I'm no Polanski but I do love the movies and turning City Council meetings into documentaries with my Flip camera gives me no end of pleasure whether anyone actually watches them.
Today's Council meeting produced wonderful cinema verite, at least as far as I'm concerned.
It had everything: Threats against a gadfly for a minor violation of the tough new rules of decorum, a violation of the Council's own rules by Bill Rosendahl so a police union official could bully the Council, a raucous demonstration by Skid Row homeless chanting "Public Comment Now."
The Council was helpless to deal with it so they recessed for 10 or 15 minutes until order was restored. They didn't empty the chamber. They didn't fill the room with cops -- which probably was wise since the homeless were protesting the LAPD's pogrom against them for the last three years.
It felt good to see that the homeless are even angrier at City Hall than those with homes. Maybe we can form a united rabble front and get some real change in the way this city is run.
But I don't want to run the movie for you, so here it is:
The most memorable line Antonio Villaraigosa ever uttered came when he was under criticism for jet-setting around the world, hobnobbing with big shots and failing to pay attention to his duties as mayor of the second largest city in America.
"I'm mayor of the city of Los Angeles, not some small town in the desert somewhere. We are a global city," Villaraigosa said.
The heart of the problem with the mayor and other officials is that they run LA like it is a small town out in the desert somewhere, a town run by a small clique of insiders who act like they own the place, show little or no regard for the common good and, worst of all, are hopelessly inefficient.
Incompetent is the word most often used to describe city government.
A case in point is the LA Convention Center, a white elephant that has gobbled up hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
"Los Angeles may be losing thousands of
dollars in fees waived by Convention Center staff because there is no
system in place to access the actual costs of each event. Failure to
properly maintain the Convention Center and restrictions in city
ordinances prevent the staff from adjusting rates to adequately compete
with other communities during non-peak booking periods. Perhaps most
startling is a labor mandate requiring that the Convention Center
utilize city electrical workers, which has resulted in thousands of
overtime hours. Twenty-five city electrical workers earned an average
of $94,000 in overtime pay with one topping out at $146,000."
There's a lot of other damaging findings in the audit:
* A flawed system for using employee overtime with a lack of oversight, which has led to over a million dollars being wasted. LACC uses City employees from other Departments - and pays them overtime, as opposed to expanding its pool of as-needed employees that can provide these services at regular rates. * Employees are being paid "overtime" when they are no longer full-time City employees. The Convention Center needs to immediately seek to recover tIie nearly $34,474 owed to the City. * An employee that has been on administrative leave for 3 and a half years and is still being paid a monthly uniform allowance. .• A lack of control over fixed assets. The Convention Center is supposed to have 61,893 fixed assets worth nearly $11.4 million. We sampled 60 items to verify their existence--and could not locate approximately 25% of the items. • No clear policy or oversight for fees being waived by the Convention Center. • For November 2008 alone, we found that 43 parking cards were used by people after the completion or cancellation of their events.
If only this kind of mismanagement were contained to the Convention Center.
The lack of regard for the public's money runs right through everything City Hall does.
The mayor boasts his business tax amnesty netted $20 million from scofflaws who avoided $7 million in penalties but hundreds of millions of dollars still owed the city go uncollected.
For seven years, the city has tried to regulate billboards but still doesn't know where those that don't have permits are, fully one-third of them of the 11,000 billboards blighting the city.
Under criticism for blanket approval to spend millions of dollars a year for community and commercial events, the City Council comes up with a policy to pay only part of the costs and then finds out that the figures they have been getting are totally fictitious. There is no bookkeeping because nobody really cares about where the money goes as long as it keeps flowing in.
The list is endless. Spending is routinely approved without any cost-benefit analysis, audits of poorly performing departments and programs create more paperwork than action.
Is it any wonder that a quarter of the way into the new fiscal year, there's a $300 million hole in the budget?
Put aside for the moment, the corruption and the sweetheart deals with unions and contractors, the biggest problem is simply a lack of competence. No one is held accountable; there aren't even accounts that are reliable.
Yet, we have the highest paid city government in America with Council members getting $180,000 a year and citywide electeds even more. No other city pays anything like that. We have 1,000 retired city employees getting $100,000 a year and thousands more who will join that exclusive club in the next few years.
The plan to start an initiative drive to cut the elected officials' salaries in half won't solve the problem. But it will make us feel better and it might send them a message that voters are fed up with them and want to see change in a hurry.
This is a city with 4 million people, not some small town out in the desert somewhere. It's time City Hall started managing LA like the big city it is.
"Less Talk - More Action" -- That's the theme of an innovative program coming this Saturday as a counter to the city-run and organized Congress of Neighborhoods set for the following Saturday, Oct. 10.
The Neighborhood Councils Action Summit grew out of widespread frustration over the pace of change within the decade-old NC movement and was organized by Greg Nelson, the first General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, along with Stephen Box and others
Like the title of the program suggests, NCs too often talk issues to death without ever getting around to doing something about them.
So the Action Summit -- being held from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Los Angeles City College, Faculty/Staff Center, 855 N. Vermont Ave.-- hopes to change that targeting a number of issues, getting participants to vote on what action to take and then using what's decided to develop campaigns for broad community support.
The subjects on the agenda with expertise on the issues are cutting city officials' salaries in half, creating a DWP Ratepayer Advocate office,city budget reform, the cyclists bill of rights, reducing the backlog of sidewalk repairs and the explosion of marijuana dispensaries.
These are all worthy subjects to address and the summit represents an important step in trying to bring NCs around the city together on specific issues that affect every neighborhood.
City Hall has all the money and power, hundreds of media spinners and bureaucrats, the unions and other special interests to control the agenda and get people elected who will serve the political machine, weak and failing as it is.
The only answer is people power, ordinary citizens armed with good information about what's going on at City Hall and around the city.
The Action Summit is a well-organized and structured event that will open with remarks by guest speakers LA Times editorial writer Robert Greene, South Central Farmers Cooperative Coordinator Tezozomoc and David Bell, president of the East Hollywood NC.
Panelists include Wave newspaper columnist Betty Pleasant, former DWP Commission President Nick Patsaouras, Street Services Department head Bill Robertson and a number of NC leaders.
"A growing number of neighborhood council board members and stakeholders
want to find a new way for the voices of neighborhood councils to be
heard.'' organizers of the Action Summit said in their event announcement.
"The Action Summit is being
designed to provide neighborhood councils and their stakeholders with
opportunities they haven't had at City Hall's Congress of
Neighborhoods, which has now been combined with the initial meeting of
the Mayor's Community Budget Day process."
Go to their website http://ncactionsummit.wetpaint.com/ to find out more about this important event that I believe will help move a growing city rebellion against City Hall's failure to the next level.
A large turnout will send City Hall a message that the time for change has come and that the community is getting stronger and better organized.
A lot of great news people I've known have left the profession, some just fed up with the way things were going, some no longer regarded with favor at a time when staffs are shrinking and standards are falling.
Since I left the profession 18 months ago, I've met a lot of others outside my little world and I think we all share the experience one way or another: Liberation. Now, many of us are free to use what we know to pursue our real dreams through unexplored territory. Our reading, listening and viewing habits are undergoing radical change so figuring out the who, what, when, where and why of news provides the opportunity to reinvent journalism.
I believe the decline of corporate control of the media has liberated America, and hopefully, freed us to speak freely in public, make more creative choices in our lives and listen better to others.
It is uncharted territory how the news and information revolution plays out in years to come. There will surely be hundreds of creative and entrepreneurial wizards who create great products that offer a competition for minds and hearts unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes.
My own contribution is OurLA.org -- a central place on the Internet where citizens, experts, journalists, anyone can contribute what they know for the whole community.
Thanks to Valley civic leader David Fleming and many other generous people, my dream is becoming a reality with the help of a young reporter named Chelsea Cody who last year was editor of the Cal State Northridge paper.
It's a struggle for money and, more importantly, to convince the community to actively participate and submit their news articles, opinions, photos, videos. So many people have their own personal or community websites that reach their own audiences.
OurLA is trying to create a central clearing-house so the knowledge and wisdom of the community is shared widely. We believe a better informed community is an important element in creating a healthier civic culture in LA and bring together the city's diverse people into a common conversation.
We don't know if we can succeed but we're giving it all we've got. In their own way, so are hundreds of other former journalists across the country.
There's not much money in it for now, except for the few, but that's the price of living your dream.
Doug McIntyre is the latest to join our fast-growing club.
He's among the most brilliant, knowledgeable and talented people I've met along my own private journey.
And more than that, Doug knows what's really going on in the civic and political life of LA as well as anyone else in the media.
Doug entered my life when he volunteered to write a column for free when I was still editor of the Daily News. When I got fired, he put me on once a week for 4 months, which helped me launch my new life post-journalism.
McIntyre was fired last week by KABC and the company that bought the radio network at a time the entire media world was changing. Tough luck for them.
Doug has started his new life, as many of us do, with a blog: RadioGasBag.com. Hopefully, he will be scooped up by a local station that recognizes he is an important community asset with a large following.
Facing the challenge of making a living and deciding what to do with the rest of his life is part of the normal sequence most of us have gone through when we engage these kinds of life changes.
The most talented, like Doug, suffer this more than others. What are the options? What kind of chances can one afford to take? Is there a creative opportunity?
Most people don't take those questions seriously enough during their whole lifetimes but I believe many of us, in all walks of life, will be facing them more frequently in the years ahead.
I think the world of hyper-consumerism, America's the richest country in the world, you can have anything you want whenever you want it, is over.
We don't create wealth in America anymore; we consume the sources of wealth: Raw materials and manufactured goods are imported while we have become a service-based workforce.
We are borrowing to sustain our illusory lives of super-affluence and sticking a younger generation with the bills, and hope they won't wake up from their electronic dream any time soon.
Those are just some of the ideas that run through my mind.
Doug McIntyre has better ones. So do my friends Tezozomoc and Stephen Box and hundreds of others, journalists and citizens, that I've had the privilege of getting to know since I was lucky enough to start down the road of Ronnie Kaye's excellent free adventure.
As far as I can see, the times really are changing this time.
A lot had happened since city inspectors first cited Nadya Mahdavi for construction without a permit at the house on Haynes Street in my modest Valley tract of single-family homes.
The case snowballed after neighbors figured out that Mahdavi was illegally converting the house into a three-unit tenement that threatened the quality of their lives and the value of their property.
They complained to the city, to Councilman Dennis Zine. They researched property records, they finally got mad enough to walk door-to-door with petitions demanding the city do something about it
That's how I got involved and started asking questions. I wanted to help, I wanted to know who was killing my neighborhood.
Was it just a greedy landlord trying to get more than $5,000 in rent by converting a 2,000-square-foot house into three units, each with its own kitchen and bathroom, 12 rooms in all? Or was it the system itself, the city, that was responsible for failing in its duty?
Everyone was a suspect.
The trail led to Chief Inspector Frank Bush and others in the Building and Safety Department, to Zine and his staff and finally to the Van Nuys Courthouse and Deputy City Attorney Don Cocek.
Citations started piling up even as Mahdavi flipped ownership of the house each time a court date approached. The ownership went from Mahdavi's Wall Street Properties to her employee to a company called Fidelity Investment Group which listed her husband Nasir Shaikh as president.
A simple permit problem, an infraction, escalated into a series of charges, misdemeanor crimes subject to fines and jail time, that were filed against Mahdavi, Shaikh and Fidelity Investments.
It took officials a while to unravel the chain of ownership and identify exactly who to hold accountable and for what.
The accused played the system for time, provided misleading information, asked for Public Defenders, didn't have lawyers representing them.
Mahdavi's failure to appear in court led to a warrant for her arrest being issued -- something that took two months to achieve because of the multiple addresses where she might be living.
Authorities' attitudes hardened as the months dragged on. My neighbors adjusted to the irritation of many cars parked at the home on Haynes and the comings and goings of the tenants of the three units.
Finally, 13 months after the first citation, the deconstruction of the house got under way and it was brought back into compliance with the law. It took six more months for Judgment Day to arrive.
Mahdavi and Shaikh were already at court when I arrived yesterday. They didn't look as cocky as they had before. They greeted me with smiles.
A lot had happened in their lives since they bought the house on Haynes. Their marriage had broken up, their high-flying lives had come down to earth as the collapse of the housing market cost them dearly, unraveling their various property schemes.
Encino attorney Gerald Cobb had worked out a deal with Cocek: Fidelity would plead guilty to three counts, Mahdavi and Shaikh would plead no contest to two counts each. They would be fined just under $10,000 and pay $1,500 in investigative fees. They would be on probation for a year and if they stay out of trouble and pay the fine, the charges will be reduced on their record from misdemeanors to infractions.
It was just before noon when they were called to appear before Commissioner Thomas E. Grodin who had imposed his own condition on the plea bargain: Each of the defendants was required to write a 1,000-word essay of contrition for him to consider at sentencing.
Mahdavi's essay ended this way:
"I would just like to state that I am extremely grateful for being
given an opportunity to resolve this case. I sincerely appreciate and am appalled by the
kindness and generosity displayed by the People and the City in respect to not placing a damaging note on my record. The People have been very patient and generous with
me and I do not deserve such mercy. I assure you that this will never happen again."
I'm sure she didn't mean to use the word "appalled" but she was late getting her essay to Grodin who was not amused and found both their essays "self-serving...barely made it." Grodin lectured them, awarding a grade of D to Mahdavi and C-minus to Shaikh.
"I was not terribly impressed ...frankly, with either one."
As we left the courthouse, Cocek said all the information he had gathered was turned over to the state Department of Real Estate.
"If they screw-up again, they will lose their licenses," he said.
The case was closed.
My neighborhood is as safe and tranquil as ever. The suspects were identified and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The system worked, if slowly. The inspectors, Cocek, the court system had done their jobs well and honorably.
But I couldn't help wondering how much my own role might have changed the course of events, the exposure of the case for all the world to see causing officials to spend far more time on it than was usual.
In her letter to Grodin, Mahdavi acknowledges how that affected her: "The
humiliation and disgrace I have felt from being
portrayed as a criminal and the harassment I have received through internet
exposure
has caused such a terrible impact on me and my family"
In the grand scheme of things, this was a small matter.
There are thousands of more serious violations of housing codes going undetected all over the city, especially in poorer areas.
Building and Safety is grossly understaffed and taking a bigger hit in the city budget crisis with our elected officials gutting funds for code enforcement to protect jobs that facilitate developers moving ahead on new projects that generate revenue.
So who is killing our neighborhoods?
There's a lot people like Mahdavi and Shaikh who do stupid and greedy things. Only the few are caught and punished despite the efforts of people like Frank Bush, Don Cocek and Judge Grodin to protect us. Usually, it takes the neighborhoods themselves to bring these problems to their attention and persist until they get action.
The same cannot be said for the city's leadership.
Throughout the current budget process, they have only talked about how to bring in more revenue to the city -- not how to preserve the neighborhoods or the quality of life for the residents.
Laws for our protection are haphazardly enforced and resources are expended to get developments approved faster and faster even though the infrastructure is deteriorating and inadequate for our needs.
Three times a week, Matt Dowd, Michael Hunt and Zuma Dogg annoy, offend and sometimes make perfect sense as co-stars in the theater of the absurd TV drama that passes for LA City Council meetings.
It says a lot about the state of LA's political culture that they have become something like the voice of the people, ranting, raving and sometimes exposing City Hall's hypocrisy.
Wednesday was no exception, the gadflies -- minus Zuma who was says he is moving on to other things with the CD2 race over -- stood before the Council and mocked and berated them.
Hunt was back in his KKK garb but this time, the Council didn't walk out (except for Richard Alarcon and Herb Wesson) or try to throw him out. Dowd was given special dispensation to ppear before the Council after being banned from speaking for violating the new rules of decorum -- rules specifically aimed at them, rules that have been added to the litany of civil rights violations he and his Venice Beach companions have sued over in federal court
Against all logic, they have not only sued but they have won.
They have won a second federal court ruling that the city's beach ordinance requiring permits to sell wares and to perform at Venice Beach where they and so many others have performed is unconstitutionally vague. Different zones have been set aside for vendors selling things and for performers but the enforcement has been haphazard, to the detriment of limiting the space available to performers like Hunt, Dowd and Zuma.
The vagueness problem comes from the city's series of unsuccessful attempts to write a valid ordinance that relies on the phrase "inextricably intertwined" with the vendor's right to free speech as the basis to deciding what is and isn't allowed.
Enforcement then is left to authorities to decide what activities are "inextricably intertwined'' with free speech -- something the litigants argue is enforced arbitrarily. So, they claim, is the ban on performers using paraphernalia over 4-feet tall like the microphone stand musician Dowd uses and the cutout of Hannah Montana he keeps nearby in hopes people will donate to him to have their picture taken on the beach with a likeness of the Disney Channel star.
The result of all this is $270,000 judgment in favor of Dowd and friends on one aspect of their current case which is continuing in mediation talks aimed at reaching a settlement.
The issue on the agenda Wednesday was the city's need to deposit $211,000 with the federal court to cover attorney fees awarded to the plaintiffs so the partial ruling in the case can be appealed.
It says a lot about the quality of leadership of this city, their skill at managing it, that guys many people would call bums have beaten all the brain power, all the lawyers, all the capacity to intimidate of a City Hall that treats its 4 million residents.
The Venice Beach performers turned into Council gadflies three years ago when the cops started harassing them because city officials wanted to clean up the Boardwalk freak show to make it more appealing to tourists.
Zuma Dogg, who is smarter than and knows more about city government than most Council members, has become something of an urban folk hero, skewering City Hall foibles and failures in his frequent public comment appearances broadcast on Channel 35. His campaigns for mayor and now CD2 attracted respectable numbers of votes for a candidate who not only is penniless but homeless.
Last week, Dowd -- now something of an amateur lawyer -- and a dozen other beach denizens filed a new complaint in federal court.
They are challenging the 2006 and 2008 beach ordinances over the same vague words "inextricably intertwined" and adding a challenge to the new rules of decorum for Council meetings that allow the Council President to ban public comment by people deemed disruptive for up to 30 meetings, or 10 weeks.
Like the permit system for beach performers, the decorum rules are arbitrary on their face and almost certainly unconstitutional. Some Council members think they don't go far enough and want to move the public comment period from the start of meetings to the end, something that has infuriated many in the activist community.
In a city where the wishes of ordinary people matter so little to those in high office, where so many are alienated or indifferent, there seems something fitting that the Council is haunted by these gadflies and that their carefully staged meetings disrupted by their antics.
But it also says a lot about the rest of us watching from the sidelines or ignoring what's going on altogether. We have abdicated our responsibilities as citizens and have the city we deserve.
TOTAL AT POLL BALLOTS 6,589 45.36%
TOTAL VOTE-BY-MAIL BALLOTS 7,936 54.64%
GRAND TOTAL OF BALLOTS CAST 14,525 -- 11.84% of 123,750 REGISTERED VOTERS
At a rate of one voter every 15 minutes per polling place on Tuesday, the East San Fernando Valley's 270,000 residents decided they want to be represented at City Hall by someone who represents the interests of those who have taken LA hostage.
The turnout on Tuesday was even lower than those who cast mail-in ballots, a grand total of less than 12 percent of registered voters.
You can't blame the machine for the outcome, a December runoff between union-backed Paul Krekorian and developer-backed Chris Essel who split nearly two-thirds of the votes cast, with Tamar Galatzan and Mary Benson distant runners-up.
You have seen the enemy, he is us.
The seven candidates who actually lived in CD2 before the election was called split just 5,092 votes, while the three carpetbaggers (Krekorian, Essel and Zuma Dogg) got 9,433.
Too many candidates with too little money -- the winners had nearly 90 percent of the cash raised for the campaign -- is the ostensible reason. You can throw in a lot of others like apathy, ignorance, demographics, defeatism to explain why it turned out to be another exercise in LA's Dictatorship of the Few.
But we shouldn't let ourselves off so easily.
I did not believe Essel could get traction in the East Valley and I was wrong. I don't think she can beat Krekorian in the runoff no matter how much more money the mayor and his cronies throw into her campaign.
It really doesn't make a lot of difference who wins. They both will maintain the unanimity of the City Council in matters large and small.
What matters is whether the activists of the city -- Neighborhood Councils, homeowner groups and everyone else who make up the city's civic culture -- face the painful truth that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
They chose up sides in this election and backed their local favorite instead of coming behind a single candidate and building a campaign organization that could man phone banks, walk precincts, leaflet at community events and hold rallies.
They didn't organize and they didn't raise any money. They acted like they lived in a small town where democracy is flourishing instead of in a big city where money and power talk loudly.
In the 18 months since I too became an activist, I've seen the same thing throughout the city.
We are victims of political myopia, unable to see anything beyond our own little issues, unwilling to see how we are like peasants in Medieval times sticking out our hands to our lordly masters and begging for crumbs from their table of power.
This is as true of the business community and the civic elite as it is of us ordinary people.
We are our own worst enemy. We victimize ourselves and blame the mayor, the unions, developers, lobbyists, contractors, consultants and other assorted connivers.
We can keep on putting all our energy and resources into the issues that we individually care about from sidewalk repair to bike paths to the oversize project in our neighborhood and the lack of planning.
Or we can see how the politicians and their army of staffers and bureaucrats backed by special interest money run circles around us even as they trash the neighborhoods and loot the city treasury.
LA is in a deep crisis. Services are being slashed. The future is being mortgaged. There is no way out unless the business and civic leaders step forward and the grassroots activists look up from the ground and see the big picture.
It's all about power.
The political machine, weak and leaky as it is, can control elections when less than 12 percent of voters cast ballots. When nearly 18 percent of the people vote as they did on Measure B and in the City Attorney's race, the people stand a chance.
If 25 percent voted, things could be different. There would be a balancing of interests and honest debate. LA could be saved from going over the precipice into bankruptcy and the chaos that would follow.
Nobody changes without taking personal responsibility and taking action to turn themselves around. It is truly now or never.
THE UNOFFICIAL COMPLETE RESULTS IN CD2:
COUNCIL DISTRICT 2 Votes Percent TAMAR GALATZAN 1,871 12.94% JOZEF "JOE" THOMAS ESSAVI 306 2.12% CHRISTINE ESSEL 4,104 28.39% MICHAEL MC CUE 339 2.35% PETE SANCHEZ 699 4.84% DAVID "ZUMA DOGG" SALTSBURG 410 2.84% FRANK SHEFTEL 441 3.05% PAUL KREKORIAN 4,929 34.10% MARY BENSON 1,198 8.29% AUGUSTO BISANI 158 1.09%
The battle over the $405 million city budget deficit is far from over despite all the self-congratulatory back-slapping and expressions of undying love last Friday.
The terms of endearment agreed to by the 22,000-member Coalition of City Unions and a unanimous City Council -- with the exceptions of Tom LaBonge and Tony Cardenas who didn't bother to show up to deal with this crisis -- provides only $78 million in total savings.
Some $20 million of that goes to restoring part of the $100 million already stolen from the emergency reserve fund. The rest goes into the general fund to pay the full the cost over 15 year for the Early Retirement Incentive Package (ERIP) for 2,400 lucky workers who get to retire as young as age 50 with the five years of service credits.
City workers' contributions will rise from 6 percent to 7.07 percent instead of the 6.75 percent in the June 26 deal. The early retirees getting a 12.5 percent boost in their pensions also will pay 1 percent for 15 years.
Other terms include deferring this and next year's cost-of-living raises for two years, requiring overtime be paid in compensatory time-off not cash, furloughs that amount to 30 minutes a week for the rest of year and half pay for holidays with the rest in more comp time,
As many workers will be transferred from general fund jobs to the Harbor, Airport and DWP -- especially the DWP -- payrolls whether they are needed or not since those are independent agencies with their own revenue streams and almost no effective public scrutiny.
They also will be looting all three agencies for services -- real or ficititious -- as much as they can get away with.
Then, there's the pay-later provisions: Cash payments for unused sick time normally made in January will be paid next August, the $15,000 golden handshake for early retirees will be paid next year and the year after, boot and uniform allowances will be paid next year as will City Attorneys fees to the California Bar.
In addition, any workers who wants an 8-day, 72-hour work schedule can have it and pensions will only be calculated with one of the many regular bonuses offered city workers to do their jobs instead of adding them all up.
Finally, if the economic miracle that this deal depends on actually comes true, much of the money will go back to city workers.
That's the deal, at least all we know about it, thanks to the unions sharing the information to their members, information our elected officials refuse to divulge because they don't see any reason why taxpayers should know what's really going on.
Not all city workers are happy about this.
The Engineers and Architects (EAA), for instance, get screwed again with one furlough day every two weeks, which is equal to a temporary 10 percent pay cut, and now will be hit with the only layoffs as well. As I understand it, 400 of EAA's 6,600 members -- city planners, technology people, auditors, criminalists and other white-collar professionals -- will get the axe because they have refused to be taken over so far by the SEIU which so deftly uses members' money to buy our city officials.
There's also a rump group of troublemakers who have set up LA CITY WORKERS.com . in an effort to build opposition to approval of the deal.
Fat chance. The vote on the deal will take place at a public meeting in two weeks where anyone who stands up to the union bosses is putting their life, at least their working life, on the liine.
An even bigger problem exists: Firefighters and police officers.
The deal approved by the Council on Friday furloughs cops one day every two weeks, halts hiring of new officers, puts cadets on notice of termination after completing their training and bars the Fire Department and Police Department " from entering into any new personal services or consulting contracts to perform work that would have been performed by sworn employees subject to the furloughs, layoffs, or other position reduction measures."
These provisions are nothing but a public relations exercise and bargaining tool.
They know damn well the public wants cops and firefighters protecting lives and property a lot more than the hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on social welfare programs and salves to special interest communities.
They count on us crying out against against the perils of anarchy in this gang-infested city and the perils of fire, flood and earthquake without adequate emergency services.
What this is about is giving the leaders of the fire and police unions, whose contracts expired three months ago, an excuse to make the same kind of modest concessions the other unions have made.
The trouble is deferring payoffs and raises until next year or the year after doesn't solve anything at all.
City Hall doesn't have the skill or the will to keep costs under control as they have promised as part of this deal and their rosy estimates of revenue will almost certainly fall short of reality.
The likelihood is that the city will face a cash crisis before this fiscal year is over. The certainty is that the city's financial condition will be much worse next year and the years after as the deferred bills come due and pension costs double and triple.
More than a year ago, I said LA had reached the point of no return. Things have gotten a lot worse since then and the actions of the mayor and City Council have compounded the depth of the problem.
If the business community and the residents of the city don't make a stand now and come together to take back City Hall, it will be too late when the libraries and parks close, the 911 emergency calls go unanswered and chaos ensues.
No. 34 -- that's how many water main breaks it takes in a two-week period for the City Council to start demanding answers from the DWP about why the blowouts are occurring.
Almost from the first blowout at Coldwater Canyon, outside engineers have speculated about whether limiting lawn sprinkling to just two days a week overstressed the rotting water pipe system with pressure surges, and many skeptical residents wondered if the whole problem was just another dirty DWP trick to squeeze a billion dollars or so more out of ratepayers.
I bring this up because it raises the issue at the heart of so much that's wrong with the way LA is managed: Competence.
DWP officials routinely fob off the Board of Commissioners, the Council and the public with answers like LA has :fewer water leaks than other comparable cities" or the "the inquiry is not complete."
Scratch the surface of almost anything City Hall does and you see the same kind of acceptance of non-answers, lack of transparency, managerial effectiveness. Incompetence is the word for it.
This is a critically important question now that the Mayor and Council have declared a $325 million deficit represents a balanced budget because unions and bureaucrats are working together like a loving family to manage the city's finances day-to-day to avoid the chaotic catastrophe that going bankrupt would cause.
How's the seven-year effort to get an effective billboard policy going or even to identify where the thousands of illegal billboards are? Or the promise to deliver updated community plans that protect neighborhoods? Or the million trees? Or the greenest city in the nation? Or dozens of other unkept promises and unresolved issues?
I concede crime is down and LA is the safest big city in America, at least one of them, and violence is down to 1950s levels, or is it?
Just look at the 30 whereas-es in the resolution the Council adopted Friday to fix the budget crisis, declare a fiscal emergency, furlough police officers two days a month, halt police hiring, subject police trainees to probationary termination and ban the Fire and Police Departments from outside contracting for consulting or other services.
By my count, the resolution contains 15 specific things that have gone haywire in the three months since the budget took effect and the unions were offered a sweetheart early retirement (ERIP) deal:
1. ERIP salary savings $23 million, not $111 million 2. Only half the ERIP salary savings can go into the general fund. 3. Employee contribution of .75 percent extra far short of covering cost of early retirement. 4. $10 million savings lost because 400 layoffs anticipated in budget not implemented. 5. $16.5 million savings lost because furloughs not implemented. 6. $75 million short in estimated tax revenue 7. $89 million in extra liability claims. 8. $5.8 million in extra subsidies for the poor to cover solid waste fees. 9. $247 million cost increase this year -- $1 million per working day -- over failure to win civilian and sworn labor concessions by expected deadlines. 10. Unknown loss of revenue due to state budget crisis. 11. $100 million taken from Reserve Fund to meet excess costs, leaving less than $150 million which could be exhausted by May. 12. $1.1 million for Station Fire. 13, $46 million less for Reserve Fund from carryover from last year that already was spent. 14. $13 million in Fire Department savings lost because of failure of negotiations. 15. $129 million in LAPD savings lost because of failure of negotiations.
If they were that far off the mark just three months ago, why would anyone believe they can do any better over the next nine months or next year when the deficit doubles or when it triples in the following years?
It's a question of trust. And for my money -- and yours -- you can't trust people who cause more problems than they solve, who spent more money that the city took in for years, did nothing about it when it became a problem and offer nothing more than a "trust us" solution as they did on Friday when let the city's budget woes had become a true crisis.
I say put a "No Confidence" measure to a vote on the June primary ballot and we'll see how the electorate feels about a City Hall that routinely sells out the public interest to special interests.
With regard to unions, here's how Councilman Bernard Parks put it recently before he succumbed at the end of a week of back room negotiations and closed door sessions on how to spin the public:
"A love cannot be an irresponsible love. It can't be an easy love. where we say we'll do whatever even if that's going to hurt more next year and the year after because it feels easy now." -- Eric Garcetti, in "How They Saved LA, The Movie."
The President of the LA City Council basked Friday in the warm glow of his love affair with his colleagues and the Coalition of City Unions, his preening humility fully on display.
The glory of making the city's $405 million deficit vanish in an instant was his.
The unions made concessions, he said. The budget was suddenly balanced, the cash flow crisis eliminated and a new era of partnership born so that labor and management will be able to triumph together over any difficulty that might arise City Hall was just one big family.
It was so easy, such an easy lovefest.
So much is uncertain, so much of the pain put off for another day, maybe even all the way until spring when they have to overcome a shortfall twice today's deficit, at $800 million -- almost 20 percent of the city's disposable revenue.
Living on credit for so many years -- what they call a structural deficit -- the city is in a money crisis.
It already was a year old when they finally cut a tentative deal Friday. At its heart, the deal did little but put off all the real decisions until yesterday's problem that became today's crisis becomes a shattering catastrophe tomorrow -- an economic earthquake that will require rebuilding the political system and reorganizing the functions of city government.
In a phrase, your City Council gambled the city's future.
They did it unanimously with the full involvement and support of a mayor dizzy from all his flip-flopping and twisting out of responsibility.
The city cut a deal that requires bigger but still small sacrifices from city workers to pay for the enhancement of the already lucrative pensions for some 2,400 of their colleagues who get to retire in the early- and mid-50s..
It depends for its success on the agreement of the unions to accept layoffs or furloughs, maybe even pay cuts as an alternative, if the situation deteriorates further.
The city's hands are no longer tied. It's the will that's missing, the integrity.
But they put it on the line and said they had found a solution and that we the people of the city back them.
I think they are dead wrong on both counts. They have solved nothing and they could not win a vote of confidence of the people.
Let them put it on the June ballot next year: Do you have confidence in the mayor and City Council? Yes or No.
If they are right about what they have set in motion, I will happily stand before them and eat humble pie. But if I'm right and the people watch what happens to the city over the next nine months and decide they have no confidence in the leadership, then the mayor and council members should be declared ineligible to ever hold city office again when their terms are up.
These are people who take an oath of office to do right by the people, not the unions.
You never hear a meaningful word from them about how cutting city services as they intend to do, padding the payrolls of the DWP, AIrport and Harbor with regular city workers and doubling and tripling our rates for water and power is good for anyone other than the unions.
So I don't expect them to willingly agree to my suggestion. But I intend to do all I can to build a political movement around it and the replacement of all of them by people who will do what's right for the people, and not just the few.
Petitions to cut the mayor and council's salaries in half will soon be circulation. Let's add a "No Confidence" in City Hall measure to that.
The workers at City Hall chanted "Save LA" on Friday. I think they meant it. I know I mean it
If our city leaders really want to save LA, they will put their jobs on the line and let us vote up or down on their collective performance in June. It's the least -- the very least -- the could do.
I first met Michael McCue at a coffee shop in Studio City. He was rifling through a thick folder of paperwork, his glasses perched at the tip of his nose. His signature navy blue blazer jacket emblazoned with his Studio City Neighborhood Council name tag and a number of other small pins advertising his social and political loyalties was draped over the chair behind him. I knew very little about him, except for the fact that he was a member of the Los Angeles Green Party and the Studio City Neighborhood Council. But within ten minutes of sitting down with Michael I was enamored of him. His warmth and intelligence were disarming. His passion was infectious and inspiring. His earnestness and buoyancy was refreshing.
As he shared his story, talking about his upbringing in a Navy family with his Goldwater Republican Father and Kennedy Democrat Mother for whom politics were an appropriate dinner table-topic, Michael McCue came into focus.
His early involvement as a teenager in local civic issues in his Midwest hometown, his later participation in LA politics clearly illustrated McCue's dedication to grassroots democracy and long-term political goal setting.
His perceptive argument for clean money politics and the infusion of new blood into the ranks of City Hall while hardly novel was renewed by his comprehensive understanding of the interconnected nature of the problems facing LA.
Willing to devote his time entirely to his campaign for the CD2 seat, McCue's dedication to common sense values and the major role of everyday people in changing this city for the better was clear the first day I met him.
Since then, McCue's following has grown to include several notable members of local news outlets, community activists and innovators, as well as CD2 residents who care deeply about their neighborhoods and their city.
This city needs someone with a bit of common sense and foresight as it grapples with a $405 million budget deficit, crumbling infrastructure, and a whole slew of issues that will fall on the backs of taxpayers because no one has the gall or creativity to address them head on.
That is why I find it immensely frustrating -no infuriating - that the City Hall political machine discriminates against community candidates like McCue; and by doing so prevents the city's ability to change, grow, and improve.
Without proper funding and political support from those indoctrinated into the city's powerful political scene there is little chance of success for the "little" community-based CD2 candidates in Tuesday's special election in the East San Fernando Valley.
Seven of the ten individuals running in this special election race are grass roots candidates. Each of them is well intentioned and passionate about creating positive change for their neighbors and the LA community. They offer innovative and challenging visions for the future based on their experiences as citizens and taxpayers.
But lacking the funds, media attention and political backing necessary to become major contenders in a money and special interest driven election means that they stand little chance at doing more than further dividing the vote and forcing a runoff election.
This leaves voters to choose between the lesser of three evils in the mainstream "big" candidates whose fancy fundraisers and glossy mailers have inundated the community for months.
Baring a sudden dramatic shift in the status quo, we will not see a genuine community representative take the Council District 2 seat in this special election.
Just another example of how the political system in this city continues to fail us. I personally love Michael McCue but all the community candidates -- Mary Benson, Augusto Bisani, Joe Essavi, Peter Sanchez, David "Zuma Dogg" Saltzburg, Frank Sheftel -- would do a better job for the community than the Big Three.
What will it take to even the political playing field and give candidates like these a fair chance?
When I got to the City Council Chambers Friday morning, it was already packed with city workers and union leaders and the Council was holed up in a back room rehearsing how they would publicly spin the deal they had reached to revive the sweetheart early retirement package.
My friends in the SEIU challenged me to don one of their purple union T-shirts which I was only too happy to do. I've known Julie Butcher and some others a long time and respect them. They represent the city's lowest paid workers and have a right to pursue their self interests as much as the rest of us.
My quarrel isn't with them. It's with the people who hold public office -- far and away the most highly paid and overly indulged city officials in America.
The celebratory mood of the several hundred city workers made it clear they were happy with the deal they had cut even though they had to give some concessions.
It was well after noon when the Council finally came out in public and Bernard Parks, the only member who tried to fix the $405 million budget deficit, started putting City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana through a scripted explanation of what had changed in the last week of intense negotiations.
There's $20 million more in the reserve fund, leaving it only $90 million short of where prudence suggests it should be given LA's proclivity for emergencies and painting rosy pictures of its financial condition.
The talks had yielded $78 million in savings, Santana said, so layoffs and furloughs would not be necessary. The Early Retirement Incentive Program with its 12.5 percent boost in pensions for 2,400 workers can go forward.
Scuttlebutt suggested the unions had agreed to raise their contributions to the pension fund from the current 6 percent to 7.01 percent, a slight increase on the 6.75 that was in the June offer, and the ERIP retirees would contribute 1 percent of their pensions for the 15 years it will take to pay off the early retirement costs exclusive the $43 million in golden handshakes it will cost to incentivize the lucky 2,400 who get to retire in their early to mid 50s.
The rest of the deal was pretty vague and needed to be kept secret from the public for the next 30 days until after the unions and the Council and mayor ratify it, Council President Eric Garcetti declared.
As luck would have it, Presiding Officer Dennis Zine decided to choose me as the first public speaker after each of the Council members got their time to declare their joy at being part of such a wonderful City Hall "family" with the unions, how their colleagues who worked so hard all week and had to give up a junket were heroes and had saved the city.
It was quite a lovefest, a real family affair. I was a lone voice in the crowd and decided I'd heard enough when they said how more than 10 percent of the 22,000 members of these unions could be sent home with rich pensions and services won't be affected. There wasn't any talk about how many of these jobs will be backfilled or people promoted into those high-paying slots.
There's still a $129 million hole in the budget that has to be worked out with the police union and the LAPD. And hundreds of city workers paid out of the general fund to be transferred to the Harbor, Airport, and the DWP which is gearing up to double and triple its rates.
You've got to pity the poor Engineers and Architects Union -- City Hall's whipping boy because the SEIU wants to steal its members. Its 6,600 members still are on furlough every 10th day, a 10 percent pay cut that is somehow morally justified despite all the whining about how the rest of the city workforce couldn't possibly take a pay cut.
Even if these and other holes in this deal don't sink the ship of the city in the coming months, there's still next year with its $800 million deficit looming and the year after when the deficit passes the billion dollar mark -- fully a quarter of the city budget.
I'm sure the "City Hall family" will pull together and solve it, no matter what it costs the public. Families are like that.
Too bad there's four million orphans like me out there who call LA home and pay for all of this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Serious water main "blowouts" at more than a dozen points around LA in recent days have raised questions about the causes and whether the DWP has properly maintained the vast network of pipes in the city. Warren Olney on his KCRW show "WHICH WAY LA?" discussed the issue Wednesday with Ron Kaye and others. Here is an excerpt whichwayla.mp3
By Chelsea Cody.
OurLA News Director
The head of DWP water operations, James McDaniel, has assured the Board of
Water and Power Commissioners about the recent water main breaks in the
city of Los Angeles this month.
McDaniel acknowledged the number of serious water main breaks has jumped sharply from 13 in September 2006 to 17 a year later to 21 last year and is likely to hit 30 this month.
But he said the overall number of pipeline breaks in the city this month is within a normal range when compared to those that occurred during recent years.
There are about 1400 leaks throughout the city each year, which breaks down to roughly 4 leaks a day, a number that is well below the average number of leaks in similar sized average
systems across the country.
He did not, however, discuss the difference in age between these systems, nor the level of comparative upkeep and it's role in these statistics.
About four times a week large breaks occur that cause the kind of damage seen when the trunk line burst on Coldwater Canyon earlier this month.
McDaniel admitted there has been an increase in these larger breaks over the past three months and although the DWP has yet to "nail down" the causes for these breaks, they are not beyond the capabilities of DWP to handle them.
The replacements proposed by McDaniel and the DWP have been budgeted at $1.3 billion over the next five years for water quality related infrastructure and $1.4 billion for general infrastructure replacement.
Much of the DWP's analysis presented by McDaniels is based on a study conducted twelve years ago.
Ten weeks into the new fiscal year, the LA City Council has spent the last five days -- putting it $5 million in the red -- trying to preserve its sweetened early retirement deal for city workers.
After two days of closed door meeting and behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Council came out in public and voted to rescind the early retirement and order layoffs and furloughs on Sept. 27. But Council President Eric Garcetti said they hoped to come back Friday and rescind that plan and approve an early retirement package.
The 7-minute public session, in all its confusion, speaks for itself. This video covers the meeting from start to finish, and contains everything you are allowed to know about decisions that will affect your job, your neighborhood, your life for years to come.
If there was any doubt where Garcetti stands, his joint statement issued last night with the Coalition of City Unions makes it clear that whatever deal emerges from these back room talks willl be in the best interests of the unions and not the city unless Councilman Bernard Parks can muster five votes or the mayor lives up to his veto pledge.
Here's the joint statement followed by my favorite song from the heyday of the union movement -- a song Garcetti and the Council, in the name of honesty and transparency, ought to play before every meeting.
Coalition and LA City Council Make Joint Pledge to Continue Working to Protect City Services
LA's City Council Wednesday committed 13-0 to continue working with SEIU and the Coalition of LA City Unions toward a budget solution that will prevent slashed services through the layoffs and furloughs recommended by the Mayor's new CAO Miguel Santana.
The outlines of a solution could come as early as Friday.Council President Eric Garcetti and the Coalition of LA City Unions released a joint statement:
After working around the clock in a marathon session of the Los Angeles City Council, which was recessed overnight to continue discussions with the Coalition of LA City Unions, significant common ground was reached to protect City services and to save jobs.
While no agreement has been reached as of now, both sides are optimistic that together solutions can be found.
"We are very grateful to the City Council for providing the leadership that this City needs to move forward," said Cheryl Parisi, Chair of the Coalition of LA City Unions. "Today's progress shows the power of working together as unions, and the importance of working in collaboration with our City leaders. We will continue to work around the clock over the next several days to finalize an agreement that keeps City services whole while keeping employees working."
"We've worked around the clock to develop solutions to meet our budget gap while giving us the flexibility necessary in these tough economic times," said L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti. "I want to acknowledge the Coalition Union leaders for their commitment to keeping this dialogue open and quickly moving towards a fiscally responsible agreement that will also save jobs and critical city services."
In addition, both sides agreed to move forward with contingency plans in the event that agreement cannot be reached. However, both sides remain optimistic that a resolution can be reached before those plans will need to be implemented.
UPDATE: The City Council emerged from two days of closed door meetings and round-the-clock negotiations shortly after 4 p.m. and voted 13-0 to reject the early retirement package and instead impose furloughs and layoffs. But members made it clear it was a bargaining tactic by agreeing to two more days of negotiations in hopes the unions would grant enough concessions to provide cover for them to flip-flop.
How did it come to pass that we, the people, wound up working for the unions instead of the unions, the public employee unions, working for us?
We can't blame them for the state of our city. We let it happen by doing nothing while they organized and pursued what was good for them. They joined forces with other special interests like developers, contractors, lobbyists and started electing the people they wanted to into office, people who serve their interests far better than the public interest.
Even when that became obvious years ago, we did nothing about it. We didn't pay attention. We didn't vote. We let them write their own contracts, their own work rules, the laws they wanted.
The creeping control of our local government has reached the point of no return. Not a single LA elected official has consistently shown the courage to unequivocally state the obvious: City government costs too much and delivers too little.
The infrastructure has been allowed to rot and become burdened by over-development. The cost of payroll and benefits has soared with multiple raises every year to most employees on top of an expanding series of regular and special bonuses. City policies have driven up the poverty rate while chasing away the middle class shrunk.
The budget crisis now threatens to force the city to make massive cuts in basic services from libraries and parks to police and fire protection even as spending on social welfare programs expands.
It never had to come to this. We allowed our city officials to be taken hostage by city unions and to sell out the public interest to special interests.
The housing market collapsed more than two years ago and the economy began to decline sharply. But City Hall kept on spending as there was a bottomless pit of money to squeeze out of the public in the form of higher taxes, rates and fees. A year ago, the nation's financial system collapsed and for all their hand-wringing, city officials kept on spending as if there was no tomorrow.
There is no tomorrow.
The city is rapidly running out of cash and facing a $405 million deficit -- nearly 10 percent of the general fund, 80 percent of which goes into salary and benefits -- and spending $1 million a day more than it takes in.
Yet, City Hall is paralyzed.
They offered a sweetened early retirement deal to 22,000 workers on June 26 in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression with revenue tumbling, and a $4 billion unfunded debt to public employee unions. They tied their own hands by guaranteeing no one would be furloughed or laid off.
They ignored what little financial advice they got, failed to get an honest analysis of the costs and benefits of the deal.
All that mattered was the welfare of city workers, not the city.
Then, last Friday, even their bureaucratic advisers could no longer shrink from the truth. The city will run out of cash by May, the deficit will double next year and triple after that. The word that was used was "unsustainable" -- the early retirement deal and other efforts to reduce city spending was insufficient.
They will not be able to pay their bills. The future of the city is stake. And so inaction became paralysis. The unions and their members cried foul, a deal is a deal. They talked of being part of a City Hall family and their entitlements to the jobs. They threatened to sue and personally retaliate against anyone who stood in their way.
One Council member after another swore their allegiance to the unions, talked of their abhorrence for wage cuts, layoffs and furloughs.
Yet, day and night and finally round-the-clock negotiations on a new deal have failed so far to produce a plan for LA to get through this year and have any hope for the future. Deadline after deadline has passed even as the deficit grows hour after hour.
You can be sure they will come up with a plan of some sort but it will only be the end of this chapter in the decline and fall of LA.
A new one will start immediately as the plan falls short of solving the deficit crisis and lawsuits move the drama into court and tensions rise and troubles mount.
Only those who allowed this to happen can fix it and write a happy ending to this story. At its heart, they did not fail us. Greed, selfishness, corruption are natural occurrences when the people abdicate their civic responsibilities.
Only a new political force, a new political organization that grows out of the grassroots and is joined by those with wealth and influence can create the new civic culture that can turn the fortunes of LA around and revive hope in our future.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa "does not
discuss his friends' private business matters with them...It's not part of the mayor's agenda to worry about people's private
business dealings."
That is one of the most laughable quotes of all time, laughable if it wasn't the best that Deputy Chief of Staff Matt Szabo could do to deflect questions about a dirty deal that stinks so bad all the hot air in City Hall won't be able to blow it away.
In a story that took many weeks of tough reporting to nail down, David Zahniser in the LA Times revealed today how mayoral insider, pal and key adviser Ari Swiller' outmaneuvered the Department of Water and Power to buy the 68,000-acre Onyx Ranch in Kern County for a wind farm site.
The deal "highlights the dual roles played by ...Swiller, an entrepreneur
whose field, renewable energy, has received a significant boost from
the mayor's pledge to make Los Angeles 'the greenest big city in
America," Zahniser reports
The threads of the story tie together like a noose. Ties between the mayor and Swiller date back to when Villaraigosa and Swiller were both employed by
supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle in 2001. Swiller was a key fund-raiser in that campaign and subsequent campaigns, emerging as the man in charge of those operations and political appointments even as he was buying the valuable wind farm property DWP had tried to get for years.
Swiller's company, Renewable Resources Group, was founded in 2004 to develop and invest in clean energy with the help of David Freeman, who was appointed in April to handle environmental
issues for Villaraigosa and who has taken the lead in driving the mayor's effort to make LA "the greenest city in America."
Swiller's partner in the Onyx Ranch deal is none other than the CIM Group, the Hollywood-based real estate company that ranks near of the top of the list of beneficiaries of City Hall's special-favors-for-special interests practices.
"City
Hall. Over the last seven years, city agencies have agreed to provide
CIM with $58 million worth of loans and subsidies," Zahniser report. "And two city pension
boards have agreed to invest up to $115 million in CIM funds on behalf
of city retirees...CIM
Group had persuaded the California Public Employees Retirement System
to invest up to $200 million in a new infrastructure fund managed by
the firm."
It's not like Swiller doesn't give a damn about the city he's helping the mayor to ruin.
He offered to sell half the Kern County property to the DWP for $65 million -- a property he bought out from under the DWP for $48 million.
Business is business, just ask DWP General Manager David Nahai who is doing everything he can to engineer billions of dollars in solar, wind and other renewable energy projects for distribution among the friends and allies of the mayor.
"(Swiller) has this friendship to the mayor. He's an advisor to the
mayor. But at the same time, he's a business person," Nahai said. "So
if nothing untoward occurred here, he'd be as free as anybody else to
try to do a business deal."
That, my friends, is the moral sensibility of the people who running LA , the people who want blank checks for billions of dollars in public money so they can profiteer from the environmental concerns we all share.
It's a small world inside City Hall, small and laughable if it weren't so dirty.
Corner-Hooked: When the corner of a pocket
prevents shooting the cue ball in a straight path directly to an object
ball, the cue ball is corner-hooked -- EasyPoolTutor.com
At 1 p.m. today, Councilman Bernard Parks and his Budget Committee will lead City Hall through an exercise in futility:Closing a $405 million budget deficit that will double and triple in the next three years, without facing the truth that salaries and benefits cost too much and too much is spent on unaffordable programs.
The day of reckoning for years of failed leadership is here. The future of Los Angeles is at stake but there is little reason for hope.
Having exhausted their ability to squeeze any more money out of the public and their ability to go even deeper into debt, the bureaucrats, politicians and union leaders have spent the weekend furiously devising schemes to solve the worsening budget crisis by the only means left: Outright stealing. GO TO OurLA.org to read the rest of this article)
An aging pipe burst and water gushed down Coldwater Canyon, causing disruption for a week as city officials demanded answers from Department of Water and Power officials to assuage angry residents.
"We have an aging infrastructure--the pipes underground are not getting
any younger," explained the DWP official in charge of the water system. " What we are doing is crossing our fingers
and hoping that this kind of thing doesn't happen again."
Crossed fingers hasn't worked too well since that incident 16 years ago in September 1993. Another burst water main closed Coldwater Canyon again September and couple of other broken pipes elsewhere caused more disruption.
LA's water and power infrastructure has gotten a lot older and more vulnerable to breaking down despite a series of rate increases that were supposed to fix the problems.
Breakdowns, massive pay raises and inflated salaries, management arrogance and lack of transparency, rejection of the Measure B solar energy plan by voters, illegal transfers of millions to the city general fund, resistance to creating a Ratepayer Advocate, City Council rejection of lifting the cap on energy surcharges -- they are among the many factors that have shaken public confidence in the DWP and its leadership, and brought its credibility to an all-time low.
Yet, that isn't stopping the mayor's Energy Czar David Freeman and DWP officials from trying to orchestrate another solar energy plan that seems a lot like the one voters rejected in March.
The campaign started in earnest last Wednesday when Freeman, City Council aides and DWP got together with some 15 or 20 environmentalists and launched their hard-sell.
The next day, most of that group got together at City Hall with representatives of business and private sector labor, and DWP Committee President Soledad Garcia, DWP critic Jack Humphreville and me -- key leaders of the extraordinary grassroots campaign that against all odds defeated Measure B.
Jeff Catalano of Councilwoman Jan Perry's office opened the meeting by making it clear that the past sins of the DWP were off the table and so was the issue of unlimited rate increases from Energy Cost Adjustment Factor (ECAF) that the Council just unanimously rejected out of fear of a voter backlash that could prove dangerous to their own cushy positions.
Nonetheless, Freeman conveyed the mayor's commitment to an open process (unlike the back room deal that Measure B represented and is now repudiated by everyone involved from the mayor, Council President Eric Garcetti, and IBEW boss Brian D'Arcy as if they hadn't engineered it).
Humphreville, who wrote the anti-Measure B ballot argument, presented his list of a couple of dozen concerns about this latest solar plan: Blank check for billions from ratepayers, DWP ownership and installation of most rooftop solar at its inflated cost structure to expand IBEW Local 18 jobs, emphasis on low-efficiency renewables, refusal to contract for best prices.
They all sound a lot like the same concerns over Measure B.
There is one big difference: Freeman insists City Hall won't make the same mistake again of putting this solar plan on the ballot and letting voters have a say about how their money is spent.
Instead, the DWP will hold a two-week series of six community meetings starting Wednesday. Workshops, they are called, where the public will be told what the DWP's intentions are and then the City Council will be asked to give the green light, no serious questions asked.
The plan itself is something of a secret, according to DWP public relations chief Joe Ramallo, who arrived late at Thursday's meeting and told the assembled environmentalists and activists that the actual plan is still a secret, a work in progress and will be refined after all citizen input is tabulated and collated.
But things didn't go the way they were supposed. Soledad, Jack and I offered oft-discussed concerns, questions and criticisms.
But so did the environmentalists.
They were burned by Measure B thanks to their leaders preferring to be in bed with the mayor and his pals than actually achieving clean energy.
They clearly do not intend to be burned again when everybody wants clean energy but also want it at a price that people can afford in these hard times and want policies that serve the public interest rather than enriching the special interests that have prospered so long on City Hall's corruption.
From the remarks of the various interests at the table, it was clear everyone wants a full private sector involvement and a minimum DWP role, a clear timeline and cost and rate impact analysis, assurances that DWP management is up to the task and the use of the most efficient technologies -- those that produce the most energy at the lowest price.
Freeman, that good old smooth-talking Southerner, said at the outset he wanted a 99 percent consensus on how to go forward. He got what he wanted -- sort of.
There was a clear consensus but it's not the one the DWP or City Hall sought. We're on the road to coming together as a city where we can find agreement on how to get the most clean energy at a pace and at a cost the public can afford.
That would be the victory we're seeking when we fought Measure B. It would be a sign of hope, hope that City Hall has lost its clout, that we are waking up across class and political lines and taking back our city.
I've suddenly got second thoughts about this initiative drive to cut the salaries of the Mayor, City Council, Controller and City Attorney in half -- it doesn't go far enough.
They should all get the "living wage" they're so proud of. So instead of $180,000 a year, or half that, they would be paid the same $14.50 per hour, or $10 per hour plus $4.50 toward health
insurance they awarded Wednesday to non-city workers at LAX.
Amid cheers and tears, the Council brushed aside all questions of costs and the impact on contractors, sub-contractors and the woebegone public to unanimously approve what amounts to as much as 30 percent raises for 5,000 low-income workers.
If they were honest about what they really believe, they would require that everyone in LA earn at least what city workers are paid with lucrative pensions and first-rate health insurance, that everyone actually work for the city or for the contractors, consultants, lobbyists that live off the city.
After all, City Hall has pursued this as an unspoken policy for years. It's why I mock them for conducting a failed experiment in municipal socialism, an appropriate oxymoron for their futile efforts to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.
The actual impact of their policies has been to dramatically shrink the middle class and dramatically increase the poverty. The rich, of course, just keep getting richer as far as I can see, especially those who contribute heavily to political campaigns and buy the politicians fancy wines and expensive meals that never get reported on conflict of interest statements.
The living wage is not the problem. Except for the few who it benefits, it is nothing but a symbolic feel-good gesture.
The problem is those people who hold these high offices act like there is a bottomless pit of money to siphon off from the residents of the city.
This was also visible Wednesday when the living wage debate was interrupted by a hearing at which DWP officials were called on the carpet to answer softball (or were they just) ignorant questions about the bursting water main disasters in the Valley.
The Council's newest member, Paul Koretz, showed how quickly he has fit into the City Hall mentality by gushing during the living wage debate: ""I think this is really a no-brainer for us...We can't do less."
And in the next breath, he suggested that the DWP's $4 billion program to replace old water pipes should be accelerated no matter what it costs.
He called the broken pipe problem a "wake-up call," which may be forgivable since he's a carpetbagger who moved into LA from West Hollywood to run for the Council.
The rotting pipes and failing electrical grid problems are the direct result of taking DWP revenue and putting it into the inflated salaries and benefits of DWP workers and transferring what was left in the city treasury to pad the salaries and benefits of the rest of the city's employees.
To hell with the infrastructure, to hell with clean energy, public be damned -- those have been the official policies for far too long.
And now the bills are coming due. The city is running out of cash and bankruptcy looms but they keep on writing blank checks without any means of raising the money to cover them except borrowing more and more at ever higher interest rates.
I'm torn between metaphors to describe this, whether it's more apt to see them like Nero and his fiddle or Marie Antoinette and her cake.
Both work well enough: LA is burning and the people are rebelling. It's a crying shame things have to get so much worse before they get better.
Setting the stage for a showdown over cutting city spending, the
LACERS Board approved the Early Retirement Incentive Program (ERIP)
that will cost up to $150,000 each for an estimated 2,400 workers.
The
board which oversees funding of pensions and lifetime health benefirts
for retirees and more than 22,000 current city workers voted 4-3
Tuesday to overrule its staff recommendation for a 5-year payback period -- the timeframe that the city will realize payroll saviings from the plan.
Sometimes, the threads of the news come together so elegantly you'd think there was an invisible hand at work making sense of it all. At least that's my experience from time to time over the years. Take the fact that last Wednesday, the City Council rejected the DWP's demand for a blank check to buy renewable energy on the open market no matter what it costs ratepayers struggling to keep their jobs if they have one, to pay their rent or mortgages and make ends meet in the midst of the worst recession in their lifetimes..
Then, on Friday, I accepted an invitation to go to City Hall this week to hear the DWP present its revised plan for solar energy that seems to be a lot like the Measure B plan the public voted down in March.
On Saturday, I dropped by the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition meeting when Councilman Bernard Parks decided to step out in public and tell us the end of the world was coming -- or at least the end of LA as we know it -- unless we take drastic steps like massive layoffs of city workers to avoid bankruptcy.
The unions, particularly the IBEW which virtually runs the DWP, have taken the city hostage and have a stranglehold on our elected officials who owe their jobs to them, he said. The result is pensions costs and spending are out of control because the unions get whatever they want from the politicians whenever they want it.
Then, Saturday night a 95-year-old water main burst on Coldwater Canyon in Studio City, flooding dozens of homes and businesses with up to three feet of water and causing massive traffic snarls that will last all week.
The mayor got there at 4 p.m. Sunday to take charge and Twitter us with the news our DWP workers were there on overtime to restore order:
"At sportsmens lodge meeting with victims of the flood. We're gonna get them back in their homes as soon as possible...At the burst pipe meeting with dwp workers who have been working since midnight to control the flooding..."
Then, a second water main burst nearby in Valley Village Monday morning, created another sinkhole, one that gulped down a fire truck, more flooding, more traffic problems.
I can hardly wait to hear why my electric bill will be doubling so the DWP can provide more jobs to the IBEW by spending billions of dollars to build and own rooftop solar installations and why I should be paying more and more for using less and less water.
It's all crazy.
Ten years ago, the DWP under the leadership of the mayor's current environment czar David Freeman launched the nation's largest solar energy initiative and spent tens of millions of dollars promoting it but never got around to actually building any solar.
Now, we're the least green big city in California with the most dirty coal energy.
Our electrical grid and water system are rotting from years of neglect and lack of investment.
But at a time when the economy is in the tank and unlikely to turn around in any significant way for a long time, we've embarked on a green energy race that will send our rates soaring along with our water rates as drought dries up supply.
Where has all our money gone? Why are we still building more housing, more luxury hotels, more massive projects when our infrastructure won't support it?
You know the answers as well as I do.
City Hall sucked billions out of our water and power rates, including $150 million illegally, and DWP workers took the rest with huge pay raises of up to 5.9 percent, raises the put their salaries as much as 40 percent higher than those paid to other city workers for jobs like secretaries, clerks and dispatchers that are not technical or dangerous like high-voltage electricians.
And we have to keep on approving developments of every sort because we need the tax revenue to feed City Hall and its insatiable needs no matter how much damage they do to the quality of our lives.
It is all crazy but it's all coming together to set the stage for the Battle of Los Angeles -- a fight to turn the city around, to save LA.
When I was a young journalist, I got involved in leading my union and fighting for empowerment of journalists in the newsroom, for equal pay for women and for the integrity of the news report.
It was a time when corporations were taking over newspapers and eliminating competition which is the key to a free press. I led a strike against Rupert Murdoch when I lived in Australia and he started fabricating the news during the constitutional crisis that followed the ousting of the Labor Party government in 1975.
I believe today that unions are vitally important to protect the rights of all workers, to improve pay and working conditions, especially of those employed on farms and in hospitals, retail outlets, service industries and other areas where organized labor has little impact.
But on this Labor Day, it's important to also recognize that organized labor has gone too far in the public sector. Cities and counties across California are facing bankruptcy because of the staggering labor costs, particularly the cost of public employee pensions.
Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, a city taken hostage by its public employee unions.
LA is fast running out of cash, spending $1 million a day more than it has coming in, borrowing heavily to pay its bills, running a $500 million current deficit, facing a shortfall of more than $1 billion next year and twice that in three years when every dollar of payroll will require 50 cents more to cover the costs of pensions.
Councilman Bernard Parks warned Saturday that at the current rate of spending, LA will run out of cash by May and face potential bankruptcy unless drastic steps are taken now. That means laying off thousands of workers since 80 percent of the city budget goes for pay and benefits -- something that won't be easy politically or practically since city rules make job eliminations so complicated it could take six months or longer to lay anyone off.
The problem, Parks said, is unions have a stranglehold on power at City Hall. They elect the politicians, get sweetheart contracts from them and demand fidelity to their interests.
There's a taboo about broaching the subject of union power in LA, but Parks, in a three-hour session with the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition, decided to break it.
He's the only Council member who actually knows anything about the budget or has consistently tried to reduce spending. He also was the target of an $8 million independent expenditure campaign by organized labor to defeat him in the recent County Supervisor race won by Mark Ridley-Thomas and has seen during his four decades as a policeman and politician how the unions have come to take control of City Hall. He has watched his colleagues knuckle under to labor and how business interests come with hat in hand begging for crumbs from the table of power just like ordinary citizens.
The most glaring example of organized labor's excess of power is the Department of Water and Power which is virtually run by its union, the IBEW. Its boss, Brian D'Arcy, ruthlessly uses the threat of turning off the city's water and electricity to win spectacular pay raises and favorable work rules even as the infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate and LA has fallen far behind other cities in California in replacing coal-powered plants with renewable energy.
.
It's a grim picture Parks paints but accurate.
It will take money from the business community and the awakening of the community to the seriousness of the situation to make a difference.
There's nothing mysterious about this. Many have seen it coming for a long time.
Parks has opened up the conversation about how we save LA. Clearly, it isn't just the budget that needs to be balanced. Power must also be balanced so that
business and labor and the community are equally able to protect and
serve their often competing interests.
We have paid the ransom demanded by the public employee unions as long as we can but there's nothing left to pay them with. We can't afford the blank check for billions demanded by the DWP or higher rates, fees and taxes. We can't afford to mortgage our future more than we have. We can't afford to elect more politicians who are owned by them.
We are staring at bankruptcy as a city and its dire consequences. One way or another, the era of a city taken hostage by its workers must end. We must unite and free LA..
In a Special Report on OurLA, LA Councilman Bernard Parks portrayed the city's financial condition in dire terms Saturday, warniing of "severe pain" that is coming. Speaking for more than two hours to the LA Neigbhorhood Council
Coalition at a meeting in West LA, Parks reported the city is spending
$1 million a day more than it has and the $350 million in savings
projected by the mayor doesn't exist because the sweetened early retirement plan for 2,400 workers isn't financially feasible.
Parks' Budget Committee will hold a public hearing at 1 p.m. Sept. 14 on the state of the city's finances and the drastic measures, including layoffs of up to 4,000 workers that must be taken. The full Council will meet the following day on the budget crisis.
Back on June 26, the day the City Council approved "in concept" the sweetened retirement deal for 2,400 city workers, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa could not resist the temptation to boast that it would "save jobs and preserve services."
He called it a "landmark" agreement between the city and unions that would "save $500 million over two years without layoffs" through early retirements and deferral of raises for those two years. "Workers will cover the net cost of the early retirements, ensuring the
program will not burden the pension system," the press release said.
Like the numerous self-congratulatory tweets continuously Twittering out of the mayor's office, those statements are at best half-truths, at worst outright lies.
DECEIT No. 1: Let's start with the mayor's use of the phrase "net cost" of the early retirement package to obscure the fact that taxpayers are on the hook for from $250 to $475 million of the cost, between 40 and 60 percent, depending on how many workers take the deal..
The letter of agreement between the mayor and City Council and the
civilian work force covered by the LACERS pension fund indicates the city "will recoup all costs associated with the ERIP from employees" over a 15-year period, according to LACERS analysis.
But the deal to increase employees contributions to their pension from 6 to 6.75 percent will not pay back the "cost" of the Early Retirement Incentive Package (ERIP). An Aug. 25 letter from the Chief Legislative Analyst and the City Administrative Officer answering questions raised by Earl Holoman, president of the LACERS Board, breaks down the costs and who pays:
Alternative 1 (2,229 retirees) Alternative 2 (2,763 retirees) Unfunded Liability (UAAL) $560 million $787 million Cash Incentives $43 million $51 million
Total Cost $603 million $838 million
Employee Payback $351 million $363 million
City Payback $252 million $475 million
Those figures include the $43 to $51 million cost of the cash buyouts of $15,000 for every employee who takes the deal but not the tens of millions of dollars it costs for the vacation and sick leave accruals. The city, i.e. taxpayers, face the bill for those costs upfront even as the city's contributions to all its pension funds will nearly double next year to $1 billion because of the 25 percent losses in investments.
LACERS staff has recommended the city should pay back the cost over five years, not 15, because it meets government accounting and financial standards and aligns the payback period with the time the city would realize savings from reducing the work force.
But a LACERS board committee has rejected that recommendation and the full board will vote next week.
DECEIT No. 2: Contrary to the mayor's assertion, nothing in this ERIP plan "saves jobs and preserves services."
It simply avoids layoffs, which would be far less costly to taxpayers. Eliminating 10 percent or more of the civilian work force will surely mean a reduction in services to the public and presumably poorer services since the most experienced senior employees will be the ones taking the deal.
No one knows how many will actually take the money and run. But 500 workers retired in July and a couple of hundred more in August with promissory notes guaranteeing them the benefits of whatever deal is finally approved.
What's on the table is basically five more years of retirement credit or a 12.5 increase in pensions that means most retirees will get 75 percent of their final salaries plus any regular bonuses and premium pay they were getting. The minimum retirement age is 55 but the five-year credit could reduce that to 50. DECEIT No. 3: There's no way the city will realize $500 million in payroll savings over two years.
We are already three months into the city's fiscal year and it could take 6 or 7 months for LACERS to actually process the 2,400 workers through retirement.
That means the payroll savings this year will be a fraction of what was anticipated. But the costs to the city will begin as soon as a deal is finalized.
City workers, in contrast, won't even begin paying the increased contribution rate until after the two-year period is over, on July 1, 2011.
DECEIT No. 4: It is true that the city is guaranteeing the unions there won't be layoffs this year or next.
But there is a loophole: there won't be any layoffs unless the financial position deteriorates further.
And that is as close to a certainty as anything about all this.
Property taxes throughout the county are about to be reduced for everyone because of deflation, sales tax receipts are falling, the state is taking away funds for the city.
Any way you look at it, the city budget that took effect July 1 is a fraud, built on false assumptions of cost reductions and revenue flows.
They can defer raises for two years but then they are committed to making workers whole plus a little more over the next three.
They can spread the payback period for the ERIP over five or 15 years but the cost just keeps on growing with interest and putting a drag on City Hall's finances and on public services for that much longer.
UGLY TRUTH: The early retirement deal is probably illegal and will certainly be challenged in court. It provides a benefit to city workers at a huge cost to the city that reduces the value of payroll savings. It doesn't solve the city's financial crisis, is fiscally irresponsible and morally indefensible, representing the failure of our elected officials to fulfill their sworn duty to serve the people of the city and interests of the city as a whole.
For the second time in six months, DWP's demand for a blank check for billions of dollars from ratepayers was rejected.
Back in March, voters repudiated the phony Measure B solar plan that wasn't a plan. On Wednesday, the reprocessed Measure B came back in the form of giving the DWP authority to impose virtually unlimited rate hikes in the name of renewable energy. The City Council rejected the proposal unanimously (Times, Daily News accounts)
Lack of transparency, failure to communicate with the public that pays the bills, insufficient details about how the money will be spent and unfairness in the rate structure are among the reasons the DWP has twice failed to get what it wants.
It seems General Manager David Nahai just can't learn from his mistakes.
Given the fact he's lost the confidence of everyone from his top managers to the Council, it seems likely the mayor will pull the plug on Nahai sooner rather than later.
Even Brian D'Arcy, the real power behind the DWP throne as head of its IBEW union, holds Nahai in such low esteem he stopped talking to him months ago and defames him around town as a man whose word cannot be trusted. That surely is the kiss of death -- undoubtedly with the traditional golden handshake.
Nahai, for all his glib obfuscations and contempt for the public, is just a symptom of the problem of the DWP.
For most of a century, the DWP has been an empire unto itself, accountable to no one.
With rare exceptions, the commissioners who are supposed to oversee the DWP on behalf of the public have been little more than yes-men. That's part of the reason the movement to create an independent Ratepayer Advocate office for DWP is gaining momentum.
It isn't just Nahai who's lost public confidence. The DWP itself has lost the public trust.
Rejecting a staff recommendation and warnings from the City
Attorney's Office, a board committee of LACERS -- the city's civilian
pension fund -- voted 2-1 Tuesday to allow unions to pay back the costs
of the early retirement incentive program (ERIP) for 2,400 of its
members over 15 years -- instead of five.
The issue -- which
threatens to blow up a deal the mayor and City Council offered the
Coalition of City Unions -- now goes to the full LACERS board and
ultimately the Council.
It's dizzying sometimes trying to tell the smoke from the smokescreen in the burned-out world of LA politics and politicians.
The wildfire now raging out of control in the Angeles National Forest from La Canada to Acton, from Sunland-Tujunga to Pasadena is a case in point. Two weeks ago, the mayor of LA was fuming about how Pat McOsker and his firefighters union had the audacity to send out a mailer that used the heroism of emergency crews in the Metrolink train crash to show how help might be a long time coming because fire stations were being left understaffed due to budget cuts.
Now we find a kid may have drowned because the short-staffed local firehouse was busy elsewhere and we see, not surprisingly, that fire crews are invaluable, especially in the heart of fire season.
It took the mayor five days after the Station Fire broke out to lift his furlough order for firefighters. By then, two firefighters were dead and 105,000 acres, 18 homes charred, smoked choked the LA Basin and there was no end in sight.
The public sector isn't alone in letting us down when it counts.
TV stations, for the first time in memory, didn't go live day and night with coverage of the fire in no small part because their news budgets have been slashed as revenue and market share have fallen sharply. The lack of non-stop video.coverage was in marked contrast
with the 24/7 coverage of the Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy deaths.
Instead of questioning whether the response in the early hours of the blaze was sufficient, County Supervisor Mike Antonovich got all fired up about how the TV stations had failed to meet their responsibilities.
"There were a large number of evacuations taking place, people and
animals were in danger, and people had no information of where to go,"
Antonovich told Greg Braxton in the Times.. "I'm upset. The media let people down
during a horrendous fire, one of the worst in the county's history."
You can feel for Antonovich. The fire is in his district and such events always afford local politicians the opportunity to don their emergency gear and pose before the TV cameras as they hold forth eloquently about their concern for the lives and property of their constituents and the public's debt to the employees whose services they pay for.
Today, LACERS board members who oversee the LA civilian employees pension fund are hearing about how the sweetened early retirement deal the mayor and City Council cut with the unions is a financial disaster.
"A retirement board's duty to its participants and
beneficiaries shall take precedence over any other duty," an Assistant City Attorney wrote,
putting that sentence in italics for emphasis.
Sally Choi and her LACERS staff have refused to back down on their insistence the cost of letting 2,400 workers retire at full 75 percent pensions as young as age 50 must be repaid within five years. Allowing payback over 15 years as the unions and our elected officials want would be reckless and irresponsible, they said, especially since billions of dollars in benefits are already unfunded and the city's financial position is so dire it may take many years to recover.
At the same times, the Metropolitan Water District, which just raised its charges by 20 percent -- the main reason LA water rates are soaring -- has cut a deal to increase pensions by 25 percent despite the half-billion-dollar unfunded liability it already faces. When the Orange County Register questioned the deal, the Met spent freely to bring in a public relations firm to obfuscate the issue.
It's all so bizarre, a theater of the absurdity of politics today.
Is it just me or do you too sense that our government agencies are spinning out of control in the face of falling revenue, that our officials panicked and paralyzed by the end of the free-spending era when pandering to special interests could keep them in power and privilege indefinitely and the people too disengaged to notice they were being ripped off for their money even as policies were making the quality of their lives and their economic opportunities worse?
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the new edition of Nina Royal's North Valley Reporter.
With the money rolling into their war chests, Chris Essel and
Paul Krekorian are on track to raise 10 times as much as the other eight
candidates City Council District 2.
That makes them, in the eyes of the press and pundits, heavy
favorites to come out of the Sept. 22 special election first and second and to
face off in the December runoff.
How can voters choose between a candidate that has
represented the entertainment industry and downtown development interests for
years and a state Assembly leader who bears a full share of responsibility for
putting California in such dire
financial straits?
It may well come to a choice between Essel, with heavy
backing from the increasingly unpopular mayor, the powerful DWP union IBEW, and
the same developer and Hollywood interests, and Krekorian who is backed by City
Hall unions and the Democratic Party organization.
Before voters from Sunland-Tujunga to Sherman Oaks face that
choice, they first need to ask themselves if either of them is qualified to represent
their values, their needs - whether either of them will stand up to the City Hall
machine and fight for what the residents in CD2 want?
The Saving LA Project will hold meet this Saturday, Jan. 23, at 10:30 a.m. at the Hollywood Community Center, 6501 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Organizing SLAP for action, the budget crisis, DWP policies, planning issues, LAUSD are on the agenda. Everyone welcome, sandwiches, easy parking. Don't be a bystander. Get involved and help save LA.
OurLA.org - The News Revolution
What's happening in LA? Go to www.OurLA.org. Participate in the reinvention of journalism online. Share what you know and what you believe. Send your articles, photos, videos to info@ourla.org. OurLA.org -- a community-based online newspaper for the 21st century. Our LA is a non-profit that belongs to the community and depends on your efforts as citizen journalists and concerned citizens. Learn from others as we bring together the content of local websites and bloggers, professional journalists and experts into a single comprehensive LA news site. Register at www.OurLA.org to be be full participant. Email me if you want to volunteer or have questions and to let me know about local content websites you find useful and informative. You can make a tax-deductible contribution by sending a check to Community Partners for the benefit of OurLA.org to Community Partners, 1000 N. Alameda St. Suite 240, Los Angeles 90012 or by credit card at the Community Partner's website.
is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News who has become a community activist, helping to found the Saving LA Project. He writes on city issues in Los Angeles and is a frequent speaker at community groups on the need to get informed and involved in the effort to make LA a city of great schools and neighborhoods, a city with a healthy business climate and good jobs, a city where the people are respected and have a seat at the table of power.
Ron Kaye