Bell’s neighbors no strangers to public corruption
They flooded Bell City Hall with requests for public records and packed a council meeting with an overflow crowd.
They collected signatures demanding an audit of city officials’ salaries and vowed to boot their handsomely paid politicians out of office. They even created a website and posted documents that the city refused to put on its official site.
In the week since residents in this working-class suburb discovered that their city manager makes nearly $800,000 a year, Bell has experienced a sudden jolt of civic engagement. It’s an anger-fueled form of participatory democracy that’s relatively new for an immigrant-heavy town of about 40,000 not known for high voter turnout.
