Who are we to believe?
Most City Council members are going around saying the massive trash fee increase cannot and does not go to hire more cops because that would make it an illegal tax.
But that's not the view of the mayor and his lapdog Councilman Jack Weiss and,
of course, Police Chief Bill Bratton who doesn't care a damn about where they get the money as long as he gets more cops.They all agree that trash fees are the only reason there's 11 fewer murders in L.A. this year -- down from 230 to 219.
Every human life is priceless so here's three cheers to the law-abiding, taxpaying homeowners who have so generously made L.A. such a safe city.
Speaking of reducing crime among homeowners, get ready soon for a "drought buster" in your neighborhood
Stuck in City Council committee for weeks, the DWP's "drought buster" plan finally is set to get the "green" light once summer is over.
The goal is to punish people who water their lawns between
The DWP, armed with all its rate hikes, will deploy 16 DWP "drought busters" -- four per one million residents -- to issue
warnings to first-time violators and fines to repeat offenders.
Actually, they're mostly going to be sitting in offices waiting for informants to report their neighbors or turn in their favorites restaurant. "This won't be simply a matter of 'drought busters' driving around the
city trying to monitor behavior," DWP General Manager H. David Nahai said
Maybe the DWP should hire "crime busters" to keep track of what its management is doing
Questions about the conduct of DWP Chief Operating Officer Raj Raman just won't go away.
The Times and Daily News have stories about a council committee peppering Nahai about contracts award to Raman's former private sector employers after he rejoined the DWP which had fired him several years earlier.
Was there a conflict of interest in awarding the contracts? Absolutely not, says Nahai. At the least the contracts were "handled sloppily," says DWP commission president Nick Patsaouras.
How could anyone question what happened: Raman was talking to DWP officials about the contracts as a representative of several firms and after he was named Nahai's No. 2, those officials came to the stunning conclusion that they'd be smart to hire Raman's former employers.
Absolutely clean, like all -- or nearly all -- corruption in L.A. Why steal if you can take what you want legally.
And in other why-everybody-hates-the-DWP-news...especially in a small town out in the desert somewhere
The Desert Hot Springs City Council voted 5-0
Tuesday to oppose DWP's Green Path North project, a proposed
transmission line that would funnel renewable geothermal energy from the
Ron Kaye is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News where he spent 23 years helping to make the newspaper the voice of the San Fernando Valley and fighting for a city government that serves the people and not special interests.
Twice in recent years, Los Angeles Magazine listed Kaye among the city’s most influential people, specifically in the area of politics. Kaye has been variously described in the media as the “accidental anarchist,” “the Patrick Henry of the San Fernando Valley” and a “passionate populist.” He is now committed to
carrying on his crusade for a greater Los Angeles as an ordinary citizen. Previously, Ron worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
Associated Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Australian as well as papers
in Fairbanks, Alaska and Yakima, Wash. He also wrote for Newsweek magazine, The Guardian in London and the National Enquirer.
16 employees at 60,000+, and 30,000 benefits, plus car + gas. A few million here, a few million there. Pocket change for DWP. Probably why Nahai never noticed his own water bill. Not important enough to even look at it.
There you go again, Ron, spreading bias and misinformation (the nicest word for it) against the Mayor and Weiss. If you are in fact a keen observer of City Hall, as I'd hope, you'd recall that some months ago when the issue came up in Council right after Bernie Parks (head of Council's Budget Comm.) et al suddenly realized the city had a crisis, there was a very public Council battle over this. (Before you accuse me of being some kind of apologist for them, I'm just appalled at how fast and loose with facts your anti-LA side plays to try to score points.)
Bernie ("Bitter Bernie" as your paper the DN was calling him then, for allegedly going against Bratton every chance he got, bitter that he'd been replaced by him) led the charge to openly swipe the trash fees into the General Budget without keeping the promise the Mayor had made that the money would go to hire cops, and he got Karen Sisson/ the CAO to say it would be downright "illegal" to designate monies not raised through a 2/3 public vote for a specific purpose. (He was supported by a testy Tony Cardenas and some others who were trying to use this money to make up for their own lack of Budget oversight.)
However, the Mayor, Weiss, Wendy Greuel -- though she was on the Budget Comm. and tried to finesse the thing -- fought them and insisted that the public's trust had to be maintained, and that the money must go to cops. They won the day in Council IN PRINCIPLE -- what's happened to the money since, in the maws of a labyrinthine and apparently absurdly obscure bookkeeping system (Chick says her audit had to ferret out the money trail by deciphering thousands of accounting steps) is another matter.
Now we have Smith, fresh from his trash junket, full of some sort of righteous indignation that the homeowners have had the nerve to actually expect that their taxes were paying for trash fee pickup, and should not expect that ANY of it would go to cops. Sure not what the Mayor said over and over, and NOT what the Council agreed to after a public battle against his side -- which tried to argue that promises made to the public didn't count. Smith even called them lies, which clearly aren't borne out by the facts -- that's another obviously Republican lie itself. So the Mayor actually meant what he'd promised on this one: he and Weiss want to do everything they can to keep their word to increase the LAPD force to 10,000. (The worst thing he can be accused of is what the Times says in its editorial today: that he was Too trusting that "the accountants" would actually do what they were supposed to with the money.)
What does really worry me is the confusion within the ranks of Council, and lack of commitment to promises made -- especially Greig Smith's blase attitude about promises made to the public over fee hikes/ virtual taxes: you'd think a Republican would, of all people, feel an obligation to the public.
In reference to earlier poster's comment, "What does really worry me is the confusion within the ranks of Council, and lack of commitment to promises made -- especially Greig Smith's blase attitude about promises made to the public over fee hikes/ virtual taxes: you'd think a Republican would, of all people, feel an obligation to the public."
The concept, "The council just can't keep their lies straight." will account for that. And Greig Smith sometimes is right and sometimes is wrong but with a high profile. He usually steps into those things with both feet and when he's wrong, it's bad.
As far as the council goes generally, party affiliation does not make much difference in how they choose to act. It might make a difference when their friends come to town, and more show time, but they are equally dismal in working for the "public good," and firmly entrenched in their misplaced priorities.
I would like to know why they on the council so often are apprised of things and then later act in a way that approaches some emergency mode. I know they used that for manipulating things to lower the pass threshold in votes, but they really do seem not see where things are headed unless they get some money coming into the kitty.
And Mayor Tony V. has pulled this "All engines, full speed ahead" style to getting to the 10,000 level of police officers for the simple purpose of being able to say, "I DID THAT" and take all the rest of the credit so he can head into the governor's race with it and hope it outweighs all the rest of his history.
Now, what you don't take into account is the fact that the DWP hikes were to become effective in gradual steps over several years. Now, they have dumped the whole schedule, boosted the “fee” to the legal maximum and we can see a $72 trash bill added for each 2-month DWP bill beginning in September. WHY? Mayor Tony V., as usual, looking out for himself and everyone else only incidentally. It’s all designed to achieve arriving at the 10,000-officer level- as the mayor “promised.” "Urgency" measure bases are not good styles to follow. It’s just not a sign of good management by the city elected officials and their appointees.
After the council got the idea to hike trash fees in the first place, the story changes. It looks like the collected money that they said was going to be used for the police hires was spent for OTHER things. Thank you, Tony V. and your henchmen (and women, can't leave out Mss. Gruel, Perry and Hahn from this blame), we really needed more bills to pay.
Getting to DWP proper, I’d say David Nahai is just an expensive puppet for Mayor Tony V's will. $310,000.00 annual salary for a puppet, an evil puppet at that. DWP connected activity now automatically gets red-flagged as far as I'm concerned. I somehow don't like the idea that these people get paid so well to be so comfortable while they just screw the public- and enrich their friends as the budget's "coup de grace".