Results tagged “city council” from Ron Kaye L.A.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The City Council's first action Tuesday was to put off for at least a week the two items approving the CRA deal with Pacifica Ventures.

With the complicity of our elected, appointed and hired officials, the jackals are feasting on the carcass of Los Angeles as if there were no tomorrow.

At the rate they are going, there will be no tomorrow.

This is a city littered with foreclosed houses and empty storefronts that is slashing core services like libraries and parks and yet they are finding hundreds of million of dollars for pet projects and giveaways in a desperate effort to buy jobs.

Last week, they declared a "tax holiday" for new businesses and soon they will offer tax breaks to old business with DWP rate cuts thrown in for good measure even as they take every last dollar out of the pockets of residents struggling to make ends meet.

Why would any business locate here or expand if the customers don't have any money to spend?

They -- the DWP and Community Redevelopment Agency -- paid more than $11 million last month for five industrial properties near downtown for their fantasy of a "clean tech corridor." But there are no firms that have shown any interest in locating there so they are offering $11,000 in prize money for innovative ideas of what could be done with it..

Today, the Council will roll over for developer Hal Katersky's Pacifica Ventures and approve the CRA selling him a property at 1601 N. Vine St. in Hollywood for $825,000 -- the same property Katersky he flipped to the CRA in 2006 for $5.45 million a month after he bought it.

Don't expect your Council members to do the background research or ask the tough questions that community activists like Bob Blue are asking about this deal and making their research available to the Council before they vote on this sweetheart deal.

This is a deal that stinks like so many others that are going on now.

Katersky bought the Vine Street property from Ullman Investments for the same price the CRA paid him a month later, presumably because Ullman was the target of a 2000 audit by the City Controller for a highly questionable deal involving CRA acquisition of a parking lot in Hollywood for an inflated price.

As for Katersky, a subsidiary of Santa Monica-based Pacifica Ventures, Pacifica Mesa, filed documents in bankruptcy court in Albuquerque just two weeks ago showing it has $105 million in debt on a studio project that flopped in recent years, a filing that came just days before the property was to be sold at auction in a foreclosure sale.

The state-of-the-art studio was built with union pension fund money and strong backing from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson who offered huge tax breaks for any movies made there.

Bankruptcy notwithstanding, Katersky and partner Dana Arnold have found a friendly environment in LA for heavy subsidies to build a  $57-million, eight-story, glass office building on Vine between Hollywood and Sunset.

Under the CRA deal, the tenants for the building are supposed to be entertainment companies and is needed, the CRA says, because "we're trying to revitalize Hollywood."

Katersky's own view is more sanguine: "Every project we do has government involvement or it doesn't take place...We are opportunistic developers."

Think about this:

Every dollar the CRA gives away comes from property taxes that could be used to keep libraries open and provide other services, could even be used to revitalize the city's vast expanse of deteriorating neighborhoods, not just downtown and Hollywood.

Every dollar the DWP gives away could be used to replace rotting water mains or upgrading the aging power grid or even keep rates low so residents had money to spend in local stores.

It's no accident that LA is broke and broken. It's not an act of God or the fault of the recession.

The waste, the mismanagement has been going on a long time because of misguided policies that neglect the interests of the public. What's shocking is that even as the bills are coming due, the city's leadership is throwing away even more money, hastening the day of reckoning. 

Austin Beutner got a pound of the City Council's flesh Wednesday but it cost DWP ratepayers $600,000.

The bills were for consultants the Council used last spring to fight the mayor's effort to impose electricity rate hikes of up to 28 percent. but the spending was never authorized until long after the fact and tasks performed were at best "vague and generic," the First Deputy Mayor and interim DWP General Manager wrote his Board of Commissioners (ladwp--paconsult.pdf).

Beutner's six-page letter supported by 246 pages of documents amounts to a scathing indictment of how the Council operates from a political agenda without regard to the public's money, legal requirements and good business practices.

It is a window into how come City Hall with nearly $7 billion in revenue annually has dug itself into a financial hole so drastuc that only deep cuts in services and staffing -- or bankruptcy -- can ever save it.

Clearly, the buck-a-year de facto mayor has not been wasting his time. What's not clear is whether the Council has learned just how dangerous someone is who is smart, independent and an expert in financial matters. 

Back in January, the DWP agreed to pay PA Consulting $250,000 for past and current services in support of increasing the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor, the utility's back door way of raising power rates without seeking Council approval.

Within a month, the Council started assigning tasks to the consultants without authority or proper financial controls. When war broke out between the Council and DWP in March, the bills started soaring with individual consultants getting up to $535 an hour and teams of consultants billing up to $1,700 an hour.

But it wasn't until late May that the Council got around to passing a motion for PA Consulting to be paid $600,000 extra for its services with DWP paying the bills, an action that the Council has no authority to impost.

"The $600,000 was for services PA Consulting had already performed, before any contract amendment authorizing the services above the $250,000 cap was authorized by City Council...That amendment increased the amount allocated for the ECAF report from $86,500 to $493,000 and the amount allocated for the presentation and responses to government officials from $22,000 to $272,000 - a more than ten-fold increase," Beutner said in his letter.

Even after that, the Council spending spree continued.

""This additional work increases the total bills from PA Consulting to over $1 million -- a 400 percent increase above the amount authorized by the Board,"

BREAKING NEWS: Alarcon says grand jury indictment coming down today over his residence problem, LA Times reports.

Dr. Keith Richman, a man I admired who was elected mayor of the City of the San Fernando Valley in the secession election, died last week after spending the last years of his life crusading for reform of the public employee pension systems that threaten the future of our city and state.

Forthright, honest and sincere are words that come to mind in my long relationship with him. He was not a hypocrite.

After listening to the LA City Council spend hours getting what they called an education in pension reform -- Pensions 101-- and hours more debating whether to outsource collecting bills for ambulance services to raise millions of extra dollars, I fumble for a word that can quite describe what I heard.

What word can describe the hypocrisy of the nation's highest paid municipal officials who quote their past hypocrisies as proof of their current honesty,  who are such phony impostors that they pay lip service to truth why lying through their teeth about what they have done, are doing and intend to do?

There is no other word except hypocrite, spelled large HYPOCRITE.

There was Paul Koretz audaciously demanding to know why the city's financial, policy advisers and pension experts never said a word about pension costs will soon eat up 40 percent of the general fund.

His question should have filled the Council Chamber with such derisive laughter it would still be echoing through the hallowed halls of City Hall.

But he was told gently, as is the custom when dealing with fools in the City Hall family, that there have been repeated warnings for a decade, endless studies and reports and numeous lengthy Council debates on the astronomical increases in the cost of pensions and health care for city workers.

Nothing was ever done about any of this so the city faces pension bills for as much as $2 billion a year in coming years -- costs that will force the city to offer the public little more than basic police and fire services unless something is done about it.

If there was a point to Bill Rosendahl's setting up the Pension 101 educational event, it was to make sure the Council and the public understand that there is little or nothing that can be done about it.

City staff explained patiently for the umpteenth time that state law and contracts with city unions require that any changes to the pension system can only be implemented if the unions are given roughly equivalent value for any concessions they make.

It wasn't mentioned whether actually guaranteeing job security for city workers now facing layoffs and furloughs is equivalent value for agreeing to pay a greater share into the pension funds or moving the full retirement age from 55 to 60 or even 65.

There was no indication Council members were any more likely to take any action on what was discussed than they were during the last decade.

Then, the Council moved onto the no-brainer issue of approving contracts to outsource billing and collection for ambulance services.

The Fire Department currently operates like a mom-and-pop store in the Great Depression, leaving $100 million of $150 million in ambulance bills going uncollected.

It's tough to run a business when you don't collect two-thirds of the money customers owe you so city officials have goofed around for several years to get rid of the 52 people who have failed at their jobs so miserably -- failed because the mayor and council didn't give them the training and computer equipment needed to do a decent job.

The unions naturally are opposed to this since thousands of workers jobs would be at stake if cost and efficiency became priorities. Since they have such a significant ownership stake in the Council, they have prevailed in blocking contracting out this service which would reduce costs and add tens of millions of dollars in new revenue to the general fund.

Fire Chief Millage Peaks found a perfect solution: Despite a "no hiring" policy and being forced
to cut fire services to the public, he magically found jobs for everyone now involved in billing and collection.

It was an offer even the unions couldn't refuse, or at least resist with any great passion.

But the union lackeys on the Council stood tall, showing for all the world to see that they care more about serving the unions than the public, more about getting union campaign support than bringing a fortune to keep workers employed and preserve public services.

Koretz tried to renegotiate the contracts, displaying his ignorance and indifference to all business practices. Cardenas, Hahn, Huizar and Zine all lined up with the unions in opposing the deal. Alarcon took it a step further and showed his utter contempt for the deal, and his colleagues by not even bothering to vote..

HYPOCRITE Definition: Person who pretends, is deceitful
Synonyms: Pharisee, actor, attitudinizer, backslider, bigot, bluffer, casuist, charlatan, cheat, con artist, crook, deceiver, decoy, dissembler, dissimulator, fake, faker, four-flusher, fraud, hook*, humbug, impostor, informer, lip server, malingerer, masquerader, mountebank, phony, playactor, poser, pretender, quack, smoothie, sophist, swindler, trickster, two-face, two-timer, wolf in sheep's clothing.

The City Council, faced with stiff union opposition, reluctantly takes up the issue Tuesday of outsourcing bill collection for ambulance services -- contracts that could net the city tens of millions of dollars a year.

The unions oppose this although "no layoffs will result from this proposal as the Fire Department will absorb the remaining personnel by filling currently vacant positions in other divisions," according to top city financial advisers (EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES.pdf)..

This is the dream deal of all time even by the standards of City Hall where sweetheart deals have become an art form, a destructive art to be sure.

How LAFD and other city officials have been unable to find 52 jobs at a time of layoffs, furloughs and job freezes is utterly miraculous, if not fiscally sound.

Even the city's employee unions -- who have yet to make significant concessions at this time of crisis with the city's, and their own, futures at stake -- ought to have a hard time saying no to the deal to outsourcing ambulance services billing to bring money needed to avoid more layoffs, more service cuts, more chaos.

True, the unions have suffered betrayal, endlessly mixed signals and duplicitous pandering by the same elected officials who have turned tough economic times into a fiscal calamity by slashing core services at the same time they have increased fees, taxes and rates and done next nothing about the underlying cost of city government..

Thousands of workers got sweetened pensions to retire or reassignment to other jobs, often with pay raises up to 50 percent, but all the unions have had to do is defer pay raises or at worst pass on raises for a year or two and contribute a little more to their pensions.

They have valid reasons for refusing to make concessions because the mayor and City Council have deceived them about what has to be done for years and now can't even promise that the cycle of layoffs and furloughs now just beginning will ever end.

Now, the unions are fighting to preserve the wage and benefits deals they were handed at the bargaining table in exchange for electing city officials who do their bidding. Even in this crisis, they resist allowing citizen volunteers to fill gaps in services at the libraries and parks or the outsourcing of programs that have been beset by years of mismanagement by the grotesquely overpaid top officials, elected and appointed.

Among the vast array of managerial disasters that have come to light in the last year is the disastrous performance of LAFD's ambulance billing and collection union.

A recent audit by Controller Wendy Greuel, in line with previous audits and studies, found LAFD only collected $53 million of the $151 million for ambulance services.
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The city's Ad Hoc Committee on Revenue Efficiency headed by Ron Galperin has done its own research and weighed in heavily in support of outsourcing to two companies the billing and collection of bills for ambulances services.

The Council has been paralyzed by opposition from unions that want a net $16 million investment in giving workers the tools needed to do a better job.

Apart from widespread skepticism about the city's ability ever to collect any of the hundreds of millions of dollars owed it, there is the problem that the budget for this year -- hypothetical and unrealistic as it is -- counts on more revenue now from ambulance fees, not a risky investment.

As hard as it is to understand why the unions are fighting this, it is incomprehensible why the Council has stalled a decision this long and why there is so much doubt about how they will vote Tuesday.

It is a no-brainer that even the most brain dead Council member ought to be able to see.

For the last two years, all we've seen and heard from our City Council is tears and pleas to save the jobs of city workers or at the least to shelter them from losses caused by a government that costs too much and delivers too little.

EDITOR'S NOTE: At 9:30 a.m. today, fired library workers and their supporters among city employees and ordinary citizens will stage a rally at the Richard J. Riordan Central Library, 5th and Grand, in protest against the policies of the mayor and City Council that have closed libraries two days a week. At the same time as the protest, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will take his broken elbow to the South Los Angeles Animal Shelter for a fund-raising event for his girlfriend and her Lu Parker Project which plans to paint the shelter's lobby as its first effort on behalf of pets.

Don't bother going to your local library today to read a book, use a computer or just cool off from the summer heat.

For the first time ever, our beautiful new libraries that we built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars will be closed on a non-holiday Monday. Just like that, we have gone from a seven-day-a-week library system to a five-day-a-week system, from one of the best library systems in the world to a dysfunctional one.

It is a crime against the city and its people.

Years of throwing away the public's money have led the city's bankrupt leadership to lay off several hundred workers, starting with the libraries, then the parks, then building code enforcers and neighborhoods planners.

It's a downhill slide. City workers who provide direct services to the public in general are the first to go, while those that provide bureaucratic services to the failed system itself and those that generate revenue -- like services to help developers -- are protected.

The reason is simple: The cost of wages and benefits for the city's 50,000 workers are too high and can no longer be afforded.

They are too high because the mayor and Council gave city unions one sweetheart contract after another in exchange for the campaign cash and political support that put them into office and kept them there.

The unions are at fault for not looking beyond their immediate self-interest and seeing the impact that inadequate public services was having on the quality of life in our neighborhoods, for not seeing how high taxation and poor services was killing jobs and driving business away.

But they are not the criminals.

Our elected officials are the perpetrators of this crime against the city. They are the ones who cut the deals with unions, developers and contractors that have left the city broke, and broken. They did it knowingly and willfully for their own benefit without regard to the public interest, which makes it a felony in moral terms at least.

Everything they have done to deal with the fiscal crisis that was looming for years has only made things worse. It's just one small thing among the thousands of wasteful things the city does, but dozens of library workers are at their jobs today in closed libraries,running up bills for air conditioning and lights.

The incompetence of our city officials extends to selling off valuable assets like parking structures and land holdings at the bottom of the market just to get through this year and have no plan to deal with the $300 million deficit next year or the $1 billion deficit the year after, no plan except more layoffs and new ways of squeezing more money out of the public through higher rates, taxes, fees and penalties.

And yet they party on with their lavish perks and enormous staffs and huge salaries, the nation's highest.

Our freeloading ceremonial mayor sets the tone by acting like Nero fiddling while his city burns.

Two days after the librarians announced their protest for Monday morning, he puts out a press release for his girlfriend's fund-raiser as if she were the city's First Lady, not his second TV newswoman mistress.

He mocks us all with his behavior, even as his political lackeys insult our intelligence with their specious attempts to deflect the public conversation from how we fix what he has broken to a theater of irrelevant absurdities.

The Council is no better, spending endless hours on inane parliamentary maneuvers and distractions but fail to openly and honestly debate the real issues, refusing.to bring the civic, business, labor and community leadership to the table to find solutions and bring the city together to solve this crisis.

City Hall's attempt at a preemptive strike against LA Clean Sweep and the effort to build a broad-based grassroots movement to elect better people for a greater city only shows how scared they are of the people, how intent they are on squelching the public conversation and protecting their privileged positions.

But it will fail like everything they do.

The community in all its diversity, with all its competing interests, with all its conflicts in values, will inevitably come together because our elected officials have neglected their sworn duties and are turning a crisis into a calamity.

It doesn't have to happen. There is another way. It's only a question of time and how much more damage is done before we come together.
 

"It's our turn!" -- So the mayor tweeted enthusiastically Sunday after Spain won the World Cup. "Let's bring WC 2018 to LA! We've showed we're a great international city that will embrace the games. It's our turn!"

Nothing could better serve as the epitaph for Antonio Villaraigosa's reign of failure as the phrase "It's our turn!"

The "our" he refers to shifts with the moment but it never refers to "us," not all of us. In the case of the World Cup, "our" could mean his benefactors at AEG who would stand to profit handsomely from a World Cup by getting approval for a football stadium downtown and filling the house for weeks on end at LA Live.

In other cases, "our" can mean the unions or Latinos or his rich pals who buy him valuable gifts. Such are the shifting politics of the mayor who has overseen the greatest increases in fees, rates and taxes in the city's history even as he bankrupted the city treasury and slashed services to the public.

The mayor is not alone in using "our" and "we" and "us" the way royalty does, meaning "my" and "I" and "me."

The City Council does the same thing as does our state legislature. It's just part of the corruption of language that has become an ingrained part of our political culture.

Today, the Council is taking up consideration of a $39 a year parcel tax supposedly to support libraries which next week will close on Mondays for the first time in our city's history because hundreds of library workers have been fired, retired or transferred in the name of balancing the budget.

There is no more vicious form of taxation than parcel taxes, which is why the Democratic-controlled legislature is moving to reduce the threshold for passage of such taxes for education from two-thirds to 55 percent.

If you own a 50-story office tower downtown or a $20 million Bel Air mansion, you pay the same $39 tax as the struggling owner of a cottage in Boyle Heights or Watts.

Personally, I don't think the Council, even the Council, is dumb enough to put this on the November ballot despite their poll showing it could narrowly pass.

The tax would become a battleground for debating all that's wrong with our city government, how it has given away our wealth to special interests and special classes, how it mismanaged almost every program, how it pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

This particular proposal has gone from having a five-year sunset clause to being endless, from being a flat $39 to escalating with inflation every year. It has the usual phony safeguards like a citizen oversight committee and annual audits that have proved ineffective in the past and somewhere between a third to two-thirds of the money could go to overhead -- not books and library materials and services to the public.

But the ultimate reason this is ridiculous is stated clearly in the proposed resolution:

"WHEREAS, the City's General Fund has had to provide the tens of millions of
dollars necessary to adequately fund Library operations, but can no longer provide such
funds due to the unprecedented decline in revenues; and

"WHEREAS, for the Fiscal Year 2011-12 Budget, the City Administrative Officer
has estimated that the City's General Fund deficit will be $318.5 million and is projected
to escalate to $1 billion in subsequent years; and

"WHEREAS, cuts to the Library's budget include the elimination of 328 positions
or 28% of the workforce resulting in a reduction from 7-day-a-week service to 5-day-a-week
service and reductions to library services and programs; and..."

In other words the mayor and Council -- for "our" benefit -- have chosen to make the libraries the first department to be hit with massive staff and service reductions that will dismantle the quality system that former City Librarian Susan Kent built on time and under budget while setting up a cost-effective delivery system to borrowers at their neighborhood library.

In other words the $30 million to be raised with this regressive tax that hits lower income families -- the people who need the libraries most -- the hardest is just a drop in the bucket when the city is facing a deficit of  $318.5 million next year and up to $1 billion in subsequent years.

That is the heart of the problem, the reason the city's leadership must be held accountable.

This crisis has been building for several years and was forcefully brought to public attention nearly two years ago.

Yet, all they have done is to cut our services and take more money out of our pockets as they will today when they approve increases of up to 40 percent in ambulance fees, fees that they don't bother to collect a third of the time because of their poor management. 

They are cooking the books, borrowing heavily, deferring costs and mortgaging our futures by their cowardly inability to confront the problem that simply is city government costs too much -- 80 percent of it for salaries, pensions and benefits -- and delivers too little.

There is only one way out of this crisis and it starts with seeing that this is truly "our" city and "our" fates are tied together so "we" need to come to terms with "our" shared reality, balance "our" interests and move forward together.

To me, that means replacing those who have failed with people who can restore credibility to City Hall, bring us all to the table of power and work out a deal that reduces the cost of city government while protecting jobs and services.

That means labor has to take a step back financially and the public a step forward through a fair and transparent short-term tax that fixes the city's finances once and for all.

This isn't about the absurdity of a bankrupt city staging the World Cup. But the mayor is right about one thing: It is our turn, the people's turn to take charge of the city and fix what they have broken.

If you want to know why the city teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, why city services are being slashed and employees losing their jobs, why business, labor and the community as whole have lost confidence in theCity, tune into the joint Personnel/Public Safety Committee meeting at 9:45 a.m. today and the joint Budget/Audits Committee meeting at 1 p.m. today.

You can get there online or by telephone ((213) 621-2489) but first you need to take a look at the documents linked from the agenda, documents that prove beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond a shadow of doubt that the nation's highest paid city officials weren't worth the minimum wage at any time during the last 20 years.

If you knew, and were repeatedly reminded, that half the money you were owed every year wasn't being collected because you had dozens of billing systems and bank accounts, each managed by different people who never communicated with each other, used entirely different accounting systems and rarely followed up on anything, wouldn't you do something about it before it was too late to save your enterprise?

You would, of course, have taken steps long ago but then you aren't one of the preening and posturing elected officials of the City of Los Angeles.

"Independent studies performed over the last 20 years regarding City receivables all suggest that centralization of collections in some form will create efficiencies by standardizing process and procedures; standardizing billing formats; and establishing a single point of accountability, yet to date, no action has been taken to implement any such proposal," says one of the Council motions on today's agenda.

The sudden concern of Council members was triggered by Controller Wendy Greuel's recent audit that found the city collect only $293 millionshows of the $553.4 million billed by city departments, most of it involving parking tickets and ambulance services.

That's a 53 percent collection rate -- an increase from the 52 percent rate revealed three years ago by then Controller Laura Chick whose long list of recommendations was haphazardly followed at best, ignored at worst.

"How can the City of Los Angeles, that has so many unmet needs and demands for services, not care about collecting ALL the money legitimately owed it? Chick asked in 2007. "How can we ask taxpayers for more money or continue to complain about inadequate funds, when untold millions of dollars remain uncollected?"

Chick traced the Council's failure back two decades, ignoring its own motions to replace outmoded financial practices like firefighters using paper forms to report ambulance services and the department often not getting around to billing people for months, if ever.

The loss alone from uncollected ambulance services runs around $1 million a week, month after month, year after year.

Long-term contracts for computerized services with Scan Health and ADP to fix this particular problem come before the Personnel/Public Safety Committee meeting today eight years after then Mayor James Hahn ordered a study that led to a report that led to hiring a consultant and more studies and more reports.

But no action.

Last November, in the midst of fiscal calamty fand with Ron Galperin's ad hoc Committee on Revenue Enhancement digging into the details and driving reform, the Fire Commission approved the contracts to outsource the ambulance services collections but it's taken until now for the Council to even consider them.

As concerned citizens of LA, you have to ask yourself why nothing was done for so long?

It's a softball question. Outsourcing means creating jobs in the private sector when the goal of a mayor and Council elected with lavish amounts of union money is to create city jobs no matter what the cost, no matter how inefficient.

It's why Greuel, who was part of the problem during her eight years on the Council, concluded in her follow-up audit: "The City remains stuck in the mud." 

"Collecting more money wouldn't close the entire budget deficit, but it would help save the City money and protect critical services for Angelenos," Greuel said.

"I don't know of any business that would stand for such a low collection rate, particularly
a business the size of the City of Los Angeles. It's simply not sustainable, and the City
cannot and should not allow this to continue. The Mayor and the City Council now have two audits and a consultant's report to guide them to centralizing the billing process, which will save the City millions of dollars each year."

Just how serious the city's financial situation is comes clear in a report being considered today at the Audits/Budget Committee meeting.

Grass-root democratic institutions in LA have always been weak and only began to grow in recent decades as unions, developers, contractors and other special interests came together to usurp power by building  a political machine that controlled the elections and owned the politicians.

Now, even the thin pretense of democracy has been destroyed.

We no longer have a mayor, not even a weak mayor, since Antonio Villaraigosa has chosen to surrender his authority and accept the role of ceremonial leader, ambassador and free-loader, attending concerts, sporting events and ribbon-cuttings as his only official duties.

He has ceded all authority to Generalissimo Beutner -- a financier anointed by the small cadre that passes as LA's civic elite -- and his team of venture capitalists and the bright young children of the well-connected.

They are operating as a law unto themselves, ignoring the ceremonial mayor's own army of supplicants and yes-men, brow-beating the professionals who run city departments into submission to their will or chasing them out entirely if they choose to flee to save their integrity.

The public's last defense, the self-styled lords and ladies who serve on the City Council, supposedly as the local communities' representatives, spend their days quibbling about obscure parliamentary procedures and the right number of days for the peasants to sprinkle their lawns -- two, four, six -- as if it really mattered when the pipes are so old and corroded, so neglected like everything else in the city, they are leaking whether the water pressure is high or low.

They didn't even challenge the glowing numbers the DWP presented for how water conservation restrictions and rate hikes are working, even though they are gross exaggerations of the actual numbers in the utility's own monthly reports.

Maybe they were saving what little courage they have for a joint audits/energy committee meeting later Tuesday when the generalissimo was supposed to face the music for his department lying about its finances and withholding $73 million from the general fund in a blatant attempt at extortion -- in the words of Controller Wendy Greuel.

Beutner stiffed them, a no-show. "It just hasn't happened," said Councilman Greig Smith, advocate of the six-day sprinkling schedule, in his 35 years of living off the pubic dole.

The easily flummoxed Paul Koretz blustered about issuing a subpoena to force Beutner to come before the Council. "I've been watching the city for over 40 years and I don't remember anything like this," said Koretz, a recent arrival in the city from West Hollywood. "We asked them to be here before and they refused. They have 10,000 employees. They could have someone here."

Others told Rick Orlov, in an exclusive report in the Daily News, DWP's blackmail attempt has damaged the city's reputation in the world of high finance where Beutner made his billion-dollar fortune.

The generalissimo and his 10,000 DWP staffers weren't talking, sending only a deputy City Attorney who told the Council members that Beutner is preparing a response to Greuel's audit.

He made his view clear enough last month when the audit was released.

"While we don't wish to engage in an extended debate over the auditor's findings, it appears there may be several errors of fact in the report," Beutner said in a statement."Since my appointment just weeks ago as General Manager of the Department of Water and Power, I have made it clear we are moving forward, not looking back."

For those who might dare to look back, despite Beutner's prohibition against learning from the past, the origins of how unelected and unaccountable people came to seize power in LA might be instructive.

It starts with the damage to his popularity that Antonio suffered when he found the pleasures of the flesh with young TV newswomen were more important than fidelity to his marriage..

Then, there were his public indictments in the media as an 11 percent mayor who preferred to party rather than work and as a FAILURE. Now, it's "Ticket-Gate" and all the luxury meals and fine wines he's taken as "gifts" from people seeking favors.

What's a poor boy to do except say, "To hell with it, I'm still the ceremonial mayor and living like a multimillionaire with servants and bodyguards and I have the time of my life."

So having lost interest in the job he was elected to do, having seen his ambitions to be governor and even president shattered, he jumped at the opportunity to surrender all authority and shirk his responsibilities..

Even if this scenario of a coup d'etat is only partially true, it ought to be a wake-up call to the citizenry.

Read the Declaration of Independence written by our nation's founding fathers 234 years ago about the abuses of power by royalty, onerous taxation and injustices that had become intolerable.

Let's see if the Council, rather than putting another tax on the November ballot, will put this simple question before voters: Do you have confidence in City Hall and your elected leaders?

A year ago today, at his inauguration to a second term, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised many things, from relieving traffic congestion to making the schools great and turning LA into the greenest city in America.

Most of all, he promised to create jobs and to be held accountable for delivering on his promises by meeting "deadlines," not making "headlines.

."You have this in writing: We're going to track every promise and put the results online for you to judge."