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

EDITOR'S NOTE: Once again, the City Council in a 41-minute meeting Tuesday put off without comment discussion of the CRA deal with Hal Katersky's Santa Monica-based Pacifica Ventures, raising questions about what's going on behind the scenes with the controversial subsidized project.

The City Council blinked last week on approving the Community Redevelopment Agency's proposal to sell a valuable Hollywood property at 1601 N. Vine St. to developer Hal Katersky for $4.5 million -- 85 percent less -- than they paid him for it four years ago.

But it's back on the calendar for action today and the CRA is pushing hard to reward Katersky's Pacifica Ventures with this lucrative gift although he is a profiteer in runaway film production that has savaged our local economy and has a history of bad deals and lawsuits.

Last week, before the Council delayed action, we reported on the deal under the headline "Sweetheart Deals and Opportunists: How to Destroy a City."

Today, Jack Humphreville at City Watch LA and Richard Verrier in the LA Times shed more light and raise more questions about Katersky.

In "The Unpleasant Aroma of a CRA Deal," Humphreville digs into the hidden details and questionable financing for this project with union money and shows that the subsidy "the equity returns for the investors are expected to exceed 20%!"

"Why is the CRA even considering subsidizing Katersky and his partner, Dana Arnold, since they are promoting and financing "runaway" production in Albuquerque, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut? ...  We need facts and answers, not the usual CRA / City Hall spin."

The Times story "Lawsuits, failed ventures mark developer's past" looks at Katersky's record and concludes: "Katersky's business career has been entangled in lawsuits over failed ventures and clashes with former partners."

Not to worry. Katersky declares that "I'm proud of my track record," and blames his troubles on  "events far outside their control."

We can at least share that feeling with Katersky when it comes to the CRA -- an agency that operates outside the control of the public which, unlike Pacific Ventures, doesn't have lobbyists from Armbruster Goldsmith & Delvac to look after their interests..

It takes tax dollars that could go to keeping libraries and parks open and gives it to people like Katersky and then takes the tax increments from its subsidized developments and gives it to other developers for projects like his that do nothing for the quality of our lives and don't need subsidies.

If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, United Teachers Los Angeles union head A.J. Duffy has clearly sided with the know-nothings -- something that goes a long way towards explaining the failure of LAUSD over the last three decades.

The LA Times has broken through LAUSD's own commitment to ignorance and provided parents, teachers, students and the general public into how how thousands of students perform on standardized tests over a seven-year period.

It was a long and complex undertaking -- one that has long been sought by many education reformers and could have been done by LAUSD a long time ago if anyone in the failed school system actually wanted to know which teachers improved student test scores and which made them worse.

With the data in hand, the highly paid administrators could have gone back and analyzed what is working and what isn't, why some teachers who are beloved by parents and students consistently have awful outcomes, whether high scores are achieved by teaching to test or by actually helping kids learn English and math.

It would have been revolutionary and still could be if parents use the Times information -- to be published online in a searchable database in the next two weeks -- to demand that the same analysis be conducted system-wide and followed up with in-depth research.

Of course, knowledge of which teachers are good and which are could lead to accountability. Intelligent programs could be designed to help low-performing teachers get better and could lead to their firing if they failed to improve.

Better skills teachers and improved outcomes for students is anathema to Duffy and other union leaders, always has been, always will.

It's why the union has fought all real reform and protected incompetence. It's why public support for public education has waned.

Teachers are trained professionals and need to act like they are and demand to be treated as such. They are like journalists and other white-collar professionals and not accept the one-size-fits-all leveling mentality that makes sense for assembly line workers.

Excellence should be rewarded with six-figure salaries and failure in the classroom should lead to retraining and other measures up to dismissal.

Quality education should be the goal, not mediocrity and failure.

Duffy's answer to the Times' revelations is to call on unionists everywhere to boycott the newspaper.

When Larry Mantle asked him on KPCC today over and over to say what was wrong with knowing how teachers' students performed on standardized tests, Duffy dissembled and evaded, unable to offer a straight answer.

He blamed everyone in the world, attacked the tests and, as usual, defended failure. It's time teachers -- the vast majority of whom are dedicated and capable -- to take control of their union and stand up for what's right for the kids and for themselves.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Newspaper coverage of the indictment of Councilman Richard Alarcon and his wife on voter fraud and perjury charges have generated a lot of criticism. Walter Moore today tore apart the Daily News story headlined "Support for Alarcon Remains Strong" while the LA Times editorial upset Bruno, LA's Watchdog.

Bruno's favorite political operative is Rahm Emanuel.

He is so Brunoesque.  The White House chief of staff is better looking but definitely part pitbull like me.  Maybe it's because he's from very un-laidback Chicago.  Who knows?

In the new Vanity Fair magazine, Rahm, who apparently works 24-7 and never sleeps, describes Washington as "Fucknutsville."

Can you imagine what he'd call Los Angeles if this was his home base?

Case in point, this morning I sniffed at the Dog Trainer and couldn't help but notice this morning's editorial on the indictment of City Councilman Richard Alarcon for perjury and voter fraud

Talk about mealy-mouthed! I couldn't help but leave my scent all over the newspaper.

The lede (that's how us news hounds spell the lead sentence of articles) goes like this:

"Maybe it's finally time for Richard Alarcon to go home, if only he could figure out where that is."

Go home?  Maybe it's time for Richard Alarcon to go to jail! The guy is accused of lying about living outside Council District 7 that is supposed to represent.

It gets worse - much worse.

"If the councilman is convicted he should, at least, be booted from office."

That's it! 

This guy has been leveraging the system and laughing at the voters for his entire political career. 

And what's worse is that The Dog Trainer knows it!

"It's worth noting that Alarcon easily trounced his opponents when he returned to the council in 2007, and it's just as noteworthy that he ran only weeks after he had taken office in the Assembly -- an office he won without opposition. Even if no criminal liability is found, Alarcon's rather loose attachment to any particular office, much like his unclear connection with any particular residence, is troubling."

Troubling? Troubling?  Calm down, guys. You're going to spill your green tea.

Then they conclude with the coup de grace intended to end my suffering and put me out of my misery.

"Like various recent political scandals such as the one unfolding in Bell -- in which elected officials drew obscene salaries without the knowledge of their constituents -- it makes it all too easy to wonder whether our system is slowly being transformed from one in which knowledgeable voters select their representatives to one in which politicians use voters as a means to some other end."

Makes you wonder?  Who's wondering?

If these geniuses can't figure out that Alarcon, not to mention the crooks in Bell,- used voters as a mean to an end - the end being cushy,  incredibly well-paid, very powerful job, or jobs, in Alarcon's case - then they all ought to have their laptops smashed.

And if anybody hasn't noticed, the voters in Bell and Alarcon's district are largely immigrants, many here illegally, and poor  They are easy targets for this kind of crap. 

They thought they were coming to LA.  Instead they ended up in Fucknutsville West. Change the address on your checks.

The Dog Trainer's editorial writers might live in safer and richer neighborhoods, but what's going on here affects their lives, too. And if they don't get mad pretty damn soon, it's going to get a lot worse.

Rahm will have to come up with a new word.  After all, his brother lives here.

Woof!

Sometimes the dots of the story just connect themselves and it all begins to make sense in a way that even the casual observer can see.

As Antonio Villaraigosa was falling off a bike because of the "careless" actions of a motorist, the Daily News was triggering a new round of mayoral bashing with a front page editorial taking him apart for a failure of leadership.

"It's time to quit monkeying around and get to work," shouted the headline above such phrases as "run out of steam...lame-duck official...the passion and energy (are) all but gone at a time when the city is in crisis and needs it most."

Tough talk that soon turned to biting satire when writer Kevin Modesti showed up for the fund-raising launch of the Lu Parker Project at a South LA animal shelter: "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa went to work Monday with a sling on one arm and a familiar brunette on the other."

At the same time, fired librarians were protesting at the Riordan Central Library over the closure of city libraries two days a week and shorter hours the other five days.

For its part, the City Council was continuing to tax the law-abiding by raising dog license fees even though half the dogs in the city aren't licensed, the much-reviled Community Redevelopment Agency was moving to gag its Board of Commissioners and unions were using their ample political muscle to get Dennis Zine and Jan Perry to muzzle efforts to outsource collection of the nearly $100 million in ambulance fees that go unpaid every year.

City Hall is in chaos. Leaderless, confused and corrupted by the influence of special interest money, the mayor and City Council don't know which way to turn so they swing at every target compounding the results of years of mismanagement and making matters worse.

There is a reason for all this: They just don't get it.

Writer, historian and keen observer of the LA political scene D.J. Waldie picked up on the Daily News editorial campaign and suggested the mayor has simply "checked out" and the entreaties that he actually go back to work would fall on his deaf ears.

"There's little in the mayor's character or experience to suggest that he has - at this low point - the reservoirs of commitment and passion with which the process of remaking civic life in Los Angeles could be restarted. And remaking the governance of Los Angeles - not more trains or charter schools or even jobs - is the essential obligation that faces the mayor of Los Angeles," Waldie wrote on the KCET blog.

"Villaraigosa had said that he intended to be the mayor of a denser city, a greener city, a transit-oriented city, a middle-class city, a working-class city, a politically progressive city, a business-oriented city, and a city where the mayor is in control of the educational system. There's a refigured narrative of Los Angeles somewhere in there, but it was always hard to discern. Certainly too hard for the mayor."

Waldie took his analysis a step further on Warren Olney's "Which Way LA?" Monday night when he outlined exactly why City Hall has gone so wrong, why it has lost all credibility, why we are closing libraries and parks, firing workers, headed toward bankruptcy.

The city's political leadership doesn't have a clue about how Charter reform in 1999 fundamentally changed the structure and form of government, shifted power to the neighborhoods and transformed the political culture.

"I despair today, that anyone at City Hall really understands how that transformation of governance, how far it's progressed and what it might become," he said.

"One reason I think that the mayor is in the doldrums, if you will, unfocused and his compass is not pointing in any direction, is he really doesn't have a vision of how politics in this city are changing.

'I think he's missing the transformation that was put in place slowly and incrementally by Charter reform in 1999  I think he and his colleagues at City Hall, including the City Council, have not fully internalized what that meant.

"The area planning councils, neighborhood councils, the change in the relationship of the mayor to the department heads, re-figuring of the power relationships between the mayor and the City Council, all of these have begun incremental and, perhaps too slow for us to see at times, a transformation of the city.

"Unfortunately, Mayor Villaraigosa hasn't yet internalized what that means and is not leading that transformation, has not embraced that transformation in ways that makes any sense to me. As a consequence of not knowing how governance works in LA now, he doesn't seem to be governing."

No one has ever said it more eloquently, clearly or dispassionately.

The mayor and Council's failure, refusal actually, to follow the City Charter and respect the rule of law is the heart of the problem.

They have continued to operate as if nothing changed. They have thwarted the growth of Neighborhood Councils at every turn. They have politicized every department and every commission, stripping the city of the independent citizen oversight that is supposed to provide the check and balance on abuses by elected officials.

"DWP says it will fire workers," shouts the Daily News across the top of the front page.

"DWP to fire two caught in sting," whispers the Times over a two-paragraph story at the bottom of page B-5  with a somewhat longer story online.

Both newspapers sent reporters to Interim DWP General Mayor and First Chief Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner's morning press conference Wednesday so did local TV stations, most especially CBS2 which broke the story of workers drinking and driving and going to a strip club while being salaries up to $144,000 a year.

It's easy to see this is a story of great public interest and significance, unlike the ridiculously hyped LA boycott-Arizona power shutoff story.

The boycott is phony and has no substance. Arizona's power official only said he might recommend looking at retaliation if it had any real effect. And the problem with Arizona's illegal immigrant law is in its symbolism and implementation which could lead to abuses and enormous liability claims, not in its substance which is basically the same as federal law and LA's Special Order 40, both of which are enforced.

So why would the Times lead page B-5 with a catchup story on unplugging LA while caring so little about the DWP story, the editors not only buried and briefed it but called it a "sting" when it was an undercover hidden camera investigation? No one was lured to the strip club or liquor stores.

First and foremost, the Times institutionally doesn't give a damn about LA or its people and never has, unless they are rich or famous or Hollywood celebrities -- like Times staffers like to see themselves despite their company being in bankruptcy and their numbers down by more than half.

So the fact the DWP is the focus of the public's growing discontent and the cash cow holding together a city government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy itself is of no importance.

Then, there's the Times' pride: It has a long history of ignoring stories broken up other media and the arbiter of the importance of all things Los Angeles even, as in this case, when the video of DWP workers aroused the sleeping population far more than rate hikes and the 100 years of DWP scandals.

Having said all that, the Times editorial decision does have a logic whether the editors actually thought about it or not.

Beutner is carefully managing the worker drinking-strip club scandal on the advice of PR people and political strategists.

It has to go away before the DWP can go after the long series of rate hikes it wants to pay its bloated payroll, appease IBEW Local 18 boss Brian D'Arcy with a couple of thousand more jobs and buy cleaner energy no matter how many billions is squeezes out of the public's pockets and the local economy -- money that will mostly go to giant Chinese and other corporations.

So he holds a quickie news conference to announce termination proceedings have started against two of the workers and others might face the same consequences while a broader investigation is under way to get closure on suspicion such conduct is widespread at the utility with at least the passive consent of managers who also are IBEW members.

You can bet little will come of the broader investigation. Beutner already has assured us he doesn't care about the past so the probe won't go very deep into the DWP culture, certainly won't look at the people who have no work to do except unlocking and locking a warehouse door or the scams involving the theft of "surplus" DWP property..

Diminishing the significance of his statements further is there is a better than even money chance nobody will ever be fired unless D'Arcy gives the green light which he might do if he fix the culprits up with cushy jobs with his brethren in the private sector, IBEW Local 11.

That still leaves the problem of appeals to the Civil Service Commission and the rules put in place by our elected leaders to make sure that there is no workplace discipline anywhere at City Hall and workers never lose their jobs no matter what they do.

You might remember the two garbage men who a few years back rang up thousands of dollars in bills for personal calls on their city cell phones. They not only weren't fired but they were given most of the rest of their lives to repay the city, supposedly because they didn't understand the phones weren't for personal use.

In days gone by, Beutner's strategy would work. The Times would eventually declare case closed and come back in a year or two with an expose of its own of past DWP abuses.

But the journalistic world has changed.

The breakdown of the rule of law and of public service at City Hall is all over talk radio and getting extensive TV coverage. The internet is filled with bloggers' reports on the DWP and City Hall's endless list of failures. Viral email extends their reach to thousands of others. Citizen watchdogs are penetrating the walls of secrecy.

This scandal and all the other crimes against the city being committed by our elected officials won't go away as easily as they did in the past. That is the light at the end of the dark tunnel that our city government has become -- something that the political machine has yet to come to terms with.

 

This School Tax Is A Bargain

For just $8.33 per household a month, voters could save hundreds of L.A. Unified teachers' jobs and help preserve arts education in elementary schools.

Those are the headlines over the LA Times highly-paid columnist Steve Lopez's column today in which he reveals that unlike his newspaper's editorial board, he supports LAUSD's $100 per parcel tax to avoid some teachers from being laid off.

"I say yes, and maybe it's because I have something no member of our editorial board has: A child who attends an L.A. Unified school," writes Lopez.

It says a lot about LAUSD that the 10 or so well-paid editorialists at the Times don't have kids in the city's public schools, something that puts them in step with thousands of other affluent LA residents.

Like Lopez, I'm a firm believer in public schools and my son is a graduate of Taft High and Berkeley and now is a post-graduate student at UC San Diego. The parents of the 650,000 LAUSD students, nearly 90 percent of them poor, immigrant or minorities, also believe in public schools or can't afford to buy the education their kids need.

Quite simply, the district is overwhelmed by students with great needs and has failed to make significant strides for three decades in carrying out the reforms needed to meet them or win the confidence of those who can afford private schools.

Writes Lopez: "Times are tough, and people don't want to dig into their pockets right now, especially since there's no citizen oversight written into the measure. On top of that, the teachers union has stubbornly resisted needed reforms, the district bureaucracy can be awful and the school board is no great shakes, either. So do we really want to send these people more money?"

No, we don't and the reasons are many.

It's not because we don't want to "save the jobs of 350 teachers, along with 400 custodians and campus aides. Seventy-five nurses, counselors and psychologists will be spared. High school class sizes, already in the 40s, won't swell any further. And arts programs in the elementary grades could be preserved," as Lopez enumerates what the $100 million a year that Measure E would generate.

It's not even because a parcel tax is the most regressive tax there is. It's the same $8.33 a month for a tiny cottage in Watts as it is for a Bel Air mansion or an office building worth hundred million dollars.

Voters have backed school bond issue after bond issue -- taxes based on the value of property -- only to see their money go to build schools that cost up to $500 million, only to see the latest bond issue not even needed for seven years from now.

We've seen superintendents and reform plans come and go but we've still not seen major improvement in dropout rates or achievement. We've seen the mayor take over the schools, at least indirectly, and still not seen the changes we were promised. We've recently seen the mayor and district officials collude with the ACLU to stop layoffs of teachers at three impacted schools, two of them directly under the mayor's control.

We're seeing the mayor, Superintendent Ramon Cortines and even teacher union leader A.J. Duffy duck the parcel tax campaign, presumably because their standing in the community is so low they would generate more "no" votes than "yes" votes. Instead, the campaign for Measure E is "hoping that if the turnout is low, only the most passionate voters will take to the polls and support the schools."

There's good reason for running an underground campaign just as events that occurred Tuesday showed.

One of the most important reforms enacted to protect the squandering of taxpayer money at LAUSD was the creation of the Inspector General's office and the appointment of former FBI agent Don Mullinax to the position.

Mullinax proved so tough and thorough that after a few years, they cut his funding and drove him out of office.

On Tuesday, Jerry Thornton, the current Inspector General, met the same fate. According to word leaking out from the school board's closed-door session, Thornton -- who was largely frozen out by the board and top officials for most of a year -- was terminated because his audits of spending and programs had a "gotcha" tone.

A review of recent audits showed Thornton found P-card abuses like someone at an early childhood education center racking up "$1,100 in dating services" on the card of someone else who was on leave and the "potential for abuse and misuse" of P-cards for millions of dollars in district and federal stimulus funds.

Of even greater significance is what happened at Verdugo Hills High on Tuesday and how the district is trying to make this scandal go away.

Community activists have long campaigned to get an investigation into LAUSD practices of marking truants present in class for the purpose of collecting the $25 daily attendance payment from the state.

What happened at Verdugo is that Principal Diane Klewitz sent home forms for parents of graduating seniors authorizing their children to go on three-day field trips to get them out of the way while other students were taking standardized tests and still collect the $25 payment..

The trouble was the field trips were for the students to stay at home, something that would not allow for the $25 daily attendance payment -- costing $5,000 a day in revenue for the 200 seniors given "stay-cations."

Klewitz told Howard Blume of the Times she inherited the tradition from her predecessors. In other words, it's common practice to scam the system and let 17-year-olds party for three days.

"Parents signed a slip saying they'd rather have their children stay home than sit in an auditorium," Klewitz said. "There are issues in terms of safety [when you] ask kids to sit in an auditorium all day. They tend to want to go out and roam the campus or jump the fence and disappear and roam the streets."

So being in school is dangerous but being off campus and doing whatever graduating seniors do is safe?

Some parents disagreed and complained and the Times called for comment so the district ordered the kids back to school today and promised to check whether Verdugo cheated in the past.

Don't expect them to end the practice everywhere else and clean up the truancy issue they have ignored for so long.

These current examples are just small elements in the grand rubric of LAUSD's failures.

Board member Tamar Galatzan, the only board member to vote against putting the parcel tax on the June ballot, explained her opposition in these terms:

"Now is the time to look at every single program, how it's funded, who benefits from it, get rid of the ones that don't work and change the ones where the funding mechanism isn't benefiting our students."

That's exactly what LAUSD needs to do to restore the public trust and get the money it needs to do a better job.

It's what the district has needed to do for 30 years but the district's leadership and the union prefer to go on protecting policies that have failed the students and the city as a whole.

Lights. Camera. Action. Bullshit!

No sooner have our city employees cleared the champagne glasses at Getty House from Antonio's pre-Oscar party last week, or read of his recent lobbying exploits in far-away Washington (I guess they turned off his phone), then we learn this morning that he's clamping down on spending -- by everyone else.

"Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sent a letter to city departments Wednesday demanding a freeze on much of their spending, from the purchase of new furniture to the use of food and beverages at city events," the Dog Trainer reported.

That sound you hear is every dog in the neighborhood howling with laughter.

We're living in a comedy that would probably earn an Oscar -- if it weren't so tragic.

The Trainer's reporter David Zahniser, as always, has at least some of the story:

"With the city facing a $484-million shortfall in the fiscal year that starts July 1, Villaraigosa also instructed several departments to halt negotiations for leased office space and barred any efforts to remodel city offices."

DZ, as he is known around City Hall, which is the opposite of ZD, which is short for my pal Zuma Dogg  added the memo does not apply to several city departments, including the Department of Water and Power, the Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles World Airports and two agencies that oversee pension funds for retired and civilian city workers.

I guess those guys, who have huge fat-filled budgets, can buy food and beverages, purchase furniture, rent space and, well, party, as Prince (a popular dog name) sung, "like it's 1999," which really was a good year.

Problem is it ain't 1999, which is probably when Dick Riordan should have started working on this budget mess.

Woof! 

An old dog who's been involved in LA politics for a long time once told me why our current leaders like Antonio and Fabian Nunez (former leader, now "consultant) tend to flaunt their power with the trappings of success usually associated with millionaires - expensive restaurants, great wine, designer clothes and a wink and a nod when it comes to ethics.

They think it's their turn, the old dog said.

I thought about this the other day when I read that Antonio, Fabian and former Ayatollah of the Assembly Willie Brown had dinner recently in one of Beverly Hills (note: not LA!) most expensive restaurants, Cut.  (Great doggie bags, if somebody would like to try to bribe me.)

Willie Brown obviously thought it was his turn, too.

I think the old dog that shared this with me had it right.  Just think about:  If you met any of these guys when they were say 16, what do you think the odds were that they would be being among the most powerful leaders in California?  A million to one?  Maybe.

These guys are scrappers.  They don't have impressive educations.  They operate from their gut.  And because they hang out with lots of rich people who want things from them - remember their power - they tend to believe they should enjoy the same lifestyle.

That's why a lot of people hate them. And I envy them.  Remember, I live on kibble in Ron's backyard.

And I'm scrappy too!

The Dog Trainer's top dog columnist, Steve Lopez, did a dumb online poll last week, asking his readers for the "worst Angeleno of all time."  The winner?  Not Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez. Not Charles Manson.  But Antonio!

The poll was ridiculous - and Lopez admitted it.  But it says a lot about how people feel about LA right now, at least those who took the time to vote.

They are pissed off.  They want a leader who can fix our problems, not a celebrity - even if it's his turn.

Woof!!

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.   

He's no Austin Powers.

LA's new job czar Austin Beutner sat down with LA's old column czar Steve Lopez of the Dog Trainer recently to reveal how he was going to reverse the city's downward economic spiral with all the talents at the disposal of a billionaire willing to work for $1 a year.

Unless all of us are willing to work for $1 a year, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Lopez said the idea to hire Beautner sprang from a meeting of Dick Riordan, Eli Broad, Michael Milken and Steve Soboroff, or what you could call the "Been There, Tried That Gang."

Remember, it was not that long ago that at least two of these guys, Riordan and Soboroff, actually ran Los Angeles (Broad runs the world and Milken, well, that's a whole other story), and if you haven't figured it out yet from reading my master's blog, our troubles didn't start yesterday.

At its core, and without going into the entertaining but sometime stultifying detail supplied by my master, the city's problems stem from its contracts with public employees.

That's a problem for our elected city officials - who, by the way, make more than $1 a year -- since their campaigns receive huge contributions from labor unions, many of which represent our pubic "servants."

"He's going to have to confront many, many special interest groups who have controlled the mayor of the city and council of the city -- developers, unions, you name it," Riordan told Lopez. "And I think it is a smart move on the mayor's part to let somebody who does not have political aspirations make the tough moves."

Then Lopez - who makes way more than $1 a year -- added his two cents:

"You could call it politically smart, sure, the mayor standing clear of the dirty work he wants done, including likely confrontations with city employee unions that have bankrolled his campaigns in the past.

"Or you could ask yourself why he didn't step up himself, long ago."

Ask yourself?  Jeez, why doesn't somebody from the Dog Trainer ask him?  Oh, that's right, it did have a long profile of the mayor recently.  Unfortunately, it concentrated on the mayor's diet - meatless Mondays - his new yoga regimen, his girlfriend and her dog, Monkey.

Riordan and Soboroff obviously didn't brief Beutner on the stuff they tried - mostly dealing with the port and airport - that didn't work.  He's going to try it all again.

The job czar did tell Lopez he had a great idea to lure a Chinese car manufacturing plant to LA.

"Beutner might promise that he'll get Villaraigosa and an A-list celebrity to show up at the Academy Awards presentation in the company's electric cars, a great promo for all the world to see."

And maybe the mayor can bring his girlfriend and her four-legged pal Monkey.

I've got a better idea.  Ron recently started to "retrain" me, as if I was ever trained in the first place.  It involves lots of new commands, increased discipline - and an electric collar that looks like it was designed by a dog-hating sadist.

Maybe the next time the Been There, Tried That Gang get together at one of their mansions, probably after Beutner realizes as a $1-a-year volunteer he won't get anything done and quits, they consider a similar regimen for our mayor, in addition to the meatless Mondays and yoga, of course.

I wonder if Armani makes an electric collar?

Woof!