“Padilla, now a state senator, did not return phone calls Thursday” — Daily News.
The fiasco of the LA Children’s Museum is now visible for all to see, a tragedy that began with then City Council President Alex Padilla’s demand — that everyone in power went along with — to locate what was supposed to be the Valley’s first such cultural institution in the most remote northern reaches of a gridlocked city of four million.
It could have been in North Hollywood 
at the end of the Metro subway line. The MTA had the land and wanted it there as part of creating a wonderful cultural center that would have regenerated a whole neighborhood and was easily accessible by public transit and freeways to the whole city.
But no, Padilla wanted this prize for his district, as well as a $25 million Major League Baseball training facility at Hansen Dam that even the community didn’t want..
Now, after years of failed leadership, the museum is going to go into bankruptcy and will be liquidated, leaving LA as the only major city in America without a museum that could light the imaginations of children with a sense of wonder and awe.
And Padilla does not return calls. His council successor, Richard Alarcon, (,ALARCÓN.doc) instead proposes that the $52 million underground building we paid for be used as a school.
Where’s the inexorable laws of karma when you need them?
Look at almost everything that City Hall does (and the state Legislature and Congress for the matter) and you will find self-service, special-interest service and a failure to serve the public interest.
If I had my way, everybody — Democrat and Republican alike — now holding public office would be banned for life like the moral felons that they are.
Look at the Zahniser story in the Times about how the mayor, council and DWP Commission under then President and now General Manager David Nahai jacked up our water rates three years ago at the height of the economic boom in order to transfer $30 million to the general fund to pay bloated salaries to city employees.
A judge has ruled tentatively in favor of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association that the rate hike violated Proposition 218 which “bars municipal utilities from overcharging ratepayers for water and then using the surplus to pay for other city programs.”
So what does the embattled Nahai say: “We have received the tentative ruling and are studying its ramifications.”
What’s to study? Nahai and everyone else knew damn well it was illegal but they kept on collecting the illegal tax. They were so sure it was illegal they put it in a special account, now totaling about $100 million, for safekeeping.
They’re supposed to refund the money but don’t rush out to your mailbox because the checks will never come.
They’ve found other ways to keep on raising your water rates like Nahai’s phony “water conservation” program that punishes the struggling middle-class homeowner and by transfering all kinds of city workers to the DWP payroll to drive up costs that would further justify higher and higher rates.
Scratch the surface of the billboard mess, or the Housing Authority and its half-million-dollar-a-year boss, or the CRA or just about anything City Hall does and you will find a scandal, a total disregard of the public interest and the public’s money.
That’s why the city is facing a $1 billion deficit next year that will soar even higher in the years ahead as the cost of employee pension funds suck the life out of city services.
If there was a shred of integrity left among our elected officials, the city would follow the lead of the Children’s Museum and file for bankruptcy today. They would appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission to deconstruct Los Angeles into governable regions that empowered the people to create livable neighborhoods, good schools and safe streets.
They don’t have to take my advice on this matter. The inexorable laws of karma are at work and sooner rather than later, the city will run out of money to pay the bills and the public will rebel against the endless increases in fees, rates and taxes and diminishing public services and lies and deceits.
LA is broken and nearly broke. They are running out of tricks to hide their failures. It’s for the people who live and work here to rise up and take ownership before it’s too late.
Thank you for covering this abomination. The empty hulk actually looks like the train wreck that it is, blocking the entire field of view down Foothill Blvd that used to open on the wide expanse of greenery of Hansen Dam Rec Area.
The museum land, public land, was given to this corporation for just $1 per year, while the LVT Library — a public amenity — was cut in half to accomodate them.
Alarcon conveniently calls the museum “the Hansen Dam Environmental Awareness Center”, thus justifying in his own little mind his theft of the community fund set up to create a public environmental awareness center.
The whole thing reeks of Los Angeles Politics, a toxic brew killing our city and our people.
Just a fact correction, Ron — the MLB Baseball stadium you mention as chased away was not entangled in the Children’s Museum deal. Not ever.
MLB, and Padilla, wanted to slap a full-sized major league baseball stadium in the middle of a vital environmental corridor. The project would train future, handpicked MLBers in a full-sized and lighted MLB stadium in a quiet, rural community. Padilla tried to sell it to the community as a place where their kids could go learn to play, until the community uncovered the fact that community kids would rarely if ever be allowed to utilize the monster facility. Needless to say, that community protested loudly and the MLB Commissioner at the time decided to look for a more appropriate location. That location was supposed to be the large expanse below and around the I-5/170 interchange, a far more appropriate placement with logical freeway access. Today those acres of empty land still sit vacant.
The Children’s Museum has been handed tens of millions of public $$ by Padilla and Alarcon. Chapter 7 means it won’t owe anyone, anything. What a total cluster f***.
In case it wasn’t clear from my earlier comment, the MLB stadium was not slated for the same land as the Children’s Museum – a much larger Lake View Terrace Public Library was. The MLB stadium was slated for a parcel on the other side of Foothill Blvd, on DWP or Public Works land that was used for storing “trees in a box” at the time.
It’s worth noting that the real victims here include the low-income, working families who lived on that land before the Army Corps declared it a flood zone and took their homes and property from them via eminent domain in the early part of last century.
Thank you, Ron, for exposing yet again what we have been tolerating as City Government here in LA. I don’t know of an appropriate punishment, nothing I can think of would be adequate, so let us go in another direction. Let us attend the NC meetings with a goal of CHANGE – not to anarchy – but rather to something like a City Manager, How would that work? If the concensus were yes, would the public outcry at the NC meetings suffice? The present form of government would not support giving up their cushy jobs, pensions, cars, drivers, homes, luxuries, gosh, they are our ROYALTY. They think we belong to them, don’t they?
Anybody? TH
TH – YES. CITY MANAGER, NON-UNION. Shall we vote for them or … I’d hate to see them in the same position as department GMs who work at the whim of Villaraitardo.
This really is and example of our out of control city and government officials at their best. God help us!! Join SLAP and help us to help ourselves. Help prevent nonsense like this by demanding transpancy and truthfullness from our officials, elected and appointed. Aren’t you tired of this cr__ Get madder than h____! Get involved!! Let’s do something about it!
By the way, that “building” is “nightmare ugly” and doesn’t fit in the environment of its host which is a rural neighborhood. It belongs in outer space and should be destroyed, or better yet left as a reminder of our city’s folly, least we forget! We have been robbed!!!!
4/3/2009
Dear Ron, Your post this morning on ronkayela and Kevin Modesti’s story on the March council meeting in Van Nuys indicate to me that changing LA is going to have to be more radical than a City Manager – it is entirely too big and probably that is the reason there is so much “Bad Karma” going on.
What happens in Woodland Hills is 35 miles from City Hall. I remember when we tried to separate the San Fernando Valley from LACITY, someone talked about organizing the new city with a manager. That is when I first heard of such a thing.
But now I realize that what really must be done is breakup the city into cities (nationwide 250,000 is a better than average sized city. And UTLA or no, each city must have its own school district. I can see Canoga Park as a city with a city manager and a school district. The big departments in LA like Police, Fire and DWP would become governments unto themselves and the new cities would hire their services until the time when it appears each could handle having their own departments. The buildings in the Valley could serve several cities, but I see Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Granada Hills, North Hollywood, Northridge, Tarzana, Reseda, Chatsworth, Canoga Park, Woodland Hills all as separate cities joining Calabasas, Burbank and San Fernando. I can smell the fresh air already.
Now Sunland-Tujunga, Mission Hills, and Sylmar would be wonderful citiies and the people would have a loyalty like nothing we experience now. The rest of LA needs to break up as well. Just as there is a Beverly Hills, West L.A., etc., (I am not too familiar with east and south LA – but we all suffer from the same
inadequate and ignorant government – it is just too big and sprawled over so many, many miles, that the government just has given up. They have thrown up their hands and are waiting to retire.
How does having REGIONAL services like the Libraries, Police, Fire and Water and Power, MTA, ZOO, LACMA sound to you? At first at least, it would be easier
The independent cities would not have to cope with huge unions which are basically selfish interests. They would have individual contracts acccording to their needs..
It is going to be a big job working things out, it will involve everyone to take part if they have any ideas to share and not leave it up to someone else. We shall have to make time, take time and use time so that
once and for all, we shall be closer to managing our own lives.
Does this all sound huge? It is, But it is never going to get any smaller, only worse and worse. So it will be a big choice for all of us. Do we or don’t we?
Your friend always, Teddy Howell, Canoga Park.
Teddy Howell is on the right track. The other possibility is the borough system like New York. Independently run boroughs with the overall City just providing regionally coordinated utilities and other services.
A unified secession is the other possibility. There is no question that smaller cities than Los Angeles are better run and have a better quality of life. Just drive down Wilshire, Santa Monica Blvd, Colorado Blvd or San Fernando Road. When you pass from a smaller city into Los Angeles, the street trees are chopped off, the sidewalks are a disaster, the lack of zoning enforcement makes the place look like a war zone.
Perhaps the Neighborhood Councils could do something really useful with their money. Contract for studies for a unified secession from the City of Los Angeles. The one thing the proposal would have to examine carefully is to avoid segregation of racial minorities. Instead, the proposal should look for ways to build on the diverse populations of Los Angeles.
The Port of Los Angeles and the Airport will also become a thorny issue regarding how they would be allocated. Maybe they should become regional and revenues from them split among the former LA territory.
The Children’s Museum is an example of just how much the City can screw up a cultural institution (and waste taxpayer money) if it has a role to play. The Museum’s ill-conceived move to taxpayer’s land in Hansen Dam deprived it of a much better location available in North Hollywood.
Time after time, the City Council keeps giving away the City’s dwindling park land to non-profit museums. There is the controversy over Jack Weiss sliding the Holocaust Museum into the Pan Pacific park in mid-city. There is the bitter controversy over Tom LaBonge waving his pom poms to support the Autry Museum’s attempted rape and pillage of the Southwest Museum in an effort to add the Southwest’s collection to a wing of the Autry in Griffith Park. There was the ill-conceived and short-lived effort of LaBonge to give money to MOCA to bailout its incompetent Board.
We have to hold the City Council accountable for all of these failures and stupid ideas in relation to museums. LaBonge knows little about culture and cultural institutions. The Mayor knows and understands even less.
To those discussing the idea of secession, here’s a bit of history to contemplate. There needs to be a change in a state law which now requires all voters in Los Angeles to vote for/against secession. This was created to answer the Valley’s call for self-determination. The powerbrokers then knew that the rest of the city wouldn’t have supported the Valley’s efforts, but they could, at least, turn around to Valley voters and say “We did the best we could.” So until there is a sufficient momentum and funds ready to take on Sacramento and lobby the hell out of them to change the law, then focus on all of the other great ideas being discussed today.
We are getting a little sidetracked here with Valley secession and all. The issue here is that people like Padilla, who was corrupt, got elected to Council without any opposition and then moved on to State Senate. Why do we keep electing such people. Where are the voters when elections come around. Lets pay attention to whom we elect, come out to vote & doggedly follow their records, and recall them when they don’t perform. And never elect career politicians who play musical chairs between the City & state seats. They are the most undeserving.
Everyone: some really great posts. I can hear the frustration, anger and agreement that something has to change.
In a City / Region of this size there has to be available some independent, experienced legal minds (retired would be good without personal agendas), that would offer their expertise and act as moderators for a (Yes, I’ll say it again) City Charter Convention, a C3. Call it whatever you want, but somewhere along the line, everyone has to get together and hash out the subject.
The Blogs and postings provide information and history that’s incredibly informative, but a journey starts with the first step. I feel that that step has already been taken. We’re ready for the second.
I’m buying a Lottery ticket today, on my way to the SLAP meeting, if I win tonight, I’ll fund the second step.
The first steps – the Valley now has it own 911 Center and a new Topanga Police Station.
Let’s redraw the lines in 2010 in a non-gerrymandered manner (Council Districts on one side of the hill only).
If we can have City Council meeting places in San Pedro – maybe there should be three cities made from one.
Regional airports and some services shared.
Why should the Council members spend hours every day in their cars? Some Council members avoid coming to the Valley.
Let’s set up three new “cities”. Then our Council members will know who they represent – the Valley, Downtown, or the San Pedro area.
Could we actually get people to show up to vote if this was on the ballot?
Let’s see…..
Somewhere along the line Alacron &/or Padilla squandered the funds.Not only for the musems, but the mitigation funds that were to create an eco educational area. (We got a corner in the library)So Alacron says this has been fulfilled and motioned to have it declared accomplished.
this building does not fit in our comunity landscape a huge cement monolith polluting the scenery. Who OK’d this mess. I believe it should be removed and a community garden be established.
Superior info and straight to the point. I’m not certain if this is actually the top place to ask but do you folks have any ideea where to hire some professional writers? Thx