What kind of scoundrel would use the debate over such a small step toward ending political corruption and bringing fair elections to California that he would go into a moralistic diatribe against the Republican candidates for governor while ignoring how union and special interest money has made LA City Hall a mockery of democracy?
Richard Alarcon, that's who...the Council member under criminal investigation because he doesn't or at least didn't live in his district.
Meanwhile, if you want to support Prop. 15, Rock the Boat and Common Cause are holding a fund-raising event Tuesday June 1 at the Echo, 1822 W. Sunset Blvd. at 8:30 p.m. with Jeremy
Dawson
of Shiny Toy Guns (DJ Set), White Apple Tree, & Buddy Akai, $8 in advance, $10 at the door.
It's been a busy weekend for the out-of-touch mayor and his team of second raters.
First, he floats the crazy idea that the discredited David Freeman will step down as "interim" general manager of the DWP having caused enough damage during his six-month reign.
His replacement on an "interim" basis likely will be "jobs czar" Austin Beutner, fresh from his triumph of putting together a $5.7 million package of subsidies to lure a garment maker to move his 30 worker factory from South Gate to South LA. That works out to nearly $200,000 per "living wage" $10 an hour job.
Whoopee! What could be more exciting and stimulating of the economy than yet another sweatshop in LA.
Then, after twisting a variety of City Council arms for support over the weekend, the mayor called an 11 a.m. press conference for Monday to announce he's backing Richard Alarcon's 13-point proposal as a "compromise" so he can get the 6 percent rate hike approved now and the other 20 to 30 percent in hikes in a few months. Alarcon couldn't even get a second for his proposal at Friday's Council meeting where the mayor's own plan was rejected 13-1.
That's really no different than what the DWP Commission approved, only to see it rejected by the Council on Friday in the face of a firestorm of public criticism.
Alarcon, the mayor's only backer on this, added his own twists by suggesting the so-called carbon surcharge trust fund be used the first year to subsidize "energy efficiency
programs for Los Angeles-based employers most severely affected by the
rate increases."
He also wants "a hardship exemption program to alleviate rate
impact for commercial and residential customers most severely affected
by the rate increases" and "an economic development strategy...to maximize creation of local public and
private-sector jobs"
So there you have it, the grand scheme developed in panic to send electricity rates soaring to subsidize the poor and poorly run businesses and to create living wage jobs. It's right up Beutner's alley from what we've seen so far.
It's what the plan was when they brought the wealthy Beutner aboard: To turn the DWP into an economic development engine by taking money from residents and businesses to "buy" jobs.
Green energy is a cover story to please environmentalists and to profit the greenwashers and insiders who will no doubt benefit handsomely from their connections.
This is a complete corruption of the DWP's mission as a publicly-owned utility providing water and power. It is not a fund to subsidize economic development, for transferring wealth from one group to another.
Spinning madly in his desperation, the mayor put out this statement overnight:
"We heard our residential and the business communities loud and
clear. Councilmember
Alarcon's compromise plan for asmall, one-time rate
increase maintains our commitment to clean energy and
green jobs while mandating reforms to protect our ratepayers. It is a
strong first step and a reasonable middle ground which I will urge theBoard
of Water and Power Commissioners to adopt if approved by the CityCouncil."
It's actually the same .8 cent increase that was previously approved as part of a series of quarterly increases of similar amounts that will double and triple rates before you know it.
The truth is the mayor has lost all credibility. The DWP and its commission have lost all trust. And if the Council goes along with this charade, the circle of failure and deceit will be complete.
The DWP does not have financial problems. It has more than half a billion dollars sitting in the bank untouched for years.
There is no justification for any rate hike until there is a clear and coherent plan with specifics on the table on how it intends to go forward, until all costs are broken down clearly and transparently and subject to full public debate, until there is a credible management team put into place, until the commission is reconstituted to provide independence and genuine public participation, until a Rate Payer Advocate's Office is created totally independent of all political control.
Those are just a few of the conditions that have to be met before we talk about how we actually achieve cleaner energy at a price residents and businesses can afford and ensure that we get value for our money.
How would you like to be a Gold Card public library user contributing money entitling you to boast you kept 100 workers from being fired so the Central Library and eight regional ones don't have to close on Sundays starting April 11?
Janice Hahn thinks it's a great idea and can't wait to declare "Sundays Fun Days" as the slogan for the honor of carrying the otherwise meaningless Gold Card. Maybe she'll make it part of her campaign for lieutenant governor.
Or maybe you just would like to write a check for several million dollars from your trust fund to save all 73 city libraries from closing a second day next fiscal year. Bill Rosendahl thinks that's a winner and is putting out calls to the billionaires who populate his wealthy district.
Their ideas might appear lame-brained considering the Council unanimously has abdicated its responsibilities for years and now has pushed the city to within $73 million of bankruptcy -- if you believe the mayor and his pathetic attempt at blackmailing the Council into approving a blank check for rate hikes for the discredited management of the Department of Water and Power.
There's an innocence to Hahn and Rosendahl that makes their sins somewhat forgivable. The same cannot be said about Richard Alarcon, suspect in a criminal investigation involving election fraud for falsely claimed he actually lives in the district he serves, allegedly.
Alarcon's pretentious and deceitful posturing on behalf of the city's unions puts him in a class by himself.
His increasingly frequent and vicious attacks on bureaucrats dealing with the budget catastrophe he and his colleagues created are shocking in their cruelty. His repeated expressions of contempt in public ought to prompt a censure motion if the other members of the Council truly had the bleeding hearts filled with compassion for their fellow man as they would have us believe.
His performance Wednesday when Martin Gomez, chief city librarian, explained the impact of having to leave 100 jobs vacant, losing 100 workers to the Early Retirement Incentive Program and facing 100 more job losses to looming layoffs -- a 30 percent staff reduction -- wasn't as obnoxious as some of his grandstand plays. But it ranked high enough to be worthy of condemnation for his unseemly efforts at humiliating people trying to do their jobs.
Tony Cardenas did that shortly after Alarcon spoke, putting him down deftly by asking City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana who makes the decisions on budgets and policies.
"The Mayor and City Council," Santana dutifully answered.
With newfound passion for the public interest, Cardenas then forcefully, made the point as he as done several times recently, that the responsibility for the city's financial woes, layoffs of workers and drastic cuts in services are not the fault of the bureaucrats.
The decisions are those of elected officials and they are the ones who should be held accountable, he said.
Cardenas is a lone voice of reason among our city officials at a time when others prefer to blame the sun, the moon and the stars rather than themselves for the crisis facing the city. He reiterated his statement later when the Internet Technology officials described how Channel 35 and the small semblance of what's left of public access TV and numerous support services were being sharply cut.
After decades of a failed experiment in municipal socialism, Austin Beutner looks like just the right man for the job of reviving LA's sagging economy from the tornado of mismanagement and poor leadership that has hit it, a steal at $1 a year.
He is the man who the mayor says "led a team that helped the Russian people in their transition to a market economy" after the fall of communism. If that doesn't convince you. consider that he made a goodly chunk of his fortune as an investment banker and expert putting people to work in Third World countries with an abundance of cheap labor. A Third World economy, cheap labor and all the assets of the DWP, harbor and airport to work with -- it's right up Beutner's alley.
You can gamble your tax bill on his ability to wipe the nearly 14 percent jobless rate, put the 200,000 people who have abandoned even looking for a job to work, balance the city budget and erase the $10.5 billion city pension debt.
It's only a matter of time before he leads us to that somewhere over the rainbow and becomes known as the Wizard of LA.
There are a few obstacles he will have to overcome, however, like the ambitions of the mayor and council to stay on the public dole for the rest of their lives without actually doing anything for the public benefit.
Can the Wizard of LA find a brain for Scarecrow Tom LaBonge (who wants to be mayor), a heart for Tin Man Dennis Zine (Controller) and courage for Cowardly Lion Bill Rosendahl (US Senator)?
If he does, he still faces the challenge of getting help from Good Witch Glinda (Lt. Gov. Janice Hahn) to help Dorothy (Mayor Jan Perry) and Toto (Assemblyman Richard Alarcon) to get back home to Kansas or wherever they're from.
Surely the Wicked Witch of the West (Mayor Wendy Greuel) or is it Mayor
Eric Garcetti will have a lot say about what he is trying to do,
especially if it makes any sense.
No, it's not going to be easy, what with the yellow brick road all cracked and broken and the Emerald City flooded by bursting water mains.
But he does have help from the man who counts, a mayor so desperate to be Governor or Senator or Ambassador or just plain rich like him that he swears on the stack of bibles and promises to give him all the support he needs no matter what.
Of course, his promises in the past have proven to be about as valuable and reliable as AIG securities.
No matter. The Wizard can fix it all if only everyone really believes it's possible.
And that's the twist in this little story that makes it all just a fantasy.
This cast of characters has betrayed the public trust. Nobody believes anything they do is for anyone's benefit but their own and the people who put them on the public stage.
It's simply a question of faith and you got to wonder if the Wizard of LA even has clue about that..
Just back from its latest vacation, the City Council looked as naked today as if they were being broadcast through the lens of a full-body scan camera.
They were done with the city's monkey business thanks to Council President Eric Garcetti emulating the great John Ferraro and limiting his colleagues to just three minutes to fill the air with their malarkey and whatever pat responses they got to softball questions of various bureaucrats.
Garcetti & Co. may not have much respect for the law but they sure are devoted to order.
Homage was paid all around to City Treasurer Joya De Foor for winning the grand prize at the Association for Financial Professionals Pinnacle Award.-- no doubt an achievement that is borderline miraculous considering the city is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and she has less money to manage due to losses in revenues and investments.
The occasion was the Council's belatedly accepting delivery of her monthly financial reports for May, June, July and August and filing them in the never-looked-at, never-to-be-looked-at depository of useless information, which may explain why the city has been operating illegally with a budget deficit for the last six months after ignoring all reason and prudence for the previous two years.
Right on cue, she dutifully talked about her commitment to put the city treasury's investments into the hands of local firms to help create at least a few dozen jobs. And that was the point since the goal was in the act of taking steps to usurp the authority of the bureaucracy to dole out the lucrative financial advisor contracts to friends and contributors.
It is hard to say for sure exactly why they were doing this except for the fact that the pension fund scandal has some of their former friends and contributors headed to jail so new ways of greasing the skids of their corruption needed to be found.
Then, they found another million dollars in ratepayer money for a consultant to tell the DWP how to fix the Owen Lake Dust Bowl so it can be paved with hundreds of millions of dollars of solar panels that presumably will be bought from friends and contributors and installed by their No. 1 friend and contributor, DWP union bully boy Brian D'Arcy.
It will be interesting to see how well D"Arcy gets along with the newest Councilman, Paul Krekorian, whose election despite D'Arcy's heavy spending was certified today so he can take the oath of office and make his inaugural appearance on Wednesday.
Krekorian's role in getting huge tax breaks for Hollywood to try to slow runaway movie and TV production was duly noted when Richard Alarcon's proposal to re-create the LA Film Commission was up for consideration.
Strangely, no mention was made about how the city;s slashing Hollywood's business taxes failed to slow runaway production or what the Film Commission is going to do. Nonetheless, Alarcon received universal and effusive praise as if he had actually saved thousands of good-paying jobs.
All that was foreplay to the climax of the day's quickie session -- endorsement of the Obama Administration's proposal to create the National Infrastructure Development Bank.
This was the real news despite the meaninglessness of he vote itself and the bewilderment of Ed Reyes that his LA River Project isn't the on the mayor's fable about what a great job he's doing.
It showed how the subway to the sea, the Westside light rail extension and the downtown rail connector will all be built in 10 years. You can take their word on it.
The National Infrastructure Development Bank will arrange for MTA to bond against the $40 billion that was supposed to be raised over 30 years from the sales tax increase and get the money in just 10 years.
The problem is that the tax is now only expected to generate a little more than $30 billion and there's no guarantee LA will get a bigger chunk of federal money than every other city in the country -- especially when it has always gotten far less than its fair share in the past.
Strangely no mention was made of how much of the transit tax will be eaten up by interest charges from the borrowing or how much all the fiinancial advisors and various other middlemen will take of the proceeds.
Maybe it isn't so strange when you think about it. The last thing City Hall wants is openness and transparency, an informed debate and an honest public conversation.
City Attorney Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich took a beating last week in the press and at City Council for trying to solve the billboard mess created by City Hall over seven years.
It's a good thing he's a tough guy from San Pedro and takes pride in being a pig-headed bull in a china shop. He broke a lot of dishes again last week and hopefully his repeated references to the commission of crimes will soon be backed up with the evidence to produce indictments.
In the 10 weeks he has been in office, Nuch has demonstrated he has no more respect for the exquisite sensibilities of the Council than for the power of AEG's Tim Leiweke, developers or anyone else.
Poor Ed Reyes' trust is shaken by the breakdown in unanimous acquiescence , Richard Alarcon is saddened at seeing department heads told to obey the law, Greig Smith is outraged at the prospect the law might override sweetheart deals and Jan Perry, her voice quivering with emotion, is out for revenge.
Good work, Nuch. We've waited a long time for this, a city official who doesn't give a damn about the niceties of the fine art of political corruption, whether misfeasance or malfeasance, and just wants to see an effective law in place to end the runaway proliferation of digital billboards that blight our landscape.
They call him a bully for standing up to the people's interest. They
say he is abusing his authority for trying to bring control to billboards and marijuana shops, and end giveaways of public money without
public benefit.
Maybe the Neighborhood Councils and homeowner groups can learn something from Nuch and stop saying thank you every time a city official talks nice to them while picking their pocket.
It's been 17 years since Rodney King, of all people, asked the question that is at the heart of what's wrong with LA: "Why can't we all just get along?"
King's his plaintive plea came at the height of the 1992 riots that followed acquittal of the officers who beat him half to death a year earlier.
This time it's not the poor who are looting stores, burning down buildings and firing guns into the night. It's the middle class that is angry, people who vent their grievances without engaging in mayhem in the streets.
They are fed up with being treated like feudal peasants, of being squeezed for every dollar they have without getting anything in return, of seeing their neighborhoods wrecked by developments that turn the law on its head, of services being cut, their futures being mortgaged and theircity lurching toward bankruptcy.
They want to know how come City Hall gave hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxpayer money to AEG so the company could reap
billions in profits with arenas, luxury hotels and condos and expensive
restaurants 90 percent of the people can't afford.
They want to know how come homeowners' trash fees were tripled to hire more cops and most of the money was used for other purposes and now we've stopped hiring cops altogether.
They want to know how come they are being slugged with one water and power rate increase after another and we've got water mains bursting all over town and the dirtiest power plants in California.
There's a thousand other questions people have about what's going on at City Hall so if anybody asks today why we can't just get along, the answer is: City Hall is at war with its people, engaging in one dirty back room deal and bureaucratic dirty trick after another.
It's clear nothing will change without a fight that brings City Hall back under the control of the people.
So give 'em Hell, Nuch! It's about time somebody stood up to the power structure and starting getting answers.
For the last 18 months I tracked how the city dealt with the illegal conversion of a single-family home into a three-apartment tenement and wrote it as a 16-part mystery called "Whodunit: Who's Killing My Neighborhood?"
Now, I learn from a second-hand viral email with the subject line "Accessory Dwelling Units" that it isn't a mystery at all.
The City of Los Angeles is killing my neighborhood of single-family homes -- and yours, too.
The email originated from Sylvia Lacy, senior deputy in Councilman Herb Wesson's 10th District Field Office.
Hello to all, the attached notices are concerning the accessory dwelling unit outreach in preparation for the City of Los Angeles to draft an ordinance to comply with SB 1866 (sic AB 1866). Questions should go to Gabriela Juárez at gabriela.juarez@lacity.org or (213) 978-1337. If you have any comments or concerns please send them to me. If your neighborhood or Neighborhood Council has taken a position, please let me know. Thanks Sylvia Lacy
The FAQ from the Planning Department explained clearly what an accessory dwelling unit is:
Q:. What is an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU)? A: An Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU), also referred to as a granny flat, secondary dwelling unit, cottage housing opportunity {ECH0), or other-daughter residence, is an apartment that can be located within the walls of an existing or newly constructed single-family home or can be an add-on to an existing home.It can also be a freestanding structure on the same lot as the principal dwelling or the conversion of a garage or a barn.
In other words, the tenement conversion in my neighborhood is about to become legal in every neighborhood in the city -- every neighborhood except those "in a Hillside area, Equinekeeping District, along a Scenic Highway designated in the General Plan, or where the width of the adjacent street is substandard," according to the Interim Guidelines.
Unbelievable, I thought. Now, I almost feel sorry for the couple that got fined $10,000 for converting the house in my neighborhood into a three-apartment tenement. It turns about they were premature and not greedy enough. If they had waited until this is enacted, they could have filled in the swimming pool in back and put up another building with two more units for a total of five.
The person who sent me Sylvia Lacy's email sounded this alarm: "To add to the seemingly endless number of issues we must consider. It looks like the state mandated "granny flats" within R1 areas (with some limitations - see attached). It looks to me like this is one step toward the elimination of true single-family neighborhoods."
It's been coming for a while.
The state legislation that makes this possible was AB 1866, a density bonus/affordable housing measure that took effect July 1 2003 with bipartisan support and the support of then Assemblymen Paul Koretz and Herb Wesson and then Sen. Richard Alarcon -- all now City Council members.
The FAQ from the Planning Department says this measure is being developed "in response" to AB 1866. No one should be misled by the phrase into thinking the legislation "requires" the city to destroy single-family home neighborhoods. Here's what the law says:
SEC. 2. Section 65852.2 of the Government Code is amended to read:65852.2. (a) (1) Any local agency may, by ordinance, provide for the creation of second units in single-family and multifamily residential zones.
"MAY" -- that's the operative word.
So the City of LA is doing this because it wants to. It is exempting "hillside" neighborhoods because it wants to.
Understand, this is the same Planning Department that wants to increase the fees for homeowners and community groups to appeal its decisions on development projects by up to 2,000 percent.
It already has held two public meetings on this at the Yucca Community Center and the Braude Constituent Services Center and plans only one more on Saturday, Nov. 7, 10 am - 2 pm at the David M. Gonzales/Pacoima Recreation Center, 10943 Herrick Avenue in Arleta.
The workshop notice says that for more information, please contact Gabriela Juárez at (213) 978-1337 or by email at gabriela.juarez@lacity.org.
Can there be any doubt that the city is at war with the middle class, with home owners, with the ordinary people who pay most of the city's bills?
Aren't there laws against this sort of discriminatory conduct? Doesn't the Constitution protect us all equally from the actions of government?
I guess it really is time to move as so many people are saying. Or to fight.
It's a lousy time to sell a house so fight we must -- or maybe just convert our houses in tenements, reap the profits and let the city go to hell.
There's something about Greig Smith that never ceases to amaze me and makes me worry that his chief of staff Mitch Englander will be more of the same when he succeeds him in 18 months, much as Smith was more of the same when he took over for his boss. Hal Bernson.
They never saw a development in their Northwest Valley they didn't like as long as there was some juice in it of one sort of another.
Smith represents the city's more conservative district, one with as high a ratio of home ownership as any in LA, yet when it comes to soaking the middle class for more money to feed the city treasury, he's the No. 1 tax-and-spend liberal.
To Smith, any services the city provides to homeowners are subsidies so he leads the charge to triple the trash fee on single-family homes with a promise to use the money solely to hire more cops for the LAPD, which by necessity puts most of its resources into providing services to areas with low percentages of homeowners. But police services are a legitimate expense, not a subsidy.
On Wednesday, he put his full weight behind increases of up to 2,000 percent in the fees charged homeowners and community groups to appeal planning-related actions, arguing that the city shouldn't be subsidizing such things because they are so widely abused to stop development projects.
Besides, he said, the under-funded and under-achieving Planning Department needs the money since its staff has shrunk from 400 to 290 and half its workers are being furloughed once every two weeks and it could drop below 250 when the early retirement deal is finalized.
It's as if Smith wasn't a power on the Budget Committee that slashed planning funding, wasn't a Council member who put planning officials on furloughs and engineered the early retirement deal.
Only one Council member, Richard Alarcon, stop up and pointedly showed that Smith was talking nonsense, if not a hypocrite.
As expected, the Council lost its nerve in the face of a public outrcy and backed down Wednesday on increasing the appeals fees -- for now.
But you can be sure these people will be back in due course with a new plan to raise the fees and find other ways to squeeze money out of the middle class. They are desperate for cash and too weak to confront the simple truth that City Hall costs too much and delivers too little.
I thought I'd seen just about everything from this City Council but my eyes were opened by Tuesday's debate over a plan to raise fees for homeowners and neighborhood and community groups to appeal Planning and Building Safety decisions by 200 to 2,000 percent.
This is a City Council that isn't worth the $180,000 a year they are paid. They aren't even worth half that as community activists are proposing to put on the ballot next year. They aren't worth 10 cents.
What was before the council was an urgent ordinance to fix "typos" and backed off somewhat from the astronomical appeals fees approved unanimously Aug. 12. It also was supposed to fix the open meeting law violation that was used to sneak it through -- something that was sure to lead to a lawsuit that could nullify the ordinance months or years from now.
What it didn't fix was the blatant constitutional violations represented by onerous fees intended to stifle the due process rights of ordinary citizens to challenge city decisions that ruin their neighborhoods and destroy the quality of their lives.
When Richard Alarcon is the people's hero, nailing the illegal anti-democratic nature of this measure, and when Tom LaBonge is the voice of reason, saying he doesn't think anyone is "comfortable" with it so put it for another day -- you know this was as ill-informed and muddled a debate as you've ever seen.
For 90 minutes, the Council circled around what this was about in a confused and pointless discussion that left them even more dumbfounded than usual, if that's possible.
In the end, they agreed, unanimously, to revisit the issue Wednesday and seemed to agree to keep citizen appeal fees to the $75 to $300 level they have been instead of up to the $6,188 level that was proposed.
But that's only a temporary decision. The intent is to come back with a new fee schedule that moves toward "full cost recovery" -- City Hall's policy of making the shrinking middle class and homeowners pay the bulk of taxes and pay again for everything they get in services from the city.
There ought to be a law, maybe there is if the nation's civil rights laws apply to ordinary law-abiding people.
A dozen or so community activists spoke out against the measure at the outset of the debate, people from the wealthy hillside communities to the Eastside, from Neighborhood Councils and environmental justice groups.
When people from all classes and backgrounds come together like this, as you're seeing so often these days, you know the winds of change are blowing and the discontent with City Hall's failure is growing.
Not everybody sees that, of course. Some are oblivious.
Ed Reyes, the Council's point man for developers, and Bernard Parks, the Council's point man on fiscal irresponsibility, for instance, argued the proposal dates back three years, that a consultant was paid $100,000 to come up with the fee schedule and public hearings have been held since April.
So everyone should know about this measure. Only everyone didn't know about it, not the Council or the public.
That's because the language on agendas hid the appeals fee issue from the public and Neighborhood Councils and other community groups were never actively brought into the process.
The best the Planning Department could do was say that information was posted on its website and emails sent out to NCs. Developers, in contrast, were brought into discussions about the increased fees they face and how they would get better and faster service for their money while the community would for the most part be silenced by the high appeals fees.
You can be sure developers, their lobbyists, lawyers, consultants and PR advisers were given all the access they wanted during the three years, five months and 68 days that have gone into the process of killing democracy in LA.
It is a sign of the times that the Council has once again back down in the face of public opposition. They are afraid of the people and the growing cohesion of activists that is rapidly building into a full-scale revolt.
They have good reason to be afraid. Their neglect and incompetence has allowed the budget deficit to threaten the city's future, billboards and marijuana stores to flourish without regulation, the DWP to gouge the public to put into the pockets of a union that is out of control.
The list of their failures goes on and on and so does their list of attacks on the rights of ordinary people to be treated fairly and to get a government that serves them.
There are only so many grievances the public will bear before they awaken and do something about what's wrong, even in LA.
So long Zuma and Mike and Matt and the rest of you homeless, crazy druggies who come to every City Council meeting and waste your time shouting, singing and preaching to deaf ears.
Next week the council will unanimously to approve a change in Rule 12 proposed aptly enough by Smith & Wesson banning you for up to 10 weeks without a warning if the Council President decides you have been disruptive or your actions cause others to be disruptive.
In discussing it Wednesday, Richard Alarcon was inspired to mock you as pitiable in his own sardonic way by feigning to find find inspiration to work harder for a better world because he sees you wasting your time and lives by coming to every Council meeting to speak your minds when none of the members cares or listens to what you have to say.
This measure was designed by the Council's lawyer, Deputy City Attorney Dion O'Connell, a nervous and irritable man whose sense of decorum is easily offended by anyone who strays for a moment for the issue at hand or in any other disturbs his need for strict orderliness.
Questioned about what the measure would do, O'Connell stammered in confusionwhen it turned out that the change to Council Rule 12 is simple enough: The Council President can ban a speaker for up to 30 meetings (at least 10 weeks) instead of 30 days without any warning necessary.
Whether the warning is given or not or how long the ban is and what constitutes disruption of decorum or who is responsible for it are solely up to the discretion of the President
Here's how Councilmen Greig Smith and Herb Wesson, authors of the Smith & Wesson Rule, explain their motives:
The man Smith praised as the kind of regular Public Commenter that's OK, Eastside activist Dr. Clyde Williams, takes issue with the Smith & Wesson Rule as arbitrary and illegal and offers to fund a legal challenge to it.
Catch Ron on the Kevin James wShow on KRLA 870 at 9:30 p.m. this Wednesday night and as a regular commentator on NBC's innovative news sho "The Filter with Fred Roggin." "The Filter" is broadcast on NBC's Raw Channel 225 at 7:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday.
Support the "LA Clean Sweep" campaign to end corruption at City Hall by electing candidates who will serve the public interest -- not special interests. For too long, concerned residents throughout Los Angeles have fought their own separate battles against the powerful forces that run City Hall and control our elected officials. The city's financial crisis, cuts in core services, layoffs of city workers, selling valuable assets, massive subsidies to insiders -- we have reached the point of no return. Only you can save LA. Join the Clean Sweep campaign and come together with people from all over the city to make a difference. Get more information on volunteering your time or contributing to at lacleansweep.com http://lacleansweep.com
or contact me at ron@ronkayela.com..
Clean Sweep Trainng for Acitvists & Candidates
This Sunday, Aug. 29, LA Clean Sweep will provide training sessions from professional politicial consultants to help you become a more effective activist and help candidates mount successful campaigns in the March 2011 or future elections. The sessions will be held at the Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood. The morning session from 9 a.m. to noon is for activists; the afternoon session from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. is for potential candidates. Lunch will be provided to all participants at noon. For more information or to register for this invaluable training gohttp://lacleansweep.com/#/events/
is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News who has become a community activist, helping to found the Saving LA Project. He writes on city issues in Los Angeles and is a frequent speaker at community groups on the need to get informed and involved in the effort to make LA a city of great schools and neighborhoods, a city with a healthy business climate and good jobs, a city where the people are respected and have a seat at the table of power.
Ron Kaye