Hot Topics: April 2008 Archives

Scaled down and still unable to arrange financing, Eli Broad's grandiose vision for L.A. is in deep trouble.

The Grand Avenue project was supposed to be the Central Park of L.A., the masterpiece of human ingenuity that was finally to make downtown the true center of the city, the place where all roads led and all people came to celebrate the wonders of urban life in Southern California.

In truth, the project exposes everything wrong with the city.

There is utterly no grassroots support for it, no public demand or interest, only the vision of a philanthropic billionaire who truly believes great monuments and a great downtown make a great city and has the clout to bring politicians to their knees to do his bidding.

Ever since Tom Bradley won election in 1973, the insider power structure has invested the city's wealth into downtown with massive public subsidies that robbed neighborhoods everywhere of services, infrastructure investment and support necessary for community health.

Once upon a time I delighted in giving Mike Feuer a hard time.

He asked for it by always reminding everybody he went to Harvard and acted like that proved he was smarter than them as if being smart was the most important quality in a person, as if going to Harvard meant you were better than getting an AA degree from Pierce College.

Maybe losing the election for City Attorney to fellow Harvard grad Rocky Delgadillo chastened Mike but I've found myself liking him a lot in my last few encounters and that made his earnestness more appealing.

So I'm not giving Mike a hard time personally over his latest email blast to constituents where he boasts of all the bills he has introduced -- 22 in all. Think about it: 22 bills times 120 members is potentially, 2,640 new laws. God help us!

There's so many laws on the books already that nobody knows what's right or wrong anymore. I've long argued there ought to be a law: No new law can be passed without repealing an old law. I don't have a clue as to how many laws there are on the books in L.A., California and  Washington but I'll to bet the number runs into the millions.

Enough already, let's cap the number until all reasonable people can tell what's legal and what's illegal. It makes you wonder how God boiled it down to Ten Commandments, obviously he hadn't created lawyers when He set down His law.

Here's why my mantra for so long has been: I love L.A., phonetically that comes out I luuuuuv L.A.

This is a city of light and dark, yin and yang, Hellywood where the lost souls of the world come to work out their karma, a city of temptations where there's no middle ground. You either get well, get dead or get out.

Which brings me to L.A. City Hall which has done none of those things. It continues to operate much like the Kremlin undemocratically and indifferent to the needs of the people.

Perhaps that's why the sidewalks have been left to crumble for decades without City Hall even being able to decide on a policy of whether the city or property owners are liable for repairs and for injuries that occur because of broken cement. The result is the city has paid out tens of millions of dollars in damage claims and there's an 83 year backlog of needed sidewalk fixes, even worse than the 75 year backlog for street paving. Some 4,600 miles of sidwalks need repairs, nearly half of the city's sidewalks.

Enter the do-littles of the City Council with a brilliant scheme to shift the responsibility to property owners who would have to pay for sidewalk repairs to be able to sell their homes or businesses. Homeowners could be hit with as much as a $7,000 repair bill which could wipe out a lot of people's equity given the 25 percent drop in home prices which is certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

With its typical cynicism the council named its most conservative, pro-business member, Greig Smith, to be the point man for this trick, a man with nothing to lose since he's leaving office next year after two terms and 25 years or so serving the whims of his illustrious predecessor, the unforgettable Hal Bernson.

Trouble is Smith has run into a firestorm of opposition from the Realtors and the newly-formed 80,000 member Los Angeles County Business Federation. They think the proposal won't fix the sidewalks, will hurt a lot of people and slow down property sales. They want the current 50/50 split program between the city and property owners to be expanded instead of elminated.

None of that matters to the council, having given away the treasury to city unions, developers and contractors -- not to mention all the money they put into their own pockets as the nation's highest paid elected city officials. The council now faces a monumental budget deficit that they want to solve by taking more money away from the people's pockets and providing less services to them.

The sidewalks point-of-sale policy fits in perfectly. It achieves nothing to make the city better and it saves the $9 million the city now pays annually for repairs plus it makes property owners the liable party, saving millions more in damage claims. That will go a long way toward keeping them and their vast staffs with all those city cars and blackberrys and other perks happy and keep the unions supportiing them.

The last point is the most telling. The pressure to adopt this policy comes from the SEIU, the largest city union whose members are the lowest paid -- which isn't saying much since city workers salaries and benefits far exceed those available in the private sectors or in big cities across the country for that matter.

The union wants to make sure its members get the 5 percent a year raises they were just promised and keep their jobs until they can retire at any early age with 75 percent of their salary and health benefits for life.

Who can blame them.

All that's standing in the way of this deal going through is the entire business community of Los Angeles which has harbored long-standing feelings that City Hall's brand of municipal socialism is somehow anti-business.

So they've mounted a letter-writing and lobbying campaign to derail the plan, much to the chagrin of Councilman Smith.

He is mad as hell about their resistance and in an email now circulating throughout the business community made it perfectly clear he's not going to take it anymore.

Smith asserts he is the "lone voice' that even wanted the business community to have be involved in the process. He accuses Realtors in particular of the "lie" that city wants to "shift" the responsibility for sidewalks to property owners, noting a 1911 state law making property owners responsible.

"The fact that the city began fixing sidewalks under Mayor Riordan has given the false imprression, and promulgated by the representatives of the Board of Realtors and the Daily News, that it is a city responsibility. IT IS NOT."

Then Smith throws his best punch, he'll turn against the business community if they persist.

"So, if the Board continues to tell its members and the public, as your spokesman did on television not long ago, that the "City is trying to shift its responsibility onto the taxpayer, and they have plenty of money to fix it themselves (the city), then I shall cease being your major supporter.''

I know Greig is hard to read and understand and there's various grammatical issues but i'm just repeating what he wrote.

But you get the gist: He's not going to be their friend anymore unless they play nice the way he likes it.

Far be it for me to throw around accusations about lying but Smith either is deliberately obscuring the truth or he doesn't know his L.A. history despite more than three decades in city government.

The facts are these: One of the first things that the Tom Bradley revolution did in 1973 was to formally take responsibility to get the crumbling sidewalks fixed across the city. And Bradley did that for a decade or so until federal money ran out and the economy softened and the city stopped making the repairs.

And there the issue has sat for more than 20 years except for a brief period when Richard Riordan was trying to fix city government to actually fulfill its mission of serving the people.

Can you imagine how a city government can even pretend to be a government when it can't even decide who has to fix the sidewalks. 

Is it any wonder that they can't fix the public transportation system, or get rid of gangs, or attract companies with good-paying jobs, or create healthy neighborhoods?

When the secession movement in the Valley was in full sway, the Daily News did stories with photographs showing how the streets and sidewalks in L.A were broken and crumbled and how across the street in Burbank, San Fernando and other cities they were in good repair.

Cops talk about the broken window theory of crime, how broken windows are a symbol of the breakdown in law and order. Well, broken sidewalks belong in the same category, a symbol of the failure of government to do its fundamental job of making life better for the people. 

So I'm out of work and my nest egg for retirement is cracking with my home worth 25 percent less than a year ago, my Social Security check doesn't go very far and I'm being hit with a lot of extra bills as I try to start a new life.

And now I find out the city, county and state want a lot more money from me.

Don't cry for me L.A. I've lived modestly within my means and i've got a little put away to tide me through these rainy days.

But that's not true for a lot of people and it's certainly not what the city, county or state did during the recent years of soaring revenue. They spent their money -- I mean our money -- even faster than it came in. The result is they are facing huge deficits, mostly caused by giveaways to contractors, developers and public employees.

I got nothing against those classes of people personally. They've just been acting out of the force of a habit that developed during decades in which their inordinate power allowed them to feast on the public treasury without regard to the public interest.

No, the problem isn't them. It's the politicians who have gotten away with violating their oaths of office, their vows to serve the public for too long, who squandered all our money and worst of all, didn't solve any of our problems.

And now as thousands of people are losing their jobs and gas is nearing $4 a gallon, the politicians are telling us their only answer is for us, the taxpayers, to pay more and get less in public services.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, has put it most nakedly: For every dollar he raises in new revenue from taxpayers, he wants to cut $1.50 in services to the public.

It's a really quite ingenious scheme. He only needs to raises taxes, fees and rates high enough to generate $200 million and then he can justify $300 million in service cuts to cover the $500 million deficit created under his leadership.

That way he can afford to deliver on the pay raises of 5 to 7 percent a year recently given to city employees in the face of a collapsing economy, avoid cleaning up the city's sloppy contracting practices and  keep on subsidizing massive development projects by Arab oil sheiks and American billionaires -- projects the public doesn't want like Grandiose Avenue.

 And still have enough change left over to to hire a few hundred more cops and keep his campaign pledge to add 1,000 cops to the LAPD's ranks -- something that is an absolute necessity for him to get re-elected next year since he hasn't done much else to distinguish his administration from the lackluster Hahn administration that preceded him.

Higher water rates, higher power rates, higher garbage fees already are in place and today Mayor Villaraigosa will announce new ways to gouge the public when he releases his budget plan for the next fiscal year.

Don't expect what's announced to be clear and transparent. It will take weeks if not months for the press and concerned citizens to actually wade through the morass of obscuring rhetoric and vaguely worded footnotes to actually see the true impact.

The only certainty is that the rich and the poor will be least affected while hard-working people struggling to keep their middle class status or reach the middle class will take the brunt of this assault.

So wake up alll you little people out there. You can either throw up your hands and take it in the chops again or get mad as hell an do something about it.

What is to be done?

You could call, write or email your City Council member or the mayor. But how much good has that ever done.

 If you really want to make a difference, here's a few suggestions:

1. Talk to your friends and neighbors about how mad you are about what's going on and get them fired up.

2. Get involved with them in your neighborhood councils and other community and civic groups in your area and work hard to reach out to everyone you can to join together to take action.

3. Put aside irrelevant ideological differences that don't mean a thing in local politics and band together with other community groups to form a broad coalition to demand City Hall pay attention to what's important to you.

I guarantee that if enough people start participating in our civic life, the insider culture of City Hall will collapse into rubble as if hit by an earthquake. Nothing but greed holds the self-servng political culture of Los Angeles together.

People power will bring it down faster than the Berlin Wall.

In the meantime, sound off about how you feel in the comments box at the top of this item. The time is right. People care about what's going on. It's time to stop grumbling and do something about it.

Inside was a beautiful four-color picture Lloyd took himself at the Sea of Galilee in 2006, according to the caption. And facing it, the lovely sentiment: "Peace and best wishes to you and yours on Passover"...Below that it said: Assembly Lloyd Levine/Candidate for State Senate. The cover states in the postmark Lloyd Levine for Senate and at the bottom is the proper identifier: Paid for by Friends of Lloyd Levine ID #1278106.

I guess Lloyd, as I had suspected previously, is Jewish. And I guess he or his friends have possession of a mailing list that presumes I too am Jewish.

So my question is what does being Jewish have to do with whether I vote in the Democratic primary for the 23rd Senate District for Levine or for his opponent, Assemblywoman Fran Pavley.

I don't know whether Pavley is Jewish or not (I think not) or whether either candidate will be participating in seders tonight when the holiday begins. I honestly don't care but I do have strong feelings about race, gender, religion politics. They offend me.

What I care about is the character and integrity of the candidate and whether they are open and honest about what they believe in and are willing to bend their beliefs in the face of political realities to support policies that make life better for society as a whole.

I haven't decided yet which candidate I'll vote for. Both are very liberal and very much party-line voters in the Assembly. Neither boasts of being endorsed by any Jewish organizations, although Pavley seems to have more personal endorsements of Jewish politicians, if people's religion can be identified by their names, the same presumption that has me on Levine's Jewish mailing list.

Instead of wishing me Happy Passover, I wish Lloyd would have sent me a mailer saying he would stop voting for higher taxes and more spending, that he would support legislation to create competitive districts that brought more moderates of both parties into office and that he would put the common good ahead of ideology, partisanship and personal advancement.

I must be dreaming. Perhaps it's the good feeling that comes with these holy days celebrating the Jewish struggle for freedom that has me hoping for politicians who work first and foremost to create healthy economic climates for hard-working people, good schools that serve the children, safer streets,  better public transportation systems and all the other basic needs of a modern community.

In any case, Happy Passover to you too, Lloyd, and to everyone who celebrates this holiday.

How dumb does City Hall think all us little people are? And why do they want to keep us dumb?

Those questions are rumbling through my mind today over City Hall's latest scheme to pick the pockets of taxpayers: Charging to use the public libraries.

Could anything be more un-American?

Half a century before the country was founded Benjamin Franklin came up with the radical idea of a free public library with the rich putting in some money to buy books and putting them in a public place where anyone could check them out, take them home and read them.

Franklin was quoted as saying "these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesman and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges."

In other words, free access to books let everyone become educated and capable of looking after themselves, even if it meant revolting against the inequitous taxes imposed by a tyrannical ruler.

Clearly, an educated populace is against the interests of those who run this city or they would not have let the LAUSD become the Los Angeles Uneducating School District.

So they have come up with a novel scheme, the same one now being applied to garbage collection and other services to the public: Tax people to provide these public services and then start charging them for these same services. In effect, it's double taxation and undoubtedly goes hand in hand with reducing the services the public has paid twice for.

The specific proposal that comes from the mayor's appointees to the Library Commission is that library users pay a $25 annual fee for their library, initially applying only to non-residents but we all know how that works. It will soon be expanded to residents, the children, the elderly, the poor, everyone.

What's most outrageous is the plan to charge $1 a book when a library user orders a book out of the catalogue and has it brought from another facility to their local branch.

That service is actually one of the few innovations in decades that is actually successful and useful to the public and more importantly was the cornerstone of the whole plan 20 years to squeeze nearly $400 million out of the public's pockets to rebuild every library in the city.

The idea was to build small neighborhood libraries, stock them with only small collections and let people choose from a vast catalogue and have the books delivered to their local branch in a timely manner.

Ingenious, every library didn't need to buy a copy of every new popular book because they could be moved around quickly. Older books could find more borrowers because people would not have to chase around town to get their hands on the books. The book would come to them.

The scheme worked so well the city started spending less and less on new books, only $3 for every person last year and now wants to cut that to $2 a head.

No one should be surprised that City Hall is gearing up to betray its commitment when it went after the two library bond issues, betray the whole idea that free access to books is an integral part of a free society, betray the public trust yet again.

City Hall is broke. Revenue has been soaring for years and the city has spent all that money and a lot more on inflating already inflated employee salaries and benefits, subsidized developments to benefit billionaires and Arab oil sheiks and connived with contractors to loot the public treasury.

So let me offer answers to the questions I raised at the outset:

They know we are dumb because we let them stay in office instead of putting them in jail or at least throwing them out on the streets where they can cadge with the rest of the bums.

 And they want to keep us dumb so they can keep on living high without actually doing anything to make life better for the people who pay the bills, actually pay the bills twice.

Link: http://origin.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8965415 

Free at last!

That's how I feel about starting a new chapter of my life and leaving the Los Angeles Daily News behind after the happiest 23 years in my life personally and professionally.

My last day on the job as editor of the Daily News was April 4 and every day since has been amazing, filled with a lot of love and support from friends, colleagues, acquaintances and even people I didn't know.

The newspaper business has been tough for a long while and getting worse day by day so the stress level has been high and I can't put into words just how good it feels to be free of it, to be free to participate in civic life just as me without a formal role, to speak publicly purely in my own voice and work directly for the things I believe in.

My only regret is the colleagues I've left behind at the Daily News, journalists most especially, since we had a great newsroom and had become a real newspaper with people finding their own voice, having fun telling stories and working hard to reinvent newspapering.

But there are also hundreds of other great people who make up the Daily News I loved so dearly, from telephone sales to the printing plant, from advertising, circulation and all the other business offices -- dedicated people who gave the paper character and identity. I wish them all the best as they struggle to find the keys to keeping alive a nearly 100-year-old tradition of community service to the San Fernando Valley.

I want to talk more about that later, the paper, the Valley, the city, the things I believe in, and the vision that drives me to fight for a better, a greater Los Angeles. I want to write from my heart and I want others to post their stories at ronkayela.com, to engage in a public conversation about who we are and what we could become if we pull together and work together for the common good.

We'll never know what that is or how to achieve it unless we talk about our experiences, our values, our needs and our aspirations. I believe with all my heart that that kind of public conversation will cut through the fog of political, media and corporate double talk and lead us to the common ground where we can start solving the problems of our community and make life better for us all.

I certainly don't pretend to know the answers; I only know what I see and I'm probably wrong about most of all of it. My newsroom knew that, and had a saying, "You can't spell wrong without R-O-N."

So let's tell the truth as we see it and learn from each other. Let the games begin.