Next Sunday, LA Clean Sweep — the voter movement to elect a clean slate to City Council — will offer professional training to potential candidates and activists who are ready to go to work to end the cycle of failure and bring responsible government to Los Angeles.
Experts in political campaigning will teach you the skills you need to win elections and fight City Hall on the issues that you carry about to protect you neighborhoods, your jobs and your business. The session for activists run from 8:30 a.m. to noon Sunday Aug. 29 at the Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood. Training for candidates for the March 2011 City Council elections and the 2013 city elections run from 1 to 5 p.m. 
Click here (CSTrainingDayFlyer-1.pdf) or go to lacleansweep.com and click on events for the details. The trainers are providing their services for free and all proceeds from the event will help fund LA Clean Sweep’s efforts to inform voters and mobilize forces for reform.
For too long, the concerned residents in all parts of the city have fought their own separate battles against the powerful forces that run City Hall and control our elected officials. LA Clean Sweep. The skills you will learn from this program will help you to work together with people in every part of LA and beat the lobbyists and special interests and help elected candidates who will stand up for the public interest.
Our city officials have been overspending for year, and even in the face of financial crisis, are making things worse without facing the fundamental issues. Libraries and parks are closing, cuts in the Fire Department are jeopardizing public safety and we are now paying the full cost or many core services in addition to soaring rates, taxes and fees.
The cycle of failure must be broken. It will only if you get involved and get the know-how to fight back successfully against the powerful entrenched interests of City Hall.
We need a new spirit of LA, one that brings together every region of the city, breaks down the barriers of ethnicity and economic status, and celebrates the freedom of possibilities of what should be the greatest place on earth.
Hundreds of activists from every part of the city have worked to develop basic ideas that we can rally around to restore credibility to our city’s leadership and fix what is broken so we can move forward together:
Here’s what LA Clean Sweep stands for:
THE PLATFORM
Issue No. 1: Clean Up City Hall
L.A. needs a change of leadership. We must elect candidates who demonstrate a firm commitment to promoting the public interest, not special interests. Candidates must commit to end the practice of giving subsidies, waivers, below-cost deals, tax breaks and other special treatment to politically connected individuals, public officials, organizations and businesses.
So that no actions of government are hidden from the public, candidates must commit to enforce and enact open access laws. Slush funds and office holder accounts need to be eliminated. City Hall must never sell, lease or otherwise dispose of public property without obtaining fair market value for it. City Hall must treat all people with dignity, fairness and equality.
Issue No. 2: Fix the Budget
City spending is out of control. The city needs to live within its means. Candidates must commit to support a City Charter amendment to limit the annual increase in city government spending to the rate of growth of inflation and city population. In good economic times, revenues that exceed the expenditure limit should be saved in a rainy day fund. This would allow the city to maintain essential services in an economic downturn.
Elected officials have a history of borrowing against future tax revenues to finance special interest economic development projects. Candidates must commit to stopping this practice, including all projects funded through the Community Redevelopment Agency. Candidates must commit to supporting compensation for city employees that is affordable and sustainable. Without these changes, additional taxes and fees will put an increasing burden on residents and force severe cutbacks in city services.
Issue No. 3: Focus on Core Services
City Hall lacks focus and wastes money. Time that could and should be spent on critical problems is instead frittered away on self-serving resolutions and other minutiae. Candidates must commit to focus on core services: Police, fire, other public safety services, street and sidewalk maintenance, sewage, trash, water and power, parks, libraries, and land use planning. Elected officials should not spend their time or taxpayers’ money on matters unrelated to the delivery of core services.
Issue No. 4: Power Sharing
Government is formed for the benefit of the people, yet City Hall routinely ignores the peoples ‘ legitimate concerns. Candidates must commit to work with Neighborhood Councils and bona fide community groups on land use, economic development and other local issues. Candidates must commit to redrawing City Council district boundaries to align with established communities. Gerrymandering of council boundaries must end.
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Contribute your time, your passion, your money. Go to lacleansweep.com. Los Angeles will not change without you getting involved.
And the instructors are going to be winning candidates? No, they would never get involved. Are they going to be Walter-types? He’s never won and can’t, so how the hell can he teach any one else to win? He only got votes because it was a year of very low turnouts and the westside came out to vote against Weiss and therefore Villaraigosa thinking they would teach him a lesson.
It didn’t work and this won’t work. You don’t have enough qualified candidates out there who are willing to get on your tea bagging, patriot, right wing team.
11:22 p.m.:
With that negative no-can-do attitude nothing will change in this city.
Grrrrrrr!
Bruno’s Pal,
G.
p.s. Walter also got tremendous support from the Valley, you know…the City’s stepchild that supports the entire city.
Mr. Kaye,
You are a scholar and a gentleman.
Thank you.
To 11:22 PM,
What part(s) of this 4-part platform do you oppose or support?
To 11:22 PM, This is 6:29,
You do have a point about “right-wing” It is a turn-off that all the trainers are all conservatives.
Of the three, I do give a liberal “hats-off” to Kevin James for being the only radio show covering LA Politics in detail and exposing the corruption. But as noble as that is, Kevin is also a Republican. I’m not saying that Mr. James has a right to affiliate with whoever he wants to, but let’s have a little diversity or you’re going to turn off many LA residents.
WOW Ron, you actually deleted two comments, the first of which was a direct response to 11:22, because it disputed a false political spin and actually said something FAIR about someone whom we know you love to hate and comically called “Enemy Number One” based on sheer innuendo (if you’d been able to prove anything you would, you sure wanted to)? But really, last I checked no one else disputed it and if they did, didn’t say so, and isn’t dialogue WHAT this is supposed to be about? You and supporters here argue you don’t have a set agenda and welcome diversity of opinion and citizenry, yet are showing that you DO have a set agenda and platform which is a turn-off to those of us who don’t like being shut out of city hall planning and other decisions but don’t want to march to some rightwing Republican banner, either.
We may agree with some of Wally’s views but not others, may or may not be from the valley and think it’s the “poor stepchild,” may or may not be lifelong Angelenos or transplants, may or may not be hard-core cyclists or car-only folks, not agree with each other as citizen activists or “Clean Sweepers” or whatever people see themselves as, may oppose the mayor’s “vision” and be disappointed he turned out to be so Latino-centric despite his promises, and voted for Wally (or not) but if you censor views you don’t agree with you are worse than those you complain about. If a “movement” is brought down by a comment or two then that is even more reason to allow free expression of ideas so that things shake out and the air is cleared out.
Isn’t that what YOU are complaining about, what homeowner and activist groups all over the city complain about, not being heard, shut out, by “City Hall?” You were the former editor of a major city paper, though you admit you felt hogtied by a journalistic ethic that gave at least a semblance of neutrality, who’s NOW demanding transparency for everyone, not “just the teabaggers,” yet…WHAT gives?
I hope there was some “tech error” because if there’s random censorship going on we should be advised loud and clear so we know the ropes. This isn’t about WHAT was said, but about whether there IS, contrary to what you keep insisting, in fact only a set viewpoint that’s even tolerated.
8:45
Herr Kaye ist ein Gelehrter und ein Gentleman.
To 6:29-
I agree with all 4 parts of the platform. That’s a no-brainer. However, there is nothing I ever agree on with Walter Moore or Kevin James. They’re both right wingers in a non-partisan race.
I don’t know who else is involved but I sure as hell would never, ever PAY either of them to teach ME how to run a campaign.
I already stated why Walter got any votes at all. Low voter turnout and Weiss anger that transferred over to Villaraigosa.
No matter what any of you think, things must be done in a certain way in City Hall and that’s the way it is. That is why so many people get there and turn into “liars”. It’s not that they’re liars, it’s that they cannot get things done the way they think they can. There is far too much devil in the details if you know what I mean.
Having so many right wing tea-bagging types involved turns off so many liberals, it isn’t even funny. And face it – there are more liberals than conservatives in LA.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the Valley voted for Walter before (barely and not enough to win). He has no power to carry Districts 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 or 14 no matter what he’s teaching.
90% of the Valley doesn’t even know who Kevin James is. Those same people don’t know Walter either and they won’t remember him from the last mayoral race.
I also give a liberal shout out to Kevin for exposing corruption.
I just happen to disagree on the way the Sweepers are going about it. i just don’t feel it will work.
Sorry. I am allowed to have my views and I can’t believe Ron Kaye deleted posts. Are you sure or is that a wild accusation?
Ron and crew are blowing the credibility of Clean Sweep with this all republican training crew and especially the racist Walter Moore. Nice try Ron. Clean Sweep is dead out of the gate.
11:20: Guess this is your time of night, huh?
Actually it’s “Villaraigosa anger that translated over to Weiss” who was perceived as pushing his high-density projects to make room for eastside Latinos who were bursting out of the seams of their districts, right or wrong. Reyes didn’t help by saying that was his objective in so many words, what was it, that Bel Air had too much open space and parks and “needed all that energy.” Panicking the folks of the HOAs. Just saying what they thought.
But you don’t get that, do you, Trujillo, any more than you got Measure B or how THAT “translated over to Weiss?” Ron’s not exactly a big fan of yours or Measure B or your boss? Trujillo, stop telling your boss Tony V that he needs “better PR to get his point across” and realize you read the cards and zeitgeist wrong – learn why a near-novice like Walter Moore with a voice that makes cows in Omaha sound sophisticated almost drummed him out of office.
The Valley was almost unanimously against him but you’re blaming THAT on Weiss too? More like Weiss being seen as HIS surrogate despite Weiss’s being the staunchest supporter of cops and public safety, the initiative in clearing up the rape back logs and so on, made them both whipping posts for the anti-illegal immigrant backlash.
Even though the city and SO40 had nothing to do with the Jamiel Shaws and letting his alleged killer out of County jail, that fruitcakes like Kevin James, McIntired, and Walter-Berger and Carmen and Cooley the Republican candidates (who SHOULD have known better as an alleged lawyers for Pete’s sake) and Ron here, blamed them for in one of the most blatant forms of partisan demagogery ever seen in this city. The re-development of Century City is a class act and praised along with the live-work-shop design — with DASH’s connecting to the rest of the city awaiting a subway stop — even by the crochety Hawthorne the Times architecture critic, by everyone but those who literally preferred the old shuttered Shubert/ movie theatres to fall down rather than be rebuilt, but the problem was, no one believed the Planning Dept’s planning studies or anything else coming out of there about traffic impacts or infrastructure impacts, you name it.
(And of course, longtime worries by some communities that it was all a plot to have “those people” not only commute to the area ut now, fulfill Reyes and Tony V’s vision that they’d become a justification for building “affordable housing” tiny boxes in huge buildings for those bursting out of the seams of their disticts on the eastside.)
Even though the developers with Weiss’s office’s intervention held scores of meetings and did a bang-up job. You folks are now sure that La Grande will be even WORSE than Goldberg whom you couldn’t bash enough, before he even starts. Well, with the recession now, the Just Say No to Everything crowd is complaining that there’s no tax revenue for supporting even core services without raising “parcel” taxes. Blaming pensions is a legit issue but cutting needs to be offset by tax revenue. Other cities are cleaning our clocks. I do NOT want to pay higher and higher taxes on my property and business while losing services and just getting the traffic going to nearby towns. Nor do I want to be forced to move out of “my” city. Still no answer on HOW Clean Sweep will do this balancing act. We can all complain.
Still no answer to comment at 8:45 about those other 2 comments. When the First Amendment starts to go… Could paste it all back BUT.
Whoa, I am the first poster at 11:22 and then I just responded to 6:29 at 11:20. So I guess this is “my time” and Ron deleted comments to me? Seriously? Then I know I’m on the right track.
I cannot believe that no matter what blog I post on, somebody always accuses me of being Trujillo. I love Trujillo! I really do. We probably agree 95% of the time. This is about the 10th time that someone has accused me of being Michael.
I’m not even a man!
“You folks are now sure that La Grande will be even WORSE than Goldberg whom you couldn’t bash enough, before he even starts”.
Worked with Goldberg and working with Logrande. You can’t bash them enough.