King/Drew closure haunts the LA County 2nd District board race

The West Los Angeles Democratic Club’s Saturday afternoon debate was more wonkish than wild as less than 150 voters listened to measured responses by the two leading faces in the L.A. County Board of Supervisors’ 2nd District race.

Noteworthy in the 2nd District debate has been how plodding the events can feel due to the sometimes dry public personas of the race’s two top candidates - 26th District State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas and Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks.

Both have solid political resumes – Ridley-Thomas with his City Council, Assembly and State Senate years and Parks with his City Council work, a bulwark against his sometimes controversial stint as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. But neither has the want-to-shake-his-hand zest of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; if the mayor feels sometimes like a Hispanic Jack Kennedy, Parks and Ridley-Thomas both can come off as African-American versions of Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

There was some meat and heat between the two over the lack of public health care in L.A.’s urban zip codes, a more pronounced problem now due to the closure of the infamous King/Drew Medical Center’s trauma unit.

Parks acknowledged the hospital had serious, even fatal, flaws in management but the downside of shuttering a hospital serving ghetto populations was that sick, poor people living there, “now overload every hospital in the county.”

Ridley-Thomas stood by his stance that King/Drew, nicknamed “Killer King,” had to be closed and that something radical had to be done. “In the delivery of health care services it is completely indefensible that that situation was allowed to deteriorate,” he said.

Parks and Ridley-Thomas both are Obama men and both addressed the national campaign’s Rev. Jeremiah Wright quagmire.

Parks deftly observed that most African-Americans in L.A. are smart enough not to take their cues from such a theological firebrand. “People in our community are intelligent,” he said to the audience in the auditorium of West L.A.’s Beethoven Elementary School.

Ridley-Thomas got in and out the Wright stuff faster, stating succinctly; “We should continue to prayer for him. All the rest of it is a sideshow.”