What started out as a simple annual election of homeowners in South Los Angeles’ abutting and most affluent neighborhoods has turned out to be a bitter war among old friends which the Los Angeles County Bar Association has agreed to mediate.

A group of members of the United Homeowners Association — residents of View Park, Windsor Hills and View Heights — became dissatisfied with the functioning of their board of directors and chose this year to replace them all in an election slated for Jan. 21, and that group of wanna-be officers has accused the sitting officers and their supporters of doing everything they can to retain their offices up to and including the illegal imposition of rules that benefit their incumbency.

It is a case of the slate of new officers: Stuart Huggins, president; Tony Dawson, vice president; Rand Paulin, treasurer; Barbara Dawson, secretary, and Charles Balls, Cliff Gamble and Sally Hampton, board members versus the present officers: Theo Irving, president; Norman Edwards, vice president; Brenda Fountain, secretary, and board members Lorinee Jackson, Art Fields, Adrienne Mayberry and Mary Martin.

These are all old friends and stable neighbors who have worked together harmoniously for years to preserve their high home values and upper middle class life style — that is, harmoniously until the PXP company wanted to turn their neighborhoods into industrial oil fields by expanding oil drilling operations in the Baldwin Hills.

The homeowners association was its united best when it fought off attempts several years ago to build a power plant in the nearby Kenneth Hahn Park. However, when the PXP came knocking on their doors and expressed a desire to erect oil wells in their yards, the group’s leadership sided with the oil company and its members fought it — and fought their association leaders, as well. A bitter feud has been roiling ever since.

The members have chosen to solve their problem by using the democratic method of voting the current leaders out of office and replacing them with people who vow to fight PXP and anything else that threatened the homeowners way-of-life. Hampton, a board candidate, said the present officers are violating present by-laws and illegally writing new rules to keep candidates’ names off the ballots and to keep homeowners from turning out to vote.

“There’re trying to disenfranchise us all,” Hampton said. “But if they think they can have an election in which only their friends vote and we don’t get elected and expect us to sit back and accept it, they’ve got another thought coming.
“We’re not taking that,” Hampton added. “I don’t understand why these people are fighting so hard to hang on to volunteer jobs. If you handle these positions right, it’s a lot of work and nobody gets paid to do it. I don’t see why they’re fighting so hard for the opportunity to continue working for nothing.”

Despite the fact that the slate of new candidates has been campaigning for a month, Hampton said a heretofore unknown “election committee” sent letters last week to the candidates advising them of their ineligibility to run because they had not paid their association dues on time.

“They are also informing people that they cannot vote unless their dues were paid by a certain date, and that’s not true,” Hampton said. “We’ve never had any rules about any number of days being required between paying dues and running or voting in an election.”

Tony Nicholas, who served as UHA president for 12 years, agrees with Hampton. Nicholas, who is the son and nephew of the famous late Nicholas Brothers dancing duo, said: “We had an election every year and our only rule had been that people must pay their dues before the election. There was never anything about a cutoff date because we were always trying to get members.

“This whole fight is very troubling to me and it’s all about that PXP thing and the mysterious failure of the officers to take a stand against those oil wells,” Nicholas added. “When I was president [from 1992 to 2004], we accomplished a lot and we had a cohesive board of directors who were on the same page as the community. Two issues are crucial to these communities: property values and quality of life — and I don’t see how the board could fail to see that oil wells in our yards would adversely impact both of those issues.”

At any rate, Hampton and the rest of the slate have engaged the Bar Association to mediate the dispute between the homeowners officers and members, but it is unable to do so because the officers refuse to communicate with either party on the subject. Which is what the officers refused to do with me. President Irving refused an interview with me about the feud and he said he would have board member Fields, who is acting as election chairman, call and talk to me, instead. Fields never did.

“We need to let the process go forward and have an election and let the people speak,” Nicholas said. “We elected Obama. Some people didn’t like him, still don’t like him, but we had an election and the people spoke. And that’s it.”