Developer leaks crude emails by Redondo Beach mayor

Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, a slow-growth mastermind in the South Bay city and beyond, has come under fire for crude emails about political rivals.

The 65-year-old former airline crew chief who has drawn the line against overdevelopment and traffic in the coastal city is taking heat for crass emails between him and his supporters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The emails, obtained through a public records request by a developer, reveal Brand saying he wants to “ram” a proposed editorial up the “cancerous ass” of a political rival who was suffering from colon cancer.

Brand, who is white, also jokes with a Black supporter about her becoming an “angry Black woman.”

In another email, Brand contends that the “increasingly latino laden Coastal Commission” would dislike a project because it was too luxurious and exclusive. Other emails sent to Brand deride the weight and appearance of a female City Council member.

In an interview with The Times, Brand said he had believed the emails to be private exchanges and were “cherry picked” by CenterCal Properties — the developer of a failed $400 million waterfront project, which obtained them in a lawsuit — to vilify him.

The project would have redone Redondo Beach’s pier by building 524,000 square feet of shops, restaurants, a hotel, a market and a movie theater.

Brand sponsored Measure C, a ballot initiative in 2017 that killed the project and propelled his mayoral election in the city of 70,000 residents. Since then, he has cut down the size of proposed apartment buildings by dozens of units and barred construction of mixed-use residential and commercial projects for a year.

“People have been coming after Redondo Beach and anybody associated with Redondo Beach,” Brand said. “It’s basically big developers or investment groups that are trying to get major upzoning to make a lot of money. And myself and others are in the way.”

Some say Brand’s emails show that the city’s top leaders are promoting an undercurrent of racism and nastiness to push their agenda.

Tonya McKenzie, a Black woman who recently ran in an unsuccessful City Council recall campaign against a Brand ally, said groups she believes are run by the mayor’s supporters regularly posted racist comments about her on social media.

“That is their way of mocking minority groups among themselves when they think no one is listening,” McKenzie told the Times. “It is not something that is rare for them.”

Others disagree. In an email exchange from February 2017, Brand told Candace Allen Nafissi that she should be proud if she lost her seat on a Redondo Beach commission in retribution for criticizing the CenterCal project.

“Where’s the angry Black woman in you?” Brand wrote.

“She[‘s] coming out little by little lol,” replied Nafissi, who is Black, and now says she’s not offended by Brand’s comment.

The leaked emails, Nafissi said, were “100 percent retribution” by developers and showed just how “nasty” they can be.

John Heath, who is Black, runs a nonprofit affordable housing management company in South Los Angeles and is working with Brand on a California initiative to block the state from overriding local land-use rules.

He called the Redondo Beach mayor “the most upstanding, committed public servant I’ve ever met.

“Folks have conversations all the time where they use words in one context that they would not use if they knew that they were speaking publicly,” Heath said.

In an email from February 2014, Brand refers to then-Redondo Beach Mayor Steve Aspel, a supporter of CenterCal’s plan to redevelop the city’s pier. Aspel had colon cancer at the time and has since recovered.

“OK, here is my first pass at an ass-kicking editorial to ram it up Aspel’s cancerous ass,” Brand wrote.

Brand said that the email was a reference to comments Aspel had made at a City Council meeting years before at which Aspel said that Brand and his allies were “more toxic than the cancer in my rectum.”

In an interview, Aspel said he took the most offense over the “hypocrisy” of the mayor.

“Bill likes to create this reputation of being the perfect gentleman and never getting into the fray,” Aspel said. “At least when I say something, I have the guts to do it in the open and not hide behind a keyboard.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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