Results tagged “Fleishman-Hillard” from Ron Kaye L.A.

Where the hell is Stevie Kaufman when you really need him?

As Ron reported a couple days ago, Stevie, an attorney who specializes in campaign and fund-raising law, represents just about every Democratic politician from San Diego to Sacramento - including Mayor Antonio.

According to Fox 11's John Schwada, a one-time ink-stained wretch who thought he was too good looking for print, Antonio and his girlfriend Lu Parker, a former beauty queen turned TV reporter who is without doubt way too good looking for print, are sitting courtside in $2,000 seats at Lakers playoff games for free.

The story angle was that the tickets are not reported on the mayor's gift disclosure forms, and that if they're a gift of Staples Center he can't legally accept them (or any gift) because arena owner AEG lobbies the city and get subsidies so big they could solve the financial problems of all the hundreds of thousands of people Antonio's policies have sent to the unemployment line.

The mayor told Schwada that at the last game he was a guest of his "friend" Jeffrey Katzenberg, and insists that because he's at the game in an "official capacity" as mayor the tickets don't have to be reported as gifts.

Holy pooper-scooper! An official capacity? Did he play? Referee? Sing the national anthem?

I can only guess Antonio was answering on the basis of Stevie's legal advice that he could  bring his honey to game and sit courtside without having to dig deep into his own pocket (ouch!), or, better yet, use his Officeholder Account, if there's anything in there.  Under state rules that would be a bad dog's trick, but in LA, you can use the dough for virtually anything - except campaigning.

I also wonder if the Dog Trainer has failed to notice his honor holding court courtside? Before it was decimated by layoffs of half its staff, the city's paper of record like to think it didn't miss such dirty tricks. Now, we need a TV reporter to tell us what's going on.

Six years ago when the Dog Trainer was eviscerating Fleishman Hilliard's relationship with the DWP and the office of Mayor James "Never Touch Me or Call Me Jimmy" Hahn, the Dog Trainer put a team of reporters on the job to find out if the DWP was secretly paying for Hahn's seats behind the Dodgers dugout.

Call me naive, call me stupid, slap me upside my head, but I somehow thought there was a mayoral ban on city agencies hiring outside public relations firms -- a prohibition put in place by Jim Hahn to cover his butt in the DWP/Fleishman-Hillard scandal and kept in place by Antonio Villaraigosa.

I guess when it comes to City Hall you just can't believe a word they say.

First, we learned in July that L.A. Harbor authorities were set to spend $1.6 million in public money for PR consultants to let the public and truckers know there's tougher air pollution rules at the port -- deals that were cut back to $350,000 after the mayor was embarrassed by the publicity.

Then, we exposed a series of PR contracts quietly awarded by airport authorities without competitive bidding to let international travelers know the Bradley Terminal is undergoing construction.

That led to somebody dropping a dime on the Animal Services Department's deal with Samson PR to let to the public and press know about the new spaying and neutering law. Animal Services  Director Ed Boks told me it isn't costing taxpayers any money thanks to a combination of pro bono services and monetary contributions.

Now, I find out the Public Works Department's Bureau of Sanitation -- flush with cash from massive increases in trash fees recently imposed on homeowners --  miraculously found at least $1.735 million, half of it available now, to hire PR firms to let the world know about the city's recycling efforts and intends to spend a lot more for media and public opinion manipulation over the next six years.

Trash fees undoubtedly will have to keep rising to pay those bills.

Unlike the other examples PR abuses, the mayor and the City Council have no cover story for this deal.

They signed off on it in principle nearly 18 months ago. And now Public Works -- moving with bureaucratic swiftness -- has identified eight PR firms and several dozen minority subcontractors as potential recipients of this gift from homeowners and is ready to award the contracts

Join a gang, run free -- Waste water, go to jail
Finally, a year after progressive cities like Long Beach cracked down on water wasters, L.A. is ready to impose some restrictions in the  face of the looming drought. The mayor is supposed to sign the water conservation measure today. How will any of us survive  without a glass of water arriving promptly at our restaurant table when we arrive? How much anxiety will we suffer trying to program our lawn sprinklers to run before 9 a.m. or after 4 p.m. Life sucks! All the more reason to figure out ways to destroy our neighborhoods by over-development.

Foreclosure epidemic hits middle class -- L.A. wants to subsidize resales
Fresh from guaranteeing toilets and other comforts to day laborers on the street, the City Council has disclosed its real plans for the city's future: Homes for the poor in Brentwood and Studio City and subsidizing sales of foreclosed homes to the working poor. OK, that's not completely fair but I'm entitled to some literary license, aren't I? Here's the facts: the Times, which devotes all of 8 paragraphs to approval of the controversial Housing Element of the General  Plan without actually mentioning it, reports that "inclusionary zoning" was included for the first  time to require units be set aside for poor people in all new developments The Daily News is more complete, emphasizing the goal is to build 113,000 new homes in five years no matter what you want. And Rick Orlov talks to Mercedes Marquez, general manager of the  Housing Department, and finds out the city wants a big chunk of the $1.2 billion coming to the state in federal funds so it can buy up the soaring number of foreclosed homes and sell them to people with incomes around or below the median level. "The first year, it was primarily the subprime loans where we saw the most foreclosures. But now we're beginning to see it hit the middle-class loans." Marquez said.

Should bashing the incredible shrinking -- and shirking -- Times become an Olympic sport?
 I've spent too many years criticizing the L.A. Times for its criminal neglect of Los Angeles to ignore the double-barreled beating it just got.
At L.A. Observed, Kevin Roderick, the former Timesman and defender of its "glory" days, mocks Editor Russ Stanton for publicly boasting that the incredible shrinking paper is fatter than ever -- 828 pages -- and even fatter than the N.Y. Times. The evidence is provided in an email from "a former editor of another Los Angeles newspaper" -- be assured this one wouldn't hide behind anonymity -- who sat down and counted the pages and reported 80 percent were preprinted ad inserts that routinely fill up recycling cans unread.
At Patterico's Pontifications, blogging prosecutor Patrick Frey publishes an email to Stanton from attorney Michael Fabet who represents my long-time friend Doug Dowie in his appeal of his conviction in Fleishman-Hillard's overbilling the DWP. Faber accuses the paper of letting former Times editors and Fleishman executives Fred Muir and Carol Stogsdill hide behind anonymity in its coverage of the story and of ignoring Muir's self-incriminating testimony at the trial. Patterico says what interests him is the allegation "that people with connections to the L.A. Times were given favorable treatment in the stories."
In the category of what a small town L.A. is, it's worth noting that Stogsdill runs the PR operation at UCLA and Roderick works for her.

Remember those $1.3 million in public relations contracts the L.A. Harbor Commission approved to promote clean air efforts at the port?

Well, with the prudence of King Solomon, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- released while he's on his faraway hideaway vacation -- found a way to split the baby.

He wrote (here's the link to the letter portsletter.pdf) Harbor Commission President S. David Freeman that he believes "it is critical that the department take measures to develop internal staff capacity to direct and manage a more robust public communications effort. Consistent with this goal, I suggest you swiftly reconsider the public education and community outreach contracts" approved June 19.

At the same time, the mayor wrote: "The contractor's work should be viewed as a temporary supplement with a scope of one year ... should be project specific and prohibit services related to obtaining media coverage; and...should be limited to one firm."

In other words, he decided to defuse the P.R. time bomb created by the commission's approval of open-ended contracts with the Rogers Group and Hill & Knowlton.

The contracts were widely seen as a replication of the $3 million a year deal the Department of Water and Power cut with the Fleishman-Hillard that led to scandal, controversy and ultimately federal court convictions of three P.R. executives.

Approval of the contracts six weeks ago raised questions about what role would be played  by Steve Sugerman, the Fleishman-Hillard P.R. executive who got probation after changing his story and admitting he engaged in falsifying DWP billings.

A big question now is whether either P.R. firm is appropriate to handle a community relations effort rather than media manipulation.

By Doug Dowie

Correspondent

Sometimes the answer to your most vexing problem is sitting right in front you.

 

There is no question that L.A. has been plagued by gang violence for decades. And the debate over how to deal with the question has lasted just as long.

 

Tough enforcement is obviously part of the solution. Some experts believe "intervention" -- getting gang members to quit the life, or at least convincing them not to shoot each other -- will also reduce the violence, which, tragically, often claims innocent lives. Sometimes kids playing in their living rooms. Sometimes babies. Sometimes people just waiting for a bus.

 

Most recently, the debate in L.A. was marred by a fight over who in City Hall would control the millions of dollars to actually prevent kids from joining gangs. No bystanders on Spring Street were killed, but it got pretty nasty

.

Soon the fight will begin -- again -- over which of the myriad of gang prevention programs will get their piece of the pie. Evaluating their effectiveness is always an issue, especially when some of the programs are run by, or employ, former gang members. It gets dicier when it's revealed that some aren't really "former."

 

But like I said, sometimes a big part of the solution is sitting there looking at you.

 

Last fall, LA's BEST announced the results of a landmark study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice and conducted by UCLA's National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing.

 

The results show that students in LA's BEST are 30 percent less likely to commit juvenile crime than their peers. Using conservative estimates, the study also found that for every dollar invested in the LA's BEST program, the city saves $2.50 in costs associated with crime.