Michael Ponce, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Cyndi Ponce at the swearing in. PHOTO BY: Bill Orton
For a generation, residents around the Port of Los Angeles seeking a more livable community fought bitterly with an indifferent planning department and visionless city officials. Residents of San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City and Harbor Gateway would drive to downtown Los Angeles only to battle with the very developers who seemingly owned City Hall.
Chances for local voices to be heard improved in 1999 when voters citywide approved changes to the city’s charter that moved some power down to the local level. The reforms not only created neighborhood councils, but also a series of Area Planning Commissions to consider neighborhood development projects.
"We have a real chance now for more traditional development," said Wilmington resident and ILWU member Michael Ponce, 42, who recently took up duties as the newest member of the Area Planning Commission that serves communities around the port of Los Angeles.
This marks the second high-profile appointment of an ILWU member by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who took office in July. The ILWU Southern California District Council President, Joe Radisich, now serves on the city’s Board of Harbor Commissioners.
"I come from a labor background," Villaraigosa told 250 labor leaders gathered Oct. 11 in San Pedro for a luncheon in his honor. "I am going to turn to people I know."
It’s hard to move around Wilmington and not know the Ponce family. Michael Ponce is a third-generation Wilmington product, having been born at Wilmington Community Hospital, a facility that is now gone. As a boy, Ponce accompanied his father—a general contractor whose first language was neither English nor bureaucratese—to City Hall, where he would be interpreter for talks between his father and city planning officials.
"I read the blueprints for my dad," said Ponce, who spent more than 25 years working in his family’s construction company and who also held a contractors license from 1985 to 1999. Ponce joined the ILWU in 1997 and got his book in 1999. He spent eight years with longshore Local 13 before transferring this year to clerks’ Local 63.
A background in construction and his work in the ILWU convinces Ponce that what is needed most in the Harbor Area is development that promotes families, home ownership and cohesive neighborhoods.
"We need more community resources, like parks and services," said Ponce, who cites a Wilmington Beautification Plan from the 1980s pushed by Mayor Tom Bradley and Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, as an example of what can be done with vigorous city leadership. The plan died after Bradley left office and Flores was replaced on the Council. Subsequent city leaders abandoned the vision just as final funding details were being ironed out.
"I’m pleased that my appointment means ordinary people will have a bigger voice in what our community looks like," Ponce said. "Local needs should be what drives development."
Ponce’s appointment to the five-member Harbor Area Planning Commission fills the seat left vacant by outgoing member Leland Hill. His term expires in 2009.
—Bill Orton
