When I reported a few days ago on the tsunami of bad press surrounding Mitch O’Farrell’s recent Council motion seeking a municipal law to ban adults from children’s playgrounds in parks it was not yet provable, no matter how probable it seemed, that the proposal was related to the ongoing battle for Selma Park. Well, yesterday the Times published an excellent if somewhat shallow article by reporter Dakota Smith which settled the matter once and for all: “[O’Farrell spokesman Tony] Arranaga said O’Farrell proposed the law after locals complained about drug dealing at Selma Park playground in Hollywood.”

It’s still not proven that Kerry Morrison had a hand in O’Farrell’s proposal, but at this point it’s clear that she must have done. First of all, as anyone who actually lives in the area knows, there are no drug dealers in the playground at Selma Park. There may be drug dealers in the adult part, I don’t know, although I haven’t seen any actual drug dealing in there. Thus when Tony Arranaga speaks of putative locals putatively complaining about putative drug dealing in Selma Park, Occam’s Razor leads me to assume he’s talking about Kerry Morrison, who is still fuming more than 15 months after my colleagues and I undid her illegal off-limitsing of the Park for adults unaccompanied by children.

And such a move would be more than consistent with what we know about Kerry Morrison’s history. My colleagues recently reported that she and her husband, Mr. Kerry Morrison, had intentionally moved to Los Angeles in order to impose their puritanical visions on our City. Further research has revealed from whence these Morrisons came to our fair City:

Kerry Morrison, executive director of Hollywood’s business improvement district … moved from the more elegant confines of Rancho Palos Verdes. She now lives with her husband and children in Hancock Park, a neighborhood that was chosen precisely because it sits in the middle of old Los Angeles.

And of course Rancho Palos Verdes is one of the four or five creepy-rich little cities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula along with Palos Verdes Estates, infamous home of the Lunada Bay Boys, a gang of zillionaire surf-local bully boys who use violence, not just tolerated but tacitly encouraged by their city government, to keep unwanted people off their lovely beaches and out of their public space much like Kerry Morrison’s BID Patrol gun thugs do in Hollywood at her behest. That missionary move to South Central Hollywood doesn’t seem to have taken Palos Verdes out of the girl much.

Which leaves us with the ultimate mystery: Why does Mitch O’Farrell pay such heed to the misbegotten, phantasmagoric, anti-urban fantasies of this poor, deluded woman? He started his term as CD13 Councilmember with a doomed effort to outlaw the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition that backfired even more explosively than this Selma Park nonsense is backfiring. He went on to carry Kerry’s pitchfork against Street Characters and against tour buses and against black people in Hollywood nightclubs, only the last of which campaigns has met with even tentative initial success. The street character thing is just going to end up earning another zillion bucks or so for Carol Sobel, and the tour bus thing is going nowhere after legitimate businessfolks complained.¹

Does she have some dirt on him that leads him to try to please her even against his own best political interests? Is his weird lap-dog-itude when it comes to Kerry-Morrison-style puritanical suburbanity related to the more than $2,500 that she and Mr. Kerry have contributed to Mitch’s campaigns? We have seen that $600,000 will buy a $72 million apartment complex in CD15, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that $2,500 will buy a little bit of legislative bluenosed Mrs. Grundyism in Hollywood. Well, we’ll probably never know the real answer, but Mitch, maybe you’ll remember this episode next time Kerry Morrison asks for a favor?

Image of Lunada Bay is by dailymatador, who has kindly made it available via Flickr under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license.

1. I will write more on this in the very near future, I sincerely hope.