inglewood Chamber of Commerce Restricts Residents Access to Annual State of the City Address

Taxpayers are beyond tired of the disrespect by the mayor, city council and city staff. The only way to stop it is to ensure an ENTIRELY NEW CITY COUNCIL is elected next year to replace George Dotson, Ralph Franklin, Eloy Morales and Alex Padilla.

I don’t know what kind of sick game Mayor Butts and his councilmates are playing, but it appears as though his emergency rent stabilization ordinance came at a convenient time for him to save face.

The council was taking heat at the top of 2019 for: destroying police records, paying out a secret multi-million dollar settlement to the families of Kisha Michel and Marquintin Sandlin, lawsuits from the former IPD officers in their shooting deaths, ongoing revelations of the Clippers/MSG/Inglewood lawsuit, countless city employees still on the payroll but not physically at work, excessive bonuses to certain city employees, a $500k police chief, mysterious signatures on city documents, and whatever else has yet to come to the public’s attention.

Residents are tired of living under the dictatorship of James Butts, and the non existent ethics of his councilmates. Residents are fed up and are ashamed to call him “mayor”.