September 2008 Archives

Even as Los Angeles Unified keeps hiring more bureaucrats and fewer teachers -- and the disparity in their pay keeps widening -- the massive school district is disintegrating under an assault from the charter school movement.

On Wednesday, ICEF Public Schools, which operates 13 charters with 3,000 students in South Los Angeles, will announce it's adding 22 new campuses in what it calls the "Education Corridor" - the 45-square-mile region bound by the 110, 105, 405 and 10 freeways.

It should more aptly be called the "Dropout Zone" with half the students quitting school witihout a diploma. With Green Dot already running many schools in the area and having taken over troubled Locke High School, the area will be getting free of LAUSD's stifling bureaucracy, its can't do culture and its 30-year record of failure.

Mostly serving African-American students in one of the city's poorest areas, the Inner City Education Foundation boasts that all its graduates go to college, two- or four-year.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa displayed his usual political chutzpah after the House rejected the $700 Wall Street bailout plan by blustering for Congress to "put politics aside and get back to work for the American people."

It's hard to beat Antonio for pure gall for demanding anyone else work harder.  After all, he's the mayor who works 11 percent of the time and showboats 89 percent of the time.

Turning Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum about speaking softly and carrying a big stick on its head, the mayor issued a press statement that was borderline hysterical.:

"The consequences of doing nothing to fix it would be simply intolerable. The credit market could collapse. Small businesses would struggle or fail to meet payroll. Families would be shut out of the housing market, and would have no ability to get a car loan or student loan for college. On the City side, tax revenues would plummet and construction projects would be delayed or canceled. Bonds would become more expensive and pension contributions would go through the roof."

The last sentence is the one he really means. He gave 6 percent pay raises to thousands of city workers, spent the city $400 million into the red, jacked up rates, fees and taxes to the breaking point  and desperately needs even more cash for massive construction projects to appease the special interests who keep him alive politically.

My congressman Brad Sherman voted "no" on the bill to keep America from falling into another Great Depression.

I think he's got the right idea so I'm going to vote "no" on Brad Sherman come election day in hopes it keeps me from falling into chronic depression. After all, he's wiping out my 401k, jeopardizing my tiny pension and my chances to get a job as a WalMart greeter to keep my house out of foreclosure.

Of course, I don't even know who his Republican challenger is or even if there is one since how I vote -- or you vote -- doesn't matter in California. All our congressional districts like our local and state districts have been gerrymandered to make sure that voting is irrelevant. Democracy works better that way for special interests and both parties prefer it nice and clean in that regard without interference from those troublemakers referred to in the Constitution as We the People.

I'm sure Brad's vote was a matter of conscience just as it was a few years ago when I editorialized in the Daily News about his stooging on the China trade bill for that small minority with big clout called organized labor and he called me up and denounced me as an M-F.

I was cool then. I'm not so cool about pushing the nation to the brink of the worst economic crisis in nearly 80 years. Everybody hates the idea of bailing out the scoundrels who caused this financial disaster and profited from doing it, but I got a question for Brad and the 227 others.

What's your plan to save the economy, the nation? And what about me?

"We're told not to worry because this $700 billion is not going to cost anything," Sherman told reporters in Washington, D.C. "Wall Street gets its money now, and we get it back never."

Say what? You calling the President of the United States and the men who would succeed him -- including your own favorite Barack Obama -- liars?

Acting in the face of growing controversy in political circles and from the community, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, acting as MTA board chairman, has decided to end the planned $4.2 million "informational" marketing campaign the agency launched with public funds for the Measure R half-cent sales tax hike.

The campaign for the $40 billion measure sparked widespread criticism with its website PR effort and a full-page ad in the Times that many felt crossed the line into outright promotion -- an illegal use of the public's money -- and with a $1 million mailing of a 16-page color brochure to the nearly four million households in L.A. County.

The brochure itself, carefully gone over by lawyers, skirted the law but left out vital information about the timeline for the vast wish list of projects contained in Measure R and failed to acknowledge that many road and transit projects will never be completed since there are now real cost estimates and substantial funding from the state and federal governments are unlikely to come through given the financial climate.

The word on the street is that county Supervisor Gloria Molina has grown highly critical of the campaign in the face of the need for money to make safety improvements to prevent another Metrolink train disaster and was prepared to escalate her attacks.

Fear not, you will still face a blitzkrieg of TV ads and mailings from outside the MTA in a campaign financed by the usual special interests that will profit from Measure R: Contractors, consultants, unions and the various lobbyists, strategists and operatives who live so well off their "access" to the politicians.

What galls me most of all about the utter contempt with which L.A.'s political and civic elite treats the neighborhoods and the people of the city is that we miss the opportunity to mobilize our human resources for the greater good of everyone.

Sooner or later, they have to be made to understand that this is our L.A.; it belongs to the people and we can make it the kind of city that it ought to be -- not the kind of city that tramples on the interests, values and needs of the people and slavishly serves the special interests without regard to the common good.

Here's just one of th 1,000 proofs of what I say, today's email from the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council which shows the kind of good works that communities are doing all over L.A.:

Having Trouble Dealing With Metrolink Trauma?
Chatsworth Support Group Can Help You Cope
Please share your thoughts with other first-responders, volunteers

Whether you were a first-responder, a volunteer, or a neighbor living in the Chatsworth community, join this group for conversation and grief/trauma education. This support meeting is planned to help you cope with thoughts and feelings about the Metrolink train tragedy. When: Saturday, Oct. 11 Time: 10 a.m. - Noon Where: St. Stephen Presbyterian Church community room, 20121 Devonshire St., at the corner of Winnetka Avenue RSVP and Questions: support@chatsworthcouncil.org Refreshments will be served. The program will be facilitated by Our House Grief Support Center, Randi Wolfson, LMFT, Adult Program Coordinator, in cooperation with the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council's Outreach Committee.   This meeting is designed for adults 18 years of age and over. For those needing further counseling or therapeutic services, please contact: San Fernando Valley Mental Health Center at 10605 Balboa Blvd., Suite 100 Granada Hills, (818) 832-2400 or  West Valley Mental Health Center at 7621 Canoga Ave. Canoga Park, (818) 598-6900. The 24-hour crisis hotline is (800) 854-7771.

Neighborhood Councils, resident associations, service clubs, religious institions and community groups of every type, race and philosophical point of view contribute to the health and well-being of our L.A. every day.

What does it say about the City Hall's political culture that not one single elected official will stand with the people and denounce a system sees the public as nothing but a cash cow to provide sweetheart contracts and handsome paydays to unions, contractors, developers, lobbyists and consultants?

Hard as this may be to believe, given all the lip service paid to fixing our failing schools, LAUSD's "bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent."

Got that? $20 billion invested in new school buildings and millions more to pay the salaries of a bloated bureaucracy and there's fewer teachers than six years ago to educate 650,000 children who still are almost as likely to drop out as get a diploma, whose test scores still remain abysmally low.

That's from Sunday's Daily News in a story by Beth Barrett, her final story at the paper after more than 20 years of exposing the sins and crimes of L.A.'s political and civic leadership.

It's accompanied by a searchable database that provides the name, salary and job of every LAUSD employee. What it shows is that the average salary of the district's 4,000 administrators. managers and other nonschool-based employees is $95,000 -- more than administrators are paid elsewhere. The average teacher salary: $63,000 -- less than teachers are paid elsewhere.

What teachers have been saying for decades is now a demonstrable fact: Classrooms have been robbed of resources to pay six-figure salaries to bureaucrats whose main function in life is to stifle the creativity and energy of the people who hold the future of our children, of our city, in their hands -- the teachers.

"(The bureaucracy) grows whether it's fat or lean times," said United Teachers Los Angeles union leader A.J. Duffy. "It's iindicative of an upper echelon, of a leadership cadre that doesn't want to use its authority to clean house."

Get rid of 1,000 of the bureaucrats and $95 million plus a third more for benefits is freed up for  classroom resources and to reward thousands of the best teachers with the salaries befitting the value of their contribution. Get rid of 2,000 and you might actually have a district that starts to work.

After 30 years of decline and failure, somebody should have figured out what the problem was and done something about it.

For all those years, we've heard repeatedly that it's the children's fault because there's too many that come from poor or immigrant families. And it turns out the biggest problem is too many bureaucrats and leadership that is too feeble to face the truth.

They point fingers at everybody else but the truth is the city's leadership lacks the political will to do anything about the LAUSD's most glaring problem or any of L.A.'s other glaring problems for that matter.

And when you see what LAUSD's board members and bureaucrats have to say in Barrett's story you can see that the mentality exposed by then Inspector General Don Mullinax years ago -- Deny, Defend, Deflect -- remain at the core of the culture of failure within the district.

What does it take to get real reform?

Breakup of the district was squelched. Dick Riordan's takeover of the school board got shanghaied. Charter schools have faced resistance every inch of the way. One superintendent after another has proven unable to act decisively. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school czar plan amounts to indirect control of less than a dozen schools and the insertion of Ray Cortines into LAUSD's No. 2 job, a role that has created more confusion than clarity of purpose.

Maybe Duffy and the teachers union is right that a strike's needed. But it's going to take a strike by parents, students and the teachers backed by the community as a whole to change the culture of LAUSD once and for all and put the district's resources to work where it counts: In the classroom.

Frankly, they can take this $7 billion bond issue on the November ballot and shove it. Let's see them dismantle this system first before they stick their hands in our pockets again.

Even before the governor signed legislation allowing the MTA to put its $40 billion tax hike on the November ballot, mailboxes at homes all over Los Angeles County -- all 3.87 million of them - were filled with beautiful and colorful 16-page brochures explaining what your money will buy.

It reads like a transportation miracle: Eased congrestion, freeway and street and rail and bus expansions, more synchronized lights and pothole repairs, safer roads for drivers and cyclists and pedestrians, safer and cleaner transit and -- unbelievably -- existing fares will be maintained "especially for seniors and the disabled."

Best of all, your taxes will "enable people and freight to move freely in L.A. County."

Now that is quite an education we got for our money but I'm skeptical. These are carefully scripted claims that could be fulfilled with one extra pothole, one extra synchronized light and so on right through the wish list.

It all depends what actual plans get developed and implemented, how much costs run out of control as they always do and most of all which projects go first. So the likelihood is there won't be money left 20 years from now to complete everything especially with the top two projects being the costliest of all: The "subway-nearly-to-the--sea" or more precisely Westwood and the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica.

Out of all the information contained in the education and "information purposes only" brochure, there seems to be one serious omission: No timeline.

Understand, this is about educating voters -- advocating they actually vote for the wish list. That's because the MTA is forbidden by law from using public money to advocating support for the half-cent sales tax. It can only inform the public about what the plans are for their money but there's no law that says they have to give complete information.

Crimes of commission, no. Crimes of omission, yes. MTA officials say they were scrupulous on that point and a dozen lawyers carefully went over every word, every element of the brochure. Sorry, I forgot to ask how they billed for their work.

But I did get what the 3.87 million brochures cost to print: $486,360 at at about 12. 5 cents. And to mail at 13.7 each or $528.297 each. A total of $1,014,657 in public money -- nearly a quarter of the total budget authorized by the MTA in July for its "information purposes only" education campaign.

The $4 million or so in public money for education is undoubtedly a drop in the bucket compared to what contractors, consultants, unions and other special interests will cough up to actually convince the public that their $40 billion will really, truly, honestly produce a traffic and transit system that works in 30 years.

You can trust them on that, I'm sure. Just because billions and billions have been poured into transportation projects for the last 30 years and congestion keeps getting worse is no reason to question the MTA this. Remember that old stock market rule: Past performance is no indicator of future performance.

I'm not a bad lawyer mayself and I've gone through the brochure and I could defend everything in it as educational, not advocacy. I'm also not a bad journalist and I get a certain delight in showing that it does make promises that are meaningless, vague or questionable since nothing is actually costed out.

And if you really believe that "people and freight will move freely in L.A. County" in 30 years, you're a dreamer or gullible. They are saying where in L.A. County this will occur and they certainly aren't saying it will happen in all or most or anywhere in particular.

I affirm to you the language in the brochure is as perfectly "educational" as lawyers could make it without actually promising anything that could make officials accountability for how they spend your money.

Who the hell do you people think you are questioning the mayor of Los Angeles...this isn't some small town out in the desert somewhere

An interesting study by UCLA Law Professor Gary Blasi casts doubt about whether the mayor's highly-touted plan to blanket skid row with cops was worth it in terms of crime reduction.

"Importantly, our study shows there was no statistically significant effect on serious, violent crime in Skid Row, with the exception of a very small effect as to the crime of robbery," Biasi tell the Daily News.

What he found was that the 50 extra cops pulled off patrol from all around the city has resulted in roughly 50 less robberies -- one per cop -- and that crime in other categories was down to the same degree it is everywhere in the city He also suggests that more people actually living in homes downtown and "walking on the streets...serves to deter crime" among the homeless.

Fair enough but that kind of talk gets under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's skin and doesn't help him in his one-issue quest for a coronation instead of an election in March.

"The Blasi report plays games with the numbers in order to achieve a desired outcome and totally ignores the real progress made on the streets," Szabo said. "A 60 percent drop in homicides might not be 'significant' to some in the academic world, but it's a life-and-death issue for the residents of Skid Row.

"The mayor makes no apologies whatsoever for slashing violent crime in a neighborhood which had been neglected for decades."

Speaking of getting under people's skin...I don't know why former Mayor Jim Hahn gets so angry whenever I say something

So there I was downtown at City Hall Thursday morning participating in a panel on charter reform, part of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce's L.A. Access program that attracted about 500 people.

George Kieffer, the attorney and former Chamber head who somehow got charter reform through a political thicket a decade ago, moderated the discussion with UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, SEIU leader Julie Butcher, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, Neighborhood Empowerment GM BongHwan Kim, Hahn and myself.

The others had a generally positive take on charter reform while acknowledging some problems depending on their point of view. Not being able to control myself as usual, I called it "a disaster" but said it was worth the price because it sparked a grassroots democracy movement for the first time in L.A. history.

Suddenly, the man sitting next to me, Hahn, exploded. I don't know why I seem to get under his skin. Perhaps, it was the occasional criticisms I offered in the Daily News of his lackluster leadership as mayor and the fact it had something to do with his achieving the impossible -- losing a re-election bid.

Here's how Dave Zahniser in the Times saw it: 

"Always more of a politician than Hahn, Kaye worked the populist themes that he had embraced for years, describing city government as systemically corrupt...'The city has never had democratic institutions in its whole history. It's been ruled by narrow elites from Day One.'

"That was too much for Hahn, who rolled his eyes and audibly groaned. 'We haven't had democratic institutions in the city of Los Angeles?' he asked, incredulous.

"After staying quiet a few more minutes, Hahn spoke up: 'I think I'm a living example of how democracy works. I was denied a second term. If we didn't have democracy, I probably wouldn't be on this panel.'"

I could have made a crack about how having a father named Kenny Hahn who was L.A.'s most popular and well-connected politician for 40 years helped but I'm too much of a gentleman.

An hour later I was at the Justice Armand Arabian public service awards banquet where I was being honored along with such truly deserving people as Gerald Turpanjian, Jayne Shapiro, Greg Baker, Greig Smith, Tommy Lasorda and Daryl Gates.

Now, if there's anyone in L.A. public life who has reason to be unforgiving of my wicked ways, it's the former police chief. My attacks on his chief-for-life status and the excesses of the old LAPD started back in the early 80s at the Herald-Examiner and kept up to the day he was forced from office.

But time can heal all wounds and we shook hands and chatted a while as if we were old friends.

There's only one way to go now: Ask the Supreme Court to hold an emergency session to rule before the November candidates deadline on whether the fundamental constitutional protection against deceit in state legislation and ballot initiatives applies to the City of Los Angeles.

The court likely would refuse to hear the question of whether the public was deceived by slipping a third term for City Council members into a so-called ethics reform measure that targeted those evil-doing lobbyists. Of course, lobbyists are the symbol -- not the source -- of City Hall's corruption.

That dishonor belongs to politicians who beg special interests for campaign money and then do their bidding -- and give unlimited access to the lobbyists, lawyers and PR flacks who get rich representing them. All Prop. R did was save lobbyists from writing personal checks to the politicians anymore.

If the court did hear the appeal  and extended the constitutional ban on such multiple issue measures, we would have wide open elections for the council in March.

If, in the end, it upheld the city's right to such a license to deceive, two can play that game.

What would stop community activists from putting together an initiative that cut council salaries in half, limited the number of take-home cars for political staff, required complete disclosure of campaign contributions and interests in real time, mandated a fixed percentage of city money to police and fire, moved city elections to general election days and so on.

Call it the Clean L.A. Plan or CLAP. Think about it.

Here's what the State Court of Appeals ruled today:

"Appellants point to nowhere in the California Constitution, or elsewhere in state

law, expressly imposing a single subject restriction on ballot measures sponsored by the

governing body of a charter city such as Los Angeles.

The Constitution must be interpreted by the language in which it is written, since

"'courts are no more at liberty to add provisions to what is therein declared in definite

language than they are to disregard any of its express provisions.'" (Delaney v. Superior

Court (1990)

50 Cal.3d 785, 799.) We conclude the single subject rule does not apply to

a city council sponsored ballot measure such as Measure R."

The full opinion is at:
 http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B203097.PDF

 

The wheels of justice turn slowly and awkwardly at best and that's little consolation to the victims of lawless behavior.

It all seemed so simple those many months ago when when my neighbors found out the foreclosed home nearby was being converted into a three-unit tenement -- three kitchens, four baths, more than a dozen rooms in all -- in 2,000 square feet.

Last month, the city charged the owners of the property at 19953 Haynes St. in Woodland Hills with four misdemeanor crimes -- illegal use of land, illegal occupancy, construction without a permit and failure to comply -- and gave them six weeks to appear in court.

Wednesday was their day in court. They didn't show up, Their lawyer didn't call. Warrants were issued for their arrest.

So tonight nothing has changed. There are still five or six cars in the driveway, the neighbors are still upset at seeing the modest stake in paradise being trashed by ineffective city policies and Kashi the dog  still is chained in front of the house and has my dog Bruno so scared he looks the other way when we walk by.

I learned in recent months that this kind of thing is going on all over the city and not enough is being done about it. Most of the time neighbors have to get together and make a big stink to get action.

While City Hall is saving us from second-hand smoke in the parks and taking money for the visual blight of 24-hour-a-day monster flashing electronic billboards, neighborhoods all over the city are being turned into slums.

I went to court in Van Nuys today to see how the system works when these defendants -- Nady Madhavi who bought the house in January and flipped it in May and something called Fidelity Investments LLC of Bellflower, the third owner in six months -- were due to enter their pleas.

I watched prostitues and druggies and abusers of animals and wives went before Magistrate Rebecca Omens one after another, most of them needing two or three months to pay fines and costs of $200 or so.

And I watched Deputy City Attorney Donald Cocek, with two Building and Safety officials standing by, deal with one case after another and patiently take time to talk to people accused of violating Building and Safety laws and regulations.

His goal was to get the problem fixed, to get people to comply with the rules, get permits and fix up their properties to code. There was a man who needed a Thai interpreter, one who needed a Korean interpreter, a third who needed a Spanish interpreter.

These were people who didn't understand the rules, who weren't turning single family homes into tenements, who weren't destroying the quality of life in their neighborhoods for profit. Cocek has a 100 percent compliance record in these cases.

My case was different and he was surprised no one showed up for it. But he's just the guy who handles the case in court, the guy who asks the judge to issue the arrest warrants. The Building and Safety guys just enforce the code.

Nobody, as far as this sleuth has been able to determine, actually investigates the relationships between the the three different owners this year of the house at 19953 Haynes Street. Nobody looks for the patterns, the larger abuses. And nobody can do anything about it as the clock keeps ticking and the rent keeps flowing in at the rate of about $5,000 a month.

The wheels of justice move slowly and the neighborhood's resentment over this nuisance keeps growing and City Hall keeps fiddling around while the city burns.

I was afraid this was going to happen when I posted the 32 claims of greatness made on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's behalf by his supporters -- people are starting to challenge the assertion that he's making Los Angeles "the greenest city in America."

Some critics note the Department of Water and Power isn't getting rid of coal burning power plants as much as its buying wind power at an enormous premium from the Northwest -- costs that are passed through straight to ratepayers as add-on charges above the soaring rates.

Then, there's the problem NIMBYs trying to preserve the quality of life in their neighborhoods with his green-lighting every development put on the table to drive revenue into the city treasury and make his campaign contributors happy while increasing the population and the demand for more electricity.

Some cynics even complained that the deal to restore the Owens River Valley started long before he took office and that the "expanded" recycling program for apartment dwellers is so miniscule as to be laughable.

And supporters of the South Central Farm -- progressives like the people who published Antonio's List -- didn't take to kindly to the idea the mayor "developed a new 9 acre farm in Watts for 150 of the displaced South L.A. Farm families.'' They point out the South Central Farm produced food for 350 families before it was bulldozed for redevelopment by Forever 21, which funneled $1.3 million to the mayor's campaigns and now can supply just 75 families.

There's just no pleasing all the people all the times or even some of the people some of the time. Isn't that the point to Antonio's game?

Here's how the green-conscious website SustainLane.com rates L.A. -- No. 28 right behind New Orleans. Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York top the list. Even Cleveland is 16th.

Here's the site's view and commentary on L.A.:

From Washington to Sacramento to the seats of power in L.A. city and county government, poltiicians suddenly have awakened to the fact that these are hard times  -- $700 billion to bail out bankers will do that to you.

Of course, ordinary citizens already knew how bad things are because they go to the grocery story, pay for their own gas and have been scrambling to pay the mortgage for a long time.

But don't worry. Nearly three months late, the governor signed a record $145 billion state budget, nixing $1 billion out of spending for the elderly poor and the poor with children -- a budget his own money man Mike Genest called "not nearly adequate" and Democratic State Controller John Chiang, a Democrat said "was out of balance the moment it was signed."

At the county, Chief Executive Officer Bill Fujioka put a hold on new spending, including projects already approved, in anticipation of his final budget presentation in a couple of weeks.

"If I can use an analogy of sorts, we need to start storing our nuts because it's going to be a very cold winter," Fujioka said.

At City Hall, the mayor and his colleagues indicated they intended to store theirs to protect the city's pension funds, debt portfolios, possible future bond expenditures and the impact on capital projects -- and crush yours.

"If this continues in the way it has over the last few weeks, then it's inevitable that the department's going to have to look at our water and power rates," Councilman Tony Cardenas is quoted as saying in the last graph of the Times story.

A fount of wisdom, Cardenas also puts the finishing touch in the Daily News story: "We should not be using public tax dollars to reward bad behavior."

The mayor himself took a similar tack: "It's absolutely ludicrous that anybody would propose a $700-billion bailout that could go to more than a trillion dollars . . . without regulation, without accountability."

It's enough to make you laugh -- or cry, depending on your mood.

Here these people -- everyone one of them -- has squandered the public's wealth while achieving precious little for the public benefit.

And now they're giving the pointed finger to Washington and Wall Street 3,000 miles away and talking about "accountability" and "rewarding bad behavior" and the problems they face borrowing money to cover up the phony budgets they approved.

And they even have the nerve to talk raising water and power rates yet again? For what? to give DWP workers another 6 percent raise next year? Oh, I almost forgot they've already written that into contract.

     WINNER                                                LOSER

                                              

                              

           OR

Here's what "progressives" who are part of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa support team list as his achievements in just three short years and why they're gathering downtown Sunday to contribute $250 to $1,000 each ("$100 non-profit hardship")

ANTONIOthegame.doc

They've come up with a list of 32 achievements to show he's done a great job. Some people might question whether "mutual gain bargaining" is an achievement or what's mutual about 6 percent raises for DWP workers during a national economic crisis is a mutual gain. Or whether he bulldozed the South Central Farm or "developed" it. Or even whether he had anything to do with any of these things.

Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So here's how to play Antonio, The Game: Just put your comments on specific achievements or failures, false claims or honest truths, in the comments sections and I will keep you posted. It's a win-win game, everybody gets to speak up. I'll keep the tally. The decision of the judge is final.

EXPANDING OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL

-This Mayor has tripled the number of youth summer jobs, from 3,000 in 2005, to over 10,000.

-He and his office have mediated the key sessions to secure new contracts for hotel workers, janitors, security officers, private waste haul drivers, and secured labor peace at the MTA and within the city through the introduction of mutual gains bargaining.

-Supported low wage workers, through the new Day Labor ordinance, support for the "Car Washeros," increased fares and appointed a strong commission to support Taxi drivers.

-Developed local hire requirements on most city construction contracts, resulting in over 1000 new paid African-American apprentices since July 1, 2006, and thousands of new local careers in the construction trades.

-Passed and defended a Living Wage Ordinance covering hotel workers in the 13 airport hotels.

-Quadrupled city job training programs. With this and other labor and workforce programs, are more than halfway toward moving 100,000 Angelenos into living wage jobs by 2010.

-Supported over 100,000 Angelenos participating in community service through 16 Days of Service, and major funding and support for two "Big Sundays." 

ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

-Tripled the amount of clean, renewable energy sold by the DWP

-Adopted the Clean Air Action Plan to reduce air pollution at Port by 45%; working with Labor and the Environmental community to replace trucks while addressing driver standards.

-Restored water to the Lower Owens River

-Expanded curb-side recycling to multi-family housing, schools, and restaurants.

-Adopted Green Building Standards, that will reduce carbon emissions more than any other green building standard in the country.

-Developed a new 9 acre farm in Watts for 150 of the displaced South L.A. Farm families

-Working with the Apollo Alliance on a Green Retrofit and Workforce campaign.

HOUSING

-For the first time, fully funded the $100 Million Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and have done so in each of the last three years.

-Investing $200 million in permanent supportive housing for the homeless.

-Supported & signed ordinance that secured higher relocation fees for displaced renters.

-About to release L.A.'s Housing Plan, with a mixed income component.  

Echoes of Tennie Pierce -- LAPD officer gets a $3.1 million bonus thanks to his bosses' misconduct

For the fifth time in the last three years, retaliation by LAPD brass against officers who report misconduct by their bosses will cost taxpayers a lot of money.

Does LAPD have a problem? Is there still a code of silence? Is retaliation against whistleblowers common?

You be the judge --- actually, you don't have to. A jury did that job Monday and awarded Officer Robert Hill, a 25-year veteran, $3.1 million because he was transferred from Northeast Division to Newton Division for refusing to back down on his complaint against Sgt. Gilbert Curtis.

Hill who was a senior lead officer reported that Curtis, listed as Hispanic in LAPD records, stole money from the Youth Explorer Program and used racial slurs like "wetbacks" and went around saying things like, "If God loved them, why did he make them black?"

LAPD brass decided the two just didn't get along (Curtis filed a police report in 2005 claiming his subordinate had threatened to kill him) so they separated them by moving Hill to patrol in Newton and exonerating Curtis of wrongdoing.

That was a big mistake -- retaliation of such a terrible nature that Hill  "should receive $3 million for pain and suffering in addition to $127,500 in lost earnings."

I don't know about you but I've faced worse retaliation than that for my big mouth and I don't know anybody who wouldn't have eaten spaghetti with dog food sauce for the $2.7 million the city originally agreed to pay firefighter Tennie Pierce for his pain and suffering -- or even the $1.6 million he finally got (the rest going to his lawyers who didn't have to eat dog food).

Is the jury system the problem? Is the City Attorney's office incompetent? Does LAPD brass protect its own and punish underlings? Is there no workplace discipline in city government?

Batten down the hatches, Chick's got another audit of suspicious contracting at L.A.'s port

Everyone who's ever owned a boat knows it's nothing but a hole to put money in. L.A.'s port is much the same except the port's hole sends money out to contractors, often in a manner best described as pay-to-play.

City Controller Laura Chick slammed that practice in a 2003, followed up in 2005 and is issuing another full audit today so we'll be finding out if real progress has been in protecting the public's money.

Here's what she said three years ago:

"It is time the Port of Los Angeles comes fully into the 21st century, and that includes opening itself up to public scrutiny. One significant step forward that the Harbor Commission must take is to publicly adopt and implement a sound leasing policy"

Life is so unfair even for wannabe City Attorney Jack Weiss, the councilman with the lackluster record of public service who wants to ride the mayor's coattails into the City Attorney's Office.

Poor Jack has worked so hard to lock up the race without actually doing anything by raising a fortune from the same people buying favors from the mayor but people in his district and all around town keep referring to him as Jack Weiss(el) or Jack the Weasel.

And now Rick Orlov in the Daily News reports "Someone bought the domain name jackweissforcityattorney.com and linked it to the Recall Jack Weiss Web site that started more than a year ago."

Weiss campaign manager Larry Levine -- a master of political dirty tricks -- laments: "We didn't buy a domain name. It's just a dirty trick. I guess someone thinks it's important or clever."

There are viable alternatives to Weiss in Assistant City Attorney Michael Amerian and Harbor area environmental attorney Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich. Videos of them talking recently to the Saving L.A. Project are worth watching.

Forget the collapse of Amercia's banking industry and the horrible train collision in Chatsworth, forget everything and suffer amnesia with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who is descending into the bowels of City Hall East today to show off for the TV cameras and the assembled members of media his latest achievement.

Dailynews.com reports today "'Operation Bottleneck Relief Phase IV" will use variable green light intervals and other traffic signal tweaks to improve traffic flow at an additional 60 of L.A.'s most-congested intersections, according to a spokesman for the mayor.'"

What the mayor is actually showing off is the latest upgrade to the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System developed by city traffic engineers 24 years ago -- the last time the city Department of Transportation did anything right -- to regulate the duration of traffic signals depending on traffic congestion.

The city's own website explains: "Based on the successful performance of the Coliseum Area ATSAC System during the 1984 Olympic Games, the ATSAC System is being implemented citywide. To date, ATSAC has been implemented at 3,100 of 4,300 City of Los Angeles signalized intersections."

ATSAC has gotten so much publicity over the years that even something called "Swindle" magazine published a lengthy story praising the system.

"L.A. traffic is the worst in the country. Rush hour can stretch for over eight hours a day. According to the Texas Transportation Institute's (TTI) 2005 Urban Mobility Study, the average peaktime traveler spent 93 excess hours sitting in congestion in 2003, and traffic jams cost each commuter about $1,600 per year in extra fuel and time lost. Yet, as costly and time consuming as L.A. traffic is, it could be worse. Much worse."

ATSAC's operations center is four stories below ground in a windowless room where traffic flow data pours in from sensors at intersections and seven large video screens show what's happening at various locations around the city.

It's not the least bit clear what if anything the mayor has to do with ATSAC or why he would claim credit for it -- unless, of course, his standing in the polls is at an all-time low, he's running for re-election and his campaign for a $40 billion sales tax hike for transportation projects is in deep trouble.

But then adding 60 more intersections -- barely 1 percent of the city's total intersections -- getting the latest upgrade to ATSAC is pretty exciting if you look at it as the mayor and political consultants.

What they see is a 60 percent increase in the 103 intersections already upgraded and can boast the mayor achieved something great to make your life better.

"According to a statement issued Sunday...(ATSAC) resulted in a reduction of 900,000 delay hours each year while reducing the average driver's time spent at red lights by 8 seconds per signal," dailynews.com reports.

California Time Bomb: Watch out for the fallout from a phony state budget and the impact of 873 bills the governor has eight days to act on

In the best of times, the legislative process produces a flood of measures in the frantic last hours of every session, many containing unnoticed provisions that pander to special interests or have explosive consequences

These are not the best of times, with the Legislature shattering all records for failing to meet the constitutional requirement of passing a state budget by July 1.

Of course, the politicians don't pay for their failure, you do. Many programs were disrupted and lives affected without state funds for three months, the budget that finally passed last week did nothing to solve the fiscal crisis they created and 873 bills held hostage in the budget stalemate are awaiting action by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The governor has just eight days to sign or veto all the bills or let them become law without a signature. Jim Saunders in the Sacramento Bee recently gave a rundown recently of what some of the 873 bills contain but I'm willing to bet a lot worse will be discovered in the coming days.

Here's a sampling of what the pols fiddled around with while California burned: Ban driving with an animal in your lap or while text messaging, banning employers from discriminating against medical marijuana users, giving driver's licenses and college scholarships to illegal immigrants, allowing churches to operate multiple bingo games at different locations but not electronic bingo that would compete with Indian casinos, require chain restaurants to post calories of menu items and exempting raw milk from bacteria regulations.

Then, there's a host of anti-business bills and the measure to set a state-run universal health care system that don't stand a chance of getting by even as half-hearted a Republican as Arnold. 

 

Now is the time make a stand for a great city, to pull together and support each to change the political culture of Los Angeles.

Nothing but greed holds the system that has failed  the people for so long together. It will topple like the Berlin Wall in the face of united community opposition. We need to take action now to demand that the interests, values and needs of the city's people must be respected.

If you're fed up and ready to get involved, here's some inspiration from the movie "Network"
madashell.WMA

Trains don't kill, people do -- that's perfectly clear from the latest Metrolink tragedy and the terrible record of carnage on the Long Beach Blue Line.

Here's the facts: Metrolink has "one of the worst fatality records of any commuter rail system in the nation" with 74 fatalities this decade and the Blue Line has recorded 90 fatalities, 64 involved pedestrians, 26 vehicles, none train passengers.

That's what happens when you do things on the cheap. Safety last might well be the motto for the L.A. transit system.

The blood on the tracks around L.A. is the inevitable consequence of building a rail system at grade for the most part in a heavily-congested urban area. Subways, trenches, elevateds, grade separations are the rule almost everywhere else but not L.A.

And since we refuse to learn from our past mistakes, we are condemned to repeat them. The Expo Line now under construction from downtown to Culver City and the Westside is a prime example.

Damien Goodmon of the Fix Expo Citizen's Campaign has organized the community into an effective force to fight against street-level crossings, particularly in the area around Dorsey High School where hundreds of students have to cross the tracks every morning and afternoon.

He warns of the certainty of deadly accidents in the area and recently wrote: "MTA/Expo Authority don't have public support for their unsafe street level crossings...We need mass transit solutions, but it has to be done right, and done safely, and the impacts should be equitable across all directly adjacent residential communities."

His campaign has been so successful that the Expo Authority, set up by the MTA as a separate agency, is fighting back with its own organizing and information operation run by Dakota Communications, the same firm that used such hardball tactics in the Sunland-Tujunga/Home Depot controversy that the community became inflamed and became highly organized.

I talked at length recently with Expo Authority spokeswoman Samantha Bricker who argued Fix Expo was engaged in a campaign of "disinformation" and the record had to be set straight so Dakota was hired for its expertise in community outreach.

She patiently and carefully took me though how the costs of Phase I of  the project had jumped a third to $860 million and how it was now on track in terms of budget and completion in 2010. As she explained it, the reasons seemed rational enough as did why the line goes underground at Flower and above ground in Culver City.

What interested me most was the idea that some kind of bizarre concept of social equity is in play:

"We're meeting all the requirements of state and federal agencies for safety at the crossings," she told me. "But even apart from the costs involved, it wouldn't be fair. We had to use the same standards that applied to the Gold Line and the Blue Line."

Isn't that the point? Isn't it why the community around Dorsey High is up in arms and Westsiders are already organized and ready for war over design for at-grade crossings for Phase II of the Expo Line?

We got it wrong in the first place because our leaders don't care about the consequences of their actions.

They built the Blue Line on the cheap so they could put most of the money available into the subway from downtown to the Westside. But they only got as far as Hollywood since the Westside didn't want it for reasons that we don't need to go into.

They only got just over the hill to the Valley because they used community opposition to save money for the Gold Line. So they built the Orange Line busway on the cheap at grade.

And now they want $40 billion in sales taxes to build the "subway-to-the-sea" while leaving everybody else at risk of death when they cross the tracks and stuck in traffic congestion because the public transit system is grossly inadequate.

That's not a vision for easing traffic congestion or for protecting the lives of the people.


 

Hooray for Councilman Tom LaBonge -- he's heeded the cry of the city, given into his heart and declared his commitment to protect L.A.'s greatest historical-cultural asset from the kind of trashy developments that are destroying so many of the our neighborhoods.

A lot of people have been worried that LaBonge had lost his way and was stooging for the greedy special interests who don't give a damn about L.A. but he sent out a mass mailing this week to the public, his colleagues on the City Council and, most importantly to the mayor, asserting his own values and his independence of thought..

Of course, there are questions about the details and nuances and especially his commitment to preserve the Southwest Museum as a living museum and not let it be destroyed by the Autry Natonal Center which has yet to prove itself financially viable or respectful of the history, culture or art of the West.

But here's what Tom had to say about keeping Griffith park "a park for the people" so you can judge for yourself:

September 17,2008

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your recent communication concerning historic-cultural designation for Griffith Park. All of us share a great love for what I consider this city's most treasured and greatest gift, Griffith Park.
Currently, the City's Cultural Heritage Commission has taken this historical designation under consideration. They will be making a recommendation that, once approved, will be forwarded to the City Council for deliberation.
I have encouraged the Commission staff to have a thoughtful discussion with Department of Recreation and Parks staff to interpret exactly what a historic designation would mean to the park and its operation. I have always been a proponent of preservation. It was my idea to apply for historic designation for the Griffith Observatory in 1976. I want to make sure other buildings, like the Greek Theater, get their designation to add to the nine existing historic sites in the park.
Additionally, the second and most current draft of the updated Griffith Park Master Plan will be reviewed soon. I want to make sure that historic designation would not conflict with the Master Plan when it's adopted.
Griffith Park is currently more than 4,218 acres: One of my major goals is to expand the park to the west, especially the area near Cahuenga Peak and the Hollywood sign. Additionally, I want to connect the park to the Los Angeles River and its revitalization.
There's a lot of misinformation out there. I hike to Mount Hollywood every morning and there have been fliers stapled to trees accusing me of supporting development in the park. I do not endorse any development plans in the park. All of the items mentioned in the emails are things I rejected years ago when I opposed the first draft of the Master Plan. That is why I formed the working group to create the second draft.
If you would like to hike with me to discuss this further, please call me at my office at (213)485-3337. Additionally, on Tuesday, September 23 at 4 p.m., I will lead a tour of the park by van for all interested parties. On that same date, I will lead a hike to Mt. Hollywood from the Fall Equinox SunsetHike. See attached flyer.
I am honored to serve this City and protect and enhance Griffith Park. My primary objective is to do what Colonel Griffith Jenkins Griffith wanted: to keep Griffith Park a park for the people.

What is there to say?

You're living in fear of losing your job. You can't afford the soaring costs of gas or food. Your neighbor just lost his house and you wonder how much longer you can keep up with your mortgage. You've got no pension and your 401k is shrinking faster than you put money into it. Your kid's school is rotten and you're worried about what the future will hold for your family.

Then you find out that all those rate hikes you're paying for water and power are going straight into the paychecks of 8,500 DWP workers who average nearly $80,000 a year already and never have to worry about losing their jobs or their pensions worth 75 percent of their salaries.

And on Oct. 1, they're getting another 6 percent raise compliments of a sweetheart contract granted them by the people who take a solemn oath to serve you and protect your interests.

I can't really say you elected them since the mayor and City Council were really put into office by special interests and the biggest and powerful of those interest is Brian D'Arcy, the business manager/financial secretary of Local 18, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

You can Google and search all you want but you won't find many pictures or quotes from D'Arcy in the public record.

He doesn't need the public; he owns the public's representatives and they tremble at the thought of crossing him as if their lives or at least their careers would be at risk if they crossed hiim.

That's how he got a five-year contract in 2005 for his workers (which includes almost everyone at DWP except the top tier of executives) that provided 3.25 percent annual pay increases with an escalator clause that could lift that to 6 percent depending on inflation

This is the year when the escalator clause kicked in with a vengeance because of the high cost of fuel and food -- the year when massive rate hikes were imposed to fix the water and power infrastructure that was allowed to deteriorate because so much money was going into DWP salaries and benefits and being transfered to the city general fund so the rest of the workforce could keep pace.

Kerry Cavanaugh in the Daily News puts the actual raise this year at 5.9 percent, much of it not budgeted, and notes pointedly that D'Arcy and other officials of the IBEW "did not return calls."   

And why should they? Does the thief call up and say thank you? Is D'Arcy going to heed the pleas of Soledad Garcia, the San Pedro community activist who heads the DWP Oversight Committee to "take pity on the ratepayers."

That isn't going to happen anymore than Antonio Villaraigosa is going to invoke the "reopener" clause in the IBEW contract and demand D'Arcy go back to the bargaining table because 5.9 percent raises are outrageous and unaffordable.

Instead, the mayor offered hollow reassurances that money from rates will only go for infrastructure improvements as promised -- just like the money from trash fee hikes would only go to hire more police officers.

You know by now that a promise from the mayor is meaningless.

So the question is what are you going to do about?

Probably nothing.

You'll do what you've done for years, you'll grumble and go on being robbed by the city day after day, year after year, hiding behind apathy and defeatism as your neighborhood gets worse and traffic gets worse and your employer relocates to Arizona or Oregon and then you'll try to sell your house and find out it's worth less than you paid for it.

There is an alternative.

You could stop being a patsy. Thousands of people across the city are fighting back and in small ways they're beginning to make a difference. The politicians might be scared to death of people like Brian D'Arcy but like all bullies, he'll run for cover if enough people join together and stand up to him and the cowards at City Hall.

Out of the blue at Tuesday's Department of Water and Power Commission meeting, Board President Nick Patsaouras threw out a revolutionary idea: What if the ratepayers had an advocate for their interests inside the utility they own?

Patsaouras who has been around City Hall politics since the early Tom Bradley years has grown increasingly and publicly concerned about DWP's disconnect from the people -- an arrogance that has made General Manager David Nahai a target of increasing criticism from Neighborhood Council members and many others.

In proposing to put a motion for the Ratepayers' Advocate position on the commission agenda for its next meeting on Oct. 7, Patsaouras offered a long list of reasons from transparency to better communication with the public and community engagement, according to community activists who were present.

Nahai was clearly caught off guard.

He questioned where the money would come from to pay such an advocate -- as if there isn't some room among the 8,000 or 9,000 DWP employees or among the deadwood dumped on the DWP by the rest of City Hall.

And he suggested stalling a decision by sending the motion to the Energy & Environment Committee to study for six weeks or so. He offered to talk further with Patsaouras in private but in the end the commission rallied behind the idea and Nahai finally agreed to work on the proposal.

Members of the DWP Oversight Committee, who come from Neighborhood Councils all over the city, jumped on the Ratepayers' Advocate idea and stepped up their own efforts to get the DWP to also create an Ombudsman who would have the independence to provide another voice for the public inside the utility.

Soledad Garcia, head of the Oversight Committee, detailed what the Ombudsman's responsibilies would be and how it was an important goal for Neighborhood Councils who are still angry over Nahai's insistence that the year-old memorandum of understanding with NCs be interpreted strictly to the letter and not become an opening for a genuine public involvement.

Oversight Committee members Dan Wiseman and Candido Marez backed her up and differentiated between an Ombudsman and a Ratepayers' Advocate.

For the thousands of people who have struggled for years to make the city better in the face of official resistance, it's important to take note of how persistent and well-organized efforts of a broad-based group of community activists can begin to make a difference.

The problem isn't the people who hold power in the city as much as the people of the city don't have any power. And that will only change when community groups across the city look beyond their narrow issues and join together to change the political culture of L.A. and the dynamics of power.

UPDATE: A reliable source close to what's going on as officials deal with the Chatsworth train collision informs me that situation over the weekend got so out of hand that the PR agency on retainer for crisis communications for Metrolink couldn't be reached for two days. The source added: "The mayor knows full well the Metrolink board is screwed up and is determined to fix it. That's why he sent in Katz, an expert on transportation issues, to clean up the mess once and for all.".

How many people must die, how bad do things have to get, before we get straight talk from our leaders?

I don't know about you all but immature as I am for an old man I find it a whole lot easier to deal with bad news if I face the facts with straight talk.

Unfortunately, all we're getting from our leaders about the Chatsworth train collision is a lot of B.S. You know that's true when a PR flack gets rebuked for telling the obvious truth and takes the high road and quits in protest because her bosses -- ultimately the political leadership of the five counties that run Metrolink -- want to manage public perception more than they want to fix the problems that caused the tragedy.

They could have stood together at the crash scene and accepted responsibility for running the commuter rail system on the cheap and told the public the hard facts.

Instead, the head of the MTA board, who just happens to be the mayor of L.A., put his point man on transportation issues, Richard Katz, on the Metrolink board and had his personal flack shamelessly pat him on the back for his courage and leadership.

"The mayor believes that the public deserves answers and the agency needs changes, and he's taking the leadership to get it done," said Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo. "The operational safety of Metrolink must be the paramount concern."

And Katz added: "We want to make sure that we have every safety tool in the toolbox working on these lines, particularly when you have freight and commuter sharing the lines...I think between the five counties we'll find a way to pay for it."

Is that any different than the drunken driver who runs down little kids in a crosswalk and promises to go into detox and never do it again? At least the drunk would probably say he's sorry.

I think the five counties should have found the money a long time ago but safety wasn't paramount. The problem was known and other communities found the right safety tool in the toolbox -- automated systems that stop trains in emergencies like running red lights -- years ago.

It's good the mayor is committed to fixing this problem but how about all the other at-grade rail crossing on MTA trains and on the busway that are dangerous and how about all the other problems we have all over L.A.

The public is fed up with lying and obfuscation from their leaders at every level. It's time they started acting like public servants and treating the public like adults.

If they really wanted to respect the lives that were lost on that train, they would stop trying to smooth over the political problems they face with carefully chosen words and start speaking the truth about this and every other issue.

Phil Anschutz' AEG has bought L.A.'s politicians but he'll have to cough up more to buy the state legislature

What do you know: State legislators don't sell out quite as cheaply as City Hall -- not even for the $2.7 million Anschutz' team has given to state political action committees in recent years, including nearly $600,000 to the "i'll never take special interest money" governor.

That is the consoling fact we learn from the state Senate's rejection of a bill sought by wannabe county Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomasl to exempt the L.A. Convention Center from highway safety laws that bar giant flashing electronic billboards along freeways.

The exemption, which also would have applied to other Southern California counties' "entertainment districts," was an embarrassing repudiation of the L.A. City Council's decision to green light 75 or so billboards covering 50,000 square feet at the Convention Center.

L.A. was supposed to get $2 million a year in exchange for AEG making its city-subsidized Staples Center and LA Live projects more visually exciting by defacing the Convention Center and putting the lives of motorists in jeopardy because of the distraction of the flashing billboards.

Hard as it might be to believe, Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) shot the bill down during an after-midnight session, saying: "This is worse than earmarks. Earmarks are at least legal. These billboards . . . are illegal." But that won't stop proponents from trying again next year or Anschutz from throwing more money at the pols.

Maybe the MTA should go for truth-in-advertising and hire PR flack Denise Tyrrell to run their campaign for the half-cent sales tax

Nah, the truth would kill the tax. Why would anyone back a plan that does nothing for three-fourths of the county and doesn't solve any traffic problems?

Hard as it might be to believe, Tyrrell has proven that a PR flack can be a hero. On Saturday, Metrolink CEO David Solow authorized Tyrrell to tell the world what had become clear about the terrible train tragedy in Chatsworth: The engineer on the commuter train ran a red light.

That sent the panicked Metrolink board into a tizzy -- one that undoubtedly was shared by the MTA board which sees its troubled transportation tax campaign falling apart. The result was a brutal closed door meeting filled with recriminations and a repudiation of Tyrrell's statement as premature -- not wrong, mind you, but premature when the truth could have been concealed for a full year while the NTSB investigates.

Tyrrell resigned in protest and Solow can't be far behind but his departure will likely be the result of being fired.

The Times reports that Solow testified before Congress last year that it would cost too much to install the safety devices that could have prevented Friday's collision. Of course, California's senators and the City Council now are outraged by the disregard of safety and want immediate action to make trains. 

With the irony and mean-spiritness of a grizzled newsman, I often would declare that long-time Northwest Valley Councilman Hal Bernson lived under a rock -- and developer Ted Stein owned the rock.

That truly was unkind of me because for all his devious ways and pandering to special interests in that old-fashioned political way of one hand strokes the other, Bernson knew how to keep his constituents happy for the most part -- probably due to his chief of staff and successor, Greig Smith.

Not so with Jack Weiss. With the irony and mean-spiritness of a grizzled newsman, I often have said Jack lives in the pocket of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and every special interest that will fund his ambition to be City Attorney or invite him to their parties

Jack who has represented Council District 5, which straddles the Westside and the Valley, is no Hal Bernson.

His constituents hate him. That's not too strong a word for it. They hate him so much they got 20,000 signatures, which is three-fourths of the votes he got in the last election, to recall him but didn't have the time or the money to qualify it for the ballot.

They set up a website that accused Jack of being a stooge of developers, and ignoring the interests of residents. And they filed a complaint with the City (Un)Ethics Commission over allegations of illegal fund-raising.

I would have focused as much on his absence during most council meetings, his ducking of critical votes and his ineffectiveness about getting things done even when he takes strong public stands on important issues.

Here's just a few examples:

Let's start with Jamiel's Law, the attempt to force the city to get tough on illegal immigrant criminals.

Weiss, who wants to be the city's chief law enforcement officer, ignored the groundswell of support for the measure until the pressure got great enough. Then, he relented and agreed to hold hearings -- but stalled for another two months so the hearing won't be held until October).

Law-and-order Jack also jumped on the LAPD's huge backlog of testing DNA samples in criminal cases, something that would take $10 million to fix.

As head of the Public Safety Committee he promised last December to "hold hearings every week...until every woman and man in this city is outraged'' by the failure to find the money to fix the backlog problem and lock up hardened criminals.

As the Daily News recently commented, "Nice sound bite, but ultimately empty" since that would have required Jack to actually do some work which is not his strong card.

Then, there's his claim to be king of the anti-billboard effort. Weiss staked his claim to succeed Rocky Delgadillo in part on accusing the City Attorney of failing to fight against the explosion of billboards in the city and the lack of enforcement against billboard companies. Yet, Weiss rolled over with the rest of the council last week and support the sell out of public interest in the deal to give Phil Anschutz's AEG the right to create massive visual blight with 75 billboards and flashing electronic signs at the Convention Center.

Typical of Weiss, he introduced a motion July 29, calling for the city's planning department, Department of Building and Safety and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office to revise and toughen the 2002 ban on billboards. Meaningless as it is, the motion won't be heard by the council for months.

Now Jack wants to be City Attorney and has the support of the mayor and council leaders Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel who know better but are too weak and ambitious themselves to face up to the punishment they would face if they stood up to the political machine that passes for L.A.'s city government.

Weiss must be stopped.

With Villaraigosa as mayor, Weiss as city attorney and Greuel succeeding Laura Chick as city controller, the public will have no voice at all at City Hall.

The last pretense at this being a democratic society will be gone. There will be nothing in the way of a system that cuts sweetheart contracts with public employee unions, rolls over to billionaires and special interests of every type and fails to deal with the city's problems.

There are alternatives to Jack -- Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich, an environmental lawyer from the harbor area, and Assistant City Attorney Michael Amerian, who works out of the Van Nuys office.

Here's video of them made by Michael Cohen talking recently to the Saving L.A. Project:

 

DWP raises rates and then spends your money to deliver 2.4 million CFL bulbs to your home so they can light up the town
That's right, you pay more and conserve power so City Hall can sell the rights to put up 75 or so billboards, many of them the super-offensive flashing electronic kind, all over the Convention Center creating visual blight, a distraction for motorists and a huge waste of electricity.

It all seems a terrible dream even by my standards jaded by too many years as a newsman.

Another hurricane causes death and destruction.

Another major financial firm faces bankruptcy.

The state legislature cuts a budget deal 11 weeks after the deadline that isn't a budget at all, and actually will make the situation worse before long.

And we are confronted with the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy in our own backyard that has investigators at war with each other as they try to determine if the engineer really was text messaging with some teenage boys as his train was heading toward disaster.

Maybe we sll should get down on our knees and pray like so many did over the weekend as they grieved for those who were killed or hoped for the recovery of those who were injured.

Nature itself seems angry at us and too many of us seemed to have lost all sense whether we're engaged in high finance or more mundane occupations.

My darkness at dawn this morning isn't just about the confluence of events this weekend. It's hardly the first time I've felt like the world's gone mad and things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Truth is a vision of looming catastrophe has haunted my thoughts most of my life. Maybe it started with being made to crouch under my desk in grade school to prepare for a nuclear way. Maybe it was the anti-Communist fanaticism or the racism exposed in the '50s or the assassination of those with the power to inspire in the '60s. Maybe it's the endless wars and pointless ideological conflicts that have brought our society to a standstill even as we continue our addiction to materialism as if more of everything could ever make us happy.

All I know is we have to change our ways before it's too late. We have to get back to basics in our personal lives and we have to start fixing what's broken in our collective lives.

I've been in awe most of my adult life at the resiliency of our society to sustain itself even as the disparities in our society grow wider, and the divisions between us harden.

None of us is free of responsibility for the state of things. We are all going to have to change our minds about the way we live, what's really important and how we are going to get along together.

There is no evidence that our government or our civic leaders are going to be the driving force of change. Wealth and power are the strongest narcotics. Change is going to have to come from the grassroots, from ordinary people waking up and starting to do something  about the world around them.

This is as close as I can come to putting into words what I believe. It's why I've gotten involved with others who have worked for years to try to make their neighborhoods and our city better. It's why we somehow have to get others to pay attention.

The warning signs are everywhere. If we keep going on the path we're on, the tragedies will only grow larger, the breakdown of our society will only grow worse.

So put me in the doomsayer class and ignore me, ignore the trend lines that are all heading in the same direction toward a collision at some point in the future. Keep mortgaging the future and living like there's no tomorrow.

Just know this: In all our lives, rich or poor, smart or dumb, beautiful or not, all bills come due sooner or later. And when you have moments of doubt sometimes that awaken you in the middle of night, dwell on it for a while and maybe you'll change your mind and start making different choices.

That's the only miracle there is and as far as I can see, we need some miracles.
.

Editor's note: This column was published in the current issue of Wayne Adelstein's North Valley Community News.

Back in 1985 when I came to the Daily News and the San Fernando Valley, the No. 1 issue I saw was respect, or more precisely the lack of respect that L.A's leaders showed the community.

 

I confess to throwing more than a few tantrums at city officials in those early years about not treating Daily News reporters and the Valley properly and did my best to support an emerging Valley leadership that began to stand up for the community's rights and interests.

 

A lot has changed since then - charter reform and secession grew out of Valley and the stronger leadership provided by Dave Fleming, Bob Hertzberg and others - and today City Hall is careful to pay lip service to the Valley and to make sure it gets a share of city resources, if not a fair share.

 

But the No. 1 issue is still lack of respect. Except it's not just the Valley that gets disrespected today; it's just about everybody from San Pedro to Chatsworth, from Boyle Heights to Westchester.

 

In fact, the lack of respect for the people of the city has turned into utter contempt. And a political system that for decades behaved in an anti-democratic and corrupt way has turned into a tightly controlled political machine that tolerates little or no dissent and sees the city treasury as a bottomless pit of money for its own enrichment.

 

For lack of a better name, we can call it Antonio's Machine but the truth is the mayor is only renting it.

MTA wants to raise fares and taxes -- more than legally allowed -- so why not spend $4.1 million of your money to get what it wants

Even as the mayor and his pals are raising millions from contractors, developers, consultants, unions and other special interest that stand to profit, the MTA itself is spending $4.1 million in public money to promote the $40 billion half-cent sales tax hike on the November ballot.

Part of that campaign is using the MTA website which is topped with this promo for the sales tax hike and the text promising "traffic relief...rail extensions...reduce foreign oil dependence."
You have a problem with that? Tough. They've got the power, the pols, the lawyers, and the guns for that matter, so shut your mouth and pay up.That's pretty much the way things are these days. There's not much you can do about except to get organized and work the grassroots to change L.A.'s political culture.

Troy Anderson in the Daily News puts it together, reporting the MTA risked violating state law by using its taxpayer-funded Web site to pomote the sales tax but when told by the County Counsel what they were doing, pulled back a little by agreeing to use more neutral language to advocate for the measure. The website now is supposedly neutral.

If I had the time, technology and knowhow, I could make an Oscar winning movie out of the council's amazing performance Wednesday as it sold off another chunk of the city to the man who already owns so much of L.A. -- Phil Anschutz.

Given how City Hall has handed Anschutz and his company AEG hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, it's a wonder that it took 12 years to finalize a deal that Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller admitted was already a done deal when the terms of the Staples Center Project were being negotiated.

Frankly, the council session on this matter -- giving AEG the right to put more than 75 billboards and flashing electronic signs covering some 50,000 square feet of the L.A. Convention Center -- was as cynical and dishonest as any I've ever seen.

Only Bill Rosendahl questioned it and for one of the few times in recent memory broke the council's unanimity by casting the lose dissenting vote.

My words are nowhere near as compelling as he council's own so I've culled videos that capture what the lone wolf had to say, how Janice Hahn and others performed their deceitful roles and finally the indications that the $2 million a year from this visual blight is nothing compared to what this will cost for road improvements, neighborhood redevelopment and rebuilding the old wing of the Convention Center.

You be the judge of whether there is honor among thieves:

Video Exhibit 1: Would you be better off with Mayor Rosendahl?


Video Exhibit 2: How do Councilwoman Janice Hahn and CLA Gerry Miller keep a straight face?


Video Exhibit 3. 
How $2 million in revenue required tens of millions in investment

Video Exhibit 4: GM Abassi suggests the old Convention Center doesn't meet AEG standards

Antonio Exposed: "The all-about-me-mayor: Antonio Villaraigosa's frenetic self-promotion"

Stop reading this now and go to the L.A. Weekly and read Patrick Range McDonald's devastating takeout on how the mayor spends his time working for himself -- not the people.

But if you're too busy to read a long article right this minute, here's the short take on how he spent the 900 "work" hours in his daily calendar from May 21 to Aug. 1: "804 hours, or 89 percent of his work schedule, on ceremonial/PR, travel, blacked-out activities, gap time, fund-raising, personal issues and undisclosed "security" issues. On direct city business -- such as signing legislation and meeting with city-department heads -- his schedule shows the mayor spent 11 percent of his time."

Got it? He's not doing the job.

At a time when the city is teetering on the brink, when communities across L.A. are seething with resentment over City Hall's neglect, disrespect and failure to address the problems, the mayor is running around the world inflating his ego -- and his campaign treasury -- and doesn't have the time to manage the city's business or the inclination to listen to the people.

Critics like Jack Humphreville, Greg Nelson, Bill Ring and myself have a lot to say in the article but the one that matters most is Eli Broad:

"I think he'll realize his political success in the future relies on the job he does with the city...Let's put it this way, Would I be more comfortable with a mayor like Richard Daley or Mike Bloomberg? The answer is yes."

McDonald describes Villaraigosa as being "so focused on the glitzy trappings of the job, and so distant from the sometimes dreary work inside City Hall," he's unlike any other mayor in recent years.
 
The result is this: "Los Angeles' mayor has not yet produced any results in improving schools, addressing greatly worsening traffic, keeping kids from joining gangs, cleaning the city's infamously filthy sidewalks, halting patently illegal clutter like 10-story building ads and thousands of illicitly constructed billboards, or controlling his spending in a time of family belt-tightening."

So ask yourself why not a siingle politician or potential candidate with the money to take Villaraigosa down has challenged him. And if they don't have the courage to do it now, should you really consider them for office in two years or four years when the city will be that much worse off?

Who needs a mayor when there's a hard-working City Council tackling the big issues:

* Council votes 15-0 to ban smoking in farmer's markets.
* Council votes 14-0 to require fast food chains to post calorie information.
* Council votes 12-1 to increase visual blight with massive electronic signs on Convention Center (more on that later).
 

Several community activists turned out today for public comment before the City Council to make the case that the Autry National Museum has reneged on its commitment to keep the Southwest Museum functioning as a living museum.

The Southwest is a treasure of the Mt. Washington-Highland Park area that was allowed to fall into decay by the city's leadership -- something that never would have happened if it was located downtown or on the Westside.

With impetus from the Gene Autry's widow Jackie, the Griffith Park institution moved in and took over the Southwest with false claims about its assets and false promises to restore the city's oldest museum. Instead, the Autry has looted the Southwest of its $1 billion collection and intends to expand in Griffith Park while turning the Southwest over to the L.A. Community College District which proposes spending $12 million from the bond issue on the November ballot to turn it into classrooms.

The Saving L.A. Project voted to support Friends of the Southwest Museum on Saturday and  activists who participated in the Town Hall meeting spoke to the City Council today.

The truth comes out about who owns L.A. -- Phil Anschutz, who did you think?

How's this for an idea: Let's sell off signage rights for giant electronic billboards on public property throughout the city and subsidize some massive developments?

1- Write letters to: Councilmember Tom Labonge, and to the Cultural Heritage Commission. They are both at City Hall, 200 North Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. We have provided samples below, but your own words are always better.

2- Send e-mails right now to: Councilmember.Labonge@lacity.org  & the Cultural Heritage Commission  CHC@lacity.org
  
3- Go the the Friends of Griffith Park website to submit your name as a supporter of protecting the park. http://www.friendsofgriffithpark.org/GPPreservationRegister.html  

4- Attend the Cultural Heritage Commission Meeting on October 2nd to personally voice your support for preserving all of Griffith Park as an Historic-Cultural Monument of the City of Los Angeles.

Open letter from Lee Zebold, L.A. Hiking Meetup Group

Although this hiking club was not created to be a political organ, sometimes we have to engage in a fight to preserve what we like to do.....go hiking.

Griffith Park is unofficially our home - it is where the genesis of the LA Meet Up Hiking Group began.

Griffith Park is UNDER ATTACK

I am writing to ask you to support the Griffith Family's application to the City to have the Griffith Park designated a Historic Monument in the City of Los Angeles.

ALL of Griffith Park must be protected, not just the existing landmarks (e. g., the Greek Theater, the Zoo, the Adobe House, the Observatory etc).

The interior must be protected as an urban wilderness; a green, open bastion of tranquility, unique in the City of Los Angeles.

Although public support for this application is almost 100%, right now it looks like councilman Tom LaBonge will kill the entire application as he has effectively stated is his intention to private parties. Publicly, he's using scare tactics about "infrastructure" that have no real merit... really sad, but unfortunately true. We thought he was our friend.

So without an overwhelming response from the public and community groups, this is likely to happen. What does that mean to you??? Well, they have plans on the table, and have for a couple years now, to turn our Park into a Disneyland with aerial tramways, restaurants, amusements, and other ways to bilk money out of the citizens. They will have controlled hiking trails, restricting most of the trials that we now use. Our "city planners" have long drooled at the 4400 acre Griffith Park as a tremendous resource to become a Cash Cow for the City.

I am going to create a webpage and email you all again with the link. It will have a form letter that you can use if you don't feel like writing your own letters. Of course, personal letters are more effective than form letters, but anything will help. Please write to each commissioner individually.

Cultural Heritage Commission
Office of Historic Resources
L.A. Department of City Planning
200 N. Spring Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

The individual commissioners are: Richard Barron, President; Glen Dake; Miriam Guttfreund Lehrer; Oz Scott; and Roella H. Louie.

Also, a letter to Tom LaBonge would be good, too....

Councilmember Tom LaBonge
Los Angeles City Hall
200 N. Spring Street
Room 480
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Jill Banks Barad, head of the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils, reports:

"The City Council's Education & Neighborhoods Committee voted today to separate the Form 52-53 Financial Disclosure forms from the opening of Council files. The recommendation of the committee to the Council will be that NCs should be able to create Council files without filing disclosure forms. The committee's recommendation to the full Council is that the filing of forms should not be required.This issue will also go to the full Council for final action...Our work in not done!"
Banks reported that Councilman (Richard) Alarcon, the committee chairman, sent the disclosure question to the PLUM Committee that normally deals with development issues but moved the measure to let NCs formally propose ordinances to the full council. Alarcon had proposed all NC members be required to file a shortened disclosure form after Greig Smith had proposed making NC members who are only advisory fill out the same lengthy form as the mayor and other elected officials.

Jubilation among residents of Sepulveda Pass and commuters turned out to be short-lived.

Closure of one of the three lanes on Sepulveda Boulevard  that was supposed to start Monday and last for eight weeks was halted because of the community uproar over never being told about it.

The community was told it would be delayed until the summer when  traffic would be lighter and the disruption less serious but that isn't what happened at the Westside Traffic Committee meeting today.

The city and state bureaucrats who didn't tell people what was going and didn't coordinate with each other prevailed. The debris fence needed to keep rocks from falling on the roadway -- and to get Stephen Wise Temple the occupancy it needs for its new school -- will start going up two weeks late, on Monday Sept. 22 and only take six weeks.

Norman Kulla, aide to Councilman Bill Rosendahl, described today's meeting as "a civil, if sometimes emotional, interchange."

New issues that came up involved electronic message boards warning of delays, notification of other schools with 4,500 students in the area and other fig leads that will allow Stephen Wise to get its permit when it wanted.

Needless to say, the community isn't happy and it's hard to see how anybody could believe there's any integrity to a system where city planning, engineering and traffic departments don't talk to one another, and none of them talk to their state counterparts and all explanations are double talk.

If there's any consolation to the affluent in the hillside and westside communities, it's that they share the same experience of government with those down below. Maybe we should all get together and do something about it.

Hard as it may be to believe, it was just six months ago that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa celebrated his managerial triumph by getting the long troubled L.A. Housing Authority (HACLA) back in the good graces of the federal government.

The mayor boasted that HACLA "has reached an important milestone in its efforts to reform..and successfully met federally mandated reforms covering the City's Section 8 voucher program, putting the department back in good-standing and ending federal oversight of the program."

"For the first time in years, this agency is solvent, functional and in a strong position to deliver much-needed help to low-income families in LA."

Oops, maybe Antonio spoke a little too soon.

A new report from federal housing authorities -- that has gotten no visibility in the press -- says he spoke way too soon  to the tune of a $27 million problem, nearly $28 million actually.

"The Authority's accounting records showed that it improperly advanced and expended more than $27 million in restricted funds to cover its operating losses for its other programs," reported Regional Inspector General Joan Hobbs in the Housing and Urban Development Report dated Aug. 21.

"The authority contended there was no misappropriation of funds, but rather the way the accounting system presented its financial transactions; however, we were unable to validate its contention."

The focus of the audit was to see if the city was still screwing recipients of Section 8 vouchers that let them live in decent units at a price they could afford but it expanded when suspicions arose that the highly-paid HACLA head Rudy Montiel  (more than $300,000) was juggling the money without regard to federal  rules or regulations.

No surprise there, the city of L.A. doesn't believe in obeying the law.

It's not entirely clear from the audit what exactly Montiel was hiding or why he was moving the money from account to account other than to conceal losses in specific areas, but HACLA's history suggests it has a lot to do with mismanagement of Section 8 housing vouchers.

From what I can see I'm willing to bet Montiel _ who's gotten a lot of favorable media treatment -- was cooking the books to make it look like the Section 8 funding problem was fixed when he, like just about everybody else at City Hall, was doing the mayor's bidding.

And in the housing area that means carrying out the mayor's insane policy of densifying the city to "address the affordable housing crisis in Los Angeles" -- a crisis manufactured by the philosophical commitment to providing new housing to any poor person who wants to live here.

Doesn't this violate the Living Wage Ordinance? Will the unions strike? How will drunk drivers work off their time if goats do the brush clearing?















The Community Redevelopment Agency hired 100 goats to clear weeds on a steep slope next to the Angels Flight funicular.downtown. Agency officials said the goats were cheaper and more environmentally friendly than two-legged brush-clearers armed with gasoline-powered weed-whackers, the Times reports..

  

Problem solved: Gangsters just wanna have fun and shoot marbles -- not people -- in the parks all night

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa boasted to the media on Monday that his first act as the city's gang czar solved the problem of gang violence and it cost only a million bucks, chump change in an $8 billion city budget.

All it took was keeping parks in the city's worst neighborhoods open late at night and offering sports, movies and marble tournaments..Only one gang-related killing near the eight parks in the program compared with seven last year, only 23 people shot compared to 42..

"Regardless of where you live or the color of your skin, we all pretty much want the same thing: We want to live, work and play in a safe community free of gang violence," Villaraigosa said. "We restored a sense of community in neighborhoods where gang violence has attempted to destroy it."

That's the quote in the Daily News so i'm guessing it's aimed at white people in the Valley who he presumes oppose his regressive and inequitous parcel tax for gangs because they are racists who think blacks and Latinos don't want good jobs, safe streets and healthy neighborhoods.

Isn't that a racist projection on his part? Is that what he believes?

I can only speak for myself in this case but he's dead wrong. Everything I wrote or had written over the last 20 years at the Daily News and the white Valley people I know want an entire city where everyone can " live, work and play in a safe community free of gang violence."

And they are williing to pay fot it.

But all they've seen is hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on mostly phony and ineffective gang programs that were nothing but political patronage and they are now being coerced into paying more when there still isn't a program and still isn't the political will to confront the roots of the problem.

Norman Kulla says he was the hero -- not the villain -- of the Sepulveda Pass closure fiasco

When I broke the news Sunday that one lane of Sepulveda Boulevard was going to be closed for eight weeks starting Monday without public notice, I reported that residents made "inquiries (that) led to Rosendahl's and Jack Weiss' council offices and the word was Norman Kulla, CD11 Chief Deputy, was caught by surprise with the news recently but signed off on DOT's request to approve the project.

Kulla, aide to Councilman Bill Rosendahl, writes today: "When I received a call from a traffic management engineer on Tuesday afternoon, September 3, 2008, requesting that Councilmember Rosendahl agree to the lane closure I  responded by asking what outreach had occurred.  The caller couldnt tell me.  I asked him to send me materials describing the project so I could immediately share the information with affected residents. I made clear that the Councilmember would not consider any sign-off until the matter was vetted with the affected community.  To date, no sign-off has occurred."

Residents speak well of him and I take his word for it so let's see what happens this morning at the Westside Traffic Committee meeting where residents are fearful of what officials are really up to.

Lucille Saunders discusses LaBrea-Willoughby Coalition's infrastructure lawsuit

d

Editor's Note: The Saving L.A. Project will hold another Town Hall meeting on Saturday Oct. 4 at the Charo Community Development Center at 4301 E. Valley Blvd. in the El Sereno neighborhood. The time will be announced soon.

 
 
During a town hall meeting Saturday in East L.A., Saving L.A. Project (SLAP) members voted to take positions on eight hot topic issues and is now looking for volunteers to mobilize the community activists across the city to help make a difference: 

SLAP OPPOSES THE TAKEOVER OF THE SOUTHWEST MUSEUM BY THE AUTRY NATIONAL CENTER

City Hall is rushing to shut off public debate and close the deal to loot the Southwest Museum of its valuable collection and turn this historic facility -- the city's oldest museum -- into community college classrooms using bond money from the November ballot measure put up by the LACCD.The Autry National Center in Griffith Park is lookiing to rebuild and expand its lackluster museum dramatically and has cut a back room deals with LACCD to get $12 million to convert the Southwest into class space -- an action that will rob the Mt. Washiington-Highland Park area of its most notable landmark. The deal betrays the commitment made by Jackie Autry, widow of the western movie star Gene Autry, to maintain the Southwest as a museum.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has broken his promise to protect the Southwest as a museum. Councilman Jose Huizar has done nothing to stand up for his constituents. Councilman Tom LaBonge has spearheaded the Autry's campaign which has spent large sums of money to get heavyweight lobbying support from City Hall insiders Bill Delvac and George Mihlsten of Latham & Watkins and PR man Steve Sugerman, the admitted felon. Please contact Heinrich Keifer <hkeifer101@sbcglobal.net> who is helping to put together a team that will drum up support from community groups, conduct email and phone campaigns and develop other strategies to force the Autry to live up to its commitments. 

SLAP  OPPOSES THE  LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT BOND ISSUE

Because of the LACCD's complicity in this back room deal, instigated by Community College Board member Mona Field, SLAP also decided to oppose the $3.5 billion bond issue, the district's third in recent years. 
 
SLAP  SUPPORTS THE CULTURAL HISTORICAL DISIGNATION OF GRIFFITH PARK

Kris Sabo won the full support of SLAP for a motion to support the efforts of Save Griffith Park and the heirs of Griffith Jenkins Griffith who donated the land for L.A.'s "Central Park" to get the city to declare the park a cultural-historical preservation zone which will give it badly needed protections from the city's intention to turn it into an amusement park and tourist trap. Councilmember LaBonge also took heavy criticism from SLAP activists for his role in pushing for other developments in Griffith Park even as he postures as its guardian. Contact ksabo@wildwildwest.org who will help coordinate with other groups. 
 
SLAP JOINS  THE LA BREA-WILLOUGHBY COALITION  

Headed by Lucille Saunders, the lawsuit  is aimed at forcing the city to carry out required studies of traffic and other infrastructure needs before approving new developments. Every neighborhood in the city is being negatively impacted by developments approved in ignorance -- the city hasn't made these required studies for a decade. Lucille Saunders  laid out the issues involved in the lawsuit and won support Saturday from the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition as well as SLAP. More than a dozen community groups have now joined the suit and the support of as many as possible will help strengthen the campaign to bring sanity and good information to the city's future development. Forms to join as Plaintiff's for the lawsuite are on the website.  They must be completed and faxed the September 11.   Contact Lucille Saunders and the website  at labreacoalition@gmail.com

Much to the dismay of local residents and thousands of unknowing commuters, the city Department of Transportation, Caltrans and Councilman Bill Rosendahl's office forgot to tell anyone that one of the three lanes on Sepulveda Boulevard near the tunnel in Sepulveda Pass will be closed today and for the next eight weeks for construction.

Call me naive, call me stupid, slap me upside my head, but I somehow thought there was a mayoral ban on city agencies hiring outside public relations firms -- a prohibition put in place by Jim Hahn to cover his butt in the DWP/Fleishman-Hillard scandal and kept in place by Antonio Villaraigosa.

I guess when it comes to City Hall you just can't believe a word they say.

First, we learned in July that L.A. Harbor authorities were set to spend $1.6 million in public money for PR consultants to let the public and truckers know there's tougher air pollution rules at the port -- deals that were cut back to $350,000 after the mayor was embarrassed by the publicity.

Then, we exposed a series of PR contracts quietly awarded by airport authorities without competitive bidding to let international travelers know the Bradley Terminal is undergoing construction.

That led to somebody dropping a dime on the Animal Services Department's deal with Samson PR to let to the public and press know about the new spaying and neutering law. Animal Services  Director Ed Boks told me it isn't costing taxpayers any money thanks to a combination of pro bono services and monetary contributions.

Now, I find out the Public Works Department's Bureau of Sanitation -- flush with cash from massive increases in trash fees recently imposed on homeowners --  miraculously found at least $1.735 million, half of it available now, to hire PR firms to let the world know about the city's recycling efforts and intends to spend a lot more for media and public opinion manipulation over the next six years.

Trash fees undoubtedly will have to keep rising to pay those bills.

Unlike the other examples PR abuses, the mayor and the City Council have no cover story for this deal.

They signed off on it in principle nearly 18 months ago. And now Public Works -- moving with bureaucratic swiftness -- has identified eight PR firms and several dozen minority subcontractors as potential recipients of this gift from homeowners and is ready to award the contracts

BREAKING NEWS - Long Beach Hits Record Low Water Use in August;
19% Below 10-Year Average; City is Nearly 10% Below 10-Year Average YTD

City has 8th record setting month since September '07

That was the headline in the press release from Ryan Alsop of the Long Beach Board of Water Commissioners this week so the question comes to mind, How is L.A. doing?

OK, that was too easy no double-doubles for getting it right.

The Department of Water and Power numbers aren't in for August but in July total water use in L.A. was up .4 % over a year earlier but down 3.8 % in June from the previous June.

But don't blame homeowners who got socked with a whopping rate increase. Single family home water use fell for the 12th straight month, by 4.7 % in June and 4.5 % in July.

In other words, water use is actually up in the city except for the efforts of the people most despised by City Hall -- homeowners. Maybe that explains the strategy for using recycled toilet water for home use: It will cut down a lot more on how much water is used.

Long Beach has taken a different strategy by imposing tough but sensible conservations measures 12 months ago and engaging in a massive campaign to inform the public about the need to conserve water.

The results are fantastic: August 2008 water demand was 18.9 % below the 10-year average and July was down 18 %. Water demand overall is running 9 % below the 10-year average.

UPDATE: The city Ethics Commission today unanimously rejected the City Council's call for a sweeping measure to require all 1,600 Neighborhood Council members to disclose their financial information. Instead, the commission recommended only members of Neighborhood Councils that formally propose measures for City Council action be required to fill out a shortened form and then only if the measure has a financial impact within the Neighborhood Council's district. The recommendation goes to the City Council on Tuesday.



The video shows the most conservative Republican member of the City Council accusing his constituents and homeowners all over L.A. of being ingrates who have sucked the city dry for 50 years getting free trash pickup compliments of the city's property owners.

Hey, wait a minute, the homeowners are the property owners or at least the largest portion of them. He must have meant commercial property owners. But no a lot of them, particularly the rich ones, get huge subsidies from Smith and his colleagues and all of them are getting tax breaks so he must have been confused.

Or maybe he was just lying through his teeth and reading from a script prepared for him so the Republican councilman from Chatsworth could carry the water for the council as it trashed the social contract so it can squeeze another $36 a month out of every homeowner -- money the city desperately needed because Smith and his colleagues had created a $500 million budget deficit with sweetheart contracts, giveaways and mismanagement.

It's a dirty job but who better to be the mouthpiece for the circle of deceit that poses as L.A.'s leadership than a guy who has lived off the public dole his whole adult life and will live the good life off those same taxpayers until the day he dies.

I was shocked when I saw Smith of all people claim last July 29 that it's the homeowners of the city who are subsidized.

And I'm more shocked today to find out it's the same Smith who is the point man for the council's attack on the integrity of the 1,600 people from every part of the city who volunteer countless hours to make their neighborhoods better in the face of City Hall's contempt for their values and needs.

Shame on Greig Smith. He knows better. He could be better. They all could. But they won't because they are all hostages to a corrupt system.

They have defied all efforts at reform.

Stripped of their authority as the governing body of the city and made nothing more than legislators, they have perpetuated their power in defiance of the will of the people and maintained control of their districts as if they were royalty ruling over fiefdoms.

Inflicted with the burden of advisory neighborhood councils, they have undermined every attempt of the people in their communities to organize effectively to make a difference in their neighborhoods.

It took three years of stalling tactics for neighborhoods councils to finally get a proposal for them to get a measure before the City Council that would allow people in the neighborhoods to formally propose new city laws and policies. That's all they would get to do. The neighborhood councils would remain as powerless as ever but they wouldn't have to go hat in hand to beg one of their elected officials to introduce their proposal.

Even that was too much.

At the last minute, Smith stood and in a carefully rehearsed manner offered an amendment that would require every member of each of the 80 or so neighborhood councils throughout the city to fill out long and complex financial disclosure forms.

It's the same Form 700 that people appointed to city commissions -- most of whom benefit personally one way or another from their public service. It's the same form City Council members and other elected officials have to fill out.

In a system with incredibly weak ethics laws and lax enforcement, Form 700 is as close as it comes to inhibiting conflicts of interest. Still, the mere requirement for disclosure has kept a lot of people from serving on city commissions.

Those who do are all decision-makers  They make policy, decide on who gets contracts and who doesn't. They don't just introduce new laws and policies, they enact them and enforce them.

Smith pretended he could not see the distinction between the disclosure requirements imposed on those with power and those without power and fulfilled his role of setting up a phony compromise.

Instead of the long disclosure form, Smith's colleagues proposed neighborhood council members --- all 1,600 of them -- would only have to fill out the shorter Form 52.

It wouldn't matter if their councils never proposed a single measure, they would still have to disclose their personal financial situation.

It wouldn't matter even if the proposals sat in council hell, the volunteers without authority would still have their personal finances on file in the public record, updated annually.

You can imagine the reaction. Neighborhood council members are outraged, talking of resigning, fed up with being given the runaround, and treated disrespectfully. Many neighborhood council leaders will show up at City Hall today to object.

They'll voice their views at the joint meeting today of the Ethics Commission and the City Council's Education and Neighborhoods Committee made up of Richard Alarcon, Dennis Zine and Janice Hahn. Here are statements issued by Leonard Shaffer, head of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition, ncshaffer.doc and by Dr. Daniel Wiseman of the "Your Neighborhood Council" public access TV show ncwiseman.doc

As the council members well know, this is a direct attack on the very existence of neighborhood councils just as many of them are becoming effective. About half the councils have overcome their internal conflicts and learned the ropes at City Hall well enough to begin to make a difference.

And that in so unacceptable that the council turns to Smith a man who knows better.than to stooge for a corrupt and failed system. Did they blackmail him? Promise him favors of one sort or another? Or has he been around City Hall so long he doesn't know the difference between right and wrong anymore?

If I was a member of a neighborhood council, I'd be pushing for all 1,600 of my colleagues to resign over this outrage. What's the point of serving if City Hall is going to make it impossible every inch of the way.

But I'm not. I can only speak my mind. This is the moment those who are serving their communities need to make a bold stand. They need to say enough is enough, to tell these officials that if they want neighborhood councils, then they have to get out of the way, to stop undermining them. They need to present a list of demands instead of begging for favors.

If the neighborhood councils go along with this, then it's hard to see how they are ever going to be effective. Too many good people will drop out and the interference from City Hall will only get worse.

From where I sit, it's now or never. 

 

Editor's Note: The Saving L.A. Project will hold a Town Hall meeting on Saturday Sept. 6 at 1:15 p.m. at the Charo Community Development Center, 4301 Valley Blvd., in the El Sereno neighborhood, following the 10 a.m. meeting of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition. The goal is to form action teams to organize, research and advocate for community interests citywide. Get involved, make a difference.


We already know with certainty that Obama will win all 55 of California's electoral college votes in November, that the odds are 100 to 1 against any congressional or legislative seats changing hands and that the public will be deluged with tens of millions of dollars in campaign ads to support higher taxes.

What we don't know is if there will be a state budget by then and if there is, how disastrous will be the consequences to the quality of our lives and our future hopes.

But even the dark cloud of the state government's grotesque incompetence has a small bright side, it seems.

Mayors of California's nine biggest cities complained to the governor yesterday that the proposed cuts in funding the cities will "sweep away all money from redevelopment programs which would 'threaten to undermine one of the key tools that cities have to grow the economy,'" the Daily News reported.

Think about it, what community protests, lawsuits and common sense has been unable to achieve is being accomplished by the bunglers in the state legislature who have shattered all records with there inability to come up with a budget to deal with the $15.2 billion hole they somehow created during one of the state's greatest economic booms.

If Mayor Villaraigosa and his counterparts are to be believed -- and that's a big if -- cutting off billions of dollars to the cities, will stop or at least slow development.

I don't know about the other cities but when Antonio signs his name to a letter saying he's worried about economic growth, I have to laugh. Since when is growing the economy the goal of City Hall in L.A.?

If it really was the goal, wouldn't the city be taking steps to make it attractive to business and industry?

The truth is the city encourages retail projects with its low-paying jobs and housing construction because of the quick payoff in revenue to the city treasury -- the monster that eats the public's wealth to provide subsidies to billionaires and salaries and benefits to city workers that far exceed what's available in the private sector.

The goal of city government is city government itself -- not the improvement of the city or the lot of its residents. That's why rates, fees and taxes keep soaring and city services get worse. That's why there's a 75-year backlog in paving streets and sidewalks, why there aren't enough cops on the street, why the pipes and power grid are neglected, why good-paying jobs and the people who filled them have been making an exodus for a generation.

Not only is City Hall the safest building in L.A. in an earthquake thanks to a $350 million renovation, jobs at City Hall especially those of the politicians are the most secure as well.

They pander to the agenda of the unions and sell out to developers, contractors and consultants to get the campaign cash and support needed to keep the system from ever changing.

And it's not like Villaraigosa or Councilman Herb Wesson -- both former state Assembly speakers -- ever did anything about the long-term failure of state government which they now are so worried about impacting local government funding.

Editor's Note: This article was written for Nina Royal's North Valley Reporter and was published this week.


After three decades of rising poverty levels and a shrinking middle class, the time has come to declare L.A.'s experiment is municipal socialism a failure and to get to work creating a healthy economic climate that attracts and retains good-paying jobs and expands opportunity.

But the opposite is happening, an acceleration of efforts to chase away middle class residents and jobs and subsidize the lives of the poor and working poor.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the failure of trying to defy the laws of a free enterprise economy, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council are more committed than ever to artificially raising the incomes of minimum wage workers with living wage legislation and to guarantee anyone who lives here a decent home whether they can afford it or not.

Just look at a few of City Hall's actions in recent days: Requirements that new Home Depot stores like the one being fought against in Sunland-Tujunga to provide toilet and other comfort facilities to day laborers, that all new developments provide homes for the poor under "inclusionary zoning" rules, that foreclosed homes be bought up with federal money for resale to lower income families.

The result is the flight of good-paying jobs and people who can afford to live in L.A. to the suburbs and beyond.

These policies and other like the refusal to crack down on illegal immigrant gangsters and criminals while cracking down on fast food and plastic garbage bags are not just a coincidence.

What's going on is a deliberate policy that can only be stopped by building a mass organization of concerned citizens like the Saving L.A. Project is launching in an effort to change the city's agenda and change the city's leadership.

Take a look at the extraordinary vision for L.A.'s economy that the mayor articulated six months ago that went virtually unnoticed at the time and received little or no critical comment. It's available at http://mayor.lacity.org/stellent/groups/electedofficials/@myr_ch_contributor/documents/contributor_web_content/lacity_004661.pdf.
The length of the web address tells you something about how visible they want this document to be.

Happy days are here again, everything's perfect in the most perfect of all worlds -- how do I know? I read it in the Daily News and the Times

 "Nearly 700,000 students head back to Los Angeles Unified classrooms today, and tens of thousands of them will no longer suffer through chaotic, year-round schedules thanks to the district's massive ongoing construction program." -- Daily News. And thanks to you the taxpayers for your generous $19.2 billion investment in bad schools which soon will be $26.2 billion unless you wake up and reject the ill-conceived $7 billion LAUSD bond issue in November.

"Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa vowed to double the rate of academic improvement at schools under his stewardship in benchmarks announced Tuesday. The marching orders apply to the 10 schools that make up the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, Villaraigosa's hgih-stakes effort to improve some of the city's lowest-achieving campuses." -- L.A. Times. And the mayor sends his regrets to the other 700 failing schools that will be left at the mercy of LAUSD's low-stakes efforts to make negligible improvements year after year.

"Homicides over the past three months in Los Angeles have fallen to their lowest levels since the Summer of Love more than 40 years age ...(thanks to) collaboration with other police agencies, an intense focus on gang crime and a crackdown on illegal immigrants with criminal records." -- Daily News. Who knew? Forget Jamiel's Law -- but if the city's recently dismantled gang program was working so well, how come they just dismantled it and want approval in November to impose the most regressive of all taxes, a parcel tax, for it.

"In a surprising and ambitious move, local transportation officials said Tuesday that they would pursue planning for two subway lines to the Westside..." -- L.A. Times. Talk about counting your chickens  -- the MTA's is so optimistic about getting another half-cent sales hike approved in November that it's already publicly boosting not one but two subway routes to the sea. Of course, the rest of the county gets nothing.

City Controller Laura Chick has scuttled the City Council's attempt to hold an illegal closed door meeting to cut a back room deal to end the political fight between her and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo.

Wannabe City Attorney Jack Weiss, backed by council leaders Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel, introduced a motion last month in absentia making council intervention in the dispute an emergency issue and setting the closed door meeting for tomorrow's council agenda.

At issue is Chick's insistence on being able to audit programs run by other elected officials, in this case the city's troubled worker compensation cases handled by the City Attorney. Delgadillo refused and filed a Superior Court complaint claiming the City Charter does not give the controller authority to subpoena his records or an audit his performance.

The council then jumped into the fray even though if Delgadillo is right it would not have the authority to intervene in a political and legal fight between two elected officials whose positions are created by the charter.

Since the council cannot affect the dispute, its justification for freezing out the public is specious as well -- nothing but a naked deceit to operate in secret on an issue that should be debated in public.

With Chick's refusal to bow to the council, the issue of her authority apparently isn't so urgent.now and will not be taken up for several weeks by the Rules Committee.

"This must be a public and open discussion that will begin in the Council Rules Committee soon and ultimately decided by the voters in March," said Chick.

I had intended to go to City Hall Wednesday to object to the closed door meeting on legal and moral grounds. The issue remains the same: The public must be vigilant and object to every illegal action by the council or other city officials

City Hall must start obeying the law. If you know of illegal actions by city offiicals, let me know at ron@ronkayela.com

Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a continuing series on how City Hall is robbing the Mt. Washington-Highland Park neighborhood of its greatest treasure, the Southwest Museum. This theft will only be stopped if community groups across the city come together and help save the city's oldest museum from being looted. Read what the community's has to say and read the first installment.


If it wasn't so ridiculous, so irrelevant, so sinister, you'd have to laugh at the Ethics Commission proposal to require lobbyists -- like adulterers long ago -- to wear scarlet letters identifying them for what they are as they go about the back rooms of City Hall peddling their influence.

This is no better than the phony Measure R that gave City Council members an extra undeserved term in office in the name of ethics reform that stopped lobbyists from making campaign donations but did nothing to end the pay-to-play system that allows officials to do the bidding of consultants, contractors, developers and unions in exchange for campaign cash.

The problem isn't lobbyists.

The problem is small-time politicians who sell out the public interest and will do anything to keep their $180,000 jobs and the all elaborate perks that come with it. The pols and their staff all know very well who the lobbyists with or without badges. They're the ones with open access to City Hall, the ones with envelopes stuffed with money from special interests.

Instead of deceiving the public, the City Council which intends to waste two months examining this meaningless proposal ought to hold public hearings and come clean about its own complicity with high-paid lobbyists in stealing $1 billion in historical treasures from the Southwest Museum, robbing the Mt. Washington-Highland Park area of its community treasure and turning the city's oldest museum into a classroom.

They might start by finding out why the Ethics Commission has done nothing about formal complaints filed last January and February against powerful and well-connected lobbyists Steve Sugerman, George Mihlsten and Bill Delvac accusing them of representing the Autry National Center for two years without registering.

Southwest Museum supporters called for "criminal prosecution by a special prosecutor, civil penalties and a full one-year ban" on lobbying the city by Sugerman, the man who admitted to federal criminal charges in the DWP/Fleishman-Hillard scandal, and Mihlsten and Delvac who with the law firm of Latham & Watkins have as much clout at City Hall as the unions and Eli Broad combined.

"Given the length of time and continuing nature of the violation, the matter deserves the Commission's immediate investigation and action," the complaint said.

Instead of investigation and action, the commission looks the other way as it always does when allegations of official corruption are involved and comes up with a badge proposal for lobbyists and suggest community groups, nonprofits and ordinary citizens be made to register as lobbyists and be made to pay hefty fees for the right to be snubbed by their elected officials while well-paid lobbyists have open access.

If we won't band together on this issue and fight to preserve the Southwest as a museum, we might as well put up for the for sale signs and start looking for a nice place to live where the rights and interests of law-abiding people are respected.

The detailed complaints can be read by clicking on these links:
southwest Latham Ethics Complaint FINAL-1.pdf
sugermanethics.pdf

The heart of the matter is how the Autry has gone about taking over the Southwest, which was badly managed for many years.

The Autry promised to renovated and restore the Southwest, claiming it had $100 million in assets -- which activists say was false and have filed a complaint with the state Board of Accountancy against various firms over allegations of ethical lapses in their reports SouthwestMuseum.pdf. Also see supporting documentation.