Guest Opinion | Rick Cole: Gordo’s Daunting Challenges Are Our Challenges As Well

No matter which candidate you voted for in the recent election, everyone in Pasadena can take pride in Victor Gordo’s installation as our city’s first Latino Mayor. His story is a compelling affirmation of the values of opportunity and inclusion that transcend politics.

Victor’s path to the City’s highest office is not only an inspiration for the next generation of youth coming up, it’s an affirmation of the struggles of previous generations to overcome Pasadena’s dark legacy of segregation and privilege. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Victor came with his family to Pasadena when he was five years old. He’s a product of Pasadena’s public schools. His first job was delivering the Pasadena Star-News. He excelled in youth sports — football, baseball, and soccer was honored on graduating from Pasadena High School with the George Stewart Memorial Award for his “character, determination, and quiet leadership.”

Those qualities carried him forward as he worked his way through Pasadena City College and then Azusa Pacific University studying business management and finance. He stayed anchored to his hometown, “paying it forward” as a youth coach and later as Program Director for Pasadena’s Day One Community Partnership. He entered public service as Field Representative for Councilmember Bill Crowfoot while earning his law degree at the University of La Verne School of Law at night. He’s served Pasadena as a Councilmember since his election to succeed Crowfoot in 2001.

In the campaign, Victor vowed to “stand up for Pasadena” and our new Mayor is fiercely loyal to this community. In his installation address, he three times invoked his declaration that “Pasadena is in fact the center of the universe!” and insisted “you should get used to hearing that and if you haven’t said it, say it out loud!”

To back up that claim, Gordo cited Caltech and JPL, the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade and Art Center College of Design. All world-class institutions with reputations and impacts far beyond our community.

Gordo then articulated his aspirations: “My vision for Pasadena – and I believe it to be a shared vision among the City Council – is that all our residents deserve the best city possible. Every child should have the opportunity to be a successful and contributing member of our community. And in my view, this means safe and thriving neighborhoods, clean and safe streets, strong schools, good housing and parks that welcome families.’’

To achieve that vision, Gordo ran on a pledge to “bring our community together.” He stressed a collaborative style that echoed the legacy of Pasadena’s first directly elected Mayor, Bill Bogaard, who was vocal in his support for Gordo. That style is suited to both our city’s civic culture and to the structure of our government, which gives the Mayor only modest authority for setting the Council agenda and presiding over its meetings. It takes five of the eight votes on the City Council to get things done and administrative power is vested in the Council-appointed City Manager and professional staff.

Coming as it did on the fateful date of December 7, Gordo referenced the unique challenges we face. “Like it or not, ladies and gentleman, we are the pandemic generation,’’ he said. “We’re bonded together by this difficult struggle, and unfortunately it may get darker and more difficult.”

All that evokes the reality that Gordo’s – and Pasadena’s – future success rests on more than his shoulders alone. The institutions Gordo cited to bolster his claim of Pasadena’s importance were not natural gifts like the mountains and the Arroyo. Creating premier educational institutions like Caltech and Art Center College of Design (which relocated here from Los Angeles) was the product of generations of far-sighted and courageous leaders. Building a 100,000 seat stadium one hundred years ago and nurturing a spontaneous New Year’s Day celebration by the Valley Hunt Club into a blockbuster world event was the product of daring and innovative perseverance. Turning a place where Caltech professors and their students fired off lab-made rockets into a center of interplanetary exploration with a workforce of 6000 and an annual budget of $2.5 billion was the product of sustained and deliberate risk-taking to boldly go where none had gone before.

Compared to these historic success stories, Gordo’s goals – safe streets, thriving neighborhoods, strong schools, good housing and parks that welcome families – may seem quotidian. They are not. In 2020, safe streets requires dealing with growing challenges of rising violence and growing distrust of policing as we know it. Thriving neighborhoods beg the question of who can afford to live here in the face of modest homes selling for more than a million dollars. Strong schools will require reimagining educational approaches that have failed too many Black and Latino students and are increasingly ill-suited to prepare all students for their lives in the 21st Century. Good housing means ensuring that families won’t have to live in garages like Gordo did when his family arrived – and no one ends up living on our streets. Parks that welcome families (like so many of Pasadena’s high quality services) will require either increased financial resources or enhanced efficiencies (or more likely both) as the cost of public services continues to outpace revenues.

Pursuing those goals will require this generation of Pasadena citizens to rise above complacency about what we’ve inherited and work together on what we’ll bequeath to the next generation. It will require not only bold leadership from our elected officials – it will require commitment and sacrifices from the rest of us. This pandemic has strained the ability of our public institutions and private interests to effectively cooperate, yet the looming challenges are even more daunting.

Gordo is right. It is time for Pasadena to come together. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels. If Pasadena is “in fact the center of the universe,” then we must be a model of a community facing up to — and overcoming  — our very real shortcomings. That’s the job for more than just the Mayor and more than just City government. Under our values as a nation and a community, that’s a job for all of us.
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Rick Cole is a former Mayor of Pasadena.