Results tagged “la news” from Ron Kaye L.A.

I don't know if Antonio Villaraigosa is a liar, or even a crook -- though I've got my suspicions about some of his cronies.

But I do know he has a hard time taking responsibility for his actions, living up to his promises and facing the truth head-on.

That's why I put up his 2009 State of the City speech and highlighted the phrases that leap off the page to me, phrases that show he deflected all responsibility for the city's financial condition, pandered politically to segments of the population and quoted a Japanese proverb (Adversity is the foundation of virtue) as if to give moral weight to his commitment to fix what he had broken.

He might better have had his speechwriter dig out the Zen koan: If you do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason, what if you die?

The right reason that the mayor outlined was his committment to take the drastic steps needed skillfully scale the city work force and spending down to a level in line with falling revenue.

The heart of his plan to deal with the fiscal crisis was that he was not going to "take a meat cleaver to essential services -- threatening meals for the poor, housing for the homeless, libraries for our students, job assistance for the unemployed and police patrols in our neighborhoods."

Instead, he was going to surgically remove the "deadwood" as he told Times editors days later.

Of course, that isn't what he -- or the City Council -- did.

He took a shotgun to the city work force and blew it to pieces with a sweetened retirement package that is getting rid of the talented and invaluable senior staff along with whatever "deadwood" has volunteered for it.

Huge gaps in managerial skill and experience are left in every department. There was nothing targeted about the ERIP, nothing strategic. It was open to just about anyone who wanted so a lot of the people who grabbed it could afford to retire with five extra years of service credit and $15,000 in cash to buy more.

Why would any capable person stay aboard a sinking ship if they didn't have to?

And now he's taking the mess he made of city government and grinding it into mush with 1,000 layoffs that will only buy a few months before the city can no longer pay its bills, time enough to sell off airports, golf courses, parking structures and meters, the zoo and Convention Center and buy a little more before the city has to file for bankruptcy.

By then there will be nothing much of value left to sell, except maybe the DWP, LAX, the parks and vast open spaces like Chatsworth Reservoir.

Nine months after his State of the City speech, what he has done to make matters so much worse, turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

He didn't do what he said he was going to do. He hasn't even had the courage to speak to the public about the budget catastrophe in all that time, preferring to flit from photo op to photo op boosting achievements in small things while the city falls apart and dreams of a better tomorrow turn into a nightmarish vision of a city without hope.

There was nothing mysterious about the city's worsening financial condition. Year after year, city bureaucrats warned of the deepening deficit.

As Walter Moore noted during his campaign for mayor, the City Administrative warned at least five times from 2005 to 2007 that the city was running more than $200 million in the red and needed to act prudently.

Instead of dealing with the problem, the mayor kept on hiring and hiring thousands of more city workers, kept on raisiing fees, taxes and rates and then spending more, most of it on poverty programs instead of basic services and infrastructure, kept on cutting sweetheart deals with unions, developers and contractors.

And now he wants to gut the Parks, Library, Planning, Neighborhood Empowerment, Building and Safety and other departments that do provide services citywide.

Even worse, he and the Council want to slam these cuts through without allowing any time for analysis or public debate.

They are seven months into this fiscal year and still have a $200 million deficit. They borrowed more than $1 billion to be able to pay their bills and don't have enough cash to pay the bills, in no small part because only a few hundred of the ERIP volunteers have actually left their jobs and will still be in them for many months more.

Today, they are raiding dozens of special funds of millions of dollars because they are out of cash. Next week, they will start ordering layoffs without regard to the functioning of departments, layoffs of the youngest workers, just like the ERIP got rid of the oldest.

Nothing they have done or are doing has anything to do with running the city for the benefit of the public. They are chasing the numbers of falling revenue downhill without a plan.

City unions are in an uproar after having been dragged to the bargaining table with a gun at their heads three times in less than a year. Their own positive ideas for reducing spending have been largely ignored, their members are as furious at their leadership as they are at city officials.

The activist community has awakened and begun to mobilize into a force to be reckoned with.

Council members, few with any experience beyond serving in government staff jobs before being elected to positions as the nation's highest paid city elected officials, see the danger to themselves and are looking for whatever deceit and subterfuge will protect them from the wrath of the people.

They will do anything except face the truth and find the courage to lead the city out of the darkness.

There is no light at the end of this tunnel.

The only hope is that a new civic culture will arise out of the ashes of City Hall's failure.

Somehow the unions must come to realize the commitments from city officials are worthless. Business leaders must see the city can't deliver on promises to create thousands of jobs and revive the economy. And ordinary citizens must look beyond their grievances and their anger and seize the moment to find common ground with each other and with these other interests that are more powerful and better organized.

We cry out for a leader who can bring us together and save us from disaster. We thought Antonio Villaraigosa might that leader five years ago. We were wrong. He has betrayed our hopes and dreams.

Worst of all, he has betrayed himself -- and for that there is no redemption.   

In his desperation to save himself politically, the mayor has reluctantly reached out to the civic elite -- people like former Mayor Richard Riordan, billionaire Eli Broad, LAEDC head Bill Allen -- to create jobs, hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs.

The mayor's own efforts have been a dismal failure with the official unemployment rate among the highest in the nation at 14 percent and another 14 percent so devoid of hope they have given up the search for work.

He loves to talk about creating a "green corridor" but couldn't bring home the cornerstone of his promise, an Italian rail car assembly (not manufacturing) plant, despite promises of subsidies and didn't lift a finger to capture even a fraction of the billions in state funding for stem cell research.

He throws his muscle behind huge subsidies for luxury hotels and expensive entertainment venues with obnoxious digital billboards and gets nothing in return except guarantees of living wage jobs while corporations reap huge profits that end up in bank accounts far away.

He talks endlessly about streamlining the wearyingly complex permit processes for major developments but fails to follow through even as he arranges for massive public subsidies and does his best to exclude the public from any influence.

He gives tax breaks and other advantages to the entertainment industry but runaway production continues unabated.

He touts a $5 billion program to build affordable housing that hardly gets off the ground and never spells out just what affordable means. Affordable for who?

Huge increases in taxes, fees and rates are imposed for public works projects that keep the local economy from collapsing entirely but make no dent in the long-term problems of soaring poverty and the flight of the middle class.

And now he turns to the civic elite he shunned for four years to bail him out of the catastrophe his policies have created.

The business community assuredly will line up behind them as they use the tools at hand: More public works spending, hasty approval of development projects that will give us bigger malls and more high-rises along with more traffic congestion and greater demand for water and power that will require huge rate hikes.

The plain truth is these efforts haven't worked for 30 years and they won't work now.

Large corporations and high-tech industries don't set up shop in cities with vast numbers of people who lack the disposable incomes to consume their goods and services and lack the skills to do their jobs.

If they want to do business in the region, they go to Santa Monica and Glendale and Pasadena and Thousand Oaks and most of the other cities that encircle LA, or the areas of LA like the Westside and the 101 corridor in the Valley where there is still affluence.

We have talked for three decades now about the failure of our schools, our gang-infested neighborhoods and the vanishing middle class and keep on using the same tools to reverse the trends.

It's time we faced the truth head-on.You aren't going to create sustainable jobs in a jobless recovery from the worst recession in a generation. 

Hard as it is to believe, LA is a city following the path of dying old industrial towns like Detroit and Cleveland -- not the path of vibrant cities that endlessly regenerate like Chicago and New York.

Our governance system is hopelessly broken. City Hall for too long has been a jobs program, not a service provider. City government simply costs too much and does too little. The bills for that have now come due and we are slashing even those services in an effort to reduce massive deficits and avoid bankruptcy.

The real problem isn't structural -- it is leadership.

The civic, political and business leaders keep on supporting band-aid approaches to what is wrong and settling for crumbs that mask the severity of the problem for a little while.

Great cities require the belief of the people who feel their interests are being served today and will be in the future. That's why they stay and invest in them.

If anything should be obvious it's that LA long ago became a city of limits where "thinking big" no longer works. There isn't enough land or other resources to support more and more development and more people.

We need to think small, to put the quality of our lives at the top of the agenda, to devolve power from City Hall to the neighborhoods, to empower our residents to bring to life a new city out of our extraordinary diversity and the shared belief in personal freedom that is the essence of what LA is all about.

Antonio Villaraigosa once held the promise of being the leader who could bring us to this promised land.

Maybe he still can but not as long as keeps on looking to enrich his friends and allies at the expense of others, not as long as keeps looking for his next job, not as long as travels the world rather than attending to his duties, not as long as he keeps thinking the people are fools who will fall for hollow promises.

I dream of a city where every individual feels empowered to affect the course of public events, where people feel an ownership stake in their city's public life, not categorized as stakeholders to be manipulated.

I believe LA can reinvent itself as a free city where people come first and freedom and mutual respect flourish in place of greed and selfishness. It seems to me that is the destiny of LA, the logical outcome of all that has come before. The alternative of a city separated by grotesque differences or wealth and poverty is unthinkable.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's another way but I haven't heard anyone propose anything that isn't already a tried and proven failure.
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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

The day after Brian D'Arcy squandered another fortune of his members' money in another losing effort to undermine even the pretense of democracy in Los Angeles, the lackeys who pass for a City Council blinked -- temporarily -- at approving a sweetheart deal with DWP union that will pay him back 50-fold in 30 days and much more in the years ahead.

D'Arcy has blown more than $1.5 million this year in losing causes -- Measure B, Jack Weiss, Chris Essel -- but DWP workers aren't complaining, and not just because they're afraid of retaliation.

The contract with IBEW Local !8 that is awaiting final approval gives DWP workers a $28 million gift in one lump sum, 3.25 percent of their pay even if they're on leave for any reason  including disciplinary action or jail as long as they come back to work for a single pay period between now and 2014.

While cops and other city workers are getting furloughs, no overtime pay, no salary increases, DWP workers are guaranteed raises of 2 to 4 percent for the next four years.

The only qualifier is the lump sum payment won't raise their base pay so it won't raise how much the DWP has to pay into their pension fund that is so grossly underfunded it will soon be costing ratepayers 70 cents for every dollar of payroll to keep it solvent.

DWP officials audaciously call that "saving" money. The mayor outrageously calls it "the gift that keeps on giving."

You can't get any lower than that unless you lick union bully boy D"Arcy's boots at high noon on the steps of City Hall, something which figuratively has been going of for years.

D'Arcy, like the mayor, seems to have lost his touch at the ballot box no matter how much he spends -- and that represents the most significant shift in the city's political culture in decades.

When only 15 percent of the people vote, grassroots campaigns can -- and are -- determining the outcome by organizing and raising the consciousness of voters in their communities.

Community activist David Vahedi almost beat the machine in CD5 last spring and spared us the bizarre and bumbling politics of Paul Koretz and Paul Krekorian did beat the lavish spending CD2 with activist support.

The Council has taken note, which is why they are spending endless hours trying to figure out how to keep the fiascoes they have created with billboards and pot shops and other issues from having political repercussions that could cost them their $180,00 jobs and lavish perks. Note the seven even-numbered districts are on the ballot in little more than a year.

Time is short but it's not too late to put the Council under pressure over the DWP contract.

The DWP is out of control, planning on doubling and tripling rates as fast as possible with nearly all the money going into the pockets of workers and to pay a premium to buy green energy no matter what it costs.

Take a minute and call, email or fax Council members if you believe that huge cash payouts and big raises are unjustified at a time of 2 percent deflation and economic crisis when so many are losing income or their jobs.

Here's the contact information (Councilcontact.rtf):

Councilman-elect Paul Krekorian: "The voters of CD2 demanded profound change and soundly rejected the domination of this city by Downtown insiders. This victory is the  beginning of a fundamental transformation of the government of Los Angeles, and it sends a strong signal that the people of the San Fernando Valley are not satisifed with business as usual.  The task now ahead of us is to build a city government that will work for the people and that is marked by integrity, honesty and accountability. To succeed, we need to start healing the divisions that have resulted from this campaign and begin bringing our community together."


It's not been a good year for Antonio Villaraigosa.

His scheme to rip off the public with a phony solar energy plan called Measure B was snuffed by voters. His stooge candidate for City Attorney was beaten by outsider Carmen Trutanich. And now the compliant Chris Essel got trounced by Paul Krekorian in the CD2 Council race in the East San Fernando Valley.

It's a new day in LA.

Community activists played the key role in all three humiliating defeats for the mayor and the creaky political machine he heads. There ought to be a law that bans three-time losers from serving in political office for the rest of their lives.

Antonio had the chance to be somebody, to bring LA together and achieve great things. But he's become a cartoon figure, a  lame duck out of touch with the people who quacks irrelevantly while the city sinks deeper into a financial crisis and the discontent of the people grows.

He knew what had to be done but lacked the courage to stand up to the entrenched interests. Instead, he chose to live like a king, drink $500 bottles of wines on other people's tabs, chase women like he's Tiger Woods and hide behind a brigade of gofers and bodyguards while flitting from one staged PR event to another and promising great schools, great public transit,  great jobs and a green city sometime way off in the future.

All the while billboards and pot shops blighted the city's neighborhoods, the infrastructure rotted from lack of investment and maintenance, poverty soared, corruption flourished and the city treasury was depleted to the point where services are being slashed and only bankruptcy or the sale of assets like parking structures, the airport or DWP can stop the flood of red ink.

Voters have finally rebelled.

When will the business, labor and civic leaders of the city wake up to what's going on and see the Antonio's promises are nothing but fool's gold?

The viciousness of the campaign Antonio's pals ran against Krekorian could turn out to be a turning point. They may have turned a knee-jerk liberal Democrat into a true democrat who has the passion to challenge the lemming-like unanimity of the City Council.

Surely, he owes his election to the grassroots activists from Sherman Oaks to Sunland-Tujunga who rallied behind him in the hope he would stand up for them and be the voice of the anger and frustration of people all over the city.

Krekorian has a mandate to lead. If he betrays that trust and becomes just another hollow man in the go-along world of City Hall, it will soon be clear enough and he will pay the price when he comes up for re-election in little more than a year.

He may turn out to be just another gear in the machine as he appeared to be at the outset of this election campaign or he can join with Trutanich and become the cornerstone of the movement to change the political and civic culture of LA.

I may see things darkly but I'm an eternal optimist and I believe Krekorian is made of the right stuff. Of course, I thought that about Antonio so I could be wrong as I so often am.

The sleazy campaign run against Krekorian with a record-shattering amount of dirty special interest money has freed him from control of the machine.

He needs to make community leaders like Mary Benson, Judy Price and Ellen Vuikovich an integral part of his team and build a grassroots organization that gives him the power to stand up to the special interests and serves a base for bringing activists all over the city together.

LA is at a turning point and the Measure B, Trutanich and Krekorian elections show there is a groundswell for reform that is growing.

There is an elegance to a completely corrupt political system that anyone with an artistic sensibility has to admire.

The case in point is disgraced LA venture capitalist Elliott Broidy and the nearly $1 million he used to buy influence and access so he could get his hands on hundreds of millions of dollars in public pension fund money.

That's quite a return on his investment, something made easier by Broidy's own role as an appointee of both Mayors Hahn and Villaraigosa to the Fire and Police Pension Fund board where he could influence decisions directly.

While Villaraigosa is busy in Copenhagen with his entourage of pals and bodyguards cleaning up the global environment, his staff back home was busy doing damage control by announcing he was giving the $2,000 Broidy gave him to an unspecified charity.

So are a lot of other politicians, none of whom, you can sure, had a clue about what Broidy or any of the others like him were up as they spread around political contributions and used the access they got in return to enrich themselves -- roughly a 1,000 % return, showing just how cheap a buy the pols are, the WalMart's of political corruption.

Not that any of them could possibly have known what was going on. That would make them criminals just like Broidy who is singing to prosecutors as loudly as he can to reduce or even avoid the four-year sentence he faces for outright bribery.

Like Villaraigosa, most of the others identified by the LA Times as recipients of Broidy money have found generosity in their hearts appropriate to this season of giving.

Here's the list: Insurance Commissioner and GOP gubernatorial hopeful Steve Poizner,  $22,000 to Toys for the Troops' Kids, $12,000 back to Broidy and his wife; Board of Equalization member Michelle Steel, $6,000 to charity; Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo, the former LA City Attorney, $3,000 to charity; Assemblyman Van Tran (R-Garden Grove) $1,800 to charity.

There was no comment from state Republican Party ($79,000), state Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks) and Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks) ($8,500 combined) and LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich ($2,000).

 "Because there is that level of impropriety with that donor, it's important we not spend that money on the campaign," said Steel spokesman Tim Clark.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ($86,000) and Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) ($3,200) were more sanguine, saying the money was already spent.

It's clear Broidy, a billionaire and finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2008, displayed no partisanship when it came to buying favors from politicians.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has spearheaded the pension fund scandal investigation, laid out in detail how Broidy bribed officials and manipulated the system to win $250 million in investments for his firm, Markstone Capital.

What isn't clear is how Broidy got investments from CalPERS or the Fire and Police fund or whether authorities in LA or California are actually doing much to find out. All the action so far has come from Cuomo and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Politicians in California have to be really stupid to actually violate the laws they have written on public corruption which require a confession or at least a recording that shows they were directly giving favors for cash.

Perhaps Broidy or the others who have pleaded guilty will shed some light on what went on.

But don't hold your breath. Attorney General Jerry Brown and District Attorney Steve Cooley have done nothing but acknowledge they are "reviewing" developments in the unfolding scandal.

That leaves it to the Feds. So the question is just how far will the Obama Administration go to find out the truth about what is largely a Democratic scandal in New York, New Mexico and California.

Don't hold your breath. What usually happens is they find some fall guys in the private sector and close the case against public officials because of insufficient evidence.

The evidence of mismanagement of public employee pension funds is quite sufficient.

As Jack Humphreville reports on City Watch LA, the Fire and Police Fund -- the one Broidy was part of -- has seen its unfunded liability triple to $5.9 billion.

That will require up to 80 cents in pension payments by taxpayers for every dollar of payroll. The same is true of the two other city pension funds and CalPERS as well.

The politicians have given sweetheart deals to public employees that are not affordable. They took campaign contributions from the investment industry in exchange for investments of huge sums of public pension fund money.

That's a crime that must be prosecuted if we are to restore public trust in our government.

"Citizen boards and commissions play a significant role in most city governments. These boards and commissions serve as voices of city residents in local government. Los Angeles goes further than most cities by granting extensive authority to selected commissions as well as defining their prominent role in the city charter." - Los Angeles: Structure of a City Government by Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Appointed City Charter Commission.

 

By any measure, the new City Charter approved by voters on June 8, 1999 in hopes of reforming City Hall and creating a more democratic government is a dismal failure.

 

Efforts to reform the city's constitution came in response to the grassroots secession movements that sprung up in the San Fernando Valley, San Pedro and Hollywood because of City Hall's failures to respond to the voices of the citizenry.

 

It was intended to empower neighborhoods and strengthen the authority of the mayor while stripping the City Council of its role as the governing body of the Los Angeles.

 

But the goal of then Mayor Richard Riordan and Valley civic leader David Fleming were derailed by the same interests - developers, contractors, unions and the political manipulators of city politics - who were responsible for policies that enriched them and driven away the middle class heart of the city.

 

The new charter, in theory, was a modest improvement over the old. In practice, it has made things worse.

 

Can anyone honestly say LA is better off today than it was 10 years ago?

 

There's still a 75-year backlog of broken sidewalks and potholed streets, poverty has soared, the middle class is still dwindling, Neighborhood Councils are powerless and largely ineffective talking societies, crime is down but gangs still control vast areas, services are being slashed even as taxes, rates and fees have soared - and Los Angeles is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as a city.

 

Today's exploration of what went wrong is focused on the system of boards and commissions - particularly the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Water and Power -- which is intended to be the public's eyes and ears in City Hall, its watchdog on the bureaucracy and a buffer between elected officials and the departments.

 

The reality is they are largely appointed by the mayor and serve at his pleasure - a mayor who is given to giving them marching orders, sending his staff to commission meetings to make sure they deliver and brow-beating them when they defy him.

 

It's noteworthy that only two commissioners out of the hundreds of them - Jane Usher as President of the Planning Commission and Nick Patsaouras as President of DWP Board - resigned in recent years in protest against what they were being ordered to do.

 

The DWP is critically important to all of us, the one agency that touches everyone in LA's life every day.

 

It is the nation's largest municipal utility, yet it operates as if it were a private corporation. But unlike private utilities it is not governed by the state Public Utilities Commission or most state laws so the DWP Commission plays - or is supposed to play -- a vital role in protecting the public interest and balancing the competing interests of business and residents, home owners and apartment dwellers.

 

That isn't how it works.

 

The DWP has become City Hall's cash cow, turning over 18.8 percent of all its electricity revenue to support the rest of city government.

 

It has allowed the infrastructure of the power and water system to rot and has the least amount of clean energy of any major electricity utility in the state even as rates have soared.

 

It is being used to redistribute the wealth of the city's residents by tripling the number of households on sharply reduced low-income rates to 250,000 even as its tiered and geographic rate structures favor one group and punish another.

 

It is virtually run by IBEW union boss Brian D'Arcy who has managed to get 5.9 percent raises in good times and raises of up to 4 percent in these bad times.

The Dec. 8 runoff in Council District 2 between Paul Krekorian and Chris Essel shaped up as a choice between the lesser of two evils, both beholden the same City Hall political machine that for so long has betrayed the public trust and jeopardized the city's future.

Krekorian: Liberal Democrat owned by Hollywood, the Democrats and the SEIU
vs.
Essel: Business advocate owned by Hollywood, downtown developers and DWP's union, the IBEW.

With nearly 90 percent of the money spent in the primary to succeed Wendy Greuel in the East San Fernando Valley, they easily knocked off eight other candidates -- who unlike them actually lived in the district prior to the seat opening up.

It was a tossup, as far as I was concerned, between two decent, intelligent people who would do nothing to change the political dynamic at City Hall.

Then, on Wednesday, the election calculus changed.

IBEW union boss Brian D'Arcy escalated what was already a vicious and expensive campaign against Krekorian by suing the people who, against their will, have made his union members the wealthiest utility workers in California, if not the nation and the world.

D'Arcy isn't just greedy and selfish like most of the special interests who feed at the trough of City Hall. He's the closest thing to a truly evil force in city politics. He's someone who has shown utter contempt for the public interest for years, someone who has sabotaged every effort to replace the DWP's coal-burning power plants with renewable resources, someone who has blackmailed city officials into putting ratepayers money into staggering increases in wages and benefits while the water and power systems rotted.

Using the IBEW front group Working Californians -- the one that spent $800,000 in a failed attempt to pass Measure B in March so the union get rip off the billions of dollars that was supposed to buy solar energy -- D'Arcy went to court Wednesday to challenge the city's campaign financing law.

Maeve Reston in the LA Times reported that the legal challenge is to the 1985 city law that "bars political committees from accepting contributions of more than $500 if the group plans to use that money to make an independent expenditure for a city candidate.
 
"In practice, the law prevents outside groups or individuals from contributing to each other to pay for independent expenditures that support city candidates. Contributions that are not earmarked for a specific city campaign are not subject to that $500 limit. (If violations are suspected, the City Ethics Commission's enforcement division determines whether a contribution was for an independent expenditure)."

In other words, D'Arcy who has already spent nearly $100,000 in the runoff to elect Essel wants to lift all limits on what he can spend to buy the election outright. It's an indication that he has polls showing the race is close and winnable, which ought to wake up voters if anything will.

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.

This may be the most desperate and despicable act yet by City Hall in its long war to eradicate the middle class from Los Angeles.

They call it a proposed Accessory Dwelling Unit ordinance. That's a phrase intended to obscure its intent which is to give every owner of a single-family home property the "right by law" to turn their house into apartments, to convert garages into living units and to even put second houses, granny flats, on their property the size of the average bungalow.

It ought to be called the Tenement Law.

Every property owner is an overstatement. It's every property owner except those on hillsides, horse-keeping areas, scenic highways or live on narrow lanes.

In other words, the rich are exempt from seeing the quality of life in their neighborhoods ruined by families living in a 1,200 square foot house in your neighbor's back yard, of having hordes of renters living next door, of cars parks all over the place -- exempt from the policies of densification that are turning LA into Manhattan, subway to come.

And if that weren't bad enough, no less than Council President Eric Garcetti with support from Bill Rosendahl, Paul Koretz, Tom LaBonge and Richard Alarcon introduced a motion Oct. 20  to take the Tenement Law a step further.

They want to legalize thousands of illegal "ADUs" showing as much contempt for the law and the public interest as the owners of those properties showed when they turned garages into death traps, houses into tenements and ignored every Building and Safety code in the books.

They want the Council to order the Planning Department. which is now "conducting a study which will lead to a recommendation for permanent Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) regulations," to "study and report back in regard to the legalization of previously unpermitted
converted units "

Their logic goes like this:

"The current housing crisis is exacerbated by the turmoil in the mortgage lending industry where foreclosures have increased and many other homeowners are on the brink. This situation impacts all segments of the housing market, but is particularly dire for those with low incomes, those with special needs and the homeless.

"The number of low income households and the pervasiveness of poverty in Los Angeles are markedly higher than in other urban areas. These factors further speak to the need for more affordable housing in Los Angeles, but creating this housing will require greater subsidies than in other areas as well."

Never have I seen the naked truth so clear in a city document.

We have more people than other cities because we have followed policies that encourage poverty by chasing away good-paying jobs, destroyed our schools, tolerated sweatshops, allowed slum conditions to flourish.

And now we have a moral and soon-to-be-legal obligation to provide every poor person a place to call home with subsidized rents, wages, utilities and other public services -- subsidies paid for by the shrinking numbers of middle class residents who still think there's a chance in hell of changing the direction of City Hall or are too set in their ways to admit the game is up.

Imagine what this city will be like when every inch of it is paved over and twice as many people are living on your street.

That's the vision and time is running short.

City Hall, exposed now for its failure in everything from financial management to the proliferations of digital billboards and marijuana dealing, will do anything to protects its perks, privileges and paychecks.

That's where the Planning Department they have totally politicized comes in.

The planners have been assigned the task of escalating the war against homeowners -- 2,000 percent increases in fees, failure to measure cumulative impacts of development, out-of-date or meaningless planning documents, approval of every project where the influence peddlers have spread around enough money.

And now granny flats and tenements -- a campaign they are running in hopes nobody would notice with a backup plane to lie, mislead and obfuscate whenever necessary.

Citizen journalist Karen Kanter reported at OurLA.org about Saturday's meeting the Neighborhood Council's Plan Check Group with City Attorney Carmen Trutanich on the ADU proposal.

Contrary the claims of city officials that this ordinance is "mandated" by a six-year-old state law, AB 1866, Trutanich said there is nothing that require the city "to adopt or amend an ordinance for the creation of these units. As for the criteria that was adopted by state law, there was no mention of minimum lot size or parking requirements or anything related to restrictions on residential density.

"In fact, room was left for cities to narrow the state requirements. Pasadena, for example, adopted an ordinance that required that these units could only appear on lots with a size of 15,000 square feet or more."

City planners in LA want have issued interim guidelines that would reduce the minimum lot size to half or a third of Pasadena's and to all but eliminate parking restrictions.

I just spent 18 months and wrote 16 articles tracking an illegal conversion of a house in my Valley floor tract into three apartments I saw the impact this one ADU had on my neighbors and neighbhorhood and can imagine if there were a lot more.

We would have no choice except to sell our house or cash in on two or three tenants each paying more in rent then our mortgage.

So maybe, if you all out there aren't going to get mad enough to stop this madness, I need to change my mind and consider this a city pension for an old newspaperman living on Social Security.

By God, I could live on a beach in Mexico like a king with the proceeds of my tenement in the Valley.