“I’m being perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about
how the city is going to be able to deliver services.” — Maggie Whelan, General Manager, Personnel Department, City of Los Angeles.
Leave it to the bureaucrats to talk truth to power, even when those in power do not listen and cannot see.
Today, our LA civic hero is a woman who has seen it all at City Hall, the longest serving general manager in a system of government that turns over its management for the slightest political whims.
Many who survived have given up entirely but there are some whose skills and detachment have allowed them to keep the system running despite the muddling and meddling from above and still preserve a measure of integrity and the ability to speak honestly, in a nice manner, to be sure.
Maggie Whelan is one of the best of those and her performance Wednesday before her City Council masters was an exhibition that should be watched closely to see what it takes to do a good job when all around you are those who could care less.
Bernard Parks was her straight man, giving nothing away in his expressions as he drew out the truth of what hell his colleagues have wrought with questions that begat facts, a dose of reality. Like Whelan, he spent his career in the stifled culture of City Hall and thrived until, in his case, he thought being Chief of Police, actually meant he was the Chief.
If your attention span ends here, this is all you need to know.
In response to Parks’ deliberately convoluted questions about the chaos caused by the shotgun approach of early retirements, the total confusion caused by layoffs where no one actually loses their jobs and a fiscal crisis that gets worse by the day, Whelan offered these words of wisdom:
“I’m being perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about
how the city is going to be able to deliver services. perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about how the city is going to be able to deliver services.”
There it is. If Maggie Whelan whose job it is to juggle the 52,000 full-time employees into a functioning city government, doesn’t know how LA is going to deliver services, nobody does.
Certainly not the mayor who has done nothing except put 4,000 more workers on the payroll and into the bankrupt pensions plans and spent money as fast as he made hollow promises.
Two weeks ago he awakened from his long disengagement from his job of leading the city and exercised powers no one knew he had to order 1,000 job eliminations immediately.
It was a trick since the goal was to transfer most of them to special funds, Harbor, Airport and DWP jobs. Only 160 have been transferred out of more than 2,000 applicants who jumped at the chance to escape what was going on and, as Whelan notes, not a single worker has been laid off.
It was as if she were speaking in a dead language like Sanskrit. The reality didn’t matter.The Council is moving forward relentlessly to carry out a plan that in the end will lead to even worse financial troubles, and losses in services that will damage the quality of life for millions and jeopardize the future of the city.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch Maggie Whelan closely for the four minutes of this video and hear what she is really saying. And if you really want to understand what is going on more deeply, watch the full video at the City Clerk’s site. .