The made-for-TV charade on Channel 35 known as the City Council meeting featured an Oscar-worthy performance by Bernard Parks as he ran roughshod over many of the constituents in the Crenshaw area of his district who harbored the strange belief the specific plans for their neighborhood meant anything at all.
The issue was Fresh & Easy wanting five variances from the Crenshaw Specific plan, the most controversial being a large parking lot on Crenshaw Boulevard at 52nd Street, near the high school.
Planning rules for the area require storefronts on the street, not parking lots, to encourage walkability and enhance the neighborhood character so residents appealed the South Area Planning Commission’s approval, demanding the parking lot go behind the store.
Parks pulled out all stops to bury their concerns: The Council chamber was packed with resident groups who back Parks, students from Crenshaw High, corporate execs and consultants, downtown, Valley and Chamber business leaders and even a cop, the local senior lead officer who said it was dangerous to put a parking lot behind a store in that neighborhood.
There were claims about obesity among the poor, the lack of access to healthy food (as if Fresh & Easy is all that healthy) and the capper was a letter Parks read from a little girl begging for Fresh & Easy in her neighborhood like the rich people have.
Only Alarcon voted no, apologizing for his vote which was based on his objection to automatic checkout in stores selling alcohol because young people might abuse the system.
A while later the meeting ended and Channel 35 returned to its usual stale out-of-date propaganda programming, including a half-hour show produced by the Community Redevelopment Agency to show the wondrous things its doing to make LA great.
Needless to say, there was no hint of any criticism or alternative points of view, not a mention that the city’s residents — at least those who pay the slightest attention — see the CRA in the same light as the DWP: Corrupt, secretive and destructive of their interests even as the give away the public’s money to the rich and powerful.
Channel 35 is a scandal in its own right. It’s no different than TV in the Soviet Union or any other dictatorship where the government promotes itself with half truths and outright lies while squelching the voices of the people.
Part of that squelching is the killing of public access television. The city gets more than $5 million a year to support public access and has four channels at its disposal but refuses to the dozens of independent and public TV producers the opportunity to show their work.
You can learn more about efforts to restore public access TV in Los Angeles by the non-profit Public -Television Industry Corp. here and see what kind of crap is on Channel 35 by watching this excerpt from the CRA’s four-year-old program that is broadcast often with a lot of other propaganda on Channel 35.
I agree with those about the safety of a rear parking lot, nuff said. Some arreas are just not safe.
Also agree with Alarcon, the area needs jobs, check out people, baggers, etc. While the area needs stores, the automatic checkout system doesn’t do much for the area. A regular supermarket would hire high schoolers and provide career paths.
Rule one is the CMs like all politicians, care first about re-election to remain practicing professional politicians who occasionally stumble across a motion that is meaningful and beneficial to the city’s people.
It doesn’t happen often unless you do fall for the performances from the Council meetings. Propaganda is the precise word for what goes on there via the video arm of the government.
Some interesting camera work could show a plethora of ills that, “if they only knew” out there in t.v. land, might raise a bit more ire to the point where the assumption that CMs know what they are doing is cleared away.
The one-minute comment time for big turnouts is really a bone tossed out the the public. Allowing access like lobbyists have, even a fraction of that time, would be fairer and definitely just. I would settle at this point for a simple calendar log of each CMs appointments: time, purpose, name and subject, and so on, that they might provide. Connecting the dots on decision-making would then be done with better reliability and less speculation.
At that point, maybe people would give them the boot. The elections don’t prove merit, quality or character. But a “constituent trigger” could be a way to go for some advancement of the idea of replacing them, one by one, on each CMs record. I leave it to others to think of HOW to do that (other than the LA Clean Sweep approach)- but there’s plenty of problems all around that call for changes to be made.
Its such a scam. I wonder why there aren’t any healthy food stores in Parks, Perry districts. ITS BECAUSE OF THEM. They don’t care about their constituents and now are pretending as if they do and going after fast food. There’s a Fresh food store on Central Ave. and the entry is right on the main street. Its very dangerous as it gets backed up and traffic is a mess. LAPD has advised the moron Perry but she’s done nothing about it. Wait until an accident happens then they do something. CHANNEL 35 takes orders from the thugs on council. The Council Phone no longer works either cause I’m sure the losers on council don’t want us to hear what they’re doing. So much corruption in this City is astounding they aren’t all arrested
Actually Ron, Fresh & Easy IS pretty healthy – they have lots of packages of vegetables as the FIRST thing you pass as you go into the store, other than a deli section – and there are lots of 98c cheap packs. And lots of meats reasonably priced, as well as the basic foods people want.
It’s a good option for that neighborhood combining price and freshness – with all due respect you are again being a devil’s advocate for the sake of it.
And Alarcon is off about the liquor issue: whenever liquor is scanned a signal is set off and a clerk has to look at the customer and give the OK or ask for ID.
The poster saying it’s a lousy option because it doesn’t provide more jobs is also missing the point, that there’s a trade-off between price, making it affordable for lower income customers. Ralphs, Vons and so on have a few sale vegetables and fruits at any given time but their overall prices are higher.
And the safety issue seems valid about parking. NOW you want the lot behind the store to encourage walkling: but almost consistently elsewhere overall, you deride that concept as part of the “elegant density” of transit/ shopping corridors!
I didn’t see the “show” today and I believe you that Parks put on the staged act they all do to make it seem the community supports them. But in this case these folks seem to have been misled perhaps by those who object to whatever the city does, the usual Just Say No’s.
Also in this neighborhood, the Damion Goodman group/ “Environmental Racism” folk demanding the most expensive overpasses at intersections, along with the usual Cheviott Hills/ westsiders NOT wanting the route along the natural right of ways in THEIR neighborhoods, have helped put the Expo line so far behind schedule and budget that now it’s not even going to be completed in the near future, and ends at La Cienega instead of near the ocean/ airport which is ridiculous. (WHAT city doesn’t have a metro line going all the way to the airport, anyway? Right, this one with its activist groups who get officials to cave instead of following through with the sensible plan and the big picture.)
In this case, people should be happy to get a market like Fresh & Easy.
Check out the ones in Hollywood – the WORST thing about them, especially the one on Hollywood at La Brea by the Chinese theater, is the difficult parking. They give an hour validation in a pricey tourist area, but the company that runs the concession is grumpy and rude. Easy parking at Fresh & EASY is a plus.
Remember, one of the best programs on Channel 35 was Full Disclosure “the news behind the news” produced by Emmy Award Winning Host/Producer Leslie Dutton and Producer T J Johnson, but it was censored by the LOST Angeles Council.
March 8, 2010 is an excellent opportunity for those Angelenos, who constantly complain, to make a difference and vote AGAINST Council members Tony Cardenas, Jose Huizar, Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Bernard Parks, and Herb Wesson seeking re-election or stop complaining.
http://blog.fulldisclosure.net/
I have a big issue with Gov’t like the idiots on city council telling me where I can eat. The idiots Parks and Perry are taking away their constituents first ammendment rights in making their own choice. Who are they to be telling people where they can eat? Maybe if these council members would have helped put grocery chain markets in the area they wouldn’t have to ban fast food. THe other problem is Fresh and Easy is realllllly expensive compared to the normal grocery markets. They’re as bad as Whole Foods and Gelsons
The comments seem to miss the point of the objection from the community. After years of planning work, a specific plan for Crenshaw Blvd was approved by City Council. Then some big corporation comes and wants to build but it wants to built whatever it wants, the community consensus expressed in the specific plan be damned. That is a constant problem in LA.
Instead of the local council member simply saying to the lobbyists of the big corporations: “No, please submit a code compliant project.”, the Council member says: “If you make a donation to my favorite non-profit (where my wife is the Executive Director), we can probably get variance for everything you want.”
We live in Chinatown. A place where corrupt elected officials like Parks, Perry, and La Bonge give away the candy to big corporations and developers every day. They are a cancer growing on the City.
LA CityView has been not working for days in my area. The signal is pixilated and frozen with no audio.
Could be useless Time Warner Cable,could be Randi Levin’s inability to run ITA or is it off everywhere at the whim of the Mayor?
Communities no longer have a say in what they want and where. Their Specific Plans are irrelevant as far as the City is concerned.
Council Members refuse to require developers to be in compliance with these laws. And, laws they are. Sadly, too many of them have ready-made-out-clauses (i.e., Exception or Variance provisions) that many developers take for granted. Time and time again, dangerous land use precedents are created as a result, i.e., there is nothing that prevents the next developer from requesting the same favorable treatment.
It always falls to the Council Members to have the final word on these dog and pony shows.
Since my District is split between Krekorian and Koretz, getting both of them on track has been trying to say the least.
Koretz has allowed the largest Ralphs Mega-Center (their name, not mine) to be built in Southern California in direct violation of a 20 year old Specific Plan. And two more large scale projects have just been filed that he will have to deal with.
Krekorian has a juggernaut of a project to deal with – one that requests not only numerous Exceptions to the same Specific Plan, but other complicated entitlements. This project literally sits by the 101/405 interchange(who’d want to live there in a so-called luxury apartment?). When he ran for office, he promised the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association that he wouldn’t approve any Exceptions to the Specific Plan…well, that was then. So, we will see what he does about this project.
Here’s the bottom line about all development in this city these days:
By the time a project is made known to any community the decisions are made. Then the Council Members give the communities lots of lip service, while winking and nodding to the various land use attorneys and/or consultants these savvy developers employ.
Imagine if communities had the resources to work a project like they do!
Why don’t we let the police worry about crime and not try to have input into design of buildings. They don’t seem to have learned anything from Chief Bratton about the broken window theory. And, shame on Parks, an ex policeman to allow his community to be a ghetto even as he regulates their waist line.
Just to give a small example, there is an elderly lady on a cornerlot on my street who no longer cares for her front and side yard. Passerbys have no problems in dumping their trash, beer bottles, food containers, dog crap and the like and even grocery carts in her yard. If she doesn’t care, neither do they.
The same applies to the design of Fresh & Easy. It could be the catalyst to revive a neighborhood that would attract other more up-scale retail/commercial uses frequented by more upscale shoppers. Criminals would move on to other areas. However, we continue to treat minority dominated areas as less deserving of the same services and respect as the more affluent areas. The culprits in my opinion are the communities themselves who keep appointing crap like Park, Perry, Reyes, Huizar, Cardenas, Alarcon and Wesson, who have never done any good for them. They are there to enrich themselves.
The CRA video about the great job they are doing in Hollywood is too good to be true. And why haven’t they highlighted our favorite project at 1601 North Vine and the exceptional credentials of the developer, Hal Katersky of Albuquerque Studios and Culver Studios fame.