Years of studies, test programs and debate over a bus-only lane on the most heavily used public transit corridor in Southern California came down to two hours of muddled City Council posturing Tuesday and a decision that amounted to pandering to Westside Nimby’s and a slap in the face of their servants.
All that mattered was whose time is more important: SUV driving Westsiders or the household help spending hours on buses to get to their low-wage jobs without benefits.
So much for the myth of L.A. liberalism. When it comes to tough decisions, the rich get richer at the public expense and the poor get lip service if they’re lucky. That’s why most of the redevelopment subsidies go to wealthy developers and corporations for downtown and Hollywood projects and the truly blighted areas of the Eastside, South Side and the heart of the Valley get neglected.
The issue was federal funding of a bus-only lane on Wilshire Boulvard from MacArthur Park to the Westside. The MTA and the County Supervisors with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s full support approved a 7.7-mile bus-only lane that would only go to Westwood while skipping Beverly Hills which opposes it as does Santa Monica.
An alternative 8.7-mile plan that would take the bus lane past the 405 all the way to the Santa Monica border brought out strong opposition from Brentwood residents that led Paul Koretz and Bill Rosendahl to abandon the heartfelt concerns they have so often expressed for the transit dependent.
Koretz threw out (or was it up) every specious argument he could find while Rosendahl at least had the decency to rail against Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and offer even a third plan that would end the bus lane at the Beverly Hills border as if that would intimidate the elitists to back down and support a bus-lane-to-the-sea.
That is is a big point to note. These are the same people that the 10 million residents of the county — 98 percent of whom don’t live in the horrifically over-developed and heavily-congested Westside — are being taxed to death to build a subway-to-the-sea to make even more high-rise development possible and leave congestion even worse, according to MTA’s study.
The under-current during the Council debate was race: The white population in cars and the minority population on the buses and that’s largely how the votes broke down.
Parks’ 8.7-mile plan got the support of the all the minority members present — Reyes, Alarcon, Cardenas and Huizar — plus Hahn and Smith. But came up one vote short — Herb Wesson siding with the concerns of the rich and the loss of construction jobs he claimed falsely would put the city’s poorest people back to work. .
As if the whole debate weren’t pathetic enough, Alarcon offered a compromise that was so ridiculous it had to be re-interpreted by the Council’s emerging No. 1 apologist for nonsense Paul Krekorian and a team of bureaucrats.
What the indicted Councilman wanted to do was have the Council vote to approve the 8.7-mile plan and the 7.7-mile plan but if the MTA and County won’t change their minds then the shorter route will go through since everybody waited until the very last minute to apply for the $23 million in federal funding for the project.
Under pressure, Alarcon accepted that the two decisions is not a decision and the Council voted 11-1 (Rosendahl sticking to his guns for shorter or longer and nothing in-between) to support the 7.7-mile route and ask the other agencies to reconsider their own stupidity — something that has about as much chance of occurring as the MTA transit system ever working efficiently with frequent service and excellent connections.
In more than three decades of building a subway that only serves the subsidized developments downtown and in Hollywood and a rail system that doesn’t even go to the airport or the major destinations anywhere in the region, the MTA has spent untold billions of dollars in local, state and federal money without building a transit system that works for people.
That’s what happens when transit decisions are always made for political reasons — a point made frequently during the Council debate even as members made their decision based solely on political considerations and not on public benefits.
I don’t know how to say this gently but what hope can anyone have for L.A. when this is the quality of leadership we get from the nation’s highest paid municipal officials with the most lucrative benefits and perks and the largest staffs of yes-men and yes-women at their beck and call.
The “City of the Angels”
Not any longer. We need help desperately.
I am in prayer.
Waxman won’t be able to hide from the poor people who take buses much longer since they are now going to be a huge part of his district. I hope he has a good explanation for why he has made their commuting lives hell for the last 30 years (and apparently the next 10 or so as well).
Ending his career will feel good since he is the very definition of a limousine liberal.
He gives progressive liberalism a bad name.
I am no longer in that person, Henry Waxman,s
District either. One bit of good news for today.
All these old farts like Waxman along with the dumb latinos like Villargosa, Reyes and the criminal Alarcon should not be allowed in any public spot.
Good idea. Only one term per person. No 20-30 year careers, no pensions, no huge stalarss that do nothing for too much money [work volunteers have done for years ( PTA, Libraries, for starters).
No politician should ever get a public pension. Someone should look into this gross public abuse. That’s the only way to get them out and earn a decent/hard living like everyone else they purport to represent. One may ask that whom does the latino Mayor & his uneducated cousin, Perez, Speaker of CA Assembly represent? Do they really represent and do good for the the latino masses or the AEGs of the world.
Regarding Public Transportation:
Ron, try making heads or tails out of the SR 710 Extension…Las Vegas should have betting lines and odds to whether the City of LA will hedge a bet on a connector road or support the tunnel long shot, or both…either way the residence of Alhambra, El Sereno, and Lincoln Heights will truly suffer from the “Road Less Graveled”!
And Janice Hahn is running on her record of giving away millions of dollars to the politically connected for years now as the reason for us to send her to Washington. Please come out and vote in the 36th Congressional District to defeat her effort to replace Jane Harman.
Janice claims to have been a major contributor to the “greening” of the Port – yet today in the Press-Telegram we read that many of the companies to whom she directed that the Port give money to buy clean trucks ($44 million dollars) have renegged on the contractual requirement that those trucks make 300 trips in a year into the Port – and all that she and the Port want is to stigmatize these companies, not demand refunds of our money plus penalties. She voted to spend millions of our dollars to fund entertainment groups and artists and low-rider groups and support AEG and other developers, but not spend to fix the crumbling infrastructure of Los Angeles. We have to close libraries, but there is money to tear down the Convention Center for a football stadium to be built. Schools without books and fresh food and hospitals without medicine and unable to provide needed services, yet she focuses on a football stadium – she reminds me of Marie Antoinette with her “let them eat cake” attitude.
Please come out and vote against continuing her sponging on the backs of taxpayers – tell her to go get a real job, like the rest of us are looking for.
Ron,
I read your take of the meeting today. What would you do if you were able to make the decision? What should be done?
Face it people, we have nothing but a bunch of incompetent lame asses making dumb ass decisions. This has to be the most incompetent group of city council members this City has seen. The Mexican Mafia gangster reps like Alaracon, Huizar, Reyes, and Cardenas haven’t done shit for their own communities and then you have the other morons who do more for the rich. Cardenas is such a dumb ass he wants to continue with the Red Light Cameras for a year knowing full well they don’t work to improve safety and just a ploy. We should find out if the American Traffic Solutions. And to think this dip shit Cardenas wants to be a Congressman.
You all carry some responsibility for this sad state of affairs.
Some of you wouldn’t want to be bothered to vote and some of you vote out of political correctness and only for somebody with a D after his / her name. You would never admit that the unchecked and abundant illegal immigration is a bad thing and has created numerous problems in the city plus this huge underground cash only economy does nothing economically. And creates fertile ground for politicians like Villar, alarcon, etc to spruce up. And Ron and his newspaper was silent on this topic. And then somebody like Walter Moore tells you how it is, you all scream “racism” and close your eyes and ears.
Well said ‘Citizen!’
I’m doing what I can to stop the ‘musical-chairs’ syndrome, that gang-affiliated Ms Hahn, apparently believes she is entitled to.
I’ll be walking the 36 district on June 18, for candidate Craig Huey for Congress.
Good luck to Craig Huey. It’d be soooooo nice to get rid of that pig hahn. Feeding at the trough her whole life. Dumb as a dump truck.