Recently in City Hall Category

Hooray for urban cyclist Stephen Box who's the lead organizer for the July 14 Bastille Day protest at City Hall. He won this week's L.A. Times' Bottleneck Blog contest by submitting this photo and report on a Hollywood traffic hazard you wouldn't believe.

"This patch of roadway abomination is found on Western Avenue, northbound approaching Lexington. It is part of a much larger network of roadway cracks, gaps and holes that keep Western Avenue cyclists alert...

"It wasn't until a bus rolled by that I realized that the pothole was actually a series of asphalt islands that "floated" or moved independently of each other, offering a sophisticated "suspension" quality to the roadway, evidence that perhaps this was not simply another pothole network but perhaps an experimental LADOT roadway innovation! The "comfort lane!"

 "The roadway is so broken that the safest place to ride is out to the left edge of the curb lane,  maintaining a straight line and controlling the lane. The cyclist above demonstrates the correct lane positioning for Western Avenue. This is true for many of the larger boulevards in the area, from Vermont and Western to Hollywood and Sunset.

"To those who might argue that the cyclist should give up the lane to motor vehicle traffic and ride the gutter pan, another obstacle awaits! Granted, the city of Los Angeles has a grate replacement program under way, but it only covers an average of  5 grates per Council District. Grate! Great!

"Ultimately, I'd gladly trade all the promises of a network of bikeways in the sweet by-and-by for a simple roadway maintenance program that puts a priority on keeping the curb lanes ridable. The big streets really can work for many, they actually get across town, there's space, when traffic is flowing it's a great place to ride...but the potholes!

"Clean up the curb lane, it's good for cyclists and that is good for all of us!"

This is one of the many reasons Stephen has gotten involved in trying to make L.A. a great city instead of a pothole hell without anywhere near the number of bike lanes a great city of the 21st century should have.

What do you think is wrong with L.A.? What do you want to see happen that would make it the city you think is great? When will you get mad enough to do something about it?

People from all over L.A. are committed to coming to City Hall to air their gripes at noon July 14 and help launch the Saving L.A. Project -- S.L.A.P. -- a citywide coalition of concerned citizens who are ready to work together to Take Back L.A. and Demand A Great City.

That's the slogan we've come up with for the Bastille Day rally at City Hall at noon July 14.

It is meant to launch a new era in L.A., to give birth to a democratic movement that empowers the people and the communities to solve the growing problems caused by a failing educational system and a failing government.

The battle for a greater Los Angeles will not be won through pleading for our leaders to solve the city's problems or through a series of reforms or at the ballot box.

It can only be won through people power. Thousands of people across the city have worked hard to make their communities better and become angry and frustrated by the lip service, the indifference, the arrogance, of a system taken hostage by special interests.

The Saving L.A. Project -- S.L.A.P. -- is organizing a rally for July 14, Bastille Day, the moment the French Revolution began, to launch a movement that will bring together people who love L.A. and want to see change. The protest will start at noon at the South Lawn of City Hall.

Already, people from San Pedro to Sunland-Tujunga and many neighborhoods between them have committed to come to the rally and dump their grievances at City Hall and demand redress.

It is the start of something big. In numbers there is strength and by forming a coalition of concerned citizens we can make a difference, something dozens of local community groups have been unable to achieve over decades of struggling.

Take Back L.A. -- Demand A Great City. That's the theme of the protest. And greatness is our goal.

Great schools where every child is given the opportunity to learn and realize their full potential.

Great neighborhoods, free of gangs and the constant menace of violence, where families can live in safety.

Great businesses that add to the quality of life and provide great jobs.

We must confront the traffic congestion now by finding solutions that give people the choice between walking, biking, busing or driving from place to place.

We must become partners in every development to make sure that every project enhances the quality of our lives.

L.A. is a great place and now it must become a great city before it is too late.

The path we are being led down is the road to ruin, a city of rich and poor. A great city is built around the middle class and offers opportunity to all to achieve that It is not built out of mansions in guarded enclaves and slums under the control of hoodlums.

The people of the city must become full partners with the government in deciding how L.A. moves forward and that can only be achieved by having the power to help or hurt our political leaders. For too long, developers, contractors and public employee unions have held all the power and the residents of L.A. are left begging for what they believe will protect or improve their lives.

The Saving L.A. Project will change that  by forming a united front. We don't have to agree on everything. We just need to support each other in our efforts to make our communities better and our city greater.

Come to the Bastille Day rally. Join hands with your neighbors. This is the birth of real democracy in L.A. where the people are the bosses and the politicians and bureaucrats are the public servants.

Think about this: The city has $8 billion to spend every year but it somehow can't provide even basic services.

That's more money than City Hall has had in history, yet there is a $400 million deficit that has been papered over and there aren't enough cops, housing inspectors, planners, traffic engineers or -- now we learn -- cleanup crews.

The Times today exposes  the travesty of neighborhoods waiting up to two months for Public Works crews to clean up unhealthy filth left by illegal dumpers, ignoring visible evidence that might lead to those responsible and blaming the lack of staff for its failure.

"We can only run so fast, and right now we're running as fast as we can," said Bruce Howell, the Public Works bureaucrat who oversees alley-cleaning. He's paid $107,824.32, according to the Daily News city salary database, presumably to make excuses and avoid accountability.

Of course, when the mayor and Councilwoman Janice Hahn were about the hold a self-promoting publicity event in Watts a few months ago, trash littering three alleys nearby suddenly got cleaned up -- three weeks after being reported.

The rats must have loved  the delay.

What really ought to concern people who want a great city instead of what we got is that the mayor, the Board of Public Works and the council are so out of touch with their responsibilities as the nation's highest paid municipal officials that they didn't know about this breakdown in basic services.

With the Times asking questions, the mayor's office went into high gear. Emergency meetings were held at the highest levels, urgent reports were being prepared and threats of crackdowns were being made.

"The department's response time for this cleanup work is totally unacceptable by any measure," said Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo. "The mayor is not interested in explanations or excuses . . . [and] believes that the bureau is in need of structural change. And he will hold his managers accountable for implementing this change."

Take him at his word. Heads will roll and private firms will be hired in place of city workers to clean up litter faster and cheaper. The revolution at City Hall is under way.

Oh no, that will only happen when the community -- neighborhood councils, resident groups, service clubs, Chambers of Commerce -- join together and take back L.A. and go to work to create the kind of city that's good for people and good for business, a city where the politicians and bureaucrats know it's the people who are the bosses -- not the fatcats, union bosses, developers, contractors and lobbyist machine.

So come all ye faithful to City Hall at noon on Bastille Day July 14 and let City Hall know that a coalition of concerned citizens is forming and the revolution to save L.A. has begun.

June 30 is the end of the six-month reporting period for candidates running in next year's city elections.

In an effort to scare away challengers, Antonio Villaraigosa has pulled out all stops to raise so much money from every quarter -- New York, Chicago, San Francisco, maybe even Israel -- that he's certain to haul in quite a bundle.

The one who guesses closest to the exact dollar amount the mayor has raised will win five coupons for double-doubles at IN-N-OUT.  All you need to do is sign up now (on the promo onthe right) to volunteer, participate or just stay informed about the Saving L.A. Protest at City Hall at noon on July 14, Bastille Day and email your guess to ANTONIOCASH@AOL.COM.

The deadline is midnight Friday June 27. All entries must include your email address and at least a first name. I'll be the judge (on this one you can trust me).

And just for fun go to Mayor Sam's blog and check out the brilliant campaign bumper stickers for possible mayoral candidates. For some reason, the only announced challenger, Walter Moore, is so far left out so check him out at his site.

My only qualification for the job of deciphering L.A. Times stories that do their best to obscure the truth about what the hell is going on in this town might be the two years I studied Sanskrit in college, a dead language much like that often used by the city's dominant news source.

"L.A. generosity flows in Mid-City..City puts up millions to see real estate group CIM finish Midtown Crossing development"

Those are the headlines above a story today at the bottom of the California section. The story backs in softy to an account of how CIM Group, a well-connected Westside developer that has flourished in the last 15 years often with the help of its City Hall connections.It isn't mentioned on the front page of latimes.com and can only be found two clicks later well down on the website's local news page.

Eventually, we learn CIM has projects, some in serious trouble, that the city and city employee pension funds have been throwing good money after bad at, particularly the Midtown Crossing project at Pico and San Vicente.

Despite misgivings of its members, the Community Redevelopment Agency recently called for the city to up its subsidy from $5 million to $14 million in the project. You can bet the mayor along with Councilman Herb Wesson who has been very helpful to CIM twisted a few arms to get that vote.

What's astonishing about this story is that near the end of it we learn why we the taxpayers are giving away our money to rich developers.

"Redevelopment officials argue that without the subsidy CIM Group would achieve a financial return of only 7 % on its project -- lower than typical developments. Still unclear is how much advertising revenue the company would obtain by winning approval of the special sign district."

The sign district, being sought by CIM pal Herb Wesson, would allow the company to make a lot of money because the site could have signage that "display 'supergraphics' -- vinyl advertisements permitted by city law only in special cases."

So there you have it: They're going to give away our money to fat-cat developers who aren't satisfied by a 7 % return on their investment in order for them to make 20 % on a project that will create a lot of low-paying retail jobs and poison the visual environment with hideous signage that encourages materialistic obsession.

Of course, that's just the interpretation of a failed Sanskrit scholar whose headline across the top of the paper's front page might have read:

"CITY HALL GIVEAWAY...Taxpayer money goes to boost developer's profits"

Come with me back in time a decade ago and listen to the story of San Fernando Valley secession and what we learned about the rights of the people who pay the bills.

Quite siimply, we learned that all the streets and sidewalks, all the sewers, water lines, power poles and lines, all the the municipal buildings, all the parks, everything that a private individual or business doesn't hold the deed to belongs to the legal fiction known as the City of Los Angeles, Inc.

None of it belongs in any sense to the people, the people who create the government to serve them -- of, by and for them -- and who pay the taxes, fees and rates that paid for the city and support it with their money. So when breakup was the issue, we were told the Valley as a city -- the nation's sixth largest, richest, safest and most intergrated big city -- owned nothing.

Everything public would belong to the City of L.A. even though it was not in L.A. but in the wannabe City of the San Fernando Valley.

Now it's 2008, and the city can't afford to maintain its property except  for coming up with $300 million to turn City Hall into a palace of  gold and marble and $500 milion to build a new police station to beautify downtown for skyscraper developers.

The property issue of the moment is sidewalks. The city ended its policy of fixing sidewalks just about the time the official policy of City Hall became giving every dollar available to pad the salaries of city employees' paychecks and grease the palms of developers and contractors.

The result is a 75-year backlog of broken and crumbling sidewalks that are hazardous to your health and lead to numerous claims and lawsuits.

Enter Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, a Republican from Westlake Village where the sidewalks and streets are in perfect condition She has proposed AB 1985 that would "hold the owner of the property on which the sidewalk is located liable for the repair and maintenance of the sidewalk."

Those are the words of L.A.'s Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and his assistant Roslyn Carter Phillips who last week sounded the alarm that City Hall's right to ownership without responsibility was under siege.

I have long mocked the idea that all the campaign money and favors bestowed on politicians brought special interests what has been euphemistically called "access."

Developers, contractors, anyone wanting to profit from government get to meet privately (i.e. secretly) with elected officials, their staffs and the bureaucracy and gather information not publicly available and to set the terms of the discussion by conveying what is in their self-interest before anyone else has a say.

This is usually done for these special interests by lobbyists, lawyers, public relations experts, consultants and political strategists who have long relationships with the government officials, relationships that are both personal and professional, and enriched by the flow of political money and advice, both free and paid for.

Most of these contacts and the business transactions they involve never even bubble to the surface, never even become public knowledge. And when they do, it is far down the road. At the point ordinary citizens become aware of what's going on, the game is up. With limited  knowledge of the fine details, relatively inexperienced at such games, the public is easily dismissed as NIMBYs, easily beaten

I knew this was a great injustice. But until I got down on the ground as a community activist myself in the last two months I didn't know just how great an injustice it is.

In hearing first-hand the frustration of community groups who just want a legitimate voice in the political process, a seat at the table of power, I got angry, angry enough to decide something dramatic had to be done to change the situation.

That's why I called for the Saving L.A. Protest at noon on July 14 at City Hall, to take the first step in creating a citywide coalition of concerned citizens who would be able to mobilize to change the rules of engagement at City Hall, to change the way the process works, to make government accountable to the people.

It's a tall order I know. But the system has grown so arrogant and abusive that we need what my friend Teddy says is a Boston Tea Party to ignite the public's emotions and get something going.

Just look at how Steve Sugerman, a onetime deputy mayor, and Richard Alatorre, a longtime elected official  -- admitted felons who were convicted for crimes involving public corruption -- are getting rich operating deep inside City Hall \. They have total access to the mayor and everyone else while the public comes with hat hand to be ignored during their two-minutes before the City Council or double-talked when they try to get information.

Former Fleishman-Hillard p.r. executive Sugerman pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge, saying he thought his boss Doug Dowie wanted him to overbill the Department of Water and Power yet he's the point man earning a fortune peddling his influence for the massive Playa Vista development, the Southwest Museum and other clients with city busiiness.

He's registered as a lobbyist but claims most of his income doesn't come from actually peddling influence directly to the pols; it comes from helping clients manipulate the political process so you, the people, aren't entitled to know that.

And Jack Weiss -- the wannabe top city law enforcement officer as City Attorney -- thinks nothing of having Sugerman host a recent fund-raiser for him. We'll never really know how much was raised at the event because the biannual reports don't show anything but the date the check was written, not who attended the event and when the deal was cut.

I know now I will not be alone in a Bastille Day protest at City Hall.

So many others have stepped forward and said they too are fed up with the arrogance and failure of our city government that I know there will be a decent crowd at high noon on the 14th of July.

The question is whether there will be enough decent people to become an army that storms the bastille and shakes the foundation of L.A.'s corrupt political culture.

Saving L.A. -- that's the mission. Celebrating L.A. the place and demanding that it becomes a city, a real city where we all come together around a vision of something greater than ourselves, a great city.

We are at the tipping point. Too much greed. Too much poverty. Too many problems left  unsolved. Bad schools, over-development, traffic congestion, neighborhoods held hostage by gangs, official indifference to the values of the people, fragmented and weak communities -- L.A. teeters on the brink.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can have great schools and great neighborhoods, great streets and great parks, great busineses and great jobs. We can be greener and safer.We can be happier.

But we will never achieve that when all the leadership gives us is choices between paying twice for garbage collection or fewer cops, between power outages and water shortages and higher rates, between something bad and something worse.

City Hall has more than enough money to solve the city's problems. But too much is given away in sweetheart contracts and giveaways to developers and contractors for no purpose other than to maintain the system of failure. Too much is spent in ways that don't matter and too little on ways that would make our lives better and our communities more livable.

We need to spend our money smarter to create the kind of choices people want and the city needs. We need to raise the standards and create the kind of a city where we can choose to walk or ride a bike or take a bus or drive when we leave our homes to go to work or play. We need to able to choose between a good public school or a good charter school. We need good choices, not choices between the lesser of two evils.

The  leadership of this city is incapable of real change. It will take the people. It will take you to step forward and get the revolution started by joining the Saving L.A. Protest and make it a S.L.A.P. in the face of our elected officials, a wakeup call that the rules are changing, that the people are taking over.

I'm just a voice in the crowd. But people are stepping forward who have spent years working in the trenches to make their neighborhoods better, who know how to organize and make this happen. It will take more people to pull this off, to volunteer and turn this into something big and the start of something bigger.

So let me know if you're coming, if you want to help figure out how we make this protest a celebration of the spirit of L.A.'s people and their hopes for the future. We don't need to get mad to get even. We can come together and party and if there's enough of us there, they'll get the message.

This city belongs to you and me. So let's take our gripes and grievances down to City Hall and leave them there as a petition for redress. Every neighborhood, every group has their own set of issues, their own values. We don't need to agree on anything except our right to a government that serves us, not special interests, and our respect for each other's right to be empowered to affect public policy.

This S.L.A.P. in City Hall's face can be the beginning, the dawning of a new L.A. Come join the party!
 


 

UPDATE: I haven't been able to connect with LAUSD on the subject but I'm told that despite what the website says about non-profits only, the district has permitted developers and other commercial interests to use school sites in the past. And that's my point public rules for the public and private rules for special interests is the hallmark of LAUSD and City Hall for that matter.

It has been a long-standing policy of the LAUSD to allow the use of public school facilities after hours only to non-profit organizations.

That's why the Sunland-Tujanga community got so aroused when it found out Mt. Gleason school was being turned over to Home Depot for a community meeting June 24 to win support for its effort to convert a closed K-Mart into one of their stores.

They started an email campaign that inundated school officials this week with complaints that giving a permit to one of America's most profitable companies violated the district's own rule.

Whatever you might think about the community's years long fight to keep Home Depot out of Sunland-Tujunga, you should be concerned about how LAUSD solved the controversy.

This is what they put up on district's website today:

Civic Center Permits

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The major function of the Civic Center Permit Office is the issuance of the appropriate permit to allow for the use of school facilities in conformance with the California Education Code mandate and the Board of Education rules, which require that each and every public school facility be made available as a civic center to members of the community and non-profit organizations for supervised recreational activities, meetings and public discussions, when regular school activities are not disrupted.

To qualify for a permit:
A group must be non-profit.(Incorrect)
Updated 6/12/08: The activity requested must be not for profit.

Poof, the problem is gone. Just change the rules. And for that I think the district with an unbroken record of failing millions of students for 30 years deserves the Chutzpah Award for pure blatant utter contempt for the public.

You got to give the bloated, overpaid and incompetent bureaucracy credit for nakedly showing exactly how they deal with all kinds of problems. Cross out the wrong answer and put in the right one. In a word, cheat.

That's exactly why the district fails. It gets the answers to problems wrong every day but instead of learning from its mistakes and getting better, it simply crosses out failure and writes in success That way there's no accountability, no growth.

And that's exactly why the people of Sunland-Tujunga feel that no matter what happens, the Home Depot store will be shoved down their throats Their experience with the city is no different than with the schools and that's what I'm hearing from people all over the city.

For my money, there is only one answer and that's to change tactics and to stop playing by the rules of a rigged game.

So if you care about the schools or the quality of life in your neighborhood or any other issues that affect your life because of local policies, join me and other community activists in a protest at City Hall on July 14, Bastille Day, the day the French Revolution began.

Ellen  Vukovich
Community Correspondent
 

I hate to admit it, but I still like living in Los Angeles.

Well, not exactly Los Angeles, but the San Fernando Valley, primarily Sherman Oaks.  That's why I volunteer my time to help keep my community a nice place to live and work in. 

However, I feel like vultures are circling around us like downed prey. I realize that our relatively traffic-less part of Ventura Boulevard and laid back Valley lifestyle could soon be devoured by a pro-development City Hall. 

Of course, we will fight to keep that from happening. The Valley has long been known for active community involvement but, that's no excuse for sitting on the sidelines, no matter where you live and work.  

Frankly, our generally great So Cal weather almost makes for a good trade-off between our worsening traffic congestion, and degradation of a once-affordable quality of life.

For those yearning to escape into a swimming pool, our mostly sunny days means we actually get to take pleasure in doing something the City does right.  Namely, taking a swim in a nearby Olympic-sized swimming pool owned and operated by LA.

The fact is this City run facility works very well -- clean and clear filtered water, hot water in the showers, and convenient hours reminds me that Los Angeles is still capable of doing something beneficial for the public, at a relatively modest cost to them.

And, yes, I do take note that I am a contradiction -- I spend more time out of the water stating what needs to be fixed in Los Angeles than remembering to say some parts do work well, such as non-toilet water filled swimming pools.