Letter to the Editor: Emma Sharif needs to stand with the community

As a longtime resident of Compton who considers myself woke, I am urging the 3 council persons including mayor elect Emma Sharif to table the bond item on this week’s agenda along with several other high dollar Items that appear to be evergreen payoffs from chambers election and as a result of personal relationships.

Mayor elect Sharif is at a crossroads and what a place to be at the beginning of your term as mayor. You can be the same ineffective and indecisive leader you’ve been your entire political career or you can rise like the Phoenix and emerge as the responsible experienced leader many who voted for you, for the sake of insuring Aja’s exodus, fear you cannot become. Please prove the naysayers wrong.

Tomorrow is the most important meeting of your entire political career! Do not vote on a bond that was orchestrated by outgoing divisive Mayor Aja Brown, who has done one finance deal after the other and still failed to improve Compton’s infrastructure, laid off employees, started a personal fight with the Sheriff’s Department that she and Damon’s dream team of expensive lawyers (a who’s who of his friends) cannot win, and is defending Chambers crony Kim McKenzie, who should have been laid off, in a vehicular manslaughter case that has nothing to do with city business. Need I continue?

Your decisions during tomorrow’s meeting will be a new beginning that will determine whether you garner respect you desperately need from residents and your new council or it will become the gasoline necklace fueled by residents disgust at your inability to become a leader who can resuscitate Compton from the 8 year Aja Brown induced coma or continue the journey to Compton’s demise.

I urge you to become that leader that we least expect you to become. Table the contractual items; the bond which you know little about and the high dollar evergreen Screaming Eagles and other contracts.

Last, but as important as the bond, do not give a five year extension to the “learning on the job” City Manager, who was incompetent as a City Attorney, whose every move has been directed by Administratively interfering Aja Brown, and has been absent from the table for every major decision. Let him continue to sit there on a month to month contract while you search for a new competent City Management TEAM!

Emma Shariff your future of Mayor hangs in the balance tomorrow night…