Happy Days Are Here Again for City Treasuries So Bureaucrats Are Padding Their Paychecks

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

Here we go again — at the first sign of recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression, government officials are gearing up to line their pockets with taxpayer money.

The Burbank City Council took the lead last week by granting 100 department heads, managers and other non-union employees raises of up to 5%.

They even voted to give themselves 5% raises, but Councilman Gary Bric had a change of heart just before midnight near the end of a six-hour meeting, saying that “there are a lot of other people that are more deserving of that than we are.”

It wasn’t clear whether he meant city workers or the populace in general.

The justification for the pay raises put forth by interim City Manager Ken Pulskamp was that staff surveyed other cities in the region and determined that executive salaries in Burbank were 11% below the market average.

Ignoring individual merit and differences in actual responsibilities, training and experience of employees, the argument presented to the council was carefully sculpted to justify the raises because it’s in the “public’s interest” to have “motivated” managers and to keep the city “competitive.”

In fairness, it has been several years since these workers got raises and they started having to pay a fraction of their pension costs two years ago, an amount that doubled last year and doubles again, now, to 4% of their wages.

Yet, there is a lot that ought to be troubling about this.

Let’s start by noting it was this “competitive” argument that got local and state government in so much financial trouble during the last 20 years.

The real competition wasn’t to retain employees. It was the pressure on politicians from the unions that helped elect them, pressure to keep up with the public employee Joneses — a spiraling competition that escalates employee costs to the point that Burbank spends 80% of its General Fund on payroll and benefit costs.

One city gave cops and firefighters 90% pensions and then, like lemmings, everybody else followed suit. Same with accelerating pensions for civilian workers so they could retire at 55 with three-quarters of their highest salary.

Then there’s the competition to keep up with other cities by expanding health and other benefits, as Burbank did last week, including allowing the employees getting these raises to cash out unused sick leave and vacation time up to 250 hours a year, a 10% increase.

With a public hearing on the city budget coming up June 4, it might be worth taking note that General Fund revenue to pay for most public services is expected to increase less than 1% next year. And just a week before granting these raises, officials had to discuss ways of cutting $2.5 million — or 2% — from the budget.

Apart from setting a precedent that other Burbank employees, and employees of other cities, will surely take as a sign that the taxpayer money machine is flowing again, the really disturbing thing about this is the way it was sold to the City Council and the public.

“Burbank employee raises to save city money via higher pension contributions,” declared the headline in the Burbank Leader last week, capturing exactly the point city officials made by twisted logic in the staff report.

“The city will realize a total savings of $399,835 between FY 2011-12 and FY 2013-14, even with the proposed salary increase,” the report said, thanks to the increase in employee pension contributions.

Of course, that claim ignores the fact that employees were made to contribute to their pensions for the first time two years ago and the savings were already counted toward keeping the budget balanced. The raise effectively compensates them for their contributions.

In other words, they are wiping out the progress that was made to reduce runaway costs that have put some cities crashing into bankruptcy, the same runaway costs that have many others teetering on the brink.

Burbank is not one of those cities. It has a healthy economy, strong tax base and a low poverty rate, but it also is raising fees for public services and rates on utilities while staring at a $252-million unfunded pension liability for its workers.

At a time when the recovery is fragile, when so many in the private sector are losing their jobs and facing low salaries and benefits, when major structural economic changes are occurring — especially in the entertainment industry that is part of Burbank’s economic base — officials should think twice about granting pay raises.

This is a time for prudence, not irrational exuberance. Happy days are not here again, not yet.

(THIS COLUMN WAS PUBLISHED SATURDAY IN THE BURBANK LEADER)

Posted in Glendale-Burbank, Hot Topics | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Elect Mike Feuer as City Attorney — Who Better Than a Crook as L.A.’s Chief Prosecutor and Law Enforcement Officer

Posted on May 16, 2013 by

Putting weaklings without courage like Greuel or Garcetti into the mayor’s office is a problem, a big problem.

Putting a two-faced scoundrel like Zine in the controller’s office as the public’s watchdog when he’s nothing but a yapping Chihuahua is a joke.

But even worse is the near certainty that you the electorate, lapdog to the rich and powerful, will elect a criminal suspect as this second-rate city’s chief prosecutor and law enforcement officer. It is no laughing matter.

Back in the days when he was a City Council member, Feuer made the radical leftist Jackie Goldberg look a Republican and showed so little respect for the law and public policy despite his Harvard law education that he thought it was smarter to pay millions of dollars a year to people injured in trip-and-fall accidents on the city’s crumbling sidewalks than to repair them.

Somehow he fumbled the 2001 City Attorney election, losing to Rocky Delgadillo but found a new calling as a state Assembly member where he supported the spending sprees that have jeopardized California’s future, and backed gutting the California Environmental Quality Act for the benefit of AEG’s now deceased Farmer’s Field project and to squelch community concerns about transit projects in L.A.

His crowning achievement was authoring AB109 to empty the prisons of supposedly non-violent, non-sexual, non-serious offenders without effective monitoring or support – a radical reform of the criminal justice system that has allowed the freed felons to engage in murder, mayhem and rape across the state.

But none of those acts are criminal – just disdainful of the public interest.

No, the crime of Mike Feuer is this:

City Ethics Ordinance, Section 49.7.28.C, “Requests for Matching Funds Payments,”“A candidate who makes a request for matching funds payment and knows or should know that the request is false…is guilty of a misdemeanor and shall return all matching funds received as a result of the request.  If the candidate holds or is elected to office, the false request constitutes a violation of official duties and, if it is deemed appropriate by a court under Charter Section 207 (C), shall be removed from office.” — City Ethics Ordinance, Section 49.7.28.C, “Requests for Matching Funds Payments,”

What Feuer did was conspire with his political consultant John Shallman to make a mockery of public financing of political campaigns.

Under the terms of their deal, Shallman — who is desperate for cash since he faces huge tax liens and debts after being robbed blind in the Kinde Durkee scandal – agreed to take $1 as payment starting in February 2012 through March 5 of this year with a $50,000 bonus if Feuer won outright in the primary. At least that’s what they claimed when questions started being asked.

The value of Shallman’s services over those 13 months was between $200,000 and $300,000 but Feuer did not report it as in-kind contributions at “fair market value” as state law requires, a deceit that allowed him to stay just under the spending limit to qualify for $300,000 in public matching funds for the primary and even more than that in the runoff.

Feuer has shown his legal skills are not all that great in changing his story and double-talking his way around this problem.

He claimed he got “verbal” non-binding approval from someone in the City Ethics staff for a scheme that somewhat parallels the crimes Councilman Martin Ludlow committed in winning election in 2005 before being forced out a year later as he faced felony charges in both state and federal court.

Because Shallman didn’t report his in-kind contributions and now has a contract of a sort with Feuer (for $15,000 a month since their finagling was exposed), they potentially both face felony conspiracy charges, not just misdemeanors – not that anyone in an official capacity has shown any interest in doing anything about this.

The see-no-evil Ethics Commission took a pass on responding to formal complaints about the Feuer scheme. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich in the runoff against Feuer on Tuesday had to recuse himself, leaving it to District Attorney Jackie Lacey who responded by announcing she was endorsing Feuer for City Attorney — not investigating him for criminality.

That left enforcement of the law to private citizen and long-time community activist Laura Lake.

A little known provision of the City Charter allows for the public to act as a “private attorney general,” which the Ethics Commission says provides for “an additional layer of oversight, public involvement and accountability” and allows private citizens to enforce the City’s ethics laws if the city fails to do so in a timely fashion, usually meaning 40 days.

Here are key provisions of the city ethics rules in the Charter:

(2) Civil Enforcement.

(A) Any person who intentionally or negligently violates any provision of this section shall be liable in a civil action brought by the City Attorney or by a person residing within the City. Where no specific civil penalty is provided, a person may be liable for an amount up to two thousand dollars ($2,000) for each violation.

(B) Any person who intentionally or negligently makes or receives a contribution, or makes expenditure, in violation of any provision of this section shall be liable in a civil action brought by the City Attorney or by a person residing within the City for an amount up to three times the amount of the unlawful contribution or expenditure.

Injunction. The City Attorney on behalf of the people of the City of Los Angeles or any person residing in the City of Los Angeles may sue for injunctive relief to enjoin violations or to compel compliance with the provisions of this section. The Court may award a plaintiff or defendant who prevails his or her costs of litigation, including reasonable attorney’s fees; provided, however, that no such award may be granted against the City of Los Angeles.

On Jan. 18, Lake filed a formal ethics complaint. Six weeks later, Shallman claimed in an LA Times interview he was being paid only $1 with a bonus to be determined later.

On March 20, Lake received a letter from the Ethics Commission stating there are no records showing written advice or opinions about Feuer’s contract with Shallman.

A week later, she filed a lawsuit, alleging Feuer violated the law. The next day Feuer announced he was “voluntarily” changing his contract with Shallman because he’s such a great consultant – not because of Lake’s lawsuit.

In subsequent days, Feuer’s story kept changing.

One day, he said he “didn’t think it was necessary” to get the ethics staff’s verbal approval in writing despite clear language in the law that informal advice is not binding. Another day he claimed there was the $50,000 bonus provision in the original contract.

What really matters is that city ethics laws were created to provide a level playing field for candidates and to provide full transparency for campaigns in the city.

For too long, the Ethics Commission has handed down little more than slap-on-the-wrist punishments for violations. If Feuer gets away with this, public financing of campaigns will be dead and ethics laws will be decimated.

Even when Ludlow was forced out of office and prosecuted, he got off with probation and was celebrated as a hero by many of the most powerful and influential people in the city who raised funds for his legal defense.

In Feuer’s case, the best hope is that voters will somehow wake up from their dream world and reject this self-styled advocate of clean and honest elections and supporter of a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions.

If he wins as expected, he will have made a mockery of democracy and provided a fitting end to the pretense of the rule of law, not men.

Someday maybe Mike Feuer will be seen as the living embodiment of the triumph of the tyranny of the majority.

In the meantime, L.A. deserves to have a crook as their chief law enforcement officer, doesn’t it?

Posted in 2013 Election, 2013 LA Elections, City Hall, Community Activists, Hot Topics, Los Angeles | Tagged , , , , , , | 23 Comments

My Sunday Column: An idea whose time hasn’t come — Assembly Democrats Want Legal Immigrants to Serve on Juries

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

My head spun when I heard Democrats with their super-majority in the state Assembly slammed through a bill that would make California the only state in the nation to let immigrants, legal ones, sit on juries.

I thought, “What has America come to when, so soon after the Boston Marathon massacre, we want someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a juror?”

But before I could get my outrage heated up, I found Katy Grimes, a writer on the conservative Cal Watchdog website, already had used the Tsarnaev line and concluded, “If you weren’t outraged over the previous bills affording illegal immigrants’ rights and liberties previously reserved for American citizens, AB 1401 should convince you that this Legislature is hell-bent on eroding what’s left of California.”

I’ve long supported immigrant rights and a pathway to citizenship, in no small part because it’s crazy to have millions of people without identities or records living among us while we spend trillions on measures to make us feel safe.

It passeth all my understanding why Democrats would exercise their absolute power to revolutionize the jury system ahead of all their other agendas: fix the schools, repair the infrastructure, ban cars, abolish corporations — there are so many true-blue targets of greater importance.

As much as we hate serving on juries, or even voting, I had to wonder whether we’ve gotten to the point that we want immigrants to fulfill our responsibilities as citizens.

As an intrepid pursuer of truth — or at least explanations that might be true — I started calling and emailing Assembly members who might shed some light on this mysterious move, starting with local Democrats who had voted for it.

Mike Gatto: Never heard back, maybe because I wrote some things he didn’t like.

Bob Blumenfield: Never heard back, maybe because I called him “2JobBob” for simultaneously running for re-election to the Assembly and for the L.A. City Council.

There were others as well, but nobody could provide any worthwhile insights, not even an aide to Assemblyman Adam Gray of Merced, the only Democrat who joined Republicans in voting against this bill. Gray took one look at it and thought it was nonsense — nothing to do with being a freshman from an overwhelmingly Republican district that almost never elects a Democrat.

I spoke with Assemblyman Don Wagner, a Republican from Tustin and vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee who was as concerned about the legislative process itself.

AB 1401 came out of nowhere, he said, as a “committee bill” without an individual sponsor, but it was done in violation of long-established protocols that such bills are bipartisan and technical in nature — not partisan and radical changes that require study and debate.

When Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Wieckowksi of Fremont called, he spoke at length about how hard it is to get people to serve as jurors (a point disputed by court officials), how women and blacks were once denied the right to serve as jurors, how there are a lot of smart immigrants and dumb citizens.

He quoted the great 19th-century observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, who noted how jury duty teaches people about justice and equality and is “the very best way of preparing people to be free,” and so on.

I tried to get him to bite on De Tocqueville’s key warning about American democracy, the danger of a tyranny of the majority inflicting its will on a minority, but he kept on rattling off reasons why this was an idea whose time has come.

So I scoured the Internet looking for pros and cons and the best I could find was the L.A. Times editorial calling it an “ingenious … interesting idea” but “in the end would move California in the wrong direction” — perhaps an idea whose time has not yet come.

The LA Weekly thought it was funny that juries made up of “the unemployed, retirees and neighborhood busy bodies” would be replaced by juries “of the people who sell used cars, wash dishes and twirl signs on street corners” — a comment that was clearly condescending and suggestive of latent racism.

It seemed like I was the only one shocked, clearly out of step with the mainstream. The only clue to what this was about came from the floor debate in which Speaker John Perez said everyone deserves a jury of their peers.

“This isn’t about affording someone who would come in as a juror something,” Perez said. “But rather understanding that the importance of the jury selection process of affording justice to the person in that courtroom.”

Immigrant juries for immigrant defendants — that’s what justice for all seems to have come to mean.

Maybe when the Senate considers AB 1401, it will take it to logical absurdity: Shouldn’t women have all-women juries, men all-men, gays all-gays, rich all-rich, criminals all-criminals?

Juries of our peers, justice for all — you’ve got to be kidding. This is California, not America.

(Published Sunday May 12, 2013 in Glendale News-Press)

Posted in Glendale-Burbank, Hot Topics | Tagged , , , , | 37 Comments

The Right Choice Is The Only Choice: Eric Garcetti for Mayor

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

I don’t know how there can be any question about who is the best person to be mayor of LA, given the choice between easiest to manipulate and easiest to intimidate.

Maybe as supporters – it would be incorrect to refer to them as believers – say Wendy is made of sterner stuff than she has shown so far in her long public career and maybe Eric has the capacity to rise above what he has shown so far in his long public career.  Maybe as everybody knows Wendy stands for nothing and Eric’s word counts for nothing.

But the choice is ours and the consequences are great.

As a muckraker and troublemaker, the only question for me is whether the bitchers and moaners in every part of the city, rich and poor and all the rainbows of so-called race and so-called ethnicity, can capture the ear of the one person who can move the public conversation and wield political influence all on his or her own.

Wendy Greuel is a decent woman; a feather dancer of sorts who always makes sure every part of her being is well-concealed. In a phrase, she is a butt-coverer who never takes a risk and so the rich and powerful and smart and caring – I mean those singular individuals of such great important who are at once richpowerfulsmartcaring and any other virtues applicable to the elite – know with certainty Wendy will do what she is told.

Eric Garcetti is not like that.

Those richpowerfulsmartcaring etc men and women of such great influence don’t trust him. I hesitate to say why but you need to know: They think he doesn’t really know who he is because he is sexually confused. If he was outright LGBT it would be OK with them. But the think that he is sexually confused – as if anyone who has ever lived wasn’t – makes him untrustworthy.

I don’t know or care about any of that. What matters to me is that he is so vulnerable and open as a person – perhaps because he is actually in touch with and expressing his sense of self – that anyone can get to him.

You may have to create a row. You may have to throw fits and tantrums and storm the City Hall Kremlin.

But anybody has a chance to get to Eric Garcetti, to make him listen, to make him do something. He doesn’t have to rise to the occasion as the elitists in the ivory towers so narcissistically put it.

He just has to respond to the clarion call of the disenchanted at least as much as from the whispers of the enchanted.

Not even as much.

Just sometimes.

Wendy cannot respond at all. She is not in touch with her own confusion so the doors and windows to her being are closed shut to all who have not met the qualifications of a woman of high standards.

There may be little hope for LA. But there is no choice for mayor.

Posted in 2013 Election, 2013 LA Elections, City Hall, Hot Topics, Los Angeles | 30 Comments

My Sunday Column: Standing up to the town bully — Glendale Just Says ‘No’ to the IBEW and Union Bully Brian D’Arcy

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

The sparse front page of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18 website expresses exactly the message Brian D’Arcy wants his members to get: Rotating photos of protesting workers waving “A DEAL IS A DEAL” signs.

It also features a “hot topics” box with a single four-year-old item about heroic workers, a one-sentence message with a mug shot of the union boss and a link to a story with the headline, “Union chief is wired into City Hall.”

The story is a three-month-old column in the L.A. Times by Steve Lopez calling D’Arcy “feared, coveted, respected, reviled” and talks about how the IBEW plans to spend millions of dollars to get Wendy Greuel elected mayor and put more compliant City Council members into office.

D’Arcy is the king of bullies and IBEW Local 18 is the club he uses to force the docile leadership of L.A. to surrender to the outrageous demands he throws on the bargaining table under threat of a strike intended to shut off water and power to four million people.

A lot of people call that blackmail. But extortion tactics have worked so well that D’Arcy — with 95% of the workforce under his control — wields as much clout in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power as the general manager. It’s a fact that helped him in contracts with municipal utilities in Burbank, Pasadena and Azusa — cities under pressure to match wage rates at the LADWP, where workers average $100,000 a year, a 50% premium over other city workers for the same jobs and a 25% premium over other utility workers in the region.

Nobody says “no” to Brian D’Arcy. Until now.

On Thursday, Glendale City Manager Scott Ochoa — after a year of being jerked around, threatened and harassed by D’Arcy and his minions during fruitless negotiations on an initial contract that long ago had reached an impasse — decided enough was enough.

He told the union the city was ready to unilaterally implement its last, best and final offer for Glendale Water & Power if the City Council agrees on Tuesday — an offer that includes a 1.75% pay cut.

Hooray for Glendale!

The pay cut doesn’t mean much will be saved this fiscal year, but it sets a lower salary benchmark for negotiations with the IBEW for next year. Martin Marrufo, the IBEW spokesman, did not return a call Friday seeking comment.

“The important part here is we are establishing a lower baseline and demonstrating our commitment to compensation and pension reform to all of our employees, that there are no protected classes,” Ochoa said. “And it signals to the community that we are equally serious in making sure we are negotiating for them in good faith. This is the city of Glendale, not the City of GWP.”

It’s a strategy not without risk. You can be sure that what happens will be watched closely by officials in other cities with IBEW contracts — even L.A., which despite its monumental budget problems, has won only modest concessions from other city unions in great part because DWP workers keep on getting richer.

In one of his first acts as mayor in 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa signed off on wage increases of up to 30% over five years for the DWP, and later for up to 4% a year even during the recession. It was a no-brainer for other unions to get 25% increases over five years in 2007.

Glendale has faced some cuts in services, but has also won significant concessions from its unions, even getting them to agree to pay some of the city’s share of pension fund contributions, and is in as good a position as any city to weather the continuing economic volatility.

But giving in to D’Arcy would endanger the deals and healthy relationships with other unions.

“We are not hell-bent for a fight,” Ochoa said. “What demonstrates that is we continued to talk with them, ‘OK, we’re at impasse, but for purposes of settlement, we’re willing to throw other things on the table.’”

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how D’Arcy responds and the union explains what has happened, since it convinced a majority of Glendale Water & Power workers to join the IBEW with the promise of the lucrative wages and benefits enjoyed by LADWP employees.

It will be no less interesting to see how City Council members respond Tuesday night with the IBEW no doubt out in full force.

(This column was published in the Sunday Glendale News-Press)

Posted in City Hall, DWP, Glendale-Burbank, Hot Topics, Los Angeles | Tagged , , , | 30 Comments

Public Be Damned: LAX Expansion and the Culture of Greed

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

In this the fifth anniversary month of my citizen activism, I thought the desolation of this election season and the futility of all that I have done – Saving LA Project, OurLA.org, LA Clean Sweep, 1902 blog posts and more than 100 newspaper columns – had silenced my voice.

And then a friend called to remind me the City Council today was taking up the long-delayed expansion plan for LAX, construction of a new north runway to accommodate super-jets at the expense of long-term disturbance of Westchester and other Westside communities and abandonment of a regionalized air traffic policy that would benefit all of Southern California.

It is an issue I’ve followed for 20 years or so and never understood why anyone in their right mind would try to salvage one of the world’s worst airports – landlocked and ocean-locked, bereft of public transport access – unless there was an ulterior motive that had nothing to do with the public interest.

The motive, of course, is the motive for everything that happened in L.A. for the last 150 years: GREED.

The business community, the labor leadership, the civic leadership are all aboard the plans for LAX, public be damned, congestion be damned, the environment be damned. There’s money to be made so why share any of it with the nobodies out in the Antelope Valley, Inland Empire or anywhere else.

Only Rosendahl (and his successor Mike Bonin) stood against the nonsense of the LAX “modernization” scheme if you discount the opportunism (Mayor) Garcetti and (Controller) Zine in casting safe “no” votes and the phony hand-wringing from the weak-kneed Koretz who rolled over as usual to the power structure.

The worst part is the EIR they approved 10-3 for the $652 million project to move the north runway 260 feet closer to residential neighborhoods for what LAX officials admitted was only a marginal safety increase, more convenience than safety in fact, totally lacks plans for traffic impact during years of construction that includes major re-routing of Lincoln Boulevard.

But who cares – more passengers means more jobs for hotel workers with their “living wage” deals, and more revenue for hotel operators blackmailed into those deals, more union construction jobs guaranteed under city-enforced project labor agreements, more business opportunities in the most congested part of the city, county and region instead of out in the boondocks.

It’s all about who profits and who holds the keys to power no matter how much harm is done to the quality of life for vast numbers of people.

This is what L.A. is about – money and power. It’s why the L.A. County Chamber of Commerce, the L.A. Civic Alliance, the L.A. County Federation of Labor all aboard to this high-flying flight to oblivion.

They are united behind Greuel for mayor and mostly for Galperin for controller, which is why Garcetti and Zine are siding with the begrudged community that came out in force with support from the city’s lowest paid unionized workers in the SEIU.

They have been united for decades now, feeding off the public, turning L.A. into a horror-show with the nation’s dirtiest air, worst congestion, bursting pipes and rutted streets, deteriorating neighborhoods, pervasive gangs, poor schools, soaring poverty, dying economy and a rapidly declining quality of life.

These are your masters. You are their slaves. You suffer the consequences of their actions, pay their bills and when it all gets to be too much, slink off with a whimper and whine.

L.A. – don’t you love it?

Posted in 2013 Election, 2013 LA Elections, City Hall, Community Activists, Hot Topics, Los Angeles | Tagged , , , , | 41 Comments

My Sunday Column: Glendale and the Armenian Community — Sinanyan admits racist remarks, expresses regrets

Posted on April 20, 2013 by

 

It was a week Zareh Sinanyan will never forget. The man who left the Soviet Republic of Armenia as a 14-year-old a quarter century ago took his seat as a Glendale City Councilman on Monday, faced harsh criticism from residents during public comment on Tuesday over hateful comments he posted on the Internet several years ago, attended several community events in his official capacity and then sat down to clear the air.

“I engaged people in conversation in an unacceptable and emotional way that I deeply regret,” he said, repeating the word “regret” more than 20 times during our 40-minute chat.

“They were conversations — antagonistic conversations — about the Armenian genocide, Armenian-Azeri relations, things my family experienced directly. They would say things like, ‘We should have done more to you. We should have finished the job.’

“It’s impossible for me to look at those conversations and even say that’s me. That does not justify it. I regret having made those statements. I regret having hurt anyone. I regret using that language. I’m not excusing myself in any way.”

Those were hard words for a proud man to utter, a man who like most Armenians will never be able to let go of what happened in 1915 and what has happened so often to Armenians over the years until there is official recognition of their suffering.

The anti-gay, anti-Muslim comments Sinanyan made on YouTube five years or so ago came back to haunt him in the campaign’s last month — “29 days before the election,” he says, and he was called to account on blogs, in the press and before the City Council, which wanted to know if he should be removed from a city commission.

His response was to stonewall the issue, a non-denial denial that left many in the community angry and seemed to jeopardize his chances to win the election. But he went on the warpath and rallied the Armenian community, which used its organizational and economic muscle to help him win the open seat created by Frank Quintero’s retirement.

“To say that I was jarred would be a gross understatement. The campaign ground to a halt. I lost weight. I kept thinking, ‘Who is doing this? Why are they doing this?’

“My reputation has been a positive one. I knew they couldn’t bring someone in who knew me who would say, ‘Yes, he’s a well-known racist, yes, a homophobe.’ But I was accused of those things. I wasn’t thinking straight. I needed to get some sleep to rationally think about this.”

Sinanyan talked about how his grandparents survived a death march from their home in Turkey across the Syrian desert, how his parents, both engineers in Armenia, arrived with their two teenage children in Burbank in 1988 with a few hundred dollars, how they worked hard to learn English and to provide a better life for the family.

He talked about his campaign platform to make city government more open and transparent, to hold council meetings in the community, to meet regularly with school officials, to impose term limits on elected officials — measures he believes will be “conducive to good governance.”

“I have a vision and I’m going to try to do my best for everyone in Glendale,” he said.

On Tuesday, at his first full City Council meeting, Sinanyan said little except to make the point that filling the seat vacated by Rafi Manoukian’s election as city treasurer should be an open process and not some political deal.

But he remained silent as several people stepped up during public comment to sharply criticism him for the hateful words he had used and his failure to respond directly — criticisms a supporter called “cheap shots.”

Mayor Dave Weaver told the critics to “can it” because Sinanyan is going to serve out his term unless he’s recalled.

The telling moment came when Glendale High freshman Zehra Siddiqui, who had read a passage from the Koran at the recent mayor’s breakfast, talked about how Muslim students are often “bullied for our religion.”

“The youth in Glendale should have people with such important titles as role models and it’s important for these so-called role models to take responsibility for their actions, whether good or bad,” she said.

Her words, her presentation, touched Sinanyan deeply and convinced him it was time to take responsibility for what he had said.

“She was the one who got to me. After she spoke all I could think about was, ‘Why would I say something that would insult someone like her?’ I would just hope that she would forgive me, I didn’t mean those things. They were obviously made in anger.

“I will do my best to represent her to the best of my abilities. I see her as the future of America. By my actions, I will show who I really am, that those words are not me.”

Clearly, Sinanyan will be living in a fish bowl for quite a while, at the center of tensions over the ascendance of Armenians in the political, economic and cultural life of a city that was very different a quarter century ago when his family arrived in the area.

For him, and for Glendale, this presents a great challenge to overcome divisions and a great opportunity to move forward and build a greater city together.

Published in the Glendale News-Press
Posted in Glendale-Burbank, Hot Topics | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

L.A.’s Committee of 12½: The Fate of Your City Is in Their Hands — The Election Runoff Outcomes Mean Nothing

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Back in they heyday of L.A., the Chandler family ruled the city in collaboration with other while male racist, anti-Semitic and Commie-hating oligarchs led by insurance tycoon Asa Call. They were  the Committee of 25.

They profited  handsomely from every deal: stealing the water from the desert, stealing the land in the San Fernando Valley, destroying the red car public transit system while building highways and selling cars. They owned it all, used their newspapers to control the politicians and enforced their rule with a paramilitary police force led by a drunken chief who shared their values.

Those were the bad old days that sometimes don’t look quite some bad these days. People from all over the world flocked to Los Angeles where the living was easy and there were plenty of good jobs, the Chandler family’s newspapers were ridiculed and the cops were hated.

It all began to change with the election of Tom Bradley in 1973 with the help of a new generation of civic and business leaders who were liberal and open-minded. Public employee unions were legalized; barriers to blacks outside the ghetto and Jews outside of Hollywood fell away; the middle class flourished.

Twenty years later, the glow had begun to fade, bringing one of the new oligarchs, Richard Riordan into the mayor’s office with the promise “to turn L.A. around.”

Yet it more than a decade after the Rodney King beating and a second riot to begin to reform the LAPD under federal court control. By then the defense and aerospace industries with their good-paying jobs were largely gone and much of the middle class with them, replaced by immigrants, legal and illegal, competing for low-wage service jobs.

And the power of unions had grown so enormous that they funded and controlled nearly every elected official, helping them get one sweetheart contract after another and to parlay their power into collaborations with developers through politically-mandated project labor agreements.

So it should come as no surprise that with the economy shattered and the city’s finances in tatters that the new oligarchs would step up and try to salvage the situation.

Call them the Committee of 12½, though it’s far from clear at this point that have even half the power or clarity of purpose than the Committee of 25 once did.

Led by long-time power player and former Clinton Administration Cabinet member Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles 2020 Commission as it prefers to be known, has brought together 12 top business, civic and labor leaders plus the one-half in alternate member George Pla, head of Cordoba Corp. and one of the richest and most influential players to rise out of Eastside politics in the last 40 years.

The commission idea was engineered by Austin Beutner, the former first deputy mayor and retired equity fund operator who took a brief shot at running for mayor before realizing an outsider had no chance of arousing a disengaged electorate to overthrow the power of unions, developers and others buy the politicians.

The Chamber of Commerce has three board members on the commission; labor unions three including the police, DWP and construction union heads; the political arena three including recalled Gov. Grey Davis; USC has a seat so does Maldef and Common Cause.

With a six-month timeline to develop in private a plan to revive the economy and fix the city budget, this elitist group intends to balance the interests of those who have power and influence to one degree or another without regard to everybody else, which is the vast majority.

It is clear to everyone involved, this is as elitist as it gets — a virtual coup d’etat hanging over the two frightened little people competing for the mayor’s office and a City Council totally under the control of the forces that have pushed the city to ruin, waiting to give them orders on what to do.

If the Committee of 12½ actually proposed the sharp pay cuts and other reforms needed to bring City Hall’s spending under control — inconceivable given the greed shown for decades by city unions — it is hard to see the new mayor or the Council toadies going along even if a tax increase were part of the package.

It is equally inconceivable that this crowd can understand that economic revival cannot take place in a city that is dispirited and disconnected without dramatically changing the political culture by eliminating the full-time Council and expanding its seat from 15 to 35 or more to bring government to the local communities.

So all they can be expected is a mix of rehashed proposals to cut business taxes, have workers pay a little more for health care, slug the public with higher taxes, and count of the Democrat-controlled legislature to gut Proposition 13 and CEQA so L.A. can speed up the destruction of its neighborhoods.

Despite the odds against achieving much, the Committee of 12½ has raised expectations be leaping into the vacuum of power and asserting it can actually do something to save L.A.

For better or worse, it is the only play in town — surely no one holds out any hope that the mayoral candidate who is easiest to manipulate or the candidate who is easiest to intimidate are going to make the slightest difference at all.

Posted in 2013 Election, 2013 LA Elections, City Hall, Hot Topics, Los Angeles | Tagged , , , , , | 40 Comments

My Sunday Column: Civic engagement and high expectations — The Dave Golonski Story

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

It was the changing of the guard — Parcher Plaza at Glendale City Hall filled with people celebrating Mayor Frank Quintero with taquitos and cupcakes, a gathering of well-wishers that included Burbank Mayor Dave Golonski, who offered a framed memento in tribute.

The irony was hard to miss.

Quintero was retiring quietly, much as he had served the public for 12 years; Golonski was going out with something of a roar, essentially fired by voters just two days earlier in a runoff election after 20 years of serving his city.

Both men had achievements to take pride in, helping their cities at a time of great transition and enormous stresses to stay healthy and vibrant.

I’ve known Golonski a long time, since an issue in the alley behind him — a large-scale development taking place without anyone in his neighborhood knowing about it or having a say — got him involved in activism and led him to the noise problems from Bob Hope Airport, and finally, to win a City Council seat in 1993 as a slow-growth candidate in the face of a decade of growth at any price.

“It’s been a great run, but after 20 years, I guess my time was up. Maybe it’s a function of being there so long,” Golonski said, taking defeat philosophically as we chatted before the Quintero event.

“We’ve seen an evolution take place in Burbank,” he said. “But we managed to grow and prosper and still somehow hold onto the small-town community feeling and pride. That’s extremely important to me.”

As a politician, Golonski made a lot of friends over the years, and his share of enemies — politics is what cities are all about.

The word “politics” itself derives from the ancient Greek word polis, meaning city, as in Athens and Sparta, where human beings came together in common purpose and feel they are part of something greater than themselves.

Cities are the basis of civilization, not nations. Great cities are about real politics, grassroots grappling with economics and quality-of-life issues that directly affect everyone’s life.

That’s why it seems so ridiculous to me that voter turnout is far higher in state and national elections than in local ones. Or that the vast majority of people pay far more attention to abstract issues and what is happening far away than what is happening down the street — to stuff that directly affects them, and that they, in turn, can directly affect.

My city, Los Angeles, is a shameless city, a city where every elected official is bought and owned by interlocking business and labor interests and the public is disengaged or paralyzed by its powerlessness.

Burbank and Glendale aren’t like that. They’re small enough for people to feel connected, big enough to control their destinies.

“It isn’t just about leadership or voter turnout — it’s about civic engagement,” Golonski said. “There’s a cadre of people in Burbank involved in all kinds of stuff, making the schools better, pushing the arts, the sustainability commission, people delivering meals to the elderly — they’re all part of that machine and they’re all committed to making sure that machine is pointed in the right direction.”

He explained why he never had other higher political ambitions.

“You never have to vote for anything you don’t believe in,” he said. “I tell new council members I’m never going to vote for anything you support unless you convince me it’s the right thing to do, so you shouldn’t vote for anything I support unless you believe it’s the right thing to do.

“If you go to Sacramento, you can’t do that because your seat will be in the nose-bleed seats and you’ll never accomplish anything.”

The biggest challenge of his time in office was Lockheed leaving, a void that was filled by the entertainment industry —something he believes the city needs to work hard to change by diversifying its economic base.

His biggest regret is that the council didn’t see the use-of-force and internal discrimination allegations at the Police Department sooner.

“There was so much esteem for the police and everyone was so happy at how effective they were that when issues came up about how they were being effective, there were people that just refused to believe that that was a possibility that there were such problems,” he said.

What makes Burbank special, what makes great cities work, Golonski added, is that “you have strong, caring neighborhoods that will come out in force and a community with high expectations.”

At 54, Golonski said doesn’t intend to simply go away. “But my level of involvement is going to be different,” he said.

(Published at Glendale News-Press)

Posted in 2013 Election, Glendale-Burbank, Hot Topics | 1 Comment

How Can Anybody Fix the ‘Time-Sucking, Money-Wasting, Soul-Crushing’ Mayoral Candidates Who Stand for Nothing?

Posted on April 12, 2013 by

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate . . . Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. — Gore Vidal

The question at Thursday night’s televised mayoral debate from Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal, cut to the heart of everyone’s everyday experience in L.A. — “How are you going to fix the time-sucking, money-wasting, soul-crushing traffic in Los Angeles?”

The answers from Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel, stripped of the not-very-hot-air they spew were identical: They are going to do exactly what Antonio Villaraigosa is doing with Measure R’s subway-to-the-sea and more light rail for the Westside plus the increasingly popular multi-billion-dollar fantasy tunnel through the mountains between Westwood and Sherman Oaks.

Think about it: These two make the morally and intellectually bankrupt Villaraigosa look dynamic and innovative.

 

Posted in 2013 Election, 2013 LA Elections, City Hall, Hot Topics, Los Angeles, Transportation | Tagged , , , | 48 Comments