Author: Ron Kaye

Where the hell is Stevie Kaufman when you really need him?

As Ron reported a couple days ago, Stevie, an attorney who specializes in campaign and fund-raising law, represents just about every Democratic politician from San Diego to Sacramento – including Mayor Antonio.

According to Fox 11’s John Schwada, a one-time ink-stained wretch who thought he was too good looking for print, Antonio and his girlfriend Lu Parker, a former beauty queen turned TV reporter who is without doubt way too good looking for print, are sitting courtside in $2,000 seats at Lakers playoff games for free.

The story angle was that the tickets are not reported on the mayor’s gift disclosure forms, and that if they’re a gift of Staples Center he can’t legally accept them (or any gift) because arena owner AEG lobbies the city and get subsidies so big they could solve the financial problems of all the hundreds of thousands of people Antonio’s policies have sent to the unemployment line.

The mayor told Schwada that at the last game he was a guest of his “friend” Jeffrey Katzenberg, and insists that because he’s at the game in an “official capacity” as mayor the tickets don’t have to be reported as gifts.

Holy pooper-scooper! An official capacity? Did he play? Referee? Sing the national anthem?

I can only guess Antonio was answering on the basis of Stevie’s legal advice that he could  bring his honey to game and sit courtside without having to dig deep into his own pocket (ouch!), or, better yet, use his Officeholder Account, if there’s anything in there.  Under state rules that would be a bad dog’s trick, but in LA, you can use the dough for virtually anything – except campaigning.

I also wonder if the Dog Trainer has failed to notice his honor holding court courtside? Before it was decimated by layoffs of half its staff, the city’s paper of record like to think it didn’t miss such dirty tricks. Now, we need a TV reporter to tell us what’s going on.

Six years ago when the Dog Trainer was eviscerating Fleishman Hilliard’s relationship with the DWP and the office of Mayor James “Never Touch Me or Call Me Jimmy” Hahn, the Dog Trainer put a team of reporters on the job to find out if the DWP was secretly paying for Hahn’s seats behind the Dodgers dugout.

Steve Lopez, famous for “The Soloist” movie about a homeless bum with musical talent and being the highest paid writer in town, the staff had great fun with some emails the Dog Trainer obtained between Fleishman Hilliard GM Doug Dowie and Jimmy’s press secretary Julie Wong in which they tried to control the inquiry by keeping the less-than-bright interim DWP GM Frank Salas away from the press.

“If Salas isn’t allowed to talk to reporters,” Lopez wrote in July 2004, “and he needs $3 million a year worth of strategic counsel and the like, why not get rid of him, the executive staff and the 23-person PR staff at DWP and let Dowie run the place?”

Given what’s happened at the DWP in the last six years, that might not have been a bad idea.

The DWP has become the utility of ill repute with a new GM every year and Dowie got in a lot of trouble in what became a criminal case involving over-billing the DWP. He, by the way, is still available to run the DWP as he waits while the case drags through the appeal process..

Nothing ever came of the Dodger ticket issue or Laura Chick’s original pay-for-play accusations.

Nowadays Dowie will be the first guy to tell you he had a lot faults, but he was no dummy about the law. After all, he was getting legal advice from Stevie Kaufman just like the mayor..

Woof!!

A year ago, LA was in the unpleasant position of having opened the floodgates to digital billboards, supergraphics and freeway-facing signs.

There were 11,000 off-site billboards, more than a third illegal, and visual blight from signage was everywhere — the result of poorly crafted legislation, miserable enforcement and the corrupting influence of money on City Hall politicians.

On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals restored a measure of law and order by overturning a lower court ruling and finding the city’s bans on freeway facing signs and supergraphics.

There were 11,000 off-site billboards, more than a third illegal, and
visual blight from signage was everywhere — the result of poorly
crafted legislation, miserable enforcement and the corrupting influence
of money on City Hall politicians.

The key issues were the free speech rights of billboard companies and the exceptions granted by city officials that allowed Staples Center and a few others to use supergraphics and digital signs that face freeways, creating potential traffic hazards,

In a 25-page ruling (worldwiderush.pdf), the appeals court in a ruling written by Judge Kim Wardlaw and supported unanimously by Judges Stephen Reinhardt and Stephen Trott, the court reversed District Court Judge Audrey Collins ruling against the city and the contempt of court finding.

“The City’s exceptions to the Freeway Facing Sign Ban do not undermine the City’s interests in aesthetics and safety,” the court ruled. “Indeed, the exceptions were made for the express purpose of advancing those very interests. Allowing billboards at the Staples Center was an important element of a project to remove’ blight and dangerous conditions from downtown Los Angeles. Similarly, the Fifteenth Street SUD (special use district) was an outgrowth of the City’s efforts to improve traffic flow, and thereby safety, on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Not only did the agreement to allow signs in the Fifteenth Street SUD advance that project, it also resulted in a net reduction of billboards inthe City. Ironically, the most significant denigration to the City’s interests in traffic safety and aesthetics might result, not from allowing the freeway facing billboards at the StaplesCenter and in the Fifteenth Street SUD but instead from strictadherence to the Freeway Facing Sign Ban, which might have severely hampered, if not completely defeated, both projects.”

Frankly, I think the court gave the city the benefit of a lot of doubts.

But after a long series of legal defeats and a seemingly unenforceable sign ordinance when he took office less than a year ago, City Attorney Carmen “Nuch” Trutanich and his team deserve a lot of the credit. Even his critics ought to be able to acknowledge that.

[4] The district court took an all-or-nothing approach to its constitutional analysis of the Freeway Facing Sign Ban, stating that to “preserv[e] even one freeway-facing sign…undermines the City’s stated interests in traffic safety and aesthetics…

His team, led by top assistant Jane Usher who crusaded for a crackdown on billboards as president of the Planning Commission before resigning in protest to what was going on, drafted a tough ordinance and got it enacted by a reluctant City Council.

In defending the new ordinance and even the old one in this case, the City Attorney’s office is wracking up a series of court victories that give LA control over signage for the first time in decades.

On the free speech issue, the appellate court said:

“The city reasonably may have concluded that, on balance, safer and more attractive thoroughfares would result from renovations to Santa Monica Boulevard and a reduction in the City’s total number of billboards, even if this required installation of some freeway facing billboards along Fifteenth Street. The City also reasonably may have concluded that the benefits of redeveloping and attracting people to an otherwise dangerous and blighted downtown area outweighed the harm of additional freeway facing billboards restricted to that area…

“The City submitted a convincing rationale — which is entirely consistent with its asserted gov-
ernmental interest — for exempting some freeway facing signs from its Ban…the City’s decision to permit some freeway facing billboards at the Staples Center and in the Fifteenth Street SUD does not break the link between the Freeway Facing Sign Ban and the City’s objectives in traffic safety and aesthetics.”

The court also threw out the argument that the “Supergraphic and Off-Site Sign Bans were unconstitutional prior restraints on speech because their exceptions impermissibly vest the City Council with unbridled discretion to select among speakers on the basis of content. “

“This legal conclusion was erroneous, however, because the prior restraint doctrine does not apply to the legislative function at issue here. The exceptions to the Supergraphic and Off-Site Sign Bans are rooted in the City Council’s legislative discretion, not its discretion to make
executive decisions as part of the LAMC’s regulatory scheme. This distinction makes all the difference.”

So while the billboard companies and the people they benefit may harangue about Trutanich’s aggressive enforcement of the law, including the arrests of company executives, he has the law on his side now so you can expect a lot tougher enforcement in the months ahead.

It looks like the lack of green power at Harbor College is a result of a lack of brainpower.

Thanks to the Daily Breeze’s Melissa Pamer for the kind of story this old dog likes to chew onm we learned the Los Angeles Community College District has installed $25 million worth of solar panels five months ago at Harbor College – but can’t turn them on.

“That’s because the Los Angeles Community College District is still sorting out how to pay the eye-popping price tag for the solar panels – and how to get the local utility to approve their use,” Pamer says.

The district’s intention had been that Chevron Energy Solutions, which installed the panels, would own the solar equipment and sell the resulting power to the college district, using federal and state alternative energy incentives to bring down the cost. After six years, LACCD would have bought the equipment.

But district officials failed to get that arrangement approved by the Department of Water and Power, which unlike most other utilities in the state doesn’t like third parties owning rooftop solar because it would break up the monopoly it holds in safe-keeping for my pit bull pal Brian D’Arcy.

So DWP declared that a third party could not sell electricity to the college, causing Chevron to demand LACCD pay its construction bills.

Pamer said the “conundrum” (she was being polite) represents a small portion of an ambitious, nearly $6 billion bond-funded construction campaign that college district officials have heavily promoted as the nation’s largest “green” building effort.

Branded as BuildLACCD, the campaign grew in 2006 to include a proposal for one of the biggest solar installations in the country.

Behind the grand plans, the nine-college district has encountered the proverbial devil among the details. Right now, the question is: Where will the money come from for projects – at Harbor College and Pierce College in Woodland Hills – that are already built?

“That’s the big screw-up,” said Mona Field, president of the district’s board of trustees who never before saw a deal she didn’t like if it benefited the unions, special interests and political machine.

“I didn’t know we were approving projects without having the money. … It has turned into a bit of a mess, I must admit.”

A bit of a mess?  Reporters can work a lifetime without encountering a public official that can dish out dumber quotes than Mona Field.   

For the past few weeks, the nine-campus community college district — the nation’s largest — has been negotiating a complex deal to get a division of Citigroup to pay off Chevron. The bank, which has already provided a short-term loan to pay most of what is owed Chevron, would lease the solar equipment back to the college district, which would eventually buy it.

Larry Eisenberg, the man some call the “visionary” behind BuildLACCD’s green tinge, said he expects DWP to approve the lease and grant a state rebate to the project this week. (A spokeswoman for DWP said department officials had received the district’s application but would not comment on a customer account.)

Eisenberg, executive director of facilities planning and development, acknowledged the district had experienced some difficulty, but he said it was encountered while helping to pioneer a new kind of financing arrangement for solar installations.

“We’re sort of learning as we’re going. It would be nice if there had been a road map, but somebody had to go first,” Eisenberg said. “In the process of going first, you wind up exploring a fair number of dead ends.”

Pamer must be ecstatic covering the LACCD.  Eisenberg’s quotes are almost as dumb as Field’s and he botched another deal Pamer came across right after the Harbor College fiasco

It was called the “Green Hive” and was the brainchild of business partners Kim Robinson and Kris Kimble who had this idea to create “a unique resource center for homeowners,
city planners and commercial builders to get hands-on learning about
eco-friendly design.”

They spent two years and $1 million in LACCD money developing their idea with Eisenberg’s help before the district suddenly pulled the plug because Eisenberg hadn’t checked to see it was illegal to use even a penny of LACCD’s billions in taxpayers money for the project.

“I was inspired by the possibilities and inspired by
Larry. He was portrayed as a visionary. … I was excited to be a part of that,” Robinson said.

Field offered this verdict: “It’s a big old mess.”

Next time the district puts a bond measure on the ballot, Pamer should interview him and Field — at length.

Woof!

What sane person could oppose Proposition 15 — the pilot project for clean money campaigns for Secretary of State candidates in 2014 and 2018?

What kind of scoundrel would use the debate over such a small step toward ending political corruption and bringing fair elections to California that he would go into a moralistic diatribe against the Republican candidates for governor while ignoring how union and special interest money has made LA City Hall a mockery of democracy?

Richard Alarcon, that’s who…the Council member under criminal investigation because he doesn’t or at least didn’t live in his district.

Meanwhile, if you want to support Prop. 15, Rock the Boat and Common Cause are holding a fund-raising event Tuesday June 1 at the Echo, 1822 W. Sunset Blvd. at 8:30 p.m. with Jeremy
Dawson
of Shiny Toy Guns (DJ Set), White Apple Tree, & Buddy Akai, $8 in advance, $10 at the door.

“Fuk em”

That was the immortal email response from LA Community College District Chancellor Mark Drummond 13 months ago when Assemblyman Kevin de Leon raised questions on behalf of the Northeast LA community about betraying the commitment to build a badly-needed satellite campus in the old Van de Kamp’s bakery site in Glassell Park.

Drummond’s contemptuous words are set to become official policy of the LACCD board when it meets Wednesday to approve the centerpiece of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s political agenda for job creation, anti-gang programs, clean energy — a strategy that tramples on the rule of law, makes a mockery of public policy and benefits the few at the expense of the many.

On the 365th day after the contemptuous response from Drummond (who was axed for misconduct last summer), Deputy Mayor Larry Frank told the LACCD Board of Trustees exactly what the site was going to be used for.

“This is the holy grail of all our new jobs…that is 1,000 jobs at the DWP that would be IBEW Local 18 jobs,” Frank said.

These workers would do the “solar and all the municipal, commercial and residential retrofit work that happens in the city of Los Angeles,” he added.

In other words, the monopoly on local solar installation and energy efficiency work would be achieved by the DWP despite the defeat of Measure B last year. It will be paid for by raising the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor by the full 20 to 30 percent despite the “meltdown” over the hike in the City Council, Frank declared.

In a deal negotiated over the last three years with the IBEW union boss Brian D’Arcy, these unemployed workers, many of them current or former gang members, would be hired after training at the Van de Kamp’s site as $16-an-hour “green doctors” in a pre-Civil Service capacity. After a two-year probation period, they will become full-time, permanent employees at much higher salaries.

It’s all part of what the mayor calls his job creation program, which is nothing more than taxing the public to create more jobs on the city payroll at inflated costs

How the Van de Kamp’s site came to be used for this purpose is far worse than even the abuse of the DWP and its ratepayers, particularly home owners and businesses that are being stuck with the bills.

Under two bond measures voters approved for LACCD, $60 million was promised specifically for turning the historic Van de Kamp’s building into classrooms and building a ew building for LA Community College classrooms for the educationally under-served Northeast LA.

In one of several “no-bid” arrangements, the LACCD Board flipped the new state-of-the-art building over for use as a technology charter school although paid for out of college bonds. Although architectural designs were approved by the state and structural reconstruction of the Van de Kamp’s building already was completed,  construction of new classrooms was suddenly halted.

Instead of classrooms, the second floor of the building was rebuilt as executive offices for LACCD officials and the DWP/IBEW work force development program.

So instead of a college, the Northeast Valley got a high school and training program that served no local community need.

What it served was the mayor’s plan to give jobs on the public payroll for hoodlums or reformed hoodlums who will some day come to your home or business and advise you how to reduce your energy use or install solar panels — jobs that could be done cheaper, faster and with a more positive economic impact by the private sector.

The Van de Kamp Coalition formed by Northeast LA residents who want the college campus they were promised put out an email blast Monday urging the public to email the LACCD Board to reject the “no-bid sweetheart lease” of the facility before Wednesday’s 3:30 p.m. meeting at West LA College.

The mayor’s message, the email says, is that “executive offices for my programs are more important than your access to educational opportunity.”

The email accuses LACCD of “giving a no-bid sweetheart lease to the City of Los Angeles after $6.3 million” in bond fund “to illegally convert classrooms into executive suites for unemployment programs funded by federal economic stimulus funds directed by the mayor.”

Here is the draft letter of protest and the email from the Van de Kamp Coalition to send to these emails:

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

CUT AND PASTE THIS LETTER INTO THE BODY OF YOUR E-MAIL (EDIT AS NEEDED FOR YOUR COMFORT WITH THIS ISSUE) AND ADD YOUR NAME AT THE END:

May 24, 2010

RE: Reject City Lease Of Van de Kamps Building; Return the Van de Kamps Campus to Community College Purposes Promised to Voters for A Decade

Dear LACCD Trustees and Mr. Mayor:

I am writing in opposition to Com. No. FPD3 on the Wednesday agenda of the Los Angeles Community College Trustees for the following reasons:

LACCD used $72 million of taxpayer bond monies to build the brand new community college satellite campus for students, not commercial office space.

For more than a decade Trustees such as Sylvia Scott-Hayes, Kelly Candaele, and Mona Field have promised voters that they would DELIVER a Northeast Satellite campus to address the unequal access opportunities for young adults in Northeast Los Angeles.

The State of California gave $3 million to this campus for the restricted purpose of a Satellite Campus of LA City College, and this action takes away the Satellite Campus.
 The voter approved Measures AA and J that allocated $60 million of new taxes to develop this high priority community college access opportunity.

LACCD staff have ignored two economic feasibility studies showing Van de Kamps can be initiated as a successful campus with both profit-oriented and traditional community college classes.

These studies mean that the Board has no substantial evidence to support its proposed “finding” that that the Northeast Campus buildings are NOT NEEDED for community college purposes.  They are needed now!

The City funded unemployment classes may properly be included among the possible profit-oriented classes offered at Van de Kamps, but the placement of executive administrative offices in 60% of the school building is highly offensive to the core mission of the Los Angeles Community College District.

LACCD and City of Los Angeles joint actions improperly discriminate against the historically underserved and predominately minority communities.  The action tells our young adults they are not deserving of a community college.

For the above reasons, the LACCD must begin offering as many community education classes (non-credit fee-based classes like computer skills, artistic endeavors, conversational foreign languages, creative writing, etc.) and contract classes (employer paid skills training) as possible.  This is the positive path to establish the Van de Kamps campus as a financially self-sustaining Satellite of LA City College.

I join the Van de Kamps Coalition and urge you to halt ill-conceived efforts led by your former Chancellor to abandon promises you made to open Van de Kamps under LA City College supervision.  The effort to hand this $72 million new campus over to tenants of the Mayor’s Office, instead of maintaining City College stewardship, will be an action remembered by voters at the next election.  If there is a vote to approve this ill-conceived LACCD staff proposal, I know I will not forget how the LACCD Board helped Mayor Villaraigosa literally steal this campus away from the community it is intended to serve.

Most sincerely,

Here is the Board Resolution:

ADOPT RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING LEASE OF SPACE TO THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES

WHEREAS, Education Code Sections 81430 -81432 authorize governing boards of community college districts to enter into leases with another public agency on a long term basis without the need for public bid if the space is not needed by the community college district for school classroom buildings; and

WHEREAS,  the Los Angeles Community College District (“Districf’) desires to lease 13,900 square feet of space located in the Van de Kamp Innovation Center at 3020 San Fernando Road in Los Angeles to the City of Los Angeles for the operation of a work force/work source center providing classes, job training as well as advisory, education and other job placement services to students and the community from June 1, 2010 through June 30, 2014; and

WHEREAS, City of Los Angeles shall pay the District an annual base rental rate of $250,000 for lease of the space plus $150,000 to cover the costs of tenant improvements for a total annual rental amount of $400,000. The District shall allow the City of Los Angeles to sublease its space to tenants approved by the Chancellor; and

WHEREAS, the space is not needed by the District for any school classroom building and shall be subject to the terms and conditions as the Chancellor may agree; and

WHEREAS, The District has given notice of the action to adopt this resolution once a week for three (3) weeks in a newspaper of general circulation prior to execution in accordance with Education Code Section 81432(b).

RESOLVED, the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees adopts this resolution authorizing lease of 13,900 square feet of space to City of Los Angeles for purposes of operating a work force/work source center to support the education, advisory and job placement needs of students and community participants in and around the Van de Kamp Innovation Center from June 1, 2010 through June 30, 2014.

IN WITNESS, of the unanimous passage of the foregoing resolution, as prescribed by law, we, the members of said Board of Trustees, present and voting thereon, have hereunto set our hands this 26th day of May 26,2010.

Here is the email exchange between Assemblyman De Leon and Drummond’s vulgar response: 

From: Drummond, Mark [[email protected]]
Sent:                      Thursday, April 16, 20092:58 PM
To:                            Moore, Jamillah K
Subject:                 RE: Satellite Campus Issues
Flag Status:           Red

fuk em

From: Moore, Jamillah K [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thu 4/16/2009 8:05 AM
To: Drummond, Mark; Barrera, Adriana D.
Subject: FW: Satellite Campus Issues

Hello,

This is just an FYI I will be following up with her directly I will keep you posted.

From: Moore, Jamillah K
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 12:17 PM
To: Moore, Jamillah K
Subject: Satellite Campus Issues

Dr. Moore,
I wanted to get some clarity on a couple of issues that come to my attention this morning:

1. Alliance Charter School – Members of the community informed me that they are to occupy the entire first floor of the Van de Kamps facility. Is this correct? They have also informed me that there is a fitness room that was made possible by funding from Congressmember Becerra’s office which is also located on the first floor. Does this mean that the community will not have access to this fitness room.
2. Community Room – Is this located on the first floor and if so, will the community have access to it if this entire floor is to be loaned out to Alliance Charter. If it is not on the first floor please let me know where it is to be located.
3. Can you please clarify how much money it costs to apply for center status?
4. Did LACC hire a consulting firm to apply for center status for the Van de Kamp site? If so what is the name of this firm consulting firm and how much was paid to them? Can you send me any documentation indicating this amount?
5. Please remind me again as to why center status was not pursued? I am hearing that Glendale City College protested against the Van de Kamps site getting center status and I would like to know if there is any truth to this and why they would protest this?
6. Is it possible to review the minutes of the Shared Governance Committee meetings online? If not can you please forward me the minutes of the meeting in which the Shared Governance Committee allocated funding to apply for Center Status for the Van de Kamps campus and the meeting in which they turned over the campus to the Los Angeles Community College District Office.

Alana Yanez
Field Representative
Assemblymember Kevin de Leon
45th Assembly District

Poor Wendy Greuel, she’s down to the last few hundred bucks in her officeholder account and needs your help to pay some personal office expenses, phone bills and mostly her lawyer-treasurer Stephen Kaufman — the man who connects the dots for so many local and state politicians, unions and special interests.

If you got $500 or $1,000 to throw away, former Mayor Richard Riordan will be hosting a “reception” at 6 p.m. Tuesday for Wendy at his Riordan’s Grill around the corner from his Pantry restaurant downtown. You could be a sponsor yourself for $5,000 and that might even buy you more than the 90 minutes allotted for the anointed next mayor of LA.

Wendy does need your money. She’s raised $688,181.22 for her officeholder account over the last decade but spent even more

$878,382.25, according to city ethics records.

With running for citywide office and the heavy demands of signing off on tepid audits and out-of-date financial advice to deal with the city budget, her fund-raising has fallen off — only raising $25,750.00 last year for her personal slush fund while spending $27,491.67 .

Most of that money — $16,259.56 — went to Kaufman, the election and campaign finance law expert who like the small coterie of insider fund-raisers and political consultants provide the points of connection for money and influence to find each other. Nearly all our city elected officials and even some well-connected wannabes like Mitch Englander, who expects to inherit Greig Smith’s seat without any questions being asked, turn to Kaufman.

City records show Kaufman Downing LLP, his former firm, got paid $1,169,355.66 over the years for their services to city campaigns and officeholders. Even in these tough times, business is picking up for his new firm, Kaufman Legal, which hauled in

$417,050.50 from these same sources.

Even as he was providing his services to the elected officials, Kaufman boasts on his website that he also provides related service to many organizations,
committees & businesses. Among those he cites are Assembly Democratic Caucus,
Conservation Action Fund, California Labor Federation, Central City
Association of Los Angeles, Clear Channel Outdoor, Democratic National
Committee, IBEW Local 11, IBEW Local 18, Los Angeles Area Chamber of
Commerce, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Los Angeles
Dodgers, Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, SEIU Local 6434,
SEIU Local 721, Sierra Club, United Firefighters of Los
Angeles City, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Women’s Political
Committee, Working Californians.

Who says business and labor and environmentalists and politicians don’t mix?

It’s not at all clear what services Kaufman actually does because those don’t have to be reported online beyond saying Wendy’s officeholder account paid him $14,384.56 on Jan. 1 for “professional services” through March 31.

Nice work if you can get it, I’m sure, with so much more to come.

Since becoming mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa has spent $294,177.35 from his officeholder account while raising $259,425.00.

This has allowed him to take billionaire Eli Broad to lunch, pay for his cellphone use and his LA TImes subscription, reimburse Jeff Carr and others for various expenses, spend $3,280.09 for a fund-raiser at the Jonathan Clubs pay $2,000 for Sparkletts and nearly $5,000 for Arrowhead water, presumably because he and his staff don’t like what DWP serves up anymore than the rest of us.

Kaufman did just fine as well with Kaufman Downing getting $90,277.12 and Kaufman Legal taking in $23,702.04. That adds up to $124,000 or nearly half of what was donated to his officeholder account.

You might ask why but that is protected by attorney-client privilege.

This isn’t kids’ games these people are playing, just a fraction of all the millions that come from people and businesses who want all kinds of favors and advantages for their largess.

Money is the name of the game and the return on contributions is often in the range of 100 times or more what the politicians got. It’s all brokered through a narrow circle of operatives that include the lawyers, political operatives and strategists, fund-raisers, lobbyists who pimp the system.

The beauty of it all is the politicians write the rules and appoint the people who enforce them so only fools could ever get caught doing anything wrong and if they do, they just set up a legal defense fund and raise more money.

I’m not going to bore with by reprinting all the provisions of LA Municipal Code SEC. 49.7.12.  OFFICEHOLDER CONTROLLED FUNDS.

Suffice it to say, it allows just about anything except what is expressly barred by state law by in SEC. 3: (a) Expenditures in connection with a future election for elective City office; (b) Membership in any athletic, social, fraternal, veteran or religious organization, (c) Supplemental compensation for employees for performance of an act which would be required or expected of the person in the regular course or hours of his or her duties as a City official or employee.

While the complex provisions of city ethics law are a nightmare for ordinary citizens who seek city office, draining their energy and limited resources, they are no problem when you have Kaufman aboard since he probably helped write most of them.

It’s not like the City Ethics staff doesn’t audit the filings but the standard language found in the review in February of Greuel’s officeholder account is this: “The (Greuel) committee did not have any findings that auditors concluded were material.”

It’s not all that easy digging out information about officeholder accounts. You have to go to the City Ethics page, click campaign/elections, click Search Expenditures, and put in the name of the person paid, like Kaufman Legal or Kaufman Downing, and the name of a candidate like Janice Hahn to find out she’s paid him more than $100,000 over the years.

Then, you have to look for which payments came from her officeholder account and look for the little six- or seven-digit number of the account to plug in to the Committee I.D. box when you search just so you can see she paid him $12,683.01 from her officeholder account.

If you want to know how much she’s raised for her officeholder account, go back to where you started but click on Search Contributions, pick out the official, plug in their Committee I.D. so you can learn Janice has raised a total of $677,483.34 for her slush fund during her time in office.

While I’m being so helpful, you can read more about what Kaufman says about his firm:

Among the
ballot measures he cites are Yes on Measure R (2008
County Transportation
Measure), Yes on Measure J (2008 L.A.
Community College
District Bond Measure), Yes on Proposition R (2006 L.A. City Term
Limits & Ethics Reform Measure), Yes on Proposition O (2004 L.A. City Clean
Water Measure).

Among the organizations,
committees & businesses he cites are Assembly Democratic Caucus,
Conservation Action Fund, California Labor Federation, Central City
Association of Los Angeles, Clear Channel Outdoor, Democratic National
Committee, IBEW Local 11, IBEW Local 18, Los Angeles Area Chamber of
Commerce, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Los Angeles
Dodgers, Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, SEIU Local 6434,
SEIU Local 721, Sierra Club, United Firefighters of Los
Angeles City, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Women’s Political
Committee, Working Californians.

When Jan Perry is good, she is very, very good like when she took on the corruption and incompetence at the DWP and stood up for transparency and the public interest.

But when she is bad, she is very, very bad like when she proposed last week that the City Council officially oppose a bill by Sen. Gil Cedillo that could lead to exposing and prosecuting the crooked back room deals that have become so commonplace at City Hall.

The measure is SB 1168 would give the City Attorney’s office the power to subpoena witnesses and documents as part of its investigations “into misdemeanor offenses involving environmental, consumer protection, workplace safety, labor, fraud, or corruption violations and unfair business practices.”

Strangely, the City Charter gives subpoena power effectively to just about everyone in City Hall except the chief law enforcement officer, the City Attorney.

“Upon the request of the Mayor,  Controller, Treasurer, President of the Council, or the presiding officer of any board, the City Clerk shall issue subpoenas  in the name of the City, attested with the corporate seal, requiring the attendance and testimony of the witness or production of documents at a specified time and place before the Mayor, Controller, Treasurer, Council, or board requesting the  subpoena,” according to Aritcle II, Section 217 of the Charter.

SB 1168 would go even further and give the City Attorney the authority until Jan. 1, 2014 to ask the presiding judge of the Superior Court to impanel a grand jury to aid in the investigation of possible crimes involving “environmental, consumer protection, workplace safety, labor, fraud, or
corruption violations and unfair business practices.”

Given the aggressiveness and independence of City Attorney Carmen “Nuch” Trutanich you can see how this kind of authority could lead to revelations of some pretty interesting things and even begin to unravel the system of political corruption.

Without the power to subpoena documents and call witnesses to testify under oath before a grand jury, it’s almost impossible to unravel all the dirty deals that have cost taxpayers so dearly for so long.

So you can understand why the mayor and City Council members would be uneasy if Trutanich were to have the power and to conduct thorough investigations. Some of them might turn up incriminating evidence of their various nefarious activities that have benefited them and their “friends” at the expense of the public interest and the health of the city’s neighborhoods and the business community.

That’s where Jan Perry enters to protect the political games at City Hall.

Last Tuesday, she introduced a resolution backed by Bernard Parks and Greig Smith, the self-styled fiscal conservatives” to include in the city’s 2009-2010 State Legislative Program OPPOSITION to SB 1168 which would allow the Los Angeles County Superior Court to impanel an additional grand jury, managed by the City Attorney, to investigate misdemeanors.”

The reason is the city’s terrible financial shape thanks to the mismanagement and corruption of the mayor and Council so Perry is terribly concerned that impaneling a grand jury might have some costs associated with it. .

“There has been no fiscal analysis of this proposal, no determination of the potential costs to manage a Grand Jury, and no evaluation of the benefits associated with this program…in these difficult fiscal times when the City of Los Angeles is making severe cuts in all areas of our services, has eliminated entire City departments, and has laid off employees, it is unwise to take on additional services without a full fiscal analysis,” Perry’s resolution states.

What a lot of b.s. that is.

Cedillo’s bill specifically states that the bills for the grand jury “shall be submitted to the
prosecuting city attorney for reimbursement of the costs to the county out of the prosecuting city attorney’s own budget.”

Get it? Trutanich has to find the money in his own budget which it should be noted has been savagely cut by the mayor and Council because they fear him as the lone outsider in a corrupt political machine, the only figure in the city who could potentially harm them.

Then there are the “no fiscal analysis, ” “no determination of potential costs” and “no evaluation of the benefits” arguments — issues the council never worries about when it’s giving away millions to unions, contractors, developers and consultants who contribute to their campaigns or treat them to expensive dinners.

The benefits of giving the power to take certain suspected crimes to a grand jury should be as clear to ordinary citizens as it is to Perry and her pals: An end to the worst corruption at City Hall that LA has seen since the Great Depression.

This is as clear-cut as any issue could be. The Council should vote to support the Cedillo bill and anyone who is on the other side is as good as admitting they are nothing but crooks.

Once upon a time in the land
of the free and home of the brace, you could trust a man’s handshake and his
word was as good as gold.

We celebrated the virtues of
frugality and modesty, idealized those who could not tell a lie and made  legends of  war heroes and Honest Abe.

Those were the days my
friends, if only they had never ended.

Today, our bankers and
financiers can’t be trusted with a dime of our money, we can’t do the simplest
business without a lawyer, envy celebrities their fortunes and their sexual
prowess.

And our politicians? They
aren’t crooks anymore, they aren’t the take. They are part of a system that
itself is corrupt, from our cities to our state’s to our nation’s capital. Corruption
is the business of politics. The two parties have divvied up the graft from the
broad array of special interests and legalized it. They have turned political
discourse and debate into a war of divisive messages meant to segment us into
antagonisms while lulling the masses into passivity and helplessness.

Trust, honesty, courage are passé.
We now look for no more than their abstractions in integrity and transparency
as if the coherency of their behavior and its visibility alone were the real
stuff of leadership.

Personally, I long ago
reduced my own political philosophy nothing more, or less, than right of
everyone to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as they see fit, just
as long as they respect those same rights for others.

When I go to the polls June
8, I will vote against who holds public office almost without exception. My
judgments have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican or any other party or
their positions on any particular issue.

It has solely to do with my
sense of their character, whether there is any reason to believe that they
might show courage, honest and are trustworthy.

There may be dozens of great
people running for office but I only have come across four of them that I
believe are people who strive to be honest, have shown the courage of their
convictions and just be worthy of our trust.

Politically, they are all over
the map, left, right and center.

At the top of the ticket,
running for the United States Senate is Mickey Kaus, a journalist who became
one of the first great bloggers with the Kaus Files and became a mainstay at
Slate.com.

Kaus is a maverick Democrat
who believes Barbara Boxer is the worst kind of political hack who achieved
little or nothing in her three terms except wasting a seat in the Senate and
pandering to the party faithful’s prejudices without actually achieving what
they want or looking after the interests of her state.

Then, there’s Marcy Winograd
who is an ultra-liberal environmental idealist who has mounted an aggressive challenge
to long-time Rep. Jane Harman in the South
Bay, someone to whom serving in the
Congress of the United
States is something like being president of
the country club except that the perks and sense of self-importance is so much
greater.

I’ve spent some time with
state Sen. Gloria Romero because I believe as she does that are schools will
never succeed unless parents are fully involved and have at least as much say
in their educations as unions, bureaucrats and the education establishment. She
stood up to all them and brought enough of her party along to get legislation adopted
earlier this year that gives parents real power over the schools. Other states
may soon adopt the “parent trigger” as well.

Romero is the only major
candidate for the non-partisan State Superintendent of Education who is
independent of the education lobby and has intellectual credibility to embrace
new ideas.

Finally, there is Sunder
Ramani, who is running in the special election to succeed Paul Krekorian in the
state Assembly representing Burbank, Glendale and East
Valley area.

There is nothing idelogicial
about Ramani. He is a successful businessman who has devoted himself for 25
years to volunteering in a broad range of community groups and won the respect
of hundreds of community leaders.

In my list of political
virtues, I left some that may be the most important: Common sense and a caring
heart. That’s why of all the candidates I’ve encountered, Sunder Ramani is the
one I most want to win.

Frankly, I don’t care if you
agree with me on any of these four people. That isn’t the point.

What matters is that you get
past the slogans and the attack ads and ideological nails hammered into your
brains with money raised from special interests and remember the values you
hold dear, the values you look for in a mate and hope to see in your children.

This isn’t some war game we’re
playing where one side wins and the other surrenders. This is our city, our
state, our nation. We’ve all got to win or feel like we had a fair chance at
winning or we’re all just a bunch of losers.

“DWP says it will fire workers,” shouts the Daily News across the top of the front page.

“DWP to fire two caught in sting,” whispers the Times over a two-paragraph story at the bottom of page B-5  with a somewhat longer story online.

Both newspapers sent reporters to Interim DWP General Mayor and First Chief Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner’s morning press conference Wednesday so did local TV stations, most especially CBS2 which broke the story of workers drinking and driving and going to a strip club while being salaries up to $144,000 a year.

It’s easy to see this is a story of great public interest and significance, unlike the ridiculously hyped LA boycott-Arizona power shutoff story.

The boycott is phony and has no substance. Arizona’s power official only said he might recommend looking at retaliation if it had any real effect. And the problem with Arizona’s illegal immigrant law is in its symbolism and implementation which could lead to abuses and enormous liability claims, not in its substance which is basically the same as federal law and LA’s Special Order 40, both of which are enforced.

So why would the Times lead page B-5 with a catchup story on unplugging LA while caring so little about the DWP story, the editors not only buried and briefed it but called it a “sting” when it was an undercover hidden camera investigation? No one was lured to the strip club or liquor stores.

First and foremost, the Times institutionally doesn’t give a damn about LA or its people and never has, unless they are rich or famous or Hollywood celebrities — like Times staffers like to see themselves despite their company being in bankruptcy and their numbers down by more than half.

So the fact the DWP is the focus of the public’s growing discontent and the cash cow holding together a city government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy itself is of no importance.

Then, there’s the Times’ pride: It has a long history of ignoring stories broken up other media and the arbiter of the importance of all things Los Angeles even, as in this case, when the video of DWP workers aroused the sleeping population far more than rate hikes and the 100 years of DWP scandals.

Having said all that, the Times editorial decision does have a logic whether the editors actually thought about it or not.

Beutner is carefully managing the worker drinking-strip club scandal on the advice of PR people and political strategists.

It has to go away before the DWP can go after the long series of rate hikes it wants to pay its bloated payroll, appease IBEW Local 18 boss Brian D’Arcy with a couple of thousand more jobs and buy cleaner energy no matter how many billions is squeezes out of the public’s pockets and the local economy — money that will mostly go to giant Chinese and other corporations.

So he holds a quickie news conference to announce termination proceedings have started against two of the workers and others might face the same consequences while a broader investigation is under way to get closure on suspicion such conduct is widespread at the utility with at least the passive consent of managers who also are IBEW members.

You can bet little will come of the broader investigation. Beutner already has assured us he doesn’t care about the past so the probe won’t go very deep into the DWP culture, certainly won’t look at the people who have no work to do except unlocking and locking a warehouse door or the scams involving the theft of “surplus” DWP property..

Diminishing the significance of his statements further is there is a better than even money chance nobody will ever be fired unless D’Arcy gives the green light which he might do if he fix the culprits up with cushy jobs with his brethren in the private sector, IBEW Local 11.

That still leaves the problem of appeals to the Civil Service Commission and the rules put in place by our elected leaders to make sure that there is no workplace discipline anywhere at City Hall and workers never lose their jobs no matter what they do.

You might remember the two garbage men who a few years back rang up thousands of dollars in bills for personal calls on their city cell phones. They not only weren’t fired but they were given most of the rest of their lives to repay the city, supposedly because they didn’t understand the phones weren’t for personal use.

In days gone by, Beutner’s strategy would work. The Times would eventually declare case closed and come back in a year or two with an expose of its own of past DWP abuses.

But the journalistic world has changed.

The breakdown of the rule of law and of public service at City Hall is all over talk radio and getting extensive TV coverage. The internet is filled with bloggers’ reports on the DWP and City Hall’s endless list of failures. Viral email extends their reach to thousands of others. Citizen watchdogs are penetrating the walls of secrecy.

This scandal and all the other crimes against the city being committed by our elected officials won’t go away as easily as they did in the past. That is the light at the end of the dark tunnel that our city government has become — something that the political machine has yet to come to terms with.

This School Tax Is A Bargain

For just $8.33 per household a month, voters could save hundreds of
L.A. Unified teachers’ jobs and help preserve arts education in
elementary schools.

Those are the headlines over the LA Times highly-paid columnist Steve Lopez’s column today in which he reveals that unlike his newspaper’s editorial board, he supports LAUSD’s $100 per parcel tax to avoid some teachers from being laid off.

“I say yes, and maybe it’s because I have something no member of our
editorial board has: A child who attends an L.A. Unified school,” writes Lopez.

It says a lot about LAUSD that the 10 or so well-paid editorialists at the Times don’t have kids in the city’s public schools, something that puts them in step with thousands of other affluent LA residents.

Like Lopez, I’m a firm believer in public schools and my son is a graduate of Taft High and Berkeley and now is a post-graduate student at UC San Diego. The parents of the 650,000 LAUSD students, nearly 90 percent of them poor, immigrant or minorities, also believe in public schools or can’t afford to buy the education their kids need.

Quite simply, the district is overwhelmed by students with great needs and has failed to make significant strides for three decades in carrying out the reforms needed to meet them or win the confidence of those who can afford private schools.

Writes Lopez: “Times are tough, and people don’t want to dig into their pockets right
now, especially since there’s no citizen oversight written into the
measure. On top of that, the teachers union has stubbornly resisted
needed reforms, the district bureaucracy can be awful and the school
board is no great shakes, either. So do we really want to send these
people more money?”

No, we don’t and the reasons are many.

It’s not because we don’t want to “save the jobs of 350 teachers, along with
400 custodians and campus aides. Seventy-five nurses, counselors and
psychologists will be spared. High school class sizes, already in the
40s, won’t swell any further. And arts programs in the elementary grades
could be preserved,” as Lopez enumerates what the $100 million a year that Measure E would generate.

It’s not even because a parcel tax is the most regressive tax there is. It’s the same $8.33 a month for a tiny cottage in Watts as it is for a Bel Air mansion or an office building worth hundred million dollars.

Voters have backed school bond issue after bond issue — taxes based on the value of property — only to see their money go to build schools that cost up to $500 million, only to see the latest bond issue not even needed for seven years from now.

We’ve seen superintendents and reform plans come and go but we’ve still not seen major improvement in dropout rates or achievement. We’ve seen the mayor take over the schools, at least indirectly, and still not seen the changes we were promised. We’ve recently seen the mayor and district officials collude with the ACLU to stop layoffs of teachers at three impacted schools, two of them directly under the mayor’s control.

We’re seeing the mayor, Superintendent Ramon Cortines and even teacher union leader A.J. Duffy duck the parcel tax campaign, presumably because their standing in the community is so low they would generate more “no” votes than “yes” votes. Instead, the campaign for Measure E is “hoping that if the turnout
is low, only the most passionate voters will take to the polls and
support the schools.”

There’s good reason for running an underground campaign just as events that occurred Tuesday showed.

One of the most important reforms enacted to protect the squandering of taxpayer money at LAUSD was the creation of the Inspector General’s office and the appointment of former FBI agent Don Mullinax to the position.

Mullinax proved so tough and thorough that after a few years, they cut his funding and drove him out of office.

On Tuesday, Jerry Thornton, the current Inspector General, met the same fate. According to word leaking out from the school board’s closed-door session, Thornton — who was largely frozen out by the board and top officials for most of a year — was terminated because

his audits of spending and programs had a “gotcha” tone.

A review of recent audits showed Thornton found P-card abuses like someone at an early childhood education center racking up “$1,100 in dating services” on the card of someone else who was on leave and the “potenti

al for abuse and

misuse” of P-cards for millions of dollars in district and federal stimulus funds.

Of even greater significance is what happened at Verdugo Hills High on Tuesday and how the district is trying to make this scandal go away.

Community activists have long campaigned to get an investigation into LAUSD practices of marking truants present in class for the purpose of collecting the $25 daily attendance payment from the state.

What happened at Verdugo is that Principal Diane Klewitz sent home forms for parents of graduating seniors authorizing their children to go on three-day field trips to get them out of the way while other students were taking standardized tests and still collect the $25 payment..

The trouble was the field trips were for the students to stay at home, something that would not allow for the $25 daily attendance payment — costing $5,000 a day in revenue for the 200 seniors given “stay-cations.”

Klewitz told Howard Blume of the Times she inherited the tradition from her predecessors. In other words, it’s common practice to scam the system and let 17-year-olds party for three days.

“Parents signed a slip saying they’d rather have their children stay
home than sit in an auditorium,” Klewitz said. “There are issues in terms of
safety [when you] ask kids to sit in an auditorium all day. They tend to want to go out and roam the campus or jump the fence
and disappear and roam the streets.”

So being in school is dangerous but being off campus and doing whatever graduating seniors do is safe?

Some parents disagreed and complained and the Times called for comment so the district ordered the kids back to school today and promised to check whether Verdugo cheated in the past.

Don’t expect them to end the practice everywhere else and clean up the truancy issue they have ignored for so long.

These current examples are just small elements in the grand rubric of LAUSD’s failures.

Board member Tamar Galatzan, the only board member to vote against putting the parcel tax on the June ballot, explained her opposition in these terms:

“Now is the time to look at
every single program, how it’s funded, who benefits from it, get rid of the
ones that don’t work and change the ones where the funding mechanism isn’t
benefiting our students.”

That’s exactly what LAUSD needs to do to restore the public trust and get the money it needs to do a better job.

It’s what the district has needed to do for 30 years but the district’s leadership and the union prefer to go on protecting policies that have failed the students and the city as a whole.

This is what we’ve come to: Four million people provide an average of $1,700 each to City Hall for police, fire, paved streets and sidewalks, parks and libraries and other basic services but all they care about is dogs, cats and gang-bangers.

Welcome to the City Hall Follies — a burlesque that lasted 11 hours on Monday and amounted to petty bickering and maneuvering to add another $5 in fines for illegal parking so they can provide more jobs to hoodlums and keep a closed-to-the-public warehouse with 167 unwanted pets functioning.

Once again, the City Council signed off on a budget that carries out the mayor’s plan for destroying the quality of life for the many to protect the few.

Even the word budget is inappropriate since it’s largely a work of fiction: Unrealistic revenue projections, revenue that doesn’t exist, layoffs and spending cuts they have no intention of carrying out.

Why they even go through the charade of holding a meeting in public and boring themselves and us to death is beyond me since it was always a done deal and solves nothing.

They balanced the budget on paper, not in reality. They want us to approve a tax on billboards so they can approve even more of them and legitimize the thousands of illegal ones they have done nothing about for years.

They make a mockery of government and fools of us.

It took them most of the day to come up the $5 illegal parking fine increase so they could keep the Northeast Valley animal shelter staffed to look after stray cats and dogs. It is the newest and costliest shelter in the city but never has opened to the public, nothing but a depot for animals destined to be euthanized.

A third of the dogs in the city are unlicensed so they impose a 50 percent fee on those who do license their dogs and do little or nothing to penalize those who don’t.

They spend millions to keep gang members from killing each other and the occasional bystander and plan to spend far more to train them as “green doctors” and laborers so they can put them on the DWP payroll and justify more rate hikes.

But the people who obey the laws and pay the taxes see their libraries and parks closing and  the 75-year backlog in paving streets and sidewalks heading toward the century mark.

Like bums cadging for money on Skid Row, they beg the city unions that elected them to temporarily give back a little from the years of sweetheart contracts just so they can get through another few months without layoffs or furloughs.

They put themselves in this position by cutting a deal last year to bribe 2,400 workers to retire early and signed a contract that deferred wage increases with the promise that workers would get two years’ of wage hikes totaling nearly 6 percent in 2010-11 if even a single worker was terminated or furloughed.

The bills are coming due for those wage hikes just as they are for the wage hikes they gave DWP workers at the same time, just as they will for their plans to borrow heavily to get through the next 12 months.

They are digging a financial hole for the city so deep that the day of reckoning accounts will have disastrous consequences.

At the end of the day, they all voted for this budget except Alarcon who objected that they didn’t do enough for the poor, the unions and the special interests and Koretz who simply disappeared when the vote was taken to no one’s surprise.

The instinct of many is to break up the city, slash their pay in half, declare bankruptcy or refuse to pay your DWP bill like so many others are doing with impunity.

We have come to this. We have become a global symbol of America’s failure and fading glory.

My only answer, for what it’s worth, is to throw these people out and start again with new leaders and a new vision that will treat people equally, restore trust in City Hall and offer a new deal that provides for a healthier future for LA   Otherwise it’s time to sell off what you can and pack your bags like so many families and businesses already have done.

They call it their “gold in the gutter” — the pennies, dollars and millions the City Council is using to paper over the massive budget deficits they created without actually reducing spending.

As the Council gets closure on its latest edition of phony budget-writing today, or perhaps Tuesday, the biggest nugget they are counting on is the $53 million in a lump sum payment from leasing 10 city-owned parking structures to a private company for 50 years.

That’s a lot less than the upwards of $150 million the mayor was looking for a year ago but you can be sure that the mayor’s and council’s vast army of P.R. spinners will put a smiley face on this back room deal that will make someone very rich even richer.

To maximize revenue, the 10 parking lots are being put up for lease as a package with the revenue earmarked for the general fund to avoid layoffs — and there in lies the problem.

The Department of Recreation and Parks like libraries and other services provided to the general public is under assault from city officials whose only goal is to protect city jobs, not public services. They already have eliminated 4,000 jobs that provide basic services through early retirement, vacant job eliminations and transfers to special funds and they want to avoid actual layoffs anyway they can.

But that isn’t proving so easy to do.

Under the City Charter, the Pershing Square lot is owned by Rec and Parks which gets all the profits from it — roughly $2 million a year now despite the city’s utterly poor management of parking facilities and its high costs for salaries and benefits which are estimated at 50 percent higher than a private operator’s, according to a consultant’s report.

Back in January, the City Administrative Office and Chief Legislative Analyst offered a detailed analysis of the parking structure proposal, including this passage on the Pershing Square issue:

Pershing Square

RAP states that Pershing Square generates approximately $2 million annually that is used to
support RAP programs, including $500,000 transferred annually to the General Fund in
support of various Citywide programs. The City Attorney has concluded that RAP is entitled to
the “net proceeds” ascribed to this asset through a concession, where “net proceeds” are
gross revenues less expenditures for operation and maintenance. To determine RAP’s proper share of the rent derived from a lease for all 10 of the parking structures, RAP and the City must estimate and agree upon the amount of the rent attributable to Pershing Square. The City Attorney has advised that various factors are relevant to this rent allocation, including, but not limited to, the historical revenue and expense numbers for all of the structures. In general, the working group believes that a private operator will generate more value from the Pershing Square garage, and this additional value should be available to support RAP operations within the funding requirements of the City Charter.

I added the emphasis because the problem lies in the determination of revenue to the parks if it’s included in the package, an issue the mayor who had demonstrated so little respect for the rule of law would like to ignore.

According to an email from the City Attorney’s Office, the mayor wants to know “why the (Rec and Parks) Board of Commissioners could not agree to receive payment from
the General Fund during the 50 year term of the lease (e.g., $2 million
per year for 50 years).”

“It was explained that monies received from revenues earned by the
department are required by Charter Section 593 (c) to be placed in the
RAP fund, and that more specifically pursuant to Charter Section 596 (a)
(5), proceeds from leasing the subsurface space for operation of a
public parking structure ‘shall be paid into the Recreation and Parks
Fund.’ The Charter is clear and does not provide a basis for the Board
or anyone else to waive its requirements. The Charter can only be
changed by an amendment approved by the voters.”

Under the Charter, Pershing Square gets specific protections because it was deeded to Rec and Parks specifically to provide funding to it. Rec and Parks also gets a piece of the city’s property tax revenue which provides most of its funding.

In theory, those funds are safe even as Rec and Parks is getting hit with a $25 million bill for water and power and reduced general fund support. But theories are cheap and city officials are looking for even more, thus the attempt to raid the Pershing Square revenue.

The City Attorney’s Office advised the mayor and others that raiding that money likely would lead to a taxpayer lawsuit.

“We also advised that the potential consequences of violating the Charter
are that an action for declaratory relief and injunction could be
brought by any taxpayer. The likely result of such a lawsuit would be
that payment to the RAP Fund would be compelled, with interest, and
attorney’s fees and costs would have to be paid by the City’s General
Fund,” the email said.

“If an arrangement that would violate the Charter is included in
the lease, the City Attorney would not be able to approve the lease. If
an arrangement that would violate the Charter is included in a public
report to the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners or any other
City body, the City Attorney would be compelled to comment on the
Charter requirements.”

So that leaves the parking deal up in the air — something City Council members are set to ignore by including the $53 million in next year’s budget.

They will undoubtedly try to get around the City Charter by allocating a portion of the $53 million to Rec and Parks but will it be a fair allocation?

Pershing Square is the most profitable city parking structure with the two that are larger — Cinerama Dome and Hollywood & Highland — both losing money hard as that might be to believe.

It is the plum in the deal. Private operators would almost certainly raise the daily rate of $15.40, even double it, and sharply cut operational costs, much as they will do to all the other lots.

City Hall has the option of continuing to operate Pershing Square and the other parking lots but that would take investment and skilled management and lower cost structures. But it wouldn’t provide all that upfront cash now in exchange for future revenue.

The city could lease Pershing Square separately, leaving the revenue stream with Rec & Parks but that wouldn’t avoid having to lay off city workers since the leasing of the nine other structures wouldn’t generate nearly as much to the general fund.

Call it the Pershing Square Dilemma, just one example of the many problems city officials are facing because they are incapable of facing the budget crisis head-on.

Do you get it yet? Or are you too numb and defeated to react to anything except the latest ball score or smutty sitcom?

You are being robbed blind in broad daylight by people who would steal the last morsel off your table without a qualm, people you elected to serve you who are so venal they have no qualms or are so weak and stupid they convince themselves you are willingly sharing a feast.

Watch CBS2 David Goldstein’s shocking report showing six-figure DWP workers going to strip clubs, drinking on the job, driving giant trucks while drinking beers wrapped in paper towels. Do you think those are isolated scenes of the few miscreants or a window into widespread abuses by a workforce that has total immunity from discipline as long as they don’t cross their union?

See the mayor’s “boys will be boys” smirk as he promises to investigate as if it’s a teenage son and his buddies getting in trouble for stealing booze from the liquor cabinet and making fools of themselves.

Is it any wonder that Austin Beutner — Jobs Czar, First Deputy Mayor and Interim DWP General Manager — is turning the DWP Headquarters into a fortress to keep the public from seeing how little is really going on inside a rogue agency that claims it’s losing money even as it jacks up rates, gives out big pay raises and has been hiring nearly 100 extra workers a month for the last two years?

That’s right when everybody else is losing their jobs and getting no raises or pay cuts, the DWP is hiring madly, giving 6 percent raises followed by five years of raises of up to 4 percent and wanting 20 to 30 percent rate hikes. Does anybody know what the 1,400 extra bodies at the DWP are doing for the public benefit?

What passes for Beutner’s and the mayor’s economic development and green energy policies is becoming clearer by the day — China gets the jobs and our green and we get the bills.

They are trampling on DWP bidding procedures in a mad rush to buy solar panels made in China and cutting deals with an “upstart Chinese electric car company — best known for making cellphone batteries” — to buy their vehicles with city money, reduce port fees and provide $1 million in subsidies to create 150 jobs in LA and thousands in China.

“Villaraigosa is basically bribing a Chinese car company to come to Los
Angeles — and he’s using your money to do it…It illustrates that L.A. is such a
hostile place for businesses that the only way they’ll move employees
here is if City Hall gives them taxpayers’ money,” Walter Moore writes.

“Do you understand, now, why Villaraigosa wants so desperately to raise
your DWP rates?  It has nothing to do with ‘green power’ — unless by
‘green’ you mean ‘money,’ and by ‘power’ you mean ‘political power.’

Day after day, City Council members, as they have for a year, go through every department eliminating services that make life better for the people of the city and create healthier neighborhoods even as they look for ways to squeeze more money out of you every which  way they can.

All this is done in the name of cost-cutting when in reality it is service cutting, and revenue generating.

A quarter of the city’s working population is unemployed or under-employed and nearly everyone’s income and wealth have decreased but the budget for next year with its $484 million deficit, papered down to $80 million, takes an optimistic view that recovery is just around the corner.

Their fantasy is your nightmare. But keep pretending it’s all just a terrible dream and the morning will be bright and filled with optimism when you wake up.

It is business as usual at City Hall. Nothing has changed or will change until you open your eyes and see the truth of what is happening.

This isn’t a make-believe movie, it’s real and it’s your life and your city.

What is there to say? CBS2’s David Goldstein got the video evidence.

Budget and Finance Committee Chairman Bernard Parks captured the attitude of the mayor and City Council on Wednesday in a debate over $10 million to revitalize the Broadway Theater District with one-time money.

For the full context of his remarks view the story and longer video at OurLA.org.

Hour after hour, department after department, the worst show on earth — City Hall’s Dancing for Dollars Budget Ballet — is playing out on Channel 35 this week.

Just as they have for the past 10 months, City Council members are breaking the public’s legs doing pathetic pratfalls and spastic missteps falling all over themselves with their top priority protecting city workers’ jobs — and their own, of course.

Forget tree trimming and sidewalk repairs — those are now the responsibility of property owners with the intent to shift liability and costs away from City Hall. Forget pothole repair. Forget there is just anything your tax dollars get you.

Your money is solely for the benefit of the system itself. Anything that most people get from city government falls under the category of “full cost recovery” so you get to pay twice for it.

There is no vision of a better city — let alone a great city — that drives the mayor and Council’s budget plan, just the preservation of the system itself by papering over the problem through transfers of money from one pot to another — every one of those transfers representing a city job saved, a public service eliminated.

It is survival of the un-fittest, this desperate attempt to protect themselves no matter how much damage they do to the quality of life of the four million residents.

Over and over, all they want to know is how they can protect the jobs of those who bring in revenue from the city’s people and businesses and how they can find other jobs for those who actually provide services directly to the public.

They don’t have a plan to actually fix what’s broken — wages and benefits that are no longer affordable, inefficiencies and low productivity in too many departments.

They only have their prayers and hopes for an Obama economic miracle.

It will take a miracle because their long-term inattention to how the city is run, their corrupt sellouts to special interests, their transformation of city government from a services provider into a jobs program are the back story for this unending crisis.

They don’t even know at this point whether the DWP will deign to give them get the $73.5 million promised to bail out this year’s deficit or the $257 they budgeted for next year.

Once again, we are facing a hypothetical budget, relying on the same plan to sell parking structures and other valuable assets that didn’t deliver a single dollar this year. CAO Miguel Santana gives them hope, they are better off now with $80 million hole based on optimistic projections for 2010-11 than they were when they passed this year’s budget with a $300 million hole before revenue projections turned out to be hopelessly optimistic.

They are living in a fantasyland while the rest of us live a nightmare with libraries and parks open only part-time and the infrastructure deteriorating and our rates, fees and taxes soaring.

In the end, they will cover the nakedness of their shame with the fig leaf of their pompous posturing and trust the public will remain apathetic and ignorant.

They are living in the past and unable to see winds of change are blowing hard, that hard times are waking people up and TV news’ sudden interest is filling their distracted minds’ with facts for a change.

In the name of saving LA, they are destroying it.

They think Neighborhood Councils should be out there trimming the trees and helping out in the parks even as they kill the Neighborhood Empowerment department, and refuse to share power with them.

It’s only a matter of time before it all falls apart — unless, of course, you believe in miracles. So we either need to throw these political bosses out and replace them with genuine public servants or get down on our knees with them and pray for LA.

Thanks to John Schwada of Fox News Channel 11, we get explanations — of a sort — from Council members Bernard Parks and Jan Perry — on how they missed keeping the DWP rate hike from becoming permanent.

I know beloved Chief Daryl Gates was buried Tuesday but the funeral was over at 11 a.m. and the Council convened half an hour later and just before 1 p.m. voted to allow the con job DWP rate increase to become permanent on a 9-5 vote.

Sellouts Alarcon, Cardenas, Hahn, Wesson and Garcetti as expected provided the five votes to reject taking jurisdiction of the sleight of hand they pulled off to turn a one-quarter increase of nearly 5 percent in power rates into a permanent rate increase.

The mayor’s boys don’t feel no need to listen to the public because they think they are so secure but Cardenas and Wesson will be facing organized challenges for re-election next March from the Clean Sweep Campaign (lacleansweep.com) and Hahn suffers delusions of grandeur that ignoring the public  in exchange for union money will carry her into the office of lieutenant governor — a heartbeat away from becoming governor of the formerly great State of California.

The criticial 10th vote was missing in action, Bernard Parks, the former police chief who had every reason to pay full respect to Gates’ controversial service to the city.

Yet, less than half an hour after he chose not to support his ally Jan Perry and fulfill his commitments, Parks appeared at the City Council Chamber to run the first Budget and Finance Committee hearing on the mayor’s new fictitious budget plan.

Parks was assuming his favored role as the public’s guardian on the city’s finances — a role he has done so well we are faced with seeing our libraries and parks closing, our building code enforcement and community planning abolished, our Neighborhood Council system decimated and our DWP rates rising in what is just the first step in a massive escalation.

Parks — the half-million dollar a year man with his pension and salary and lucrative perks and benefits — was a no-show when it counted.

He must be preoccupied with his war against senior lead officers and the three-day work week for cops and thus forgot that he could have pressured the DWP to deliver the $73.5 million it promised to the general fund and given ratepayers a fair shot and forcing the utility to come clean about all the hundreds of plans and costs it has done such a good job of hiding for so long.

It would be charitable to let him off the hook as nothing but a lapse in memory. But that isn’t the truth. It was a rigged vote and Parks made it happen intentionally.

The Council has a long tradition of fixing the vote on controversial issues so that they appear to be close and gee whiz the public lost again.

That’s what happened a week ago when Zine and Krekorian rolled over and let them get away with making the DWP rate hike permanent without anyone except maybe the Machiavellian Garcetti really knowing what they were doing.

So with five “no” votes secure and Parks taking a dive, everyone else on the Council was free to pander to the anger and resentment of their constituents without disrupting the flow of money to a secretive and demonstrably incompetent agency that represents the city’s most valuable asset.

For all his talk about fiscal responsibility, for all his knowledge of penny-ante fine points of the city budget, Parks has allowed the city to paper over its overspending, make promises to workers and the public it cannot keep and pushed the city to brink of bankruptcy as much as anybody.

For a cop, always being there when duty calls is what makes them better than the rest of us. The greatest failing of Gates was that he was off partying when the Rodney King riots erupted and got out of hand.

For Parks, it was that he wasn’t there when we needed the Council to stand up to the DWP on behalf of the four million people of this city. He can posture and nitpick all he wants from now on, but he was the missing man when it counted.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The City Council voted 9-5 Tuesday — one vote short of the two-thirds needed to take jurisdiction of the nearly 5 percent DWP power rate after learning it is permanent, not temporary as many of them, the press and the public believed. Parks, who had opposed the increase and could have supplied the 10th vote, was absent. Alarcon, Cardenas, Hahn, Wesson and Garcetti supported the permanent rate hike. (I erred earlier in saying Zine, missing that Garcetti’s name is now at the bottom of the alphabetical list.)

Austin Beutner has made transparency of the DWP a top priority so taking his word at face value I’ve sent him several requests for information about DWP rates, plans and policies.

Of course, words can mean different things to different people but I’ll go with Wikipedia which says transparency “implies openness, communication, and accountability” which in a government sense includes “open meetings, financial disclosure statements, freedom of information legislation, budgetary review, audits, etc.”

Based on the DWP’s long history of obfuscation, half-truths and outright lies, it could take the middle-aged Beutner the rest of his life to shed light into all the darkness of DWP machinations.

We know with certainty that Beutner’s real job is to be just transparent enough to get massive rate hikes through the City Council which means giving then enough cover so that they can overcome their phobic fear of the wrath of voters.

There must be thousands of questions to ask about what has happened to ratepayers’ billions in recent years, why water mains are bursting and the electrical system aging, why there’s so little green energy, why no comprehensive planning, why salaries are so high, how hundreds of millions can be turned over as “surplus” to general fund every year…

Today, Jan Perry’s Energy and Environment Committee is asking questions about why the DWP needs to spend $6 million a year more for “dumping privileges for dumping dirt, asphalt, and concrete” at landfills on top of the $4 million already allocated.

Questions also could be asked about why the DWP is spending $11.125 million to buy warehouse and industrial property for the mayor’s “clean tech corridor” near downtown and is intending — with help from the other bottomless pit of public wealth, the Community Redevelopment Agency — to buy jobs with massive subsidies.

“The Clean Technology Business Incubator will help CRA/LA fulfill its
role of economic development and job creation by encouraging research
and development in green technologies such as renewable energy,
recycling and next-generation transportation,” said Calvin Hollis,
CRA/LA Interim Chief Executive Officer, according to CurbedLA.

Apart from dressing up the DWP to look respectable, Beutner’s real task as “Jobs Czar” is to turn our bankrupt city government into an economic engine the way the Soviet Union and China in their Communist heydays tried to do without success before turning to that old-fashioned notion of free enterprise capitalism.

Perhaps, he knows something Stalin and Mao did not.

Certainly, a key area of flagrant DWP spending is its crash program to meet the mayor’s artificial political goal of achieving 20 percent renewables by 2010 no matter how much it costs, no matter that there is no plan to get rid of coal plants or to methodically go green at a cost the public can afford.

Other People’s Money has always been something the mayor has generously spent and this report Monday from the Tehachapi News shows just how desperate the DWP officials are to please the mayor without regard to cost or common sense:

“At the April 13 Airport Commission board meeting, Tehachapi Municipal
Airport Manager Tom Glasgow offered a clue as to why the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power needs its huge rate increase.

“Jet fuel sales jumped from 186 gallons in January 2009 to 1,821 gallons
in January 2010.”

Money is no object when it’s other people’s and that’s what DWP’s green energy plan is all about: Buying wind and solar power and renewable energy credits on the open market at a premium because they failed to carry out their stated goal more than a decade ago to reduce reliance on coal for nearly half the city’s power, why they even dragged their feet on rooftop solar to the point LA couldn’t even power a square block with solar.

This frantic politically-driven policy of buying renewables was so successful the DWP actually achieved the goal of 20 percent in March but the mayor’s failure to get his 20 to 30 percent rate hike could diminish that to 12 percent by the year’s end.

At that level, LA not only would have the state’s dirtiest energy portfolio but also the one with the lowest level of clean energy.

Transparency is the issue and Beutner has to come clean about all the questions about DWP before he has any chance of getting his hands on more of the public’s money.

To do that, he’s going to have to take the politics out of water and power policy, rein in payroll costs that make up nearly 60 percent of DWP spending after buying water and fuel — not the 25 percent of total costs he claims — and put forward clear long-term plans for rebuilding the infrastructure, generating renewable energy, closing coal plants and do all that at rates that don’t kill more jobs than they create and bankrupt more people than they enrich.

In other words, the mission of DWP must be what it’s supposed to be: Providing water and power for the City of Los Angeles, not serving the political games of the mayor. It’s a utility that provides public services, not a jobs or wealth redistribution program.

In light of the mayor’s scathing criticism of DWP’s management, it’s worth noting what the mayor’s point man, Jobs Czar and Interim General Manager Austin Beutner is telling the utility’s staff.

“While I have been at the Department for a few days, I have already gained great respect and admiration for the linemen, engineers, managers, support staff, and thousands of professional men and women of this Department. You insure the reliability of incredibly complex water and power systems. For this, I extend the thanks of a grateful City,” Beutner said in a letter to staff Monday. (Read the full letter at OurLA.org)

“These efforts are led by a very capable senior management team that gets the
job done day in and day out. The senior management team has my confidence,
and I look forward to working with them over the coming months.”

His words are in sharp contrast to what the mayor told the LA TImes last Wednesday, words that drew a sharp rebuke from union boss Brian D’Arcy and set off a firestorm of anger among senior managers.

“For four years, I’ve battled a bureaucracy that just won’t respond to the policy direction” to move away from coal toward renewable fuels like solar and wind energy. It’s been an absolute war,” the mayor said.

“Every time that we tried to figure out what the numbers are,” the bureaucracy resists. “Getting through that Byzantine bureaucracy is very difficult…. We’ve got to figure out a way to make that agency more transparent.

“They undermined [former General Manager Ronald] Deaton, they undermined [former General Manager David] Nahai. Even [outgoing General Manager S. David] Freeman,” Villaraigosa said. “…I’m talking about that upper-level management…You can’t fire them. They just go back to the Civil Service system” and they lose about $15,000 in salary as well as their city-provided cars, but they stay in the DWP. “They out-wait you. They’ve out-waited everybody.”