In February of 2009, a month after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose randomly forwarded to friends and colleagues a meme he found humorous.
The image showed the White House lawn planted with watermelons.
Grose’s email swiftly circulated well beyond his address book and into the national news cycle, casting an unenviable spotlight on the small town of about 11,500 residents.
“I viewed it in a lighthearted manner, but it got interpreted as racism,” recalled Grose, who resigned in the midst of the controversy.
Grose returned to the council in 2012, lost his reelection bid in 2016, and then won again in 2018.
Now, in what could be viewed as an ironic twist, Grose is running against a Black woman, Tanya Doby – in a city where Black people make up about 3% of the population.
This November marks the city’s first by-district election, pitting the two council members against one another. Under threat of litigation claiming violation of voters’ rights, Los Alamitos converted from at-large elections two years ago.
“It’s unfortunate that two incumbents are running for one seat,” Grose said. “Dividing up such a small city into five districts doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Doby came in fourth out of five candidates vying for three at-large seats in 2018. She was appointed by the council in January of this year after Councilman Warren Kusumoto moved out of state.
“I like to be involved in my community,” Doby said. “I’m not a fan of people who complain about something but give no input.”
Doby said she does not dwell on Grose’s infamous email. “I don’t look at him and think, ‘You’re Watermelon Man,’” she said. “It would have been selfish of me to get on the council if I were unwilling to see past that. As an adult, you sometimes have to work with people you might not agree with.”
The mother of two young children, Doby is an active volunteer in the Los Alamitos School District and has served on city commissions. She owns a local apparel design business, The Anchored Rose.
Mayor Richard Murphy, who is not running for reelection, joked that if Doby wins, “with Dean and me gone, the average age on the city council will drop by 30 years.”
“She has brought a fresh viewpoint to the council,” Murphy said.
Living in an area known as “Apartment Row,” Doby is the only council member who doesn’t own a home.
“That gives me a different perspective,” Doby said. “Some communities become overlooked simply because their perspective isn’t represented.”
As an example, Doby said, “When my counterparts wanted to close the parks entirely due to coronavirus, I pointed out that children who live in apartments don’t have backyards.” Instead, the city roped off only the playground equipment but left grassy areas available.
For his part, Grose, a 35-year resident of Los Alamitos, “offers a wealth of institutional knowledge,” Councilman Mark Chirco said. “When an issue comes up that I don’t know the history on, Dean can tell me everything about it.”
Grose “works his butt off,” Murphy said: “I’m big-picture, but Dean’s a detail guy. At any event, he’s the first to arrive and the last to leave.”
However, since 2009, the city council has not named Grose mayor – a ceremonial title usually bequeathed by rotation. And in July, he clearly annoyed colleagues who had hoped to present a unified front for a 1.5% sales tax increase initiative.
Although he voted with everyone else to put the measure on the upcoming ballot, Grose declined to sign an argument for it. “Ideologically, I’m opposed to taxes,” Grose said in a special meeting on Aug. 11.
Joining fellow council members in a chorus of exasperation, Shelley Hasselbrink told him, “You have to be for or against it. You can’t be in the middle of the road.”
Longtime Grose critic Pete Carvajal, a former city commissioner, called Grose’s stand on the tax measure “showboating,” but agreed that “nobody can question Dean’s dedication to the city.”
Still, Carvajal said, “It speaks to this moment of racial strife in our country that Tanya – a dynamic young African American woman – has to run against Dean, of all people. He never really apologized for his actions, nor does he appear to have evolved.”
On Aug. 4, Grose tweeted, “If you don’t want to be killed by police, don’t engage in illegal activities.” And on Aug. 22, he retweeted a meme attributing the trajectory of vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris to “sleep(ing) with the right powerfully connected men.”
Grose still believes that the local uproar over his 2009 email was “politically motivated.”
“It was a direct attack on me to get me off the council, and it worked,” he said. “I didn’t feel it (the watermelon photo illustration) was a big issue. We had just elected our first Black president. I thought we’d moved beyond calling each other racist.”
When Doby relocated a decade ago from Long Beach to Los Alamitos, friends reminded her of Grose’s email.
“I told them, ‘I can’t base the entire city on one man’s quip,’” Doby said. “My husband and I love living here.”
Doby said she harbors no resentment toward Grose. “Humans are nuanced creatures,” she said. “I try not to judge a person’s sense of humor. I can only say how it makes me feel. I can’t change anyone who doesn’t want to change, or who doesn’t see the error of their ways.
“If you look for negative stuff, you will always find it,” Doby added. “But if you look for people who listen to your perspective, who try to be an ally, you will find them, too.”
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Los Alamitos councilman slammed for racist email in 2009 faces Black colleague in reelection bid - OCRegister
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