Results tagged “Our LA” from Ron Kaye L.A.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was written for the current issue of Nina Royal's North Valley Reporter.

Last winter, dozens of community activists fired off emails to thousands, manned phone banks and fanned out across Los Angeles to spread the word that the solar energy Measure B was a fraud - a multi-million rip-off of ratepayers.

They beat the City Hall political machine despite being outspent 70 to 1.

It showed that grassroots movements could make a difference if they had truth on their side and a better, well-honed tory line and used all the tools available in this high-tech era.

Two months later, community activists came together again and formed the base of support that helped elect Carmen Trutanich as City Attorney over the machine's hand-picked legal gofer Jack Weiss and nearly pulled off an upset in the Council District 5 where Neighborhood Council leader David Vahedi faced ultra-liberal professional politician Paul Koretz.

In both those elections, solid Republican support was vital. Though only 25 percent of the electorate, Republicans are organized and often vote as a bloc, which means if you have them on your side, you only need a third of the remaining votes to win.

The CD2 special election to succeed Wendy Greuel was trickier. None of the eight candidates who actually stood a chance before the seat opened up ever stood a chance.

Assemblyman Paul Krekorian and Hollywood lobbyist Chris Essel had all the money and support from public employee unions and the power structure. They easily made the runoff, leaving the activist community in a quandary over who was the lesser of the two evils.

NC members, homeowner groups and other activists spent a lot of time auditing the candidates and overwhelmingly came to the conclusion that Krekorian was the best hope for better representation at City Hall.

The challenge now is to hold Krekorian's feet to the fire, to make sure his staff is responsive to community needs and that he has the support he needs to stand up to the back room dealing and bungling at City Hall and avoid being co-opted.

Krekorian said rightly that the election represented "democracy as it's supposed to be,"
neighborhood leaders coming together to beat the machine's candidate despite having a 2- to-1 money advantage, much of it spent in nasty hit attacks.

Taken together, the elections this year provide a road map to how to seize power at City Hall.

Ken Draper's City Watch publishes new content from CIty Hall activists, observers and insiders every Tuesday and Friday. Here's some articles up today:

* Greuel Scolds Transpo for Dismissing the Public on Bicycle Plan

* Los Angeles Dreamin' on 10th anniversary of Neighborhood Councils.

* Growing Wheat in the Tundra on bulldozing urban blight.

* In the Driver's Seat on the NC movement.

* Congestion Pricing: More Heat than Light on traffic congestion.

Here's my contribution to City Watch:

We Need a Bombshell

In the last 25 years, the consumer price index has risen roughly 100 percent while the salaries of Los Angeles' elected officials has soared by more than 700 percent.
 
So the question I ask is this: Is LA a better city than it was a generation ago?
 
Admittedly, the air is cleaner but it's still the most polluted in the nation. Traffic congestion is still the worst in the nation. There's a 75 years backlog to fix the streets and sidewalks. Planning for neighborhood improvement is non-existent. The poverty rate has soared. Few major corporations call LA home and the civic culture has weakened to the point or irrelevancy.

The list of negatives is long and the current batch of city officials has done little to make things better and a lot to make things worse.
 
From time to time, the public has risen up and demanded change: Ethics reform in the early 1990s, City Charter Reform a few years later and finally San Fernando Valley secession at the start of the 21st century.
 
For all the lip service that was paid to the commitment to reform, city government today is more corrupted than ever, more immune to the voice of the people, more held hostage by the role of special interests whose money makes them all but unbeatable in elections.
 
The result is massive public subsidies to billionaires and large corporations for developments that most people didn't want, digital billboards and pot shops popping up everywhere much to the annoyance of residents, a soaring budget deficit at the same time rates, fees and taxes have risen sharply.
 
For years, community activists have spent endless hours trying to have their voices heard, to be partners in solving the city's problems, working hard to put people into public office who will represent their interests.
 
Their efforts have largely been to no avail although the defeat of Measure B in March and the election of Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich as City Attorney in May are signs that the winds of change are gaining strength
 
To make a difference, we need to redouble our efforts. We need to become better organized and learn to collaborate among the city's far-flung regions, to gather better information and expertise, to be as effective in bringing pressure on City Hall as the best lobbyists.
 
But none of that will mean a thing unless we awaken the sleeping giant of LA politics: The 83 percent who ... apathetic, uninformed or defeated ... don't even bother to vote.
 
We need a bombshell, maybe many of them.
 
The weapon at hand is the salaries of our elected officials - salaries that are far higher than the elected officials of New York or any other city in the nation.
 
Our council members are paid $180,000 a year, the controller, city attorney and mayor 10, 20 and 30 percent more.
 
A Charter Amendment that slashed those salaries in half would be the wakeup call we need to get the public debate focused on the performance of the people who win elections with dirty money and serve special interests far better than the public interest.
 
It's a giant task to get a Charter Amendment on the ballot but no politician in his or her right mind - if there are any - can oppose it without looking the self-servers they are.
 
The "50 percent solution" itself is only one piece in the puzzle of how to turn LA around, but it's an important step down the road of real change.

Nearly five years ago, I went to work on the kernel of an idea on how to reinvent journalism to serve the community using the technology of the 21st century -- a central place where all of Los Angeles can come to share their knowledge and ideas and learn about what's going on in our city.

 

It started with the launch of the Daily News citizen journalism website valleynews.com and has evolved in the last year into OurLA.org with the help of Internet experts, business and civic leaders and community activists from across Los Angeles.

I'm pleased to announce that Our LA was approved last week to become part of Community Partners, the largest incubator of non-profit community organizations in Los Angeles. It is fully operational but will not be launched until the spring when it is loaded with content.

 

This is really exciting, a dream coming true for me. It is what I set out to do when I left the Daily News in April and started blogging and became a community activist.

 

Operating under Community Partners auspices and with the help of its President and CEO Paul Vandeventer and Senior Program Director Cynthia Freeman who refined the concept of Our L.A., we are now able to seek tax deductible contributions.

 

If you wish to contribute, you may send a check to Community Partners FBO (for the benefit of) Our LA, 1000 North Alameda St., Suite 240, Los Angeles CA  or go to their website and contribute by credit card.

 

Initial funding will allow us to hire staff to load OurLA.org with content from the hundreds of websites and blogs all across the city that deal with issues of community importance.  Volunteers with basic computer skills are welcome and needed. Just write me at ron@ronkayela.com.

 

Our LA is intended to be the Public Square for Los Angeles. I describe it in simplest terms as Huffington Post meets Facebook meets the old Valley News & Green Sheet. It combines citizen journalism with professional journalism, blogs and commentary, video and podcasts, forums and databases.

 

I've prepared a short explanation with more information about Our LA ( OURLA1Page.doc )   and don't be shy about providing me with your ideas and feedback.

 

This is a non-profit because it's meant to belong to the community.

Toward that end we will be creating an advisory board and a series of regional networks who want to be involved in helping to develop this Public Square into a place where the grassroots of civic engagement can grow into a new civic culture for Los Angeles, a place where people of all backgrounds and beliefs can come together and give birth to a new spirit for the city.

The success of Our LA will depend on your participation and the value it brings to you and the community.

Our LA will launch in the spring. Please let me know what you think and your interest in being involved.

It's a new year, a time of renewal and hope, the chance to make a new beginning.

But most people I meet are scared to death. They are worried about their jobs, their retirement, their children, the future.

Somehow, most of us are hoping for some kind of miracle from Barack Obama. Somehow, we hope he's going to wave a magic wand and the economy will suddenly improve. Somehow, he's going to change the global dynamic and there will be peace on earth.

I don't think it's going to be that easy or simple. But I do believe in miracles. They happen all the time when darkness turns to light, when something good comes out of nowhere at just the right time, when minds change from fear to hope.

Personally, I spent a lot of my life wallowing in depression over a world that seemed to have gone mad and my inability to do anything about it. For better or worse, I learned to focus on the things I could do something about and to see seemingly hopeless challenges as creative opportunities for change.

Whether I've really had much of an effect on things or took advantage of those opportunities is debatable. But that kind of thinking has certainly improved my outlook on life.

The dark cloud of a global recession and the flames of war hang heavy on all of us. But they also create a climate for great changes, a chance to remake our society, to make our government and workplaces more democratic, to strengthen our communities, to discover there is more to life than hyper-consumerism and conforming to the latest cultural fads.

The only certainty always is change and there can't be any doubt that 2009 is going to be a year of enormous changes, and not just because it was the theme of the presidential campaign.

I don't think it's just me who sees the bankruptcy of our ruling elites. Wall Street, the banks and insurance companies, government at all levels have failed us. And truth be told, we the people have failed too. We have allowed ourselves to become consumer zombies, captives of advertising and marketing, addicted to the latest toys and fashions, measuring our own worth and that of others by wealth and position - not character and the loving kindness of our hearts.

We are swept away by a runaway culture, clinging for dear life to its empty cycles that lead us farther away from our own values, our own identities.

Hard times have a way of changing things, of waking us from our stupor and putting us in touch with what's permanent and precious and personal.