May 2008 Archives

Is it just me or is the behavior of what passes for the political aristocracy of L.A. beginning to look a like it did during the last days of the French royalty and the Russian tsars?

Take for example the mayor and his entourage heading off to Israel on the dime -- quite a few dimes at that -- of the customers of the Department of Water and Power who have just been slugged with yet another big rate hike supposedly to rebuild the infrastructure that was allowed to rot while contractors and employees got rich on sweetheart deals.

Or how about Councilman Greig Smith -- who has fought so hard to get a sane and modern garbage policy -- skimming a quarter of a million dollars of revenue from the much-despised Sunshine Canyon Landfill to go globetrotting with City Council staffers in Europe where a Coke costs $15 or so in U.S. currency.

I'm not trash-talking in bringing these things up. They're just pieces in a mosaic of arrogant conduct and wanton disregard for the people of the city -- people mind you that are seeing their federal income tax rebates gobbled up by city tax hikes, who can't afford $4 a gallon in gas to sit in gridlocked traffic trying to get to work, and are living  in fear of losing their jobs and their homes.

It's like everywhere you look there are signs of privilege and self-indulgence.

The new L.A. airport director subverts the contracting procedures to reward old pals with a lucrative deal, but skates because nothing is in writing and nobody involved is hauled before a grand jury to testify under oath about exactly what went down.

Even city watchdog Controller Laura Chick whitewashed the deal while finding the process was a lot less than wholesome. Obviously, she's in a good mood since she also hailed the great strides made in cleaning up the adolescent, illegal and costly misconduct in the Fire Department.

And the man who would be the people's lawyer, lackluster Councilman Jack Weiss, has taken a noblesse oblige attitude about consorting with felons as long as he can raise a lot of money for his campaign for City Attorney next year.

Weiss shows no shame about well-connected public relations operative Steve Sugerman holding a $500 a person fundraising event June 10 in Santa Monica even though Sugerman admitted to felony misconduct in the DWP/Fleishman-Hillard billing case. Of course, Weiss isn't alone in seeing nothing wrong with the involvement of Sugerman who operates freely in City Hall despite having confessed to bilking the city.

Then, there's the report by Thom Senzee published here that District Attorney Steve Cooley has enough empathy for sexual predators that he won't use the full force of the law against them like other prosecutors across the state.

I could go and on but I'm in Philadelphia having a good time with friends and family and my outrage meter isn't running as high as normal.

Hopefully, yours is and you're working up a lather and will start taking note of these kinds of rotten excesses and get off your duffs and do something about it.

By Doug Dowie

Correspondent

Unlike other prosecutors in California and the position of the state Attorney General, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley refused to apply tough provisions of Jessica's Law retroactively against sexually violent predators (SVP).

A copy of an October 2006 an agreement Stipulation Agreement.pdf   between Cooley's office and  the Public Defender and L.A. Superior Court shows that a deal was reached not to seek indeterminate commitments of the worst sexual predators -- instead of the two-year maximum allowed before Jessica's Law passed -- if their cases already were in the legal system.

Jessica's Law contained a retroactive provision allowing indeterminate commitments in all pending cases and that provision has been applied across the state, unheld in appellate courts and supported by Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Cooley's office was afforded two days to respond to the issue but did not issue a statement and Cooley did not agree to be interviewed.

The disclosure comes as Cooley faces a primary election Tuesday and was seized on by one of his opponents Deputy District Attorney Steve Ipsen.

             "This is the only place where the D.A. is not following the law," said Ipsen.  "Jessica's Law, which is the will of the people and has been affirmed by the courts, says any person who has been determined to be an SVP should be committed to a mental-health facility for an indeterminate period after serving a sentence for their crime." 

Editor's Note: I welcome contributions to this blog from everyone. It's about the experience of L.A. in all its richness and diversity. Many people have worked long and hard to make L.A. a better city and the better we understand each other, the more likely will be to succeed. This contribution is from Sandy Sand, a longtime community journalist and activist.

By Sandy Sand

Community Correspondent

My own island or a shack on a small lake somewhere is looking better and better all the time.

Living in L.A. is looking worse and worse.

But then, L.A. never looked good to me, just as living in the suffocating heat of the Valley never looked good to my oldest daughter, who I dragged here from West L.A.

I was uprooted from East Lansing, Michigan, by my parents whose brothers and sisters preceded us here.  I liked the visits we made here, but move here?

No, it wasn't for the young me, and besides, I'd just gotten a brand new sled and my very own shoe ice skates.  The sled didn't come to L.A. with me, but the skates did; I still have them and they still fit.

It was also the last winter that it really snowed. I mean snowed! Drifts up to the second story windows. Ever try to walk up a snowdrift to peek into a friend's window and say hi, because she was in bed with the chick pox you gave her? Bummer! We could have had so much fun trying to navigate that drift together.

It looked solid, but it wasn't. Before I could say red, red robin, the snow pile had drifted up to my waist and I realized it was not only a lost cause, but I'd snowed myself into thinking I could do it.

Besides the fun of that, the fire department had flooded a field that was close enough to walk to with ice skates slung over one shoulder with one banging our chests while the other kept patting us on the back.

You can't do that in L.A. without plowing your way up overcrowded mountain roads or driving to a rink, if there is still such a thing here.

In L.A., in the Valley we plow our way through traffic to go anywhere at any time of day. Drive time is all the time.

Thataway Jimmy.

I know it will sound sarcastic after the rough time I've given Jim Hahn for so long but I genuinely mean it. Congratulations on your decision to become a judge.

From my days in the early 1980s at the Herald Examiner, I knew Kenny Hahn. He was always good for a quote whenever you needed someone official to bolster a story of misfeasance or malfeasance, someone who would demand a full investigation or was angry to find out something was amiss.

Kenneth Hahn was the consummate politiician. His son was not. My dad was meticulous and organized; I'm chaotic and sloppy. The apple does not fall far from the tree in all ways.

And that was why I gave City Attorney James Hahn such a hard time and why I gave Mayor James Hahn a much harder time. He didn't have a political bone in his being. He not only didn't like to glad hand the public, he didn't even like to be touched.

During his four years as mayor, Hahn never spoke to me. I can't really blame him. He was the first mayor in modern L.A. history to start his term with the power to take charge of City Hall under the new charter that limited the City Council largely to being a legislative and oversight body and gave the mayor control of the entire vast bureaucracy.

Instead of asserting his authority, Hahn let the council continue to run the show and maintain its fiefdom power over its members' individual districts. Instead of chasing the lobbyists and manipulators out of City Hall, he opened the doors to them and let them call the shots.

I never thought his was a moral failing but a failing of leadership. He would never have been in politics if his name wasn't Hahn, if it wasn't for the shadow of his father who stayed in elected office for decades representing a largely African-American constituency because he had the gift of the natural born politician.

Personally, I don't think that gift is such a great thing or that it alone has produced great results.

I think James K. Hahn is perfectly suited to sit on the bench and I think he'll be a good judge. I'm happy he's found his calling and I'm sure he'll be happier too. The best to you Judge Hahn. 

To be perfectly honest, I am a golf fanatic.

For years now, I wake up at the crack of dawn every Monday and Tuesday and dial into the L.A. city golf reservation system with one phone in my left hand and one in my right.

Sometimes I get straight in when the system opens at 6 a.m. but more times than not it takes me dozens, even hundreds, of redials before the recorded voice says: "Welcome to the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks teetiime reservation system....to reserve a teetime press one..."

It's so bad that Francois our cockatiel does perfect imitations of a busy signal. But I am an expert at making reservations and almost always able to get one of the earliest teetimes for Saturday and Sunday for me and my pals.

I am not an expert golfer. In fact, I'm terrible and I cheat all the time. But I do love the game. It gets me out of my head, connects me with the birds and the trees and the sky above and with my friends for a few hours.

There's a fraternity among golfers, and that's especially true among municipal course golfers, a camaraderie that comes from playing on working class facilities where the sand traps are like concrete, the greens bumpy, and the fairways covered with bare spots and muddy patches even in the heat of summer.

I'm not complaining, a cowpatch would be fine with me. But that's not true for all municipal course golfers, the ones who take it seriously and have the skill to hit the ball straight and far. They are given to bitching about the marshals who drive around oblivious to slow players, the condition of the courses and the soaring fees the city is charging.

Right now, with City Hall paralyzed by its financial mismanagement, they are up in arms over plans to price city courses out of the market, cut back in maintenance and give away a contract for golf carts that fails to maximize revenue to the treasury.   

The evidence is now unequivocal: Civil disobedience works in L.A.

Not only does City Hall give away the public treasury to employees, contractors, developers and other special interests but it can't even get up to 80 percent of dog owners to pay for a license.

City Controller exposed the bungling incompetence in the Animal Services Department in an audit released Tuesday. 

She reported that the Animal Services Department only issues 123,000 licenses when the dog population is estimated at 400,000 to 800,000 -- roughly 75 to 80 percent don't pay, she said -- and doesn't do a damn thing to collect the money it's owed.

Reports like this are exactly why Chick has earned the title of the city's watchdog.

It's a small world isn't it, small and funny and fine -- at least for people in the tight little circles of influence where opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies abounds.

Take the case of Northeast San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes who, while nobody was watching largely because he has been so invisible, took steps to strip the City of L.A. and its citizens of their basic right to decide land use issues by letting developers do almost anything they want like tear down houses and put up apartments.

It should be noted that his skullduggery was aided and abetted by the fact the Daily News no longer has anyone in Sacramento and the Times still doesn't care about such mundane matters as the well-being of the city.

But word does get around and on Friday Rick Orlov reported Fuente's deceit and a brushfire of outrage quickly spread across the city.

(Strike up the appropriate music by clicking here to get in the right mood for what follows)

With a little help from his friends, Fuentes has concocted a measure, AB212, that  "would limit the ability of the city to make zone changes in areas where the community plan is not consistent with the general plan," according to Orlov.

That lack of consistency is everywhere since the general plan is a fraud and the community plans outdated.

Fuentes' goal is affordable housing -- a code word for taxpayer subsidized housing for the poor and densification of neighborhoods all across L.A.

Now I don't know at this point who would get rich from Fuentes' effort to strip the people of L.A. and their government of control of land use but an examination of how he came to be an elected official and how this legislation came to be might be instructive.

For starters, you need to know Fuentes is a tool of City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former City Council President Alex Padilla, who is now a state senator.

I'm just a voice in the crowd. I can't say I never thought I was more than that but then I've never been happier or freer than I am at this moment.

At this point in my life I can do what I want when I want and say what I want the way I want. And if it doesn't work out, I know there's a place somewhere else out there for me and my wife to be perfectly happy.

So this is my last stand, L.A.'s last stand. It's now or never because L.A. is in grave danger of chasing away the last vestiges of its middle class and becoming a city of rich sheltered in privately-guarded enclaves and poor living in squalor.

There are thousands of others out there -- people I've met over the years and especially those that I'm meeting now -- who have taken just about as much as they're going to take from a government that kowtows to the rich and powerful and seduces special classes with money and flattery.

Many more have left over the years. They called it white flight back in the 1980s  but it's become a rainbow flight in the last decade. You got to be rich or poor or just plain crazy enough to have stayed and fought for all these years. I know for a fact that there's a lot more crazies like that all across L.A. than the people in power realize.

Imagine what would happen if all those who cared about the dream of a greater L.A. came down and stood in front of City Hall.

Imagine what would happen if every one of them brought a bag of garbage and put it on the steps of that gold-plated palace to a failed government, a City Hall that constantly raises fees and taxes even as it fails to solve the city's problems.

The news about L.A. just gets worse and worse.

Gangsters are running wild in the San Fernando Valley and so are racists and anti-Semites; the political wannabes have so corrupted the electoral process, a Republican might even stand a chance; the city budget is so phony it almost certainly will have to be revised before it takes effect July 1 -- which may explain why the City Council hardly bothered to discuss it.

But if you're looking for a reason to get so mad you might actually do something, nothing quite tops Scandal Central: The Department of Water and Power, now or at any time during the last 100 years.

This is a saga of how ratepayers' money is squandered, why rates keep soaring, why service stinks, how insiders get rich, why the DWP union gets lucrative sweetheart contracts and virtually runs the show and how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has put the wolves in charge of the henhouse.

The latest chapter involves the notorious DWP figure Raman Raj, who was booted out of the utility a few years back after serving as onetime DWP head David Freeman's right-hand man. He might just as easily have been described as the right-hand man of Brian D'Arcy, the head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers which represents nearly all 8,000 DWP workers including most managers.

Don't feel sorry about Raj  After being dumped, he started representing a long list of companies that contract with the DWP and just like magic he's back six years later in a top job at the DWP being paid the handsome sum of a quarter of a million dollars.

An article by David Zahniser in the Times Saturday raises serious questions about just what Raj is up to in his new role.

For the life of me, the thing about L.A. that's hardest for me to understand is why not one single politician in this city has stepped forward and embraced the tens of thousands of people who work so hard on their own time to make this a better place.

Everywhere I go I meet dedicated and passionate people doing good works, volunteering in charities and service clubs and residents' groups and neighborhood councils and youth sports leagues and Neighborhood Watch to name just a few of the ways people express their commitment to a greater L.A.

Yesterday, I played golf as a guest of a friend in an event that raised money for the In-N-Out charity foundation and saw an outpouring of generosity and goodwill. A friend told me about another event yesterday for the Little Tokyo Service Center, which now provides help mostly to poor Latinos in that changing downtown neighborhood. Every day there are events like this all across L.A.

On Wednesday, I went to the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association's monthly meeting and heard from all kinds of people who have been working hard for years to make their community better. Earlier that day, I spoke with Sunland-Tujunga community activist Nina Royal who has spent 20 years working with her neighbors to preserve the semi-rural nature of the community against the onslaught of developers aided by City Hall.

In my nearly 30 years in L.A., I have never seen so much energy out in the community, so much passion to fight for healthy communities, so much fear about where the city is headed.

When I ask political insiders to explain this phenomena -- the Marie Antoinette-like indifference  to the people -- they usually look at me like I'm crazy or at least ridiculously naive.

"Because they'd lose,'' one told me recently. "The political reality makes it virtually impossible for a poorly-financed populist to be elected citywide or to the council..  

"If you ever attended a strategy meeting for any of these campaigns as a non-journalist,and suggested they take advantage of 'the people and the energy out there,' they'd roll their eyes, shove the polling numbers up your ass and send you out for coffee. It's worse than you can imagine."

As I've watched the circus that passes for politics in L.A. over the years, that phrase often has popped into my head so it was amusing when I heard someone near me last night at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting murmur a similar sentiment.

It was near the end of Councilwoman Wendy Greuel's talk and she was answering a question about why for so long garbage collection was provided out of taxes like police and fire services, a basic commitment of City Hall to the people, and now the city is recovering the full cost of garbage collection.

Now here's the most capable member of the City Council talking gibberish as if no one in the room is smart enought to know the simple truth: The city squandered all its tax dollars and has no chance in hell of getting two-thirds of the voters to approve higher taxes so they're charging for services that have long been free.

That way the public doesn't get a say, which is the point to be sure. The less say the public has, the easier it is for the mayor and council to have sweetheart deals with city unions and sweetheart deals with Arab oil sheiks who want to profit from city-subsidized developments.

Inside the game of L.A. politics, the word is out: We don't really need next year's citywide elections because the results are already in.

The "Committee of 225" -- the godless clique of lobbyists, developers, contractors, union bosses and the like -- who buy the politicians (and get a handsome return on their investment) are unanimous that Villaraigosa has a second term locked up.

His puppet on a string, Councilman Jack Weiss, is as sure a thing for City Attorney as Big Brown for the Triple Crown. He can't be stopped, or so they believe.

And don't even bother to think about City Controller. Everybody loves Wendy Greuel even though the councilwoman for all her good works has failed to demonstrate the feisty independence that made Laura Chick the only standout elected official in L.A. in the 21st century.

That's the book on L.A. politics. And for good reason. They've got all the money from that aforementioned godless clique of lobbyists, developers, contractors, union bosses and the like who make up what passes for a political establishment -- a leadership cadre that has failed with rare exceptions to demonstrate the capacity to think beyond its own greedy interests.

So why don't we just call the whole thing off. We don't really need elections if hardly anybody votes and the outcomes are pre-determined like in Russia where Putin does whatever he wants and handpicks his successor who does what he wants. In Russia, of course, nearly everyone votes so the Putin dictatorship at least has a certain legitimacy. 

Think of the money we'd save. Why we could give bonuses to every city worker.

This item was written by long-time community activist Noel Weiss, an attorney who played a key role in winning City Hall support in 2006 for doubling tenant relocation payments.

By Noel Weiss

West Side activist

Levels of trust begin to grow when people from the community can have 'heart to heart' discussions with the police; with the City Attorney; with the educators; with the politicians; with each other. The Watts Gang Task Force is a clearinghouse of not just ideas, but of emotions (both negative and positive).
 
So that is why, for example, the Watts community can put on a three day carnival which closed down (lawfully) some City streets and which drew people from throughout the community - gang and non-gang alike. People knew what was expected of them. The 'interventionists' from the community were there to provide a buffer, with the police providing  the ultimate back-up. There was not one incident even though rival gang members came.
 
Having pulled this off, and of course, there was no press coverage of the good news, the Community, the police, the interventionists, the churches, everyone, could take pride and satisfaction in being able to accomplish something which other parts of the City probably take for granted .
 
At the task force meetings, there is generally a Deputy Chief of Police, a Commander, and the local captain. This kind of concern and compassion results in a reciprocal kind of respect - such that now when there is a hint of a potential problem, a direct line (literally) exists between the community leaders (interventionists) and LAPD, so that the Police can, with confidence, know what is happening, what is being done, and what needs to be done to quell any problem.
 
In short, there is trust being built between the police and the community. This is important because the gangs rely on a lack of trust in order to stir up trouble and swell their ranks.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm reminded that City Controller Laura Chick released an audit in March that included the golf range concession at Rancho Park. She concluded broadly that the audit, and previous audits, of the Recreation and Parks Department "calls into question the Department's success in meeting" its goals for concessionaires of providing good services and maximizing city revenue. The City Council audits committee has yet to hold a hearing on the audit.

I have played golf at city courses for years and noticed time and again how many of the carts are in poor condition, and how by 11:30 on busy weekend days they have run out and guys are standing around waiting for carts to be returned so they can play.

And then I start hearing from guys like Ted Winship who have been involved with the men's clubs at the local courses for years that something is rotten in Recreation and Parks, something worse than just not being competent about managing facilities.

What Ted and his pals have figured out is that there is some kind of insiders' game going on with golf carts just like there is in everything else the city does. The result as always is a loss of revenue for the city treasury and poor services to the public.

The golf cart issue is expected to come to a head Wednesday when the Rec and Parks commissioners sign off on a new contract to continue to waste money and provide poor service, according to Ted.

It appears the commissioners know people are watching because they have put off final action on this deal month after month. Based on past experience, my guess is that the powers that be have been huddling to make sure they have developed a sufficiently plausible alibi to fend off all accusations of mismanagement.

But Ted is no fool. He's a retired real estate broker who lives in Studio City and was president of the Hansen Dam Senior Men's Golf Club for years. He's studied the city's records on golf carts thoroughly and come to the conclusion  that the city could have more golf carts, newer golf carts and rake in $1.2 million a year more than it does now if it managed the service itself instead of contracting it out.

By Ellen Vukovich

Sherman Oaks activist

One thing I have learned is that City Hall underestimates a rule I call "The Power of One." 

It only takes one person to effectively and consistently stand-up for a neighborhood when demanding action from the City. 

An effective powerful "one" is one who has a computer, loves nothing better than to write emails, track emails, make telephone calls, send letters, circulate petitions and never let up the pressure on City officials, departments, etc., when seeking to resolve a problem.
 
Case in point is a fellow activist who recently wrote me about something dear to our mayor's heart -- potholes.
 
Apparently, my friend's street has not been slurred or paved for nearly 28 years thus earning the dubious distinction by the Department of Street Services as a "failure." 

He stated that "we have about 14-16 potholes each month which the city fills." However, there is one slight problem -- many of the new ones fail thus causing a vicious cycle. 
 
So what keeps him from being discouraged? His neighbors understand and apply the power of one theory.  According to my friend, these neighbors do "love to mix it up, complain, and boast how they are going to do this and that, but in the end...they do push me to lead and get those holes filled for them."
 
While it takes a three-man crew to fill potholes, it's still a patch job. Yet, seeing any job through only takes "one" strong leader. 

You got to feel for Russ Stanton. He comes from nowhere to land one of the plum jobs in American journalism as editor of the Los Angeles Times just as the bottom falls out of the industry.

So he's facing round after round of staff cuts and worsening morale and the challenge of reinventing the newspaper in the Internet age and then BANG -- the Times' shoddy journalistic practices blow up in his face.

First, there was the Chuck Philips fiasco. Philips is a reporter who has been repeatedly accused of carrying the water for the such questionable characters as Suge Knight in the rap music scene wars that led to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls among others,

Yet, the Times apparently did nothing to investigate allegations Philips breached industry ethical standards. I say apparently because when Philips earlier this year wrote a story accusing Sean "Puffy" Combs of complicity in a criminal attack on Shakur, only one senior editor vetted it for content and it went up online and ultimately into the paper.

It didn't take long before the blogosphere exposed several fatal problems: The story was based on falsified documents and anonymous sources, and was so badly reported that the Times had to run a front-page retraction. It now faces enormous costs to settle the matter.

And now accusations that are potentially even more serious have surfaced that grow out of the Anthony Pellicano case, the Hollywood private eye who ran roughshod over the law and common decency in numerous cases involving celebrity clients.

The probe of Pellicano began after then Times reporter Anita Busch was threatened to scare her off a story. With Pellicano's conviction last week, Busch went public with her experiences in an interview with blogger Patrick Frey at Patterico.com. She called for an investigation into Pellicano's relationships with Philips, Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton, Newton's wife Karlene Goller who is the Times' in-house lawyer and other journalists.

In a series of posts in recent days at Patterico.com, Frey, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, has questioned Philips' relationship with Pellicano and why he wrote stories challenging the government's case against him; why after Pellicano was indicted for the threat against Busch, Goller suggested the private eye be hired to investigate the threat against Busch, and why Newton kept a gift of a paperweight from Pellicano on his desk long after he was suspected in the Busch threat.

Journalism is a noble calling -- or at least that's what so many of us believed throughout our careers.

We were society's watchdogs, democracy's infantry, doing the dirty work of ferreting out the truth about what was really going on in our government, our society. We took no prisoners, threw our verbal bricks at windows on both sides of street.

Or so we thought.

Of course, that wasn't my experience for the most part. The watchdogs were our bosses, making sure  we didn't go too far. Only the truly talented had the right to exercise the First Amendment to any real degree. The rest of us sneaked in the truth, if we could, between the lines the same way good journalists at Pravda did.

Some of us with an excess of passion also formed an underground. We pushed the rules of corporate journalism to the edges and took our chances. Sometimes we went too far, sometimes we succumbed to alcoholism, or gave up and joined the fraternity of public manipulators in the world of public relations experts, lobbyists and political staff.

The collapse of newspapers in particular and news media in general that's now under way has robbed even the most diehard journalists I know of all illusion. The game is up. At my former paper, four great journalists have quit in just a few weeks -- all for public relations where they will earn a much better living, have more fun and salve their wounds knowing there is life after your dream is over.

Soon, a friend said recently, there will be no journalists left for all the PR types to manipulate.

And that's the point of this: Manipulation of the media is far more sophisticated than the media and that's been true for a long, long time. It's a big reason our government at all levels is doing such a poor job of serving the people and such a good job of serving itself.

A decade or so ago I did one of my famous newsroom rants when we uncovered one of those lovely little City Hall secrets that had been in the works for several years.

Without public discussion, they were well on their way to engineering a water recycling program but only for homes on the Valley floor and poorer parts of the city over the hill.

The screaming headline TOILET-TO-TAP alone was enough to bring it to a halt.

Well, no surprise toilet-to-tap is back on the lips of the mayor and with all the fanfare accompanying all great leaps forward, he will announce its revival at 10 a.m. today at the Tillman Reclamation Plant, which is in the Valley of course.

The plan is called "Securing L.A.'s Water Supply," which sounds sort of like securing our borders with 1,000 miles of fence without adopting an immigration policy or making our kids safe in school without doing anything about gangs or pedophile teachers. You know your water's safe because you flushed it down your toilet yesterday.

Now, the reason we need this breakthrough technology is that the mayor and his backers want the city to grow by half a million people as fast as possible to refill the city treasury and keep contractors and construction workers fat and happy. That this will make traffic congestion, air pollution and the quality of life worse is of no consequence.

"Blade Runner" city here we come.

I know this is too harsh but sometimes I can't help myself. I can't stand being manipulated and treated like an idiot who's too dumb to even know what time it is.

"L.A.'s future depends on our willingness to adopt an ethic of sustainability. If we don't commit ourselves to conserving and recycling water, we will tap ourselves out," Villaraigosa told the Daily News. "This plan makes a basic promise to our kids. We are going to recycle and conserve enough water to meet 100 percent of new demand."

We're going to drink toilet water for the kids' sake? Aw. c'mon Antonio.

The plot thickens.

In the last episode, Councilwoman Janice Hahn fought back against the talk shows, bloggers and concerned citizens who were inflamed by a Fox Channel 11 report she helped get two tough anti-gang cops pulled out of Watts, supported a woman who raised a family of gangsters to be the queen of gangland peace and helped channel city funds to known hoodlums.

Today's installment of Janice and The Gangs fuels the public conversation by tearing apart piece by piece much of the Fox News storyline. The San Pedro councilwoman's local newspaper, the Daily Breeze, published a well-researched article by reporter Gene Maddaus under the headline "TV report accusing Hahn flawed" which sought to defend Hahn by debunking elements of the story so far.

This is the nut graph, the heart of the story, about the flaws in the Fox reprot: "Most notably, records and interviews show that the gang intervention workers identified in the report have not received city funding. Additionally, a convicted rapist was wrongly identified as a gang intervention worker, and Hahn was mistakenly accused of providing funds directly to gang workers."

Don't you love it? I do. We're actually starting to talk about a critical element of the gang problem and like most things, the truth lies in the details and the Breeze story supplies some new ones.

What intrigues me about what's going on in Watts under Hahn's auspices is the growing evidence that the LAPD is using the same strategy General Petraeus is employing in Iraq.

I call it the "Baghdad Strategy." It works like this: When authorities are powerless to stop the violence being committed in all directions by multiple terrorist factions, they fund one or more of the warring groups to buy a measure of peace. In exchange, the newfound allies are pretty much given free rein to do what they want on their own turf.

It's a devil's deal if ever there were one.

By Ellen Vukovich

Sherman Oaks activist

Driving south on Woodman Avenue in Sherman Oaks recently, I tried to avoid the congestion around the 101 Freeway so I turned onto Riverside where I was greeted by absolute gridlock .

I looked to my left and saw the cause for the traffic: Los Angeles City Street Service workers are repaving a portion of Riverside. It was obvious that these repairs were scheduled on a Saturday in an attempt to avoid congesting streets during a workday in front of an already high traffic generating area -- Westfield's Fashion Square Mall. However, the repairs were scheduled the day before Mother's Day when last-minute shoppers needed to make a hasty trip to the local mall to find a nice gift for Mom.
 
When I finally made it home, a headline in the Daily News caught my eye about traffic. So, I sat down and read all about all of the taxes and fees which are on the drawing board in Sacramento and Los Angeles to alleviate future traffic congestion. 

Naturally, I also thought about what happened. While I certainly appreciate the need to think ahead and plan for future growth, I get the feeling that our elected officials haven't learned that they can't lose sight of the need to solve our current problems. 

I think if the City took a lesson from Cal Trans, who repairs our freeways while we sleep and on early morning weekends that would be a huge improvement, signaling a shift away from entrenched bureaucratic practices and thinking.  In other words, it's time to get creative. 

Frankly, I think the true traffic experts in Los Angeles are you, the public. It's too bad that the City of Los Angeles doesn't take advantage of the wealth of ideas all of us have to offer since we pay for so much already with the hope services will improve.

We can still get their attention at the ballot box, provided that we can make it home in time to vote.
 

Of all the crimes committed against the people of Los Angeles, and there are many, the most unforgivable is the crime committed against generations of the city's children by the public schools.

Horrendous dropout rates that fuel gangs and crime and poverty.

Tens of billions spent on new school buildings but little or nothing achieved in student performance.

Near total resistance to every type of reform effort, relegating yet another generation of children to ignorance. Note how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spent three years fighting for responsibility over the schools only to end up with control of just nine, barely one percent of the district.

In the grand scheme of LAUSD's sins against the people, what happened Tuesday is a small thing -- like the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic -- but it symbolized the hopelessness of all efforts to try to work with the district.

About 300 charter school supporters came to the school board meeting to demand that Superintendent David Brewer and the seven invisibles who supposedly represent the people live up to their commitment to house 39 charter schools on LAUSD campuses as the law requires, as the district agreed to, as common decency commands.

But they were denied a hearing until their cries of protest forced the board to allow a single representative just three minutes to make their case. It seems the public that pays all the bills needs a reservation to speak their mind and the board's tolerance for public comment is so limited that the taxpayers, parents and concerned citizens need to book a month in advance.

This from a school system that is one of the nation's worst performing.

This from a school district that offered no cooperation with City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's gang intervention and child safety effort at Markham Middle School in Watts while assigning as an assistant principal  a man already under a cloud of suspicion for taking sexual advantage of an underage girl, a man now charged with molesting young teens.

This from a district that squanders tens of millions of dollars to enrich unneeded consultants while facing a massive budget deficit and maintaining an army of six-figure bureaucrats who don't achieve a thing.

It's time to pull the plug and put the LAUSD to sleep.

Antonio Villaraigosa was his usual charming self last night when he dropped by the latter-day secession group Valley Vote to spend 90 minutes or so auditioning his re-election pitch and addressing concerns from overdevelopment to overpaid city workers.

He even said nice things about me even though we disagree on a lot of issues. I got to chat with a lot of these truly concerned citizens who have worked long and hard for a better city whether it's L.A. or the Valley.

Before the mayor arrived, I got a chance to make my own pitch which is that nothing great will happen unless business, civic, social groups of all types across the city unite around a handful of core issues -- like quality schools, safe streets, healthy neighborhoods and good jobs -- and become the third force in city politics equal to the unions and developers/contractors/lobbyists.

Both Antonio and I were warmly received which tells you a lot about the decency of these people and their eagerness to embrace anyone who offers any hope at all at making L.A. a better city.

What intrigues me about everyone who lives inside the bubble of City Hall -- is how the world they operate in makes such perfect sense to them when it seems so corrupt to me. This is true of every politician and staff member and bureaucrat I know even ones who are cynical about what's going on.

Somehow, they can't see that inflated salaries and benefits, civil service rules that reward and protect low achievement and sloppy contracting practices that give away fortunes are the problem.

The mayor is certainly no exception.

His scheme to raise taxes, fees and rates while cutting services almost seems to make a kind of insane sense when you listen to the innocence with which he says that every new dollar he takes in from the public, he'll reduce services by $1.50. He blithely explains away giving pay raises that far exceed inflation even as the economy was sinking, even blaming the economists for not predicting things would be as bad as they are.

As always, he rests his case on the reduction in crime and makes the city's new plans for massive development without community input sound like smart growth.

I'm not going to belabor the point because I'm putting up video of the event. It's the first time I ever tried to shoot with a video camera or post it online. So it'll be pretty amateurish at best. Click here for his answer to a question on city salaries, the Tennie Pierce case is here and here for the first segment of his talk, Part II is here, Part III is here.

UPDATE: I've spoken with Ben Austin who is now working part-time as an assistant city attorney mainly working on litigation involving health care providers and he's paid somewhat less than the salary in the city database. He also works part-time for the Green Dot charter schools on educational issues, an arrangement approved in advance by the City Ethics Commission officials.

Personally I like Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.'s City Attorney, and Ben Austin, the Democratic political consultant Rocky hired as his "director of communications" when he took office back in 2001.

But when I start going through the city salary database put up by the Daily News  along with hard-hitting stories on the outrageous pay of city workers, I find this entry: 

CITY ATTORNEY     ASST CITY ATTORNEY     AUSTIN,BEN B     $119,031.66  

And that makes me mad as hell.

Throughout city government -- government at all levels really -- there are vast public relations operations paid for by the taxpayers.

For the most part, these aren't people who spend a whole lot of time communicating what is actually going on behind the scenes to the public, or providing the public useful information to better understand what government is actually doing.

They are there for one purpose and one purpose only: To make the politicians look good, to make the bureaucrats look good. In fact, their principal mission is to mislead the public about what's going on.

When the obituary is written someday in bankruptcy court for the City of L.A., the cause of death will be described as suicide by a thousand pay raises.

For the No. 1 reason, L.A. is a city that doesn't work for the people is the runaway cost of salaries and benefits for City Hall and its nearly 50,000  employees.

Beth Barrett in the Daily News on Sunday nailed the runaway costs of the city's payroll and put up online in a searchable database the name, job title and salary of every employee.

It's enough to make you sick. Or better yet get mad as hell and ready to do something about it. The editorial accompanying the story said: "Don't just be outraged; act on it. Armed with the information from this series, Angelenos ought to demand that their elected officials begin to correct imbalance of power."

This is a city that has overspent by $500 million even as revenue was soaring in recent years and is now jacking up garbage fees, water and power rates, library and parking fines, golf and recreation fees, you name it. Even as services to the public are being cut.

Get this: City painters earn up $70,000 a year, almost twice what the private sector pays; plumbers as much as $79,000 vs $47,000 outside the city; even the city's batallion of lawyers earn more than those in private practice.

By the time I was 14, my friends and I thought we had figured out something very basic about the American political system and reduced our insight to a very simple slogan: What difference does it make?

A month ago I retired from the Daily News, a month without the identity as a newspaperman, a month without reading a newspaper.

It's strange on many levels all that's happened, and getting my news online only through websites run by corporations and blogs run by individuals is part of that new experience.

I'm a novice to say the least at blogging, learning bit by bit the technology and the art of blogging. I still write like a journalist in long takes, instead of short takes that blogging requires, a few paragraphs at a time.

But for the first time in my life, after 44 years as a reporter and editor, I'm writing publicly under my own name what I think and what I know in the way I want to. No rules but my own. No bosses. No journalistic standards except my own..

It's liberating. Not having a job is liberating. It may seem odd to many that a long-time journalist is finding the exercise of his right of free speech and of the press to be a new experience. But that's the way it is. The news business is just that, a business that manufactures products according to industry standards and consumer expectations. Not one professional journalist out of a thousand has the talent, skill and permission to  exercise the First Amendment in any meaningful way, though most struggle to bring at least some of themselves into the work they produce.

I'm not sure anybody should care about this postinig but it's my blog and I feel like talking about what's been happening in my life.