It took only seven weeks for the LA city budget to blow up.

 

Imagine that: Thousands of six-figure workers with huge lifetime pensions and health benefits, the nation's highest paid municipal elected officials with huge staffs and lucrative perks, and the $4 billion budget they put into effect 49 days ago is no longer valid.

 

And it only gets worse.

 

Revenue projections are turning out to be overly optimistic, as everyone knew when the budget was written The plan to lease parking lots for 50 years is running at least six months late and proving to be a lot less certain than, as everyone knew when the budget was written. Hopes for some sort of Wall Street miracle that would fatten the pension funds and reduce the city's liability are turning out to be pipedreams, as everyone knew when the budget was written.

 

City Hall is sinking into the quicksand of financial mismanagement, chasing declining revenue numbers downhill toward bankruptcy, making matters worse with almost every decision they make - and all the tough decisions they don't have the courage to make.

 

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana sounded the alarm Tuesday, warning that failure to move quickly on the parking lot deal will lead to up to 1,000 layoffs immediately, force other drastic cost-cutting measures and "lose the option of securitizing parking meter revenue at a future date.

cao-parking-budget08-17.pdf

 

"If we don't have the money this year, we are going to have to take extraordinary steps to make it up," Santana told Rick Orlov of the Daily News.

 

"We would begin the (layoff) process immediately. Any money beyond that will be used to mitigate next year's shortfall, which is at $320 million. If we decide not to go ahead, then we should begin to make the cuts now."

 

He proposes making departments savaged of their senior staff by the costly Early Retirement Incentive Program pay the city's $21.2 million bill - police, fire, planning, City Attorney, transportation and so on.

 

Then, he wants library and parks volunteer programs gutted and $2 million or more from parks, fire and public works programs as well along with increasing the number of furlough days for thousands of city employees from two to three days a month.

 

Almost all these cuts impact the services provided to the tax-paying public which routinely is expected to pay the full cost of most services they do get from trash collection to ambulances.

 

If there is a method to this madness, it is to force the unions to the bargaining table to make concessions.

 

But what would motivate the unions to do that after City Hall has betrayed one deal after another and still doesn't have a plan to actually solve the financial problem?

 

They are running city government as if it were a business that can get rid of the services to the public - those that cost money but making a city livable -- while preserving revenue-generating positions as if turning a profit is the goal.

 

The mission ought to be to create a great city with great core services - not a social welfare system for wealthy and influential developers and corporations.

 

They are drowning in the muck of their failure of leadership and taking us all with them.

Think about this: All the City Council wants to do with the fantasized $53 million from leasing parking structures is to keep the endangered employees on the payroll for nine more months.

They don't have a plan to solve the problem. They face a $320 million deficit next year and a $1 billion deficit the year after.

What will be left when they are done?

Sometimes the dots of the story just connect themselves and it all begins to make sense in a way that even the casual observer can see.

As Antonio Villaraigosa was falling off a bike because of the "careless" actions of a motorist, the Daily News was triggering a new round of mayoral bashing with a front page editorial taking him apart for a failure of leadership.

"It's time to quit monkeying around and get to work," shouted the headline above such phrases as "run out of steam...lame-duck official...the passion and energy (are) all but gone at a time when the city is in crisis and needs it most."

Tough talk that soon turned to biting satire when writer Kevin Modesti showed up for the fund-raising launch of the Lu Parker Project at a South LA animal shelter: "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa went to work Monday with a sling on one arm and a familiar brunette on the other."

At the same time, fired librarians were protesting at the Riordan Central Library over the closure of city libraries two days a week and shorter hours the other five days.

For its part, the City Council was continuing to tax the law-abiding by raising dog license fees even though half the dogs in the city aren't licensed, the much-reviled Community Redevelopment Agency was moving to gag its Board of Commissioners and unions were using their ample political muscle to get Dennis Zine and Jan Perry to muzzle efforts to outsource collection of the nearly $100 million in ambulance fees that go unpaid every year.

City Hall is in chaos. Leaderless, confused and corrupted by the influence of special interest money, the mayor and City Council don't know which way to turn so they swing at every target compounding the results of years of mismanagement and making matters worse.

There is a reason for all this: They just don't get it.

Writer, historian and keen observer of the LA political scene D.J. Waldie picked up on the Daily News editorial campaign and suggested the mayor has simply "checked out" and the entreaties that he actually go back to work would fall on his deaf ears.

"There's little in the mayor's character or experience to suggest that he has - at this low point - the reservoirs of commitment and passion with which the process of remaking civic life in Los Angeles could be restarted. And remaking the governance of Los Angeles - not more trains or charter schools or even jobs - is the essential obligation that faces the mayor of Los Angeles," Waldie wrote on the KCET blog.

"Villaraigosa had said that he intended to be the mayor of a denser city, a greener city, a transit-oriented city, a middle-class city, a working-class city, a politically progressive city, a business-oriented city, and a city where the mayor is in control of the educational system. There's a refigured narrative of Los Angeles somewhere in there, but it was always hard to discern. Certainly too hard for the mayor."

Waldie took his analysis a step further on Warren Olney's "Which Way LA?" Monday night when he outlined exactly why City Hall has gone so wrong, why it has lost all credibility, why we are closing libraries and parks, firing workers, headed toward bankruptcy.

The city's political leadership doesn't have a clue about how Charter reform in 1999 fundamentally changed the structure and form of government, shifted power to the neighborhoods and transformed the political culture.

"I despair today, that anyone at City Hall really understands how that transformation of governance, how far it's progressed and what it might become," he said.

"One reason I think that the mayor is in the doldrums, if you will, unfocused and his compass is not pointing in any direction, is he really doesn't have a vision of how politics in this city are changing.

'I think he's missing the transformation that was put in place slowly and incrementally by Charter reform in 1999  I think he and his colleagues at City Hall, including the City Council, have not fully internalized what that meant.

"The area planning councils, neighborhood councils, the change in the relationship of the mayor to the department heads, re-figuring of the power relationships between the mayor and the City Council, all of these have begun incremental and, perhaps too slow for us to see at times, a transformation of the city.

"Unfortunately, Mayor Villaraigosa hasn't yet internalized what that means and is not leading that transformation, has not embraced that transformation in ways that makes any sense to me. As a consequence of not knowing how governance works in LA now, he doesn't seem to be governing."

No one has ever said it more eloquently, clearly or dispassionately.

The mayor and Council's failure, refusal actually, to follow the City Charter and respect the rule of law is the heart of the problem.

They have continued to operate as if nothing changed. They have thwarted the growth of Neighborhood Councils at every turn. They have politicized every department and every commission, stripping the city of the independent citizen oversight that is supposed to provide the check and balance on abuses by elected officials.

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. 

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:

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.

Exactly one year ago Saturday I was fired as Editor of the Daily News, the newspaper I devoted 23 years of my life to. and like everybody else who worked there during that time, endured just about everything imaginable to be able to keep my job and put out the best newspaper I could for myself, the organization and the San Fernando Valley.

I got no regrets.

The Daily News was the best thing that ever happened to me. I found success, and met my wife there. Together, we found true happiness and saw our son grow up strong and smart.

Without a doubt, this was the best year of my life. I found my voice as a writer, for better and worse, blogging whatever I wanted after a career of struggling to express myself under the constraints of corporate journalism.

And best of all, I got to connect to thousands of people all across the city who just like me were frustrated that the LA of their dreams was in reality a city going to hell.

While I'd been closeted in a newsroom taking pride in being part of a newspaper that stood up for the community and exposed wrongdoing in high places, these community activists were doing the hard work by joining Neighborhood Councils and neighborhood associations, business and political groups and service clubs.

They did good works for their communities and went to City Hall to plead their cases in the minute or two allotted to them. They studied the records and sat through endless hours of public meetings.

As a newsman, I found they knew more about what was going in our city than the entire news media. I came to realize that we in the news media spent nearly all our time covering government and government officials when the real stories of this city were out in the neighborhoods among the people where the decisions of government touched the lives of the people.

Often, I've said that if I had a staff or four or five good reporters today I could tell better stories, more important stories, more human stories, than I could with a newsroom of journalists.

The newsroom I left behind is now barely half the size it was when I was fired. I don't see how it can survive and that breaks my heart because of the pain it causes my colleagues and for the loss it means to the community.

Ever since I arrived in LA in 1980 as part of the traveling road show of an Indian guru, I've grappled with the tantalizing mystery of this place. If Chicago is the city of big shoulders, LA is the city of lovely shoulders, beautful but dangerous.

I've grappled over and over with the anything goes, anything is possible nature of LA, with its myths of stardom and freedom without bounds.

Only now, after a year without the armor of a job, a year as just another ordinary citizen fighting City Hall, am I getting a glimmer of what LA is really about.

It's as simple as happiness.

All the struggles and handwringing, all the lawsuits and protests, are about the failure of our city leaders to provide the environment we need to find our own happiness.

That, of course, means different things to different people, different things in different neighborhoods.

In a city of extreme diversity, a city of extremes, we have a government that panders to the poor without actually helping them, that enriches the rich without making the city better, that gives sweetheart deals to the special interests without serving the general interest.

We are segmented instead of unified. We are played against each other instead of being brought together. We are at war with a city that destroys a community farm in South LA, green-lights digital billboards all over West LA, gives lip service to the Valley and ignores East LA.

It isn't good enough anymore. We must do better before it's too late.

We are being gouged for our money every time we turn around from trash fees to parking meters. We get too little in return. We are about to get even less as the mayor proposes slashing our services and raising our fees to paper over his $1 billion budget deficit without solving any problems. In fact, he will make them worse.

I don't think he'll get away with it. The financial hole is too deep and certain to get worse. The global economic crisis insures that.

People are waking up. We saw that in the recent election. We'll see it again in the May 19 election when voters examine a series of state tax and spending measure that don't address what's broken and as they consider local runoff election candidates like Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich in the City Attorney race and David "Ty" Vahedi in Council District 5 and Tina Park in the Community College Board contest -- people who can make a positive difference.

Something big is going on and we need something big to change the course of history for our city.

This is our LA and we are going to take it back. My year as an ordinary citizen has convinced me it can happen. I have no illusions that it will happen overnight or be easy. But change is coming.

That's what I believe anyway as I start my second year as a blogger and ordinary citizen.

As momentum against Measure B continued to grow, the DWP -- still claiming its a neutral information source -- held a series of forums in the last few days around the city but attracted only a few dozen people, most of them protesters from Laborers Union 300.

The Laborers, like other unions of construction workers, feel the measure is a direct attack on them and their members because it gives a monopoly on solar installations to the DWP and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Meanwhile, the Daily News came out strongly against Measure B on Sunday, saying it's an unnecessary charter reform and was rushed to the ballot without adequate public discussion or knowledge of the costs.

The editorial said that "frankly, ratepayers have little reason to trust an agency that has been hiking rates repeatedly in recent years, with few results to show for the money.

"As well, this particular initiative would write into the city charter a requirement that all solar work would be done by DWP's highly paid unionized workers -- despite the fact that they don't have the skills to install and maintain solar panels...

"What's more, this measure would give the utility an airtight excuse when residents start complaining about higher-than-expected rate increases to cover the costs of the program: "Hey, you guys voted for it.'"

Like the Daily News, the Times opposed Measure E, a charter amendment that gives City Hall a blank check to give businesses incentives without proper safeguards, but delayed announcing its position on Measure B until Thursday.

It said that despite serious concerns about the use of such charter amendments, Measure B is "a special case requiring extra attention" because of its "complex and controversial" nature.

In deciding to oppose Measure B, the Green Party of LA County noted the growing opposition from labor, business, community organizations, political groups and politicians.

The Green Party cited "violations of Social Justice concerns, of shortcomings in Ecological Wisdom, of the absence of Grassroots Democracy, of the imposition of a centralized framework over Decentralization, of closed-bid rather than Community-Based Economics, of pitting union against union, instead of Respect for Diversity, of cronyism, not Personal and Global Responsibility, and misplaced and misguided Future Focus/Sustainability."

:Defeat of this top-down, anti-union, payola underwritten Proposition does not stop solar development within the City of Los Angeles. Measure B will be defeated and then we will make a real plan for clean energy and clean government, with a place for all Stakeholders at the table to refine it and move swiftly ahead."

At a meeting of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park fire victims last month at Mission College, Councilman Richard Alarcon proposed using the $100,000 from the Lopez Canyon fund to aid the victims of the Sylmar tragedy but not victims of Sky Terrace who should also have benefited from that assistance.

Glenn Bell, President of Neighborhood Friends- an advocacy group that champions the rights for mobile home park owners, said all victims deserve help and the two parks should be given equal funding.. "The Governor brought FEMA into the Oak Ridge Fire, where at least 85% of the victims were insured, leaving those in Sky Terrace to fend for themselves." 

Hard as this may be to believe, given all the lip service paid to fixing our failing schools, LAUSD's "bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent."

Got that? $20 billion invested in new school buildings and millions more to pay the salaries of a bloated bureaucracy and there's fewer teachers than six years ago to educate 650,000 children who still are almost as likely to drop out as get a diploma, whose test scores still remain abysmally low.

That's from Sunday's Daily News in a story by Beth Barrett, her final story at the paper after more than 20 years of exposing the sins and crimes of L.A.'s political and civic leadership.

It's accompanied by a searchable database that provides the name, salary and job of every LAUSD employee. What it shows is that the average salary of the district's 4,000 administrators. managers and other nonschool-based employees is $95,000 -- more than administrators are paid elsewhere. The average teacher salary: $63,000 -- less than teachers are paid elsewhere.

What teachers have been saying for decades is now a demonstrable fact: Classrooms have been robbed of resources to pay six-figure salaries to bureaucrats whose main function in life is to stifle the creativity and energy of the people who hold the future of our children, of our city, in their hands -- the teachers.

"(The bureaucracy) grows whether it's fat or lean times," said United Teachers Los Angeles union leader A.J. Duffy. "It's iindicative of an upper echelon, of a leadership cadre that doesn't want to use its authority to clean house."

Get rid of 1,000 of the bureaucrats and $95 million plus a third more for benefits is freed up for  classroom resources and to reward thousands of the best teachers with the salaries befitting the value of their contribution. Get rid of 2,000 and you might actually have a district that starts to work.

After 30 years of decline and failure, somebody should have figured out what the problem was and done something about it.

For all those years, we've heard repeatedly that it's the children's fault because there's too many that come from poor or immigrant families. And it turns out the biggest problem is too many bureaucrats and leadership that is too feeble to face the truth.

They point fingers at everybody else but the truth is the city's leadership lacks the political will to do anything about the LAUSD's most glaring problem or any of L.A.'s other glaring problems for that matter.

And when you see what LAUSD's board members and bureaucrats have to say in Barrett's story you can see that the mentality exposed by then Inspector General Don Mullinax years ago -- Deny, Defend, Deflect -- remain at the core of the culture of failure within the district.

What does it take to get real reform?

Breakup of the district was squelched. Dick Riordan's takeover of the school board got shanghaied. Charter schools have faced resistance every inch of the way. One superintendent after another has proven unable to act decisively. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school czar plan amounts to indirect control of less than a dozen schools and the insertion of Ray Cortines into LAUSD's No. 2 job, a role that has created more confusion than clarity of purpose.

Maybe Duffy and the teachers union is right that a strike's needed. But it's going to take a strike by parents, students and the teachers backed by the community as a whole to change the culture of LAUSD once and for all and put the district's resources to work where it counts: In the classroom.

Frankly, they can take this $7 billion bond issue on the November ballot and shove it. Let's see them dismantle this system first before they stick their hands in our pockets again.

(This article was published Sunday in the Daily News.)

Taking back Los Angeles