For all the talk about cutting costs by laying off 4,000 workers, the mayor and City Council arranged to transfer as many workers as possible first from positions paid out of the general fund to proprietary departments and special funds.
Most of them have so far gone to the Department of Water and Power where they got huge raises.
Under the California Public Records Act, OurLA.org has obtained the first list of transfered workers, some of whom are getting raises of up to 50 percent.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Read the consultant's report recommending massive DWP
electricity rate hikes at OurLA.org.
You don't
know nothing if you didn't know this was coming: Massive DWP rate hikes.
How else
did you think they were going bail out the sinking ship of the city except by
socking it to you?
It's all
been a setup, planned for a long time and now it's being executed: 800 percent
increase in the "energy cost adjustment factor" pass-through on April 1, 20
percent increase in the next 12 months, 33 percent with last year included.
And from
there, you can be 100 percent certain your power rates will keep going up and
away, doubled and tripled.
You are
sitting in the DWP's electric chair and they are about to pull the switch. I've
been telling you this was coming for months so don't be shocked when your
electricity bill soars higher than your mortgage.
Don't kid
yourselves: It's the people who have mortgages that are paying the bulk of
these rate hikes.
They
jiggled the rate tiers to punish the 40 percent of residents who live in single
family homes while keeping bills low for most apartment dwellers and tripling
the number of customers with heavy subsidies to 250,000 households - a sixth of
DWP's customers.
They
squandered tens of millions of dollars pretending to go green but have the
worst renewable energy portfolio in the state so they are desperate to buy wind
and solar power from anybody who has some no matter what it costs to meet the
20 percent goal mandated by the state by the end of this year.
They have
painted themselves into a corner and don't know any other way except to slug it
to the middle class, from those just getting by on two family incomes to those
in the upper middle class who have seen their wealth decline sharply and their
incomes fall.
This is
their cockeyed theory of municipal socialism laid bare, a redistribution of
wealth that gives pennies to the poor and feeds the insider culture that has
feasted so long on the public treasury.
The DWP
is the city's cash cow. It has hired 1,400 workers since the recession began
and now has transferred 300 city workers facing layoffs to its payroll with
most of them getting raises of 20 to 40 percent.
When
other city workers gave up raises, City Hall rewarded DWP employees with 3.25
percent lump sum cash payments and guaranteed them raises of up to 4 percent
for the following four years - raises for people who already are the highest
paid utility workers in the nation.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills for all this featherbedding and over-indulgence, and
that's you.
Somebody
has got to pay for all these sweetheart contracts for contractors, consultants
and power purchases, and that's you.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills to rebuild the water and power infrastructure that is
bursting and blowing up from neglect while they put the money into the pockets
of workers and insiders, and that's you.
And every
time you pay more, don't forget that nearly 20 percent of your money goes
straight into the general fund to bail out City Hall from its deficits that
total billions of dollars and are going up every week by millions of dollars.
Somebody
has got to pay, alright. I say make them pay. If you want to help me do that,
go up to the right-hand column of this page and see how you can donate to OurLA.org,
my non-profit community news and networking site so I can hire a reporter who
will work full-time to penetrate the secrecy of the DWP and expose where your
money is really going.
Or you
can just get used to paying more and more of your hard-earned money for less and
less.
At the meeting Friday with Neighborhood Council leaders, Deputy Mayor Larry Frank announced that the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment will be abolished and nearly all its staff eliminated.
DONE Commissioner and NC leader Al Abrams sent out an email Saturday explaining what the mayor's plan is. Go to OurLA.org and read what happened.
The City Council takes up CAO Miguel Santana's three-year plan to restructure city government Tuesday to reorganize departments, possibly eliminating Human Services, Neighborhood Empowerment and other agencies.
He sent his list of the 1,000 positions to be eliminated with some of all of the workers transferring to the DWP, Harbor, Airport and special funds. The list of positions was obtained by OurLA.org where it has been posted.
In the first six months after City Hall offered the Early Retirement
Incentive Pprgram, 625 workers have actually retired with pensions
averaging more than $1,000 a week with 32 of them getting pensions in
excess of $100,000 a year, according to records obtained by OurLA.org. under the California Public Records Act.
Read who joined the city's nearly 1,000 members of the Six-Figure Pension Club and the list of the 625 who retired since enhanced pensions were offer to city workers and how much they get monthly at yearly. Go to OurLA.org.
The deadline for applying for the city's costly Early Retirement Incentive Program passed at 5 p.m. Wednesday with more than 3,100 workers seeking the deal limited to 2,400.
Read the full story at OurLA.org -- the community-based news and information website for Los Angeles. OurLA.org is an innovative non-profit site that relies on citizen and professional journalists and needs your support and participation
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.
UPDATE: The City Council delayed a vote for a week and probably longer on a new ordinance implementing the 13-year-old state medical marijuana law. Councilman Ed Reyes and others proposed a long series of amendments intended to gut the City Attorney's proposal to bring LA -- poster child for out-of-control marijuana dispensaries -- into compliance with the letter of the state law. No matter what the Council does, District Attorney Steve Cooley has vowed to prosecutie operators of dispensaries on felony drug sales charges.
Day by day, Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich is showing how much of a difference one person can make, one person who stands apart from the lemmings who populate City Hall.
Lemmings are little rats who breed like flies to the point they overwhelm their environment and scamper en masse to the edge of cliffs and jump off together to their doom -- a delightful scene immortalized by Disney in "White Wilderness" 50 years ago when LA was in its heyday as long as you didn't need to breathe.
Our city officials are a lot like Disney's lemmings.
Admittedly, their breeding habits aren't the cause of LA's overpopulation as far as I know but the end result is the same: They are overwhelming our environment with more people than there is water, power, space, jobs or schools.
Not a one of them gets out of step with the others -- at least that's been the case until Nuch arrived in town and refused to join the pack.
In a Special Report on OurLA, LA Councilman Bernard Parks portrayed the city's financial condition in dire terms Saturday, warniing of "severe pain" that is coming. Speaking for more than two hours to the LA Neigbhorhood Council
Coalition at a meeting in West LA, Parks reported the city is spending
$1 million a day more than it has and the $350 million in savings
projected by the mayor doesn't exist because the sweetened early retirement plan for 2,400 workers isn't financially feasible.
Parks' Budget Committee will hold a public hearing at 1 p.m. Sept. 14 on the state of the city's finances and the drastic measures, including layoffs of up to 4,000 workers that must be taken. The full Council will meet the following day on the budget crisis.
Editor's Note: Community activist Lucille Saunders has long been in the forefront of the fight to stop over-development -- projects that add to traffic congestion, strain the water and power supply and harm the quality of life in our neighborhoods. Writer Chelsea Cody of OurLA.org -- the new online community-based newspaper now gearing up launch in coming weeks -- covered the story of the City Council voting to approve the project. The fireworks between dead-duck Councilman Jack Weiss and Councilwoman Janice Hahn captured in this video highlighted the debate.
Maintaining Illusion of Due Diligence, the City Council Green Lights La Brea Gateway Project despite Community Objections
Chelsea Cody OurLA.org Writer
For 38-year La Brea-Willoughby resident Lucille Saunders, the Los Angeles City Council's unanimous approval of the long-contested 219-unit La Brea Gateway apartment project last week was not a surprise.
Nor was it surprising that Councilman Jack Weiss who represents the area would wish to block Saunders and other area residents from voicing their opinions before the council's decision.
Saunders has encountered a great deal of limited if not discriminatory consideration from elected leaders since her fight against the Gateway project began four years ago.
Saunders, who is the president of the La Brea-Willoughby Coalition of concerned fighting to maintain the quality of their neighborhood, has been slugging it out with developers, city officials and lawyers since 2005.
In June 2008, Saunders' coalition sued the city for violating state law and the city's general plan over its failure to conduct annual audits of infrastructure for a decade.
Appearing before the council Wednesday with about 75 of her fellow La Brea-Willoughby residents, Saunders sought to make a last-ditch appeal to the council to halt the project which had sailed through the planning process.
But without debate or allowing public comment, the council approved the project unanimously. And the issue would be closed right then short of filing a lawsuit if Councilmen Tom LaBonge and Bill Rosendahl hadn't felt squeamish about not even giving the public a chance to be heard.
They were given five minutes and so were supporters.
"We have tried to work with and within the system. But this is not a planning process it is a political process," Saunders said in an interview. "One project overrides a whole community's health and needs in order to serve those of one well connected developer."
Gateway developers, the Martin Group and Bomel Companies, have cited the project's capacity to bring jobs and amenities to the area as a primary reason for allowing the development. However, the developers and their counsel Latham & Watkins land-use attorney, George Mihlsten have been short on details about these jobs and benefits.
The tipping point Saunders said is that the project will dramatically alter the zoning classification of the area, changing an industrial zoned block into a mixed-use residential/commercial area and eventually into a strictly residential block.
This change, residents insist, would dramatically alter the character and scale of the La Brea Willoughby neighborhood.
In an area dominated by narrow streets lined with one and two-story bungalow homes and a shortage of parking, the complex of 219 apartments and about 35,000 square feet of retail space would be a dramatic departure from the neighborhood's current aesthetic.
During the council debate, there was no mention of the community's concerns: Zoning changes, environmental impact, traffic congestion or the loss of industrial jobs. Instead, the council focused on the lack of affordable housing and got the developer to agree to set aside 10 percent of the units for affordable housing -- something that was not achieved during the long process from Neighborhood Council to the Planning Department, Planning Commission and Councilman Ed Reyes pro-development Planning and Land Use Committee.
The debate climaxed with the lame-duck Weiss giving the rest of the council a lecture about how they shouldn't get involved in development issues that have gone through Reyes' committee.
Councilwoman Janice Hahn, the main target of his lecture, shot back with a fiery rebuke to Weiss, noting that the full council achieved what he had not -- an affordable housing commitment.
The vote was unanimous 13-0 -- in no small part because the issue did not come before the council until the last day for action when unanimous approval of at least 12 members was required to avoid a second vote this week which would put it past the deadline.
Saunders indicated the neighborhood coalition would continue to take steps to try to preserve their 'modest' community.
Catch Ron on the Kevin James wShow on KRLA 870 at 9:30 p.m. this Wednesday night and as a regular commentator on NBC's innovative news sho "The Filter with Fred Roggin." "The Filter" is broadcast on NBC's Raw Channel 225 at 7:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday.
Support the "LA Clean Sweep" campaign to end corruption at City Hall by electing candidates who will serve the public interest -- not special interests. For too long, concerned residents throughout Los Angeles have fought their own separate battles against the powerful forces that run City Hall and control our elected officials. The city's financial crisis, cuts in core services, layoffs of city workers, selling valuable assets, massive subsidies to insiders -- we have reached the point of no return. Only you can save LA. Join the Clean Sweep campaign and come together with people from all over the city to make a difference. Get more information on volunteering your time or contributing to at lacleansweep.com http://lacleansweep.com
or contact me at ron@ronkayela.com..
Clean Sweep Trainng for Acitvists & Candidates
This Sunday, Aug. 29, LA Clean Sweep will provide training sessions from professional politicial consultants to help you become a more effective activist and help candidates mount successful campaigns in the March 2011 or future elections. The sessions will be held at the Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood. The morning session from 9 a.m. to noon is for activists; the afternoon session from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. is for potential candidates. Lunch will be provided to all participants at noon. For more information or to register for this invaluable training gohttp://lacleansweep.com/#/events/
is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News who has become a community activist, helping to found the Saving LA Project. He writes on city issues in Los Angeles and is a frequent speaker at community groups on the need to get informed and involved in the effort to make LA a city of great schools and neighborhoods, a city with a healthy business climate and good jobs, a city where the people are respected and have a seat at the table of power.
Ron Kaye