Results tagged “Saving L.A. Project” from Ron Kaye L.A.

Reform LA -- the new organizing group for the "Clean Sweep" campaign to clean up City Hall -- will meet at 9:45 a.m. Saturday at the Hollywood Community Center, 6501 Fountain Ave.

The goal is to develop strategies to recruit credible candidates and form a political action committee for the elections next march for the even-numbered City Council districts -- Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Tony Cardenas, Bernard Parks, Herb Wesson, Jose Huizar and Greig Smith's open seat.

Recent events involving DWP rate hikes and the city budget and coming events that will show how dire the city's financial condition is with public services being slashed, massive job layoffs and sell-off of valuable assets.

Don't just get mad, get even by participating in the movement to change LA and bring responsible government to the city.

Reform LA was created by the Saving LA Project and the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition and is open to everyone in the city, residents, business people, labor and environmental activists -- people who can come together and put the interests of the city ahead of all private beliefs and work for the common good.

We hope to put together a slate of candidates who can win and restore confidence in City Hall.

At the end of a daylong series of inter-connected community meetings, the Saving LA Project voted unanimously to seek candidates in the seven even-numbered City Council Districts for elections next March and run a "Clean Sweep" campaign for a slate that can clean up City Hall.

More than 20 people signed up to form a steering committee to recruit credible candidates with the ability to raise enough money to qualify for city matching funds. They will also develop a citywide strategy and explore formation of a political action committee that will hold incumbents accountable for the worsening city budget crisis.

Anyone interested in consideration as a Reform LA candidate should contact me at ron@ronkayela.com.

Incumbents up for re-election next year are Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Tony Cardenas, Bernard Parks, Herb Wesson and Jose Huizar. Greig Smith's seat will be open and his chief of staff Mitch Englander has attempted to lock up the seat early.

SLAP also endorsed recommendations of Tony Wilkinson's DWP MOU Committee to oppose the mayor's vague "lockbox" proposal for a portion of his rate hike proposal and to advocate for breaking up the catchall Energy Cost Adjustment Factor into separate funds for fluctuating costs of fossil fuels, green energy, energy efficiency and other programs.

Former DWP Commission President Nick Patsouras and DWP Committee for Advocacy Jack Humphreville were named to head an committee to mobilize community groups behind creation of an independent Rate Payer Advocate protected permanently through an amendment to the City Charter.

The RPA issue will come before Jan Perry's Energy and Environment Committee this month with a variety of proposals put forward by Council members and the mayor pushing to gut the RPA's independence of Controller Wendy Greuel who has supported repeated large pay increases for the IBEW and received more than $250,000 in contributions from the union.

The LA Neighborhood Council Coalition spent considerable time discussing the elimination of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment and its consolidation into the Community Development Department.

Proposals from Shawn Simons were adopted as the strategy for how this dramatic change might work to preserve efforts to achieve community empowerment despite what the mayor is doing. Read the plan here: (DONE-CDDsummary.doc)(DONE-CDDplan.doc).

The NCs' BudgetLA Advocates also met and presented the facts about the city's budget crisis and discusses strategies going forward with the mayor to present his budget proposal shortly.

The clock is ticking on the mayor's plan to gut city services and sell its assets, and every day the City Council dawdles revenue falls and the budget deficit grows by nearly $340,000.

On Saturday, activists at the Saving LA Project meeting discussed the issue of what is in the best interests of the community as a whole and the city's workforce and reached a consensus.

No Layoffs of city workers, because every worker eliminated from the general fund or transferred to the Harbor, Airport or DWP means less service for the city's four million residents, the people who pay the bills.

No Payoffs like the early retirement plan that is getting rid of nearly 3,000 senior city staff or the kind of deals our elected officials cut with contributors and special interests, deals that have allowed billboards, pot shops and over-sized developments to pop up everywhere.

No Selloffs of parking lots and meters, the zoo, golf courses, the convention center, airports, even the power system they are now talking about -- deals that based on past performance will surely benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The budget plan put forward by the CAO's office on instructions of the mayor and Council leadership is nothing but a hodgepodge of gimmicks that punish city workers and slash city services in order to cook the books so they can borrow billions to have the cash to get through this financial year and next.

The so-called restructuring plan -- like the ERIP and layoff strategies -- is nothing but a shotgun approach to effective and efficient government.

There is no coherent logic to the strategy, no details of what they really intend to do, no idea of how it impacts departments and the ability to provide basic services. Parks, libraries, planning, building code enforcement will be decimated. The City Attorney's ability to prosecute criminals, solve neighborhood problems and defend the city against nearly $1 billion in lawsuits, mainly of the frivolous, will be undermined.

There are no negotiations with the unions or effort to implement their cost-saving strategies.

There is no engagement of community leaders or respect being shown to the public or their needs.

There is no plan, just a desperate attempt to defer cleaning up the budgetary mess they created in the vain hope that somehow a miracle will save them from wrath of the people.

There is another way.

Bring community, union and business leaders to the table and come up with real solutions that actually solve the fundamental problems and get LA moving forward again.

Those are the views of SLAP activists and many others I have spoken with.

My own view is that city workers in all departments need to take a step back financially and the public needs to take a step forward to provide a new revenue source for two or three years to bring the budget into balance without destroying our human capital, our services infrastructure.

I have run this idea past dozens of people in the political and civic culture of LA and the response is unanimous: No one will support higher taxes because they don't trust the city's leadership.

That I think goes to the heart of the matter. The financial troubles facing LA are simply the monetary manifestation of the loss of confidence and trust in our leaders.

The only real solution is to bring us all together to find a consensus. It may involve unions' and the community giving ground but it will produce a transparent strategy that will create a new spirit of LA, mutual respect and trust.

The alternative is to see more jobs disappear, the value of property and businesses continue to decline and the acceleration of middle class flight.

Stop the nonsense. Let your voice be heard. We want real solutions, not gimmicks.

Doesn't the goodness of the people count for anything or is this a godforsaken town beyond redemption?

I believe that the people must count or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing anymore than thousands of other people from all walks of life who have worked so hard for so long in the face of the imperious indifference of the city's leadership and the failure of its policies.

We deserve better than what we've gotten from the influential and powerful who ignore the desires and values of the people of Los Angeles and sell out the public interest to the various special interests who benefit so handsomely from their mediocrity and pretense of public service.

Starting Monday at 6 p.m. at Van Nuys City Hall, a new era could begin when Bernard Parks' Council Budget Committee starts a series of hearings around the city on this year's massive deficit and next year's shortfall that is even worse.

Bankruptcy is a certainty unless drastic steps are taken that should have been taken a long time ago. The future of the city depends on what those steps are and whether they succeed in regenerating our neighborhoods, rebuilding our economy and repairing the damage they have done.
 
At Saturday's joint meeting of the Saving LA Project, and Budget Committee formed by LA Neighborhood Council Coalition and the NC budget advisory group, there was an overwhelming consensus that what the Mayor and Council are proposing will have catastrophic consequences.

At least 1,000 layoffs on top of 1,200 vacant job eliminations and expansion of the sweetened retirement program from 2,400 to 2,763 would compound the impact on public services, especially since they have protected revenue-producing positions at the expense of those that serve the general public.

They threw out a grab-bag of proposals to raise every fee that they can, to transfer every body they can to special funds or proprietary departments, to loot every dollar they can from those same areas and, worst of all, to sell off the city's assets that provide long-term revenue and public value.

The zoo, golf courses, theaters, parking structures and meters, information technology, property management, the convention center, Van Nuys Airport and Ontario Airport are all on their list for privatization or sale.

They have framed the issue solely as a question of whether or not hiring police officers should continue and they are trying to cut deals with the business and labor communities to support them in their doomed enterprise.

The public is left out in the cold, except for the mayor's budget survey that makes a mockery of public concerns and the opportunity Monday in Van Nuys, and on Feb. 22 at Hamilton High on the Westside, on March 8 at El Sereno Recreation Center on the Eastside and on March 22 at the CD9 City Hall

Activists at Saturday's meeting offered dozens of suggestions to reduce city spending, create efficiencies, focus on critical services but much of the discussion was focused on public employees pensions -- an unfunded liability that has taxpayers on the hook for $10.5 billion on top of the $400 million deficit forecast for next year, $775 million the year after, $875 million the following year and over $1 billion after that.

What came out of the community meetings was an emphasis on significant pension reform, zero-based budgeting of all departments, an end to gimmicks that mask the problems and, most of all, a seat at the table of power where decisions are being made.

None of that is where City Hall is headed.

SEIU union leader Julie Butcher sent out an email Sunday saying that another letter has surfaced from the Mayor and Council instructing City Administrator Officer Miguel Santana to open talks on Friday with labor on leadership's plan for "mass privatization, benefit cuts... pension reform."

"We'll continue to insist the city act to fully implement our agreement as quickly as possible, to maximize smart ideas, & to act strategically & quickly (yeah, right!)...Collect & investigate all rumors.  They'll be wild & varied," she said.

A dissident SEIU group is questioning where this is all leading.

"Good grief. Are our contracts with the City written on toilet paper, or what? There are all the indications that our jobs, livelihoods, families and futures are being played with, fast and loosely," wrote long-time union steward Dan Mariscal

The unions have every right to be concerned and so do ordinary citizens.

LA belongs to all of us. It is not the private property of the politicians, developers or any other narrow interest.

If we want to assert that the people are the bosses, we need to demonstrate we are as serious as the unions and the insiders protecting their interests.

I hope of lot of ordinary people will join the budget team activists at the news conference Monday before the hearing begins and demand that the public, the people who pay the bills, have a right to direct involvement in all talks on how LA gets through this crisis.

The Mayor and the Council have forfeited their right to assert they represent the people by their irresponsibility. If the residents of this city met with the unions and with business to try to figure out what we can do to save LA from the downward spiral it's on., we would find better solutions to the problems than we will from the charade being put on by the politicians.

This is our LA and if we don't fight about this and protect our interests, we are as much to blame as anyone.

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can vote on whether to cut our city elected officials' salaries should be cut in half at OurLA.org -- the community-based online non-profit newspaper for all of LA which is now in beta test.

They are the nation's highest paid municipal officials - the Mayor, City Attorney, Controller and 15 Council members.

But they don't earn their pay, their squadrons of staff members, free cars, slush funds or long list of perks.

They are guilty of turning politics into a pay-to-play scam, selling out the public to unions, developers, contractors, lobbyists and anyone else buy them expensive meals with costly wines, stuff bundles of $1,000 checks into their campaign war chests or otherwise keep them in office.

They have squandered billions of dollars and run up massive budget deficits that mean basic services to the public are being slashed and make the prospect of bankruptcy the most likely way out of LA's financial troubles.

They tripled the trash fee with the promise of hiring more cops but put the money into the pockets of all city workers, used the DWP cash cow and its soaring power and water rates to fund useless poverty programs, allowed over-development to ruin the quality of life, bungled everything from billboards to pot shops, killed hopes for a new Children's Museum and revived Southwest Museum while putting hundreds of millions of dollars into hands of billionaire Phil
Anschutz and his LA Live and Staples Center projects.

Their crimes against the people would fill an indictment dozens of pages long if each of the city's nearly four million citizens were given the opportunity to list their grievances.

Now, the time has come  for them to pay the bill for their failure. Their are many changes that need to be made to right the ship of the city but let's start with making is simple and personal.

Let's cut their salaries in half.

That means the Council members' $180,000 salaries would drop to $90,000, which is more or less when other big cities pay their legislators. Cut in half, the Controller would get roughly $100,000, the City Attorney $110,000 and Mayor $120,000.

On Saturday, participants in the Saving LA Project's Town Hall voted 23-1 to take the lead in organizing the campaign for a half-off sale at City Hall -- something that might send our public servants the message that they have lost the confidence of the people..

To cut our elected officials' salaries in half will only take a slight change in the City Charter's Article II, Section 218 (a) (1):

"Members of the City Council shall be paid a salary equal to that prescribed by law for judges ...The Controller shall be paid a salary that is 10% more than that of a Council member...The City Attorney shall be paid a salary that is 20% more than that of a Council member.  The Mayor shall be paid a salary that is 30% more than that of a Council member."

All that we have to do is insert the word "half" after equal and princes and princesses will be brought to the economic earth where the rest of us are trying to make ends meet.

Doug Epperhart of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council proposed the Charter Amendment and will head the organizing committee to mount what will require a massive public campaign to get the salary reduction measure on the ballot.

Some 240,000 valid signatures on petitions will be needed and we'll have six months to gather them once the Charter Amendment is certified.

There's a lot of things of greater importance in the grand scheme of things that need to be fixed but let's start somewhere that everyone can understand.

The coalition that fought Measure B to a stalemate -- residents, business and labor -- is the coalition that can change LA.

I know it's an alien concept, this old-fashioned idea of democracy, and has never taken hold in the entire history of LA.

But it's an idea whose time has come. There is no other way. Runaway spending that created a billion dollar budget deficit, billboard blight, a real solar energy plan instead of Measure B and all the B.S at City Hall are just a few of the issues that must be faced immediately.

The quality of life in our city has declined and our problems have only gotten worse during a generation that began with hope with the election of Tom Bradley as mayor and the collapse of the right-wing oligarchy known as the Committee of 25.

Almost overnight, LA went from a conservative, anti-union town to a liberal, union-dominated town. Subway and rail lines got built and downtown got rebuilt but something went wrong along the way as the cost of city government soared out of control and the quality of services declined.

What we got is what I've ironically called a failed experiment in municipal socialism. Development without planning led to worse traffic congestion, poverty soared, neighborhoods deteriorated, gangs took control of vast sections of the city, the school system failed.

Richard Riordan rode a groundswell of discontent into the mayor's office and brought together a new elite, a new establishment that promised to "turn LA around" by hiring more police, fixing the schools, creating good jobs.

But the civic culture that coalesced around Riordan was no match for the political forces that had gained so much power, for the demographic changes that were taking place. He turned LA around but could not really get it moving forward and so the discontent of the people once again surfaced.

Efforts at reforming the City Charter were largely taken over by public employee unions, resulting in a mashup of powerless Neighborhood Councils and blurred lines of authority between the mayor and City Council.

That's when the San Fernando Valley rebelled and sought to secede and form its own city -- the nation's sixth largest, safest, richest and most integrated. It never stood a chance.

A new power structure had evolved, the Committee of 225, as I've sarcastically called it. The elite civic culture was weak, communities divided by race and class, Fortune 500 companies and major banks were gone. Power came to be held by lobbyists, consultants and influence peddlers who fed the political system with campaign cash and fed off it with contracts and  sweetheart deals.

"Pay-to-play" flourished under the lackluster leadership of Mayor James Hahn and has become rationalized into a political machine under the leadership of the politically-ambitious Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

And so we are now at the turning point in the history of LA. We have become an old city with an aging infrastructure. We lack the political will to make the hard decisions needed to revive our economy, fix our schools, solve our problems.

That's why what happened in the campaign against Measure B is so important. It was a symbol of everything wrong with our city government: Back room deals, lack of honesty and transparency, profiteering by narrow special interests without regard to the public interest.

Everyone wants clean energy in a city with the nation's dirtiest air and dirtiest power plants but residents, business and labor came together and stood up to the machine and stopped what was nothing more than a blank check for graft and corruption.

We must build on that foundation. We must rebuild our civic culture. There can be no excuses for sitting on the sidelines any longer.

There's a lot of work to be done. At the grassroots level, Neighborhood Councils need to talk less and act more to bring together residents and business, service clubs and churches and then join nearby NCs to form coalitions that can put real pressure on Council members.

Civic, business and labor leaders need to stop accepting crumbs from the table of power and stand up for what's right for the city.

And Council members need to stop going along to get along and find the courage to speak the truth and refuse to approve anything they doesn't serve the people's interest.

Nothing but the greed of petty little people holds this machine together. It will crumble in the face of a broad-based and inclusive movement that gave everyone a seat at the table of power.

Only then will we able to find the common ground and begin to solve our problems and make LA the great city it could become.  
 

CORRECTION: I originally wrote Jan. 17. The meeting is on Jan. 24 right after the Alliance of Neighborhood Council event.

You're all encouraged to come to the DWP Committee meeting at noon Saturday Jan. 24 at the Faculty Lounge at L..A Community College on Vermont Avenue, parking at the Faculty Structure off Heliotrope.

This is an event of great importance for the Saving L.A. Project and activists from all across the city who want to make a difference in the March 3 election.

The DWP Committee led by Soledad Garcia has taken the lead in working defeat Measure B, the phony solar energy proposition that is nothing but a payoff to the DWP/IBEW which have resisted clean energy efforts for the last decade and now are demanding a monopoly that will send rates soaring send billions of dollars in the public's money to China where the solar panels are made. This measure creates at most 400 IBEW jobs in L.A. and thousands overseas.

Even worse, the City Council and mayor approved this measure, written by the IBEW, without having done any study on feasibility, engineering or costs. In fact, the only analysis was kept secret from the council and the public until seven weeks after Measure B was approved.

And if that isn't bad enough, the solar energy component is a smokescreen to cover up that what Measure B is really about is a radical change in the City Charter. For the first time in L.A. history, the charter reform would allow the council by a simple majority vote to overturn the will of the people and change this plan at any time, in any way, without another ballot measure.

That makes Measure B a blank check and a license to steal.

Working together, SLAP, the DWP Committee and many community activists have mounted a campaign that can and will defeat Measure B despite the millions of dollars in special interest money being poured into the "Yes" campaign.

We have the truth on our side and they, along with DWP officials, are telling nothing but lies. We even have a court ruling by Judge David Yaffe who, in rejecting the "Yes" campaign's lawsuit against our "No on B" ballot pamphlet argument, found that this measure is so vague as to be meaningless.

The board of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, the Valley Industry & Commerce Association, Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils, Greater Wilshire NC, Sherman Oaks NC and other groups have come out in opposition to Measure B.

The momentum of our campaign is building but we need all hands aboard to win.

At Saturday's meeting will break into area groups to work out details of a ground, phone and email campaign.

We also are reaching out to various organizations for the money we will need. You can contribute to by sending checks to the DWP Committee c/o of Secretary/ Treasurer Heinrich Keifer, 5669 York Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90042  Every dollar helps.

We are also coordinating with City Attorney candidates to stop Jack Weiss who would be a disaster as the People's Lawyer.

And working to help Nick Patsaouras, who proposed creating the Ratepayer Advocate position when he was president of the DWP Commission, win the race to succeed Laura Chick as City Controller. We need a tough watchdog like Nick, not a lapdog, in the Controller's office -- a post that is even more important under Measure B since annual audits by the Controller are the only meaningful safeguard against massive corruption of the billions involved in this solar energy plan.

Many people believe this is the tipping point for Los Angeles. If they get away with this Measure B fraud and have the mayor, Jack Weiss and Wendy Greuel in the citywide offices, nothing will stop them.

We can change L.A. We can win this election. It's now or never.

This article was sent out as an email to hundreds of Saving L.A. Project members. Please copy and send it to everyone who might be interested.

What could be an easier sell to the people than something everybody wants?

That's what makes the growing opposition the City Hall's solar energy fraud, Proposition B, so interesting. Who could be against getting clean energy from L.A. abundant sunshine instead of from coal-burning power plants belching noxious smoke?

No one, of course. So why is it that three Department of Water and Power officials and Prop. B campaign manager Mike Trujillo dissembled, deflected and deceived so much when faced with a barrage of hard questions Saturday at a meeting of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition meeting?

Their problem -- the problem with Prop. B. -- is that it has got nothing to do with solar energy.

It's about the public writing a blank check for City Hall for billions of dollars. It's about paying off the DWP and its union, IBEW Local 18, for resisting the development of a solar energy industry and generation system in L.A. with all their political influence for the last quarter of a century.

They saw clean energy as a threat to their monopoly, their power, their jobs so all they allowed was one measly megawatt of solar energy in L.A. a year for the last 12 years. And now, with astonishing arrogance, they want to be bribed with what they claim is a $1.2 billion payoff -- but could turn out to be two, three or four times that amount -- to allow the city with the nation's most polluted air to finally embrace solar energy.

Prop. B promises 400 megawatts of solar energy within five years or 80 times as much annually as we've been getting and the mayor claims he can even triple that with a still unspecified plan that goes beyond Prop. B.

None of this has been studied, planned, engineered, examined, scrutinized, debated or analyzed. Yet, the City Council agreed unanimously to this measure without even understanding it, without even having access to a highly critical consultant's study that Council President Eric Garcetti kept secret until seven weeks after the measure was put on the ballot.

The DWP team was led by Aram Benyamin, the $233,000 a year head of power operations, who admitted the utility has failed to deliver on the public demand for solar energy, and by campaign manager Trujillo, a long-time political operative for the mayor, who did his best to frame the question as simply a referendum on whether the public supports or opposes solar energy.

That's the Big Lie of this campaign.

At Saturday's town hall meeting of the Saving L.A. Project (SLAP), the overwhelming sentiment of participants was that the ill-conceived and hastily approved March 3 ballot measure Proposition B is a fraud and must be defeated.

A lot of discussion focused on the lack of strong candidates taking on the mayor or any of the six incumbents seeking a third term they are eligible for thanks to the ruse they used to undo term limits restrictions under the guise of meaningless ethics reform in Proposition R.

Mary Ann Hutchison of Pico-Union and Jim O'Sullivan of the Mid-City area provided a preliminary political strategy for the activist community that would focus on backing longtime spending watchdog and city commissioner Nick Patsaouras for City Controller and environmental lawyer Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich for City Attorney while sending City Hall a message by voting against the mayor and incumbent council members or not voting at all in those races.

"Nick, Nuch and No, No, No" was suggested as a campaign slogan. area suggested a popular slogan for the March.

Their ideas had broad support and a committee was set up to explore how to mount a grassroots movement that would bring together members of Neighborhood Councils, resident groups, service clubs, non-profits who have long worked hard to make L.A. a better city for all its people.

And knowing something about the middle class is something Knox takes pride in. He chaired the Assembly Select Committee on California's Middle Class and after leaving office, he got a Masters Degree in econometric sociology at UCLA studying the American middle class.

"Upon completion of his studies he founded the Institute for the Middle Class, the only national research institute entirely devoted to restoring the vitality of the American middle class," according to his bio on the DWP website.

So why would a man so "entirely devoted to restoring the vitality of the American middle class" embarrass himself so publicly by trying to undercut all the reasons why middle class people want to know what's going on in the city's largest agency and have a say in how it's run?

Is it his allegiance to the union that has so much clout many believe it runs the DWP? Is it his obedience to City Hall's political culture that tolerates no dissent? Does Wally Knox really think of his gratitude to DWP workers when he sits in air conditioning on a hot summer day?

As I listened to him Tuesday in a board room filled with activists from the Saving L.A. Project and other community groups, I realized why Patsaouras' call for a Ratepayer Advocate touched a nerve with so many.

We don't have advocates for the public in our elected offices or on the commissions that oversee the agencies of government. When people like Knox won't stand up for us, it will take a lot more than a Ratepayer Advocate to restore public trust and end years of mismanagement of the city and its assets.