Community Activists: July 2008 Archives

"You got to meet Lucille Saunders."  I must have been told that half a dozen times in the past few weeks. '"She's the one who gets things done."

At the Saving L.A. Project's Bastille Day rally at City Hall I did get to meet Lucille and spend a few minutes with her. My wife spent a lot of time with her and told me later, "You've got to really meet Lucille. She's amazing."

Lucille Saunders, psychotherapist in private practice and longtime community activist, has taken a bead on the No. 1 problem in Los Angeles: Out-of-control development without a coherent plan for making the city better for its residents, workers or businesses.

She's found the fatal flaw -- and she's trying to drive a stake through the heart of City Hall's corruption.

What has been going on for years as anybody who has paid the least bit of attention knows is that our public servants have been selling out the public interest to developers.

What Saunders has found is that City Hall is violating state law and the city's own general plan for development -- and the violations have been going on for a decade.

Saunders and the La Brea-Willoughby Coalition she leads sued the city last month with the help of attorneys Sabrina Venskus and Emilee Moeller. They don't want money, only for the city to obey the law. Here is the suit, click on the link to download:
labrea.pdf.

"We will not be diverted from what we're asking. We will not be co-opted," Saunders told me."There's audits and procedures required by law that must be done... or the city cannot know whether developing is outpacing infrastructure. The city hasn't followed the rules since 1998."

If Saunders wins, we ought to build a statue to her on the South Lawn of City Hall.

Victory would mean the judge imposes a moratorium on city approval of zoning changes and changes to specific community or the general plans until the monitoring and reporting is completed. It also would force officials to sit down at the table of power with the people and figure out what kind of city this is and how the quality of life can be improved for all and make sure new projects enhance, rather than degrade, the urban environment or face the consequences with an increasingly organized and effective electorate.

Dressed appropriately for the occasion writer, performer and NPR commentator Sandra Tsing Loh, author of "A Year in Van Nuys" and public school advocate, speaks at the Saving L.A. Project's July 14th Bastille Day rally at City Hall.

KABC morning talk show host Doug McIntyre speaks to the Bastille Day rally at City Hall.

Green Dot Charter School head Steve Barr speaks to Bastille Day Rally

City Controller Laura Chick's remarks at the Bastille Day rally

Noel Weiss, an attorney long active in community affairs, speaks at the ralley

City Councilman Dennis Zine speaks at the Bastille Day rally

Clean money advocate Wayne Williams speaks to the Bastille Day rally

Videos by Michael Cohen

For those who came from every corner of L.A. to City Hall on Monday, something good and positive happened at the Saving L.A. Project's rally.

There was a feeling of belonging, of being among people like yourself who care deeply about the community they are part of, of being among people who have worked long and hard to make their dreams come true and kept alive their spirit in the face of official resistance and the apathy of so many.

For a couple of hours, they felt hope that they were there at the birth of a movement that finally would bring to life the real spirit of the city -- the spirit of the freest place on earth, a place where dreams really can come true.

These aren't people who dream of wealth or glamor or stardom or the pleasure of libidinal excesses. Theirs are more mundane dreams: Good schools, safe streets, healthy neighborhoods, a good life for themselves and others.

There were in all 200 or so people there, 135 signed up to be part of this people's coalition. Most of the rest already were involved.

Here's how the Daily News, Times and City News Service covered Monday's Bastille Day rally, which also got coverage local radio and TV news shows.

"The political institution of LA is corrupt," Kaye told a sizable crowd yesterday afternoon. "We've got to take them down and be the boss."

The crowd, which was mostly white and middle-aged, clapped, cheered, and egged Kaye on to say some more. It was the first public rally for the former editor's brainchild called The Saving LA Project, and it showed, at the very least, that a groundswell of frustrated citizens were now willing to speak up, organize, and hit the streets. The politicians will be watching Kaye's follow through.

Daily News:

Ex-editor holds  fix-L.A. rally

The impetuous fool in me came out a while back and I declared publicly I was going to engage in an act of civil disobedience and carry a bag of garbage down to City Hall on Bastille Day and deposit it as an act of civil disobedience.

Foolish I might be but I'm a man of my word and on Monday I'll bring a bag of garbage and leave it on the steps of City Hall as a symbol of protest, an expression of my anger over soaring trash and other fees and the declining quality of life in the city I love.

I've learned since I made that declaration that we don't need acts of civil disobedience to change L.A. from a city rotting in the failure of its leadership to a city rising on the energy of its people.

The outpouring of support from hundreds of dedicated people from all over the city who have worked so hard for so long to make our community better has helped me to see the light.

We have the numbers. We have the knowledge and the skill. We have the leaders in community groups of one type or another to take power from the special interests without acts of defiance.

Nothing but greed holds the power structure together and it will crumble in the face of a united community. Our elected officials are held hostage by the unions, developers and contractors who flatter their delusion of self-importance with the money that keeps them in office.

From the Eastside to the Westside, from San Pedro to the Valley, I've heard over and over similar stories of frustration with our city government and our elected officials, and with their neighbors hiding behind indifference and ignorance.

The issues may be different in different neighborhoods, in different communities of interest, but the experience is the same. We get the runaround while special interests are buying access and favors.

It's time to put aside the differences and find the common ground that brings us together as people, as residents of L.A., as people who want a great city with great schools and great neighborhoods.

The power structure has used these differences -- race, class, needs, values -- to keep us separated and weak, begging for crumbs from the table of power while the insiders feast on the city's wealth.

We need to change the system. We need to seize power and make our government accountable to us, to do what we want.

There's only one way for this happen. It's through a community coalition that is united in support of each other, united in demanding openness, honesty, accountability and respect for the people of the city.

This is America and the basic civil rights of the ordinary men and women of L.A. have been trampled upon for too long. We have a right to own our schools, our neighborhoods and our city.

On Monday -- Bastille Day when the French Revolution began more than 200 years ago -- people from every part of L.A. are coming to City Hall at noon to Take Back Los Angeles -- Demand A Great City.

We don't need garbage to symbolize our frustration. We need each other.

We'll listen to each other's stories of the failure of city government to serve us and the failure of the schools to serve our children. We'll talk about overdevelopment and bad development, traffic congestion and poor public transit and we will open the dialogue on how to solve these and so many other problems now and in the long run.

We need to learn from each other. We need to understand each other. And we need to come up with solutions that achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

We know there are no easy answers. But through an honest and open public conversation we can do a lot better than what we've been doing.

Whether there are 30 of us or 300 come to City Hall on Monday, this will be the start of something big, something great. It's not going to come from high from the people in power. It's going to have to come from the grassroots, from you.

This rally is only the first step. We will follow up quickly with a town hall meeting to organize our coalition of the people. And we will build on that and grow more confident with each success and see those on the sidelines step forward into the public arena.

That's my dream anyway, fool that I might be. But I know now that there are others who share that dream and are willing to help make it come true.

Skeptical as he should be, Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal, wrote a column  published online Wednesday under the headline Take back L.A. -- the theme of Monday's noon rally at City Hall -- based on the realization  that  "we're fast becoming a second-rate city."

Eshman observes "public safety is broken...education is broken...public health care is broken...transportation is broken...those Neighborhood Councils don't have enough power, the L.A. City Council and Board of Supervisors have too many constituents....."

He writes:

"Now there is a movement afoot to change that. The unlikely agitator is a middle-aged Jewish man in Woodland Hills, Ron Kaye.

"Kaye, the former editor of The Daily News, has put together the Saving L.A. Project (yes, SLAP). The idea is to inspire and empower citizen activists across the city to voice their anger at the way things are, and to come up with a "Contract for L.A." outlining a bold, future-oriented agenda for the city.

"The group will hold its first rally on Monday, July 14, at noon on the steps of City Hall. "People from around the city of Los Angeles will come together," reads the group's Web site, www.savingla.com, "to demand that our city leadership join the people in making Los Angeles a great city."

"I took issue with Kaye when he backed Valley secession back in 2002. It struck me as a misguided protest, whose end result would be to create another huge bureaucracy side by side with Los Angeles' existing one.

"But now I think he's onto something.

"'I came to the conclusion that the problem is us," he told me by phone. "We don't seize power. We let them use our money to run circles around us."

"'The Internet has leveled the playing field somewhat, helping citizens organize, spreading important local news in a town whose main paper has all but abdicated that role. Saving L.A. hopes to inspire "a lively public discussion," said Kaye, and stiffen the spine of leaders like Villaraigosa. "If we have enough energy and can define the agenda," he said, "maybe these people will do what they have to do."

"Monday, July 14, at noon Ron Kaye will be on the steps of City Hall -- mad as hell.

"I'll be there, too."

 

UPDATE: Police intend to seek criminal charges against a motorist involved in a road rage  incident that seriously injured two cyclists in Mandeville Canyon on July Fourth. Laist.com has shocking photos and the story.

 You've heard the story now of how the city is destroying my neighborhood by passively standing by while a single-family house has been turned into a tenement apartment building and how commenters say the same thing is happening in their neighborhoods.

But did you know that golfers at city courses now have to show driver's licenses to prove they really are legal residents of L.A. even as City Hall resists asking for the same kind of proof from illegal immigrant gangsters who commit crimes, violent or otherwise.

And then there's the astonishing case of the LAPD's handcuffing and searching bicyclists for not having a front light -- one of a growing number of incidents logged at laist.com that suggests the LAPD has decided cyclists, not gangsters, are the real menace to our society.

SoapBoxLA.com reported on the incident that occurred last Wednesday in Hollywood and it seemed so outrageous I decided to call the cyclists involved myself.

The story involves a high-tech software developer, a young woman and a UCLA doctoral candidate in mathematics who were cycling home from Echo Park to the Westside when they were treated the way the LAPD used to treat hoodlums in its militaristic glory days under Daryl Gates.

The cyclists -- Alex Thompson, Paul Bringetto and Andrea Tzvetkov -- saw a Latino man slowly riding his bike being pulled over and handcuffed. They didn't know the man but they decided to stop and observe what was happening because that's the protocol adopted by activists who are demanding a Cyclist Bill of Rights.

Officers Corona and Stine did not like being watched and certainly didn't like Bringetto asking what was going on.

"It's like they equate bikes with poverty and poverty with criminals and think they can get away with anything," said Thompson, the doctoral candidate who will be blogging about the incident today at Westside BikeSide, an activist website.

He recalled Corona telling Bringetto, "Mind your own business."

Bringetto: "What did he do wrong?"

Corona: "Don't move. Stay there."

Bringetto: "We're just here to observe."

Corona: "You're going to jail."

By Ellen Vukovich

Community correspondent

I have a small proposal which could have large implications for changing LAUSD schools. At minimum, it would stir things up. At maximum, it might even succeed.  

Imagine if parents with children in private schools enrolled them in their neighborhood public schools. Instead of paying tens of thousands for school tuition, they could donate one-half of that money to help to pay for what LAUSD no longer provides -- like supplies, art, music and shop classes along with some field trips.

This is key: Parents could take the time and dedication they currently lavish on private schools and do the same for their children's new schools.

Can you imagine if every neighborhood school was filled to the brim with parents and children that way? Can you imagine how that would inspire the teachers and staff?  Students might be inclined to want to learn. 

Over the last few years, friends have told me of their experiences with their children going to private schools. Excellent academic programs. A strong support system thanks to active parent participation. Catered lunches.  Themed parties and after-school events.

I went to LAUSD schools and we had some of that too.

UPDATE: laist.com riffs off of Lopez column and mentions the Bastille Day rally, observing, "The Saving L.A. Project seems to directly answer everyone's questions when it comes down to what's wrong and how to fix it: While we need great leaders, we need each other more."

L.A. Times star columnist Steve Lopez visited Chicago recently and was struck by the dynamism of  a city with strong leadership and the will to make things better -- a sharp contrast to what he sees happening in our city.

In his column Sunday,  Lopez asks a series of rhetorical questions to show just how big a difference there is between the city of Big Shoulders and what we all might agree is our city with no guts -- views that are similar to what I wrote about after my recent visit to Chicago.

He writes about how Chicago, under the leadership of Mayor Richard Daley, gets things done while L.A. under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa languishes. "(Villaraigosa''s) self-induced loss of momentum, along with funding shortages and a City Council that never veers from its quest for mediocrity, have conspired to knock the shine off Antonio's Holy Card smile."

Lopez and I spoke at length Thursday about this tale of two cities and he mentions the Bastille Day July 14 rally at noon at City Hall, calling the idea of leading a public revolt -- in the absence of real leadership by our elected officials -- "the least rewarding of all L.A. challenges."

He closes by saying, "OK, I'm all for revolution. But at least for a while, couldn't we work out an exchange program in which we trade Villaraigosa for Daley and see what happens?

His skepticism is appropriate until enough of us come together and demonstrate we can force City Hall to respond to our concerns instead of giving us lip service and the special interests our money.

The publicity for the rally is welcome. We've printed up thousands of fliers to promote the rally and we need people to distribute them far and wide so email me and we'll figure out how to get some to you. I can also send you an email copy of the flier and the letter that community activists are sending out all over town.

From Boyle Heights to Westchester, from West Hills to San Pedro, people are committed to coming down to City Hall on Monday July 14th. There is your chance to shake the foundations of City Hall and begin the process of bringing real democracy to L.A. and empowering the communities to stand up together to a failing power structure.

Take Back Los Angeles -- Demand A Great City. Join the Saving L.A. Project.