Put aside for the moment, if you can, City Hall’s well-documented mismanagement, its failure to respond to its budget crisis until it was completely out of control and its sweetheart deals with unions, contractors, consultants and developers.
A good case can be made that our elected representatives are guilty of both misfeasance and malfeasance in office and should be recalled or rejected by voters for what they have done.
Over the last two years, I believe I have made a plausible case in those regards. But the more important question is how we are going to get out of this mess with the quality of our lives without suffering permanent damage, without destroying our own economic futures.
I suggested the only way out is for all city unions to take a step back financially and the public to take a step forward financially, something that can only be engineered by sharing power with business, labor and the community since our elected officials have lost all credibility.
But that clearly is not City Hall’s way judging from the plan that has been put forward to destroy the Neighborhood Council movement, slash services, eliminate nearly 7,000 jobs and give tax breaks and incentives to businesses that can leave town or set up in town while burdening those stuck here along with the four million residents with higher rates, fees, taxes and penalties.
It’s crazy when you think about it, insane since it shows they don’t know the difference between right and wrong, insane since they have lost touch with reality.
All of the measures being undertaken by City Hall depend on the economy returning to “normal” within a few years, “normal” being as it was in the boom years of 2006-07.
When, then, is the economy going to return to “normal”?
Never!
Apart from all else that City Hall has done, and is doing, wrong, that is the fatal flaw.
My friend Mark Barnhill made that point as a panelist at a conference on the private equity landscape in Beverly Hills last week.
He made the point that this is a transformative moment in history, that the “old normal” is not coming back, a “new normal” is evolving in uncertain ways.
Globalization, technology, overpopulation, environmental change are all factors but perhaps the most important for America is the loss of manufacturing capacity. We no longer own the means of production. We no longer create wealth, we consume it as evidenced by our long-term staggering trade deficits and borrowing.
Los Angeles faces serious challenges of its own: Its boom-and-bust and growth-at-any-price economic patterns, its loss of financial institutions and manufacturing, its high poverty and jobless rates, its dramatic loss of TV and film production.
Even in comparison to other cities in the county, LA is at a serious disadvantage because of its high taxation policies and high rents for housing and commercial space.
The
city report last week that was used to justify an 80 percent tax
reduction for Internet service companies demonstrated just how
disadvantaged. Only Santa Monica is even in the ball park with LA
when operating costs and rents were tied together.
“On the
basis of operating costs alone, every cityinvestigated
for this report offers substantial potential savings over the City of Los Angeles,” the report said.
According
to the city’s report, here are the operating fees for these types of
business — small, medium and large —
in nearby cities and in Los Angeles
CitySmallMediumLarge
Burbank $294 $913$2,563
Downey$62$62 $62
Glendale$0 $0 $0
Long
Beach$737 $1,986$5,316
Pasadena$855 $2,993$8,695
Pomona$5,095$80,095$200,Q95
Santa
Clarita$0$0$0
Santa Monica $15,000 $240,000 $600,000
Torrance$1,793$6,368$18,568
West Covina $470$1,689$4,939
Los Angeles $125,000 $400,000 $1,000,000
So
where do think businesses are setting up shop, LA or Santa Monica? Or
any of
the other cities for that matter, all of which have healthier economies
and
fewer financial troubles in running their city governments.
Will LA be any more
attractive in the next few years as library and parks close and there’s
little left functioning except maybe the police and fire departments and
taxes, rates and fees for captive businesses and residents go even
higher?
This isn’t child’s play, yet our city leaders are acting like
children intent on shielding themselves from accountability and
protecting their political careers.
We cannot let this happen but it will unless the civic, business
and labor leaders recognize there is a “new normal” and step forward
with the community leadership and put an end to this nonsense before it
is too late.
Every failing regime needs an apologist and a henchman and Antonio Villaraigosa has found his in Tim Rutten of the Times and his Chief of Staff Jeff Carr.
Rev. Carr may have learned too much from his days hanging around the city’s vast hoodlum class as the mayor’s gang czar.
To many in City Hall, he is a thug, the mayor’s enforcer, the man who conveys the orders to keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told or you’re out. To commissioners and top bureaucrats, he is the obedient servant of a mayor who has lost touch with his roots, his values, his city.
Carr’s excellent service in eliminating the worst violence of the gangs and loyalty to the mayor earned his promotion late last year, a position envied by others in the world of Antonio who thought themselves more deserving.
That his success was in no small part due to participating in the “Baghdad Solution” to LA’s street violence, achieved by having former gangsters on the city payroll give free passes to hoodlums to do what they wanted as long as they reduced their number of Class 1 crimes that show up on LAPD statistic sheets.
Inside City Hall, what is going on is nothing like the live-and-live deal the hoodlums are getting. Carr listens sympathetically to the entreaties of others but he does not hear, Orders are orders.
Rutten is a different case.
He obeys without being ordered unless you believe his bosses had to tell him explicitly that the company line is the city is in good hands and all will be well be as soon as the economy returns to normal.
Clearly not paying attention to what is going on himself, he turns to Carr of all people for understanding how the city can get of the difficult financial situation created by poor leadership and awful management.
What he learns is this: “The problem, Carr says, is that the mayor’s call for shared sacrifice so
far has been met with silence or rejection. But labor’s refusal to
engage could have profound consequences on its members and the city.”
And labor’s refusal to accept pay cuts of 10 or 15 percent is “a tragedy that organized labor one day may come to regret.:
None of that is remotely true. Unions representing 22,000 city workers have twice in last nine months negotiated deals with the mayor for early retirements and no raises, 10,000 cops have given up raises, thousands of other workers have seen their pay cut by up to 10 percent through furloughs.
Only the mayor’s pals in the DWP union have gotten off without giving up
anything, On top of the nearly 6 percent raises in the first two years
of the recession, they got handsome lump-sum payments of 3.25 percent of
their salaries this year and up to 4 percent in each of the next four
years. Many of those DWP workers got retroactive raises going back three
years and managers just were handed $5.5 million in cash payments
Friday by the City Council.
Any question of give-backs from DWP
workers are off the table but the mayor wants rate hikes of nearly 25
percent this year to help pay their salary increases.
In his
slavish belief in the perfection of City Hall’s failures, Rutten
concludes: “Los Angeles and organized labor have been good for one
another. Now
they need to see each other through the bad times, so that when
prosperity returns, the goodwill engendered by shared sacrifice will
ensure that all share in the benefits.”
Just three days earlier, Rutten was taken to task
for his attack
on City Attorney Carmen Trutanich for his crackdown on millionaire
scofflaw Kayvan Setareh who put up a supergraphic on a Hollywood
building to reap profits promoting a movie in defiance of the billboard
ordinance and fire safety laws.
“Elected office can be made a
bully pulpit, we all suffer when it’s
transformed into a pulpit for bullies,” showing his contempt for those
who believe in the rule of law.
A week earlier, he gave the mayor
a forum without a critical question to sell the genius of his
deceit in selling the public on a 30-year sales tax hike to build a
subway to the sea and now trying to borrow against that revenue stream
to build it in just 10 years.
The henchman and the apologist —
only regimes that are failing try to enforce their rule this way.
The
Villaraigosa Administration is a failure by any measure and no amount
of coercion or puffery can save it from its rightful place in history.
The
unions have been at the table, made concessions and cut deal after deal
that were approved by mayor and Council.
They have even talked
about dramatic pay cuts only to be told that the situation is so bad
they may still face massive layoffs — DWP workers and certain other
classes exempt from both.
The mayor can’t pull off a deal because
he has no credibility with the unions or the public. He has lost
everyone’s confidence and could not win an election if it were held
today.
He is trapped in a box and everything he tries will blow
up into controversy and conflict.
He is trying to destroy the
community empowerment movement that has beat him in three straight
elections and seeks nothing more than full transparency, complete
honesty, an end to back room deals and a share of power.
Such
basic democratic goals are as abhorrent to him as to his henchman and
his apologist. The only question is how much harm we will let him and
his allies do before they fall and a new deal is put into place.
Bruno couldn’t make it to the Getty House for the mayor’s premature Oscar party, too busy chomping down on the dribbles of kibbles dispensed from the new damn MannersMinder machine. At least that’s my story, not getting an invite might also have had something to do with it. But other media mongrels did so. The Hollywood Reporter came up with some pictures of the mostly from the second tier glamor and glitterati set.
Of all the dog trainers in the world, it was the Wall Street Journal that provided an account of the rest of us missed.
Speakeasy writer Stephen Kurutz, who might have sneaked in saying he was Paul Koretz, described the soiree, saying that “for much of the evening we felt like we were in a scene from “The
Player.’”
Noting the mayor being photographed on the red carpet and the city workers seeing red with protest signs out front of Getty House, Kurutz mingled with industry exec types in suits and eavesdropped on two guys he made as agents or managers. You know the type. They were exchanging boasts about who they represent.
Then he heard these snippets from other partygoers:
“Oh, my God. Ben Silverman is here. We truly have arrived.”
“Best agent in the business, right here.”
“Was Morgan Freeman trying to take your tacos?”
The last comment was his favorite and made his think it was some kind of Hollywood “sexual innuendo,” whatever that means.
Freeman only stayed long enough for a cameo and Kathryn Bigelow stood the mayor up so this WSJ guy hung around “The Blind Side” star Quinton Aaro, who is so big even Bruno wouldn’t mess with him.
He was about as well known as Bruno until this movie but the ladies seem to be enamored so he was asked what it was like to be fawned over and a big-time celebrity.
“I’m loving it,” he said.
The Speakeasy commented “It wasn’t exactly Tolstoy but it seemed to sum everything up quite
well.”
Bruno feels a whole lot better about the mayor’s snub hearing that.
Everybody bitches about taxes but nobody does anything about it — except for the city’s Internet service companies, somewhere between 800 and 1,400 businesses depending on which document and which official you listen to..
For the last few years, they have been raising hell over being reclassified from a very low business tax rate to a high one in a haphazard fashion the left some paying little and others, like the 200-employee Shopzilla, ordered to pay high taxes.
On Friday, while most basic services like parks and libraries are being gutted, thousands of workers fired, and City Hall is looking to hit the public with a rash of higher fees, taxes, rates and penalties, Internet companies got a $3.4 million tax break this year that adds to the estimated $212 deficit that now exists.
All they had to do was threaten to move to Glendale or other nearby cities, rally the business community behind them, persevere for 11 months after the City Council took notice and wait for their windfall.
Paul Koretz, Jose Huizar and Tony Cardenas yelped about the retroactivite provision, the vote was unanimous because they were warned of consequences if they delayed approval a week when the Council will be rushing off to a hard-earned vacation. It must be exhausting nodding approval no matter what you think is right.
It isn’t just break on future taxes, it’s retroactive so they are going to get rebates for the tax payments that were due March 1 to cover their gross receipts for all of 2009.
Don’t you wish you could get the same deal?
Too bad you’re not a corporation. If you were, the Council promised to come back with a whole slew of tax breaks for all kinds of companies even as they try to erase budget deficits of $2 billion over the next two years.
It works this way: The mayor and Council have figured out that LA is the most business unfriendly city in Southern California with the highest tax structure, the least efficient policies and practices, the most extensive portfolio of sweetheart contracts with unions and contractors and the most generous subsidies for developers, well-connected ones at least.
It’s why we call LA city government a failed experiment in municipal socialism. It’s an oxymoronic phrase appropriate to moronic policies.
So with bankruptcy looming, City Hall is turning away from socialism to Milton Friedman’s capitalism, cutting off free trash collection and other subsidies to the poor and cutting taxes to business, giving extra tax credits for job creation and ready to loot the DWP, Harbor and Airport to buy even more new jobs..
The reason is that with 13.4 percent unemployment, and even Eric Garcetti admitting the real rate is twice that, there is a sudden realization that good-paying jobs drive the economy and lower taxes can actually generate more revenue to the city over time.
Don’t get too excited. It’s not like they are ready to call a ceasefire in their decades-long war against the middle class.
When you’re already broke, somebody has got to pay for all these job-buying efforts. And that’s the four million residents of the city, rich and poor and in between, but mostly those in between.
If you got a decent job or a two-income family or if you are jobless or retired or struggling to make ends meet, it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares about you. You don’t own a business so you get the bill.
Once upon a time in a land not far away, a young man they called Tony dreamed of changing the world for the better.
He ventured out into a world he knew nothing about and found that his charm opened doors to a life far beyond what he had ever known before. The rich and powerful, the smart and sophisticated adored him and taught him about the good life of fine wines and food, and fancy clothes and put money in his pockets so he could afford them himself.
He saw how little difference there was between him and them except for the advantages they had growing up and soon was on his way to power himself so he could help uplift the poor and the unprivileged so they too could enjoy the life he had come to love.
Soon, throngs of people cheered him wherever he went, pinning their hopes on him, and he traveled the world, honored by kings and billionaires, applauding his vision.
“Dream with me,” he told them all.
“Dream with me of a Los Angeles where our kids can walk to school in
safety and where they receive an education that gives them a genuine
opportunity to pursue their own dreams….
“Dream with me of a Los Angeles where it doesn’t matter whether you’re
African American, Latino, Caucasian, or Asian. Whether you’re Jewish or
Muslim, Protestant or Catholic. Whether you’re from Watts or Westwood.
Where every Angeleno is an equal stakeholder in our city’s future.”
Everyone dreamed that dream with him. Everyone loved him even the people who hated him.
Dreams can come true but more often than not they fall apart at the seams and that’s what happened to the man they once called Tony.
He hardly noticed how it happened because he was so busy going to extremes with impossible schemes that only brought him more praise and fame. He had gone from being a penniless nobody to living like a king himself.
He still could talk the talk but he had forgotten where he came from and soon friends and lovers accused him of betrayal as he left a long string of broken promises behind him.
Soon, the cheers turned to jeers and ordinary folks who once loved him sneered at the mere mention of his name. He couldn’t even throw a party for the stars of the Hollywood galaxy he traveled in without humble workers shouting in protest outside his mansion.
It all seemed a terrible dream so he went on his merry way ignoring their cries of discontent as if nothing was wrong.
But fairy tales can come true and that’s the funny thing about this story about the man who inspired his city to dream with him.
Those who wanted kids to walk the streets safely and those who wanted the kids to get good educations and those who wanted everyone to have genuine opportunity started to come together.
It didn’t matter whether they were African American, Latino, Caucasian, or Asian, whether they were Jewish or
Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, whether they were from Watts or Westwood, they all saw themselves as equal stakeholders in their city’s future.
Times were tough but they shared a dream and knew that someday, together, it would come true and they all would live happily ever after.
And the young man who came from a land not far away? That’s another story but it’s not a fairy tale because fairy tales have happy endings.
When I covered the Alabama legislature way back when in the late ’60s, they would filibuster for weeks on end and sessions would go on all night long.
The booze flowed freely and so did the broads and the bags of cash and sometimes during the wee small hours of the morning, the rap sessions that developed in the back rooms provided an enlightening education to a young reporter.
One of my favorite stories that the good old boys told involved a particularly corrupt time not that long before when the civil rights struggle already was under way and the Montgomery bus boycott had brought Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King to national attention.
The story was about how nearly half the legislature got thrown out over a small mistake that happened in one of those all-night sessions when everyone was pie-eyed and thought they could get away with anything.
It was known as the 24-hook bill that killed them. Because they were careless and drunk on their power, they thought nothing they did had consequences and carelessly passed a law that banned fishing hooks with 24-hooks on them, the kind of tool used in the back country commonly in back country to bring home dinner without actually having to fish for it. Throw it into the pond and spear some fish.
I bring this up because the mayor and City Council are showing the same kind of carelessness and arrogance. They are drunk on power, if not alcohol, and they certainly don’t work all night. But they do think they are invincible.
Crooked or incompetent politicians can get away with a lot but when they trip up. It’s almost always a small thing, not their neglect of duty, their sellout to special interests, their corruption that gets them.
The mayor’s pre-Oscar party Thursday night at the Getty House mansion he said he would never live in is one of those small mistakes that is costing him a lot more than all his other broken promises and personal betrayals, his global travel and self-promotion, his luxurious lifestyle, his failure to attend to his duties, his giveaways to big shots and unions, his failure to manage the city’s financial affairs, his destructive solutions.
A day after he sent pink slips to 562 city workers, 50 times more than have been laid off in generations, he’s dancing with the stars, the Oscar nominees, the celebrities whose own self-indulgence mocks the mundane struggles of the hundreds of thousands of jobless, the millions hanging to their small pieces of the good life in this paradise lost.
I can’t tell you how many of the hundreds of email a day that I get contain bitter words of resentment about this wretched excess.
They see Antonio Villaraigosa as the Bernie Madoff of LA, a swindler who has stolen their city, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.
Maybe it’s just the people who connect to me but I don’t think so. I think it’s Antonio’s 24-hook bill, his let-them-eat-cake symbol of his true indifference to the hurt ordinary people are suffering all over this town.
We’re scared to death.
All we hear is it’s going to bad for a long, long time. The parks and libraries and schools, the tree-trimming and street-paving, the basic services we count on as part of our daily lives, our sense of place — they’re all going to be worse, a lot worse, or gone forever . All we hear is those that’s got are getting more. And those don’t are getting nothing.
Nobody hears his spin that global corporations are paying the bills for his party because we know in our hearts we’re getting the bills for all their parties.
Life is funny that way, little things do mean a lot.
Special Forum on “Campaign Finance Reform: Where to Now?” Hosted by L.A. Councilmember José Huizar
Experts predicted the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission will change the way campaigns are financed and now we have the proof. Just last month, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission announced a ban has been lifted on the use of corporation and labor treasury funds for express advocacy in our elections.
Learn more about this new development and other issues like full public financing of elections at a special forum on campaign finance reform this Thursday, March 4th here at City Hall. A handful of experts and thought leaders have been secured and there will be audience Q&A at the end of the program.
“Campaign Finance Reform: Where to Now?” Thursday, March 4, 2010 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Los Angeles City Hall in Council Chambers (200 N. Spring Street, 3rd Floor) Moderator – Honorable José Huizar Panelists: Kathy Feng, Common Cause; Ron Kaye, RonKayeLA; Bob Stern, Center for Governmental Studies; Xandra Kayden, League of Women Voters; LeeAnn Pelham, L.A. City Ethics Commission; James Sutton, Campaign Lawyers; and Trent Lange, California Clean Money Campaign
How bad is the city’s budget crisis? I’ll tell you how bad it is, Controller Wendy Greuel predicts that next year’s revenue will be all of $16.8 million below this year’s — a decline of less than one-half of one percent, .04 to be exact, on a general fund budget of $4.2 billion!.
That’s right, it’s negligible. It’s why 7,000 jobs have to be eliminated through payoffs, layoffs and transfers. It’s why the city has to defer all the costs it can into future years, borrow to pay its current bills, why it has to hold fire sales to get rid of revenue streams like parking structures, golf courses, the convention center.
It’s why City Hall is in a panic.
Simply put, there is no revenue crisis. There isn’t even a spending crisis. There is a leadership crisis and a crisis in confidence.
What may be the most interesting fact in Greuel’s otherwise unremarkable report — unremarkable since almost all the information is already known and her report does little more than deflect responsibility — is that that the city’s special funds are likely to drop by $140 million next year or 7 percent. That’s significant because like the Harbor and Airport which have suffered revenue declines, the City Council keeps thinking they can put 4,000 people on to those payrolls and not lay off anybody.
The only place left to avoid layoffs is the Department of Water and Power which is looking for surcharges supposedly to replace its vast portfolio of dirty coal-burning plants and massive rate hikes supposedly for solar and wind power and to rebuild its deteriorating power grid.
That makes it difficult to pack a whole lot of workers onto the DWP payroll, especially when the people being hit are mostly child care workers who serve the poor, messengers who make the library system by moving books to borrowers’ neighborhoods and clerks who are already in abundance at the utility.
Despite the crisis and intense pressure to impose a 20 percent rate hike by April 1, the DWP Commission canceled its meeting Tuesday for lack of a quorum. The pressure comes from the need to sign four contracts to buy clean energy on the open market at premium prices to meet the 20 percent renewable goal by year’s end.
The lack of a quorum came about in part by the departure of Commissioner Edith Ramirez, leaving a vacancy that a mayor in touch with reality would fill from the DWP citizen committees to answer demands for a ratepayer advocate. Fat chance.
Not to worry, the fate of your city is in good hands if you believe Greuel or Council President Eric Garcetti who were interviewed Wednesday night on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA? I was the skeptic brought in as counterpoint so I can tell you I haven’t heard such fairy tales since I listened to Deputy Mayor Larry Frank last Saturday at the Budget LA meeting.
Garcetti, who has the reassuring demeanor of the chaplain on the Titanic, actually said “core services” like the libraries won’t be hurt when between early retirements and layoffs, it’s certain that hours of operation will be cut by 20 to 30 percent and the book delivery system will be decimated.
With the certainty of a true believer, Garcetti — who Olney noted refused to appear on the show with me — spoke of the enormous care and diligence that has gone into everything the mayor and Council have done to respond rapidly to the budget crisis with detailed plans to avoid great harm to public services.
Greuel was little more forthcoming and did her best to show her own diligence at proposing paperwork to show she’s doing her job as controller while ignoring she was a Council leader when nothing was done about the falloff in revenue and every warning was ignored.
The Council, on the other hand, is showing signs of growing nervousness about the fact that they have approved the non-plan to solve the budget crisis without any understanding about what they have done.
You can ask any of the department heads, all 65 of them, whether there has been a clear direction given them on how to reduce spending or whose job to eliminate. The only direction they are getting from the mayor’s office is they prove their obedience or they’ll be fired.
It’s only dawned on the Council now that they and the mayor have not provided any direction other than cut, cut, and cut and then berated them and threatened them with dismissal because services are being slashed.
What could they have thought was going to happen when they protected 75 percent of the work force from elimination and ordered staffing in parks, libraries, planning, building and safety and most other departments cut in half.
Of all the promises the mayor has broken in his life, the most destructive is the one he made a year ago about cutting city staff surgically, not with a meat cleaver.
In fact, they took a shotgun to it and let anyone retire who wanted to with a sweetheart deal and then fired off a few more shells in any direction and called it a layoff plan.
They’re scrambling on the fly now to figure out what hell they have wrought. It’s gotten harder to blame the bureaucrats when they don’t know who’s working for them and who isn’t and what the leadership’s priorities are.
Tensions are rising, fingers are pointing, everybody is looking for a fall guy. That’s the easy part, it’s you and me. We’re the ones who will suffer, who will get stuck with the bills one way or another and suffer the consequences of a city in chaos.
Maybe they are right about protecting the cops. We’re going to need them in the months ahead.
EDITOR”S NOTE:This article was originally published in the latest edition of Nina Royal’s North Valley Reporter.
City officials for years have ignored the fact that spending more money than they take in sooner or later leads to bankruptcy. They did it in good times and in bad, and they are still doing it in this time of the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.
Fifteen months ago, the city’s financial advisers laid out the case that drastic measures needed to be taken at once. Their advice was ignored and every quarter since then, city revenues have fallen by double-digit percentages.
Yet, the mayor and the City Council kept on spending like there never would be a day of reckoning.
Finally, in June, without any financial analysis, they cut a deal with most city unions to pay 2,400 workers handsome bonuses to retire early. When that deal blew up and was shown to make the city’s financial situation even worse, they went back to the bargaining table and cut a second deal that involved workers paying a little more toward their pensions, and giving up pay raises for two years with the promise of being made whole within five years.
Now that deal has blow up as financially unsound, too, so we are watching the mayor and Council doing a budget contortionist act to try to get the unions back to the bargaining table a third time.
They gave the unions all the leverage back in October when they signed the last deal so we have seen in a matter of days of the threat of 1,000 layoffs jump to 2,000, and then 3,000, and finally, now 4,000 — the exact number that was in their financial advisers’ report 15 months ago.
If layoffs are ever carried out, it will mean the overall city work force will have been reduced by nearly 7,000, or close to 15 percent of the total.
But all the cuts proposed come from a pool of less than 13,000 workers — the people who run the parks and libraries, community planning and building code enforcement, and many other services used by all of us
The truth is, they do not have a plan to fix what is broken–what they broke. Their only plan is to get through this year, and maybe next, by selling off golf courses, parking structures, the convention center and other revenue producing assets, to defer costs into future years and to borrow heavily – all steps that perpetuate today’s problems for years, even decades to come.
It is a never-ending story.
The moves they are making will blow up, just as surely as the ones they
already have taken.
Dramatically worse services hurt the quality of everyone’s life, the
value of everyone’s property and business. Dramatically higher DWP rates
coming as soon as April 1, and higher fees for just about everything in
the city hurt everyone, drain money from the economy, and make life
harder at a time when incomes are declining and jobs are in jeopardy.
All that their strategy achieves is to get through this year and maybe
next. They have no plan beyond when the deficit is expected to reach
$775 million, or nearly 20 percent of the current budget, or the year
after when it goes past the $1 billion mark.
This is a catastrophe in the making. Every action they are taking is
certain to blow up into controversy and conflict without actually
solving the problem.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is only one way out that preserves city jobs and services, and
cleans up the city’s financial problems once and for all.
Instead of using gimmicks and deceits as the city’s leadership is doing,
they need to admit they have failed. They need to bring the civic,
business, labor and community leaders
to the table and talk about how we all pull together to save our city.
Clearly, city workers at all levels including agencies such as the DWP
are paid more than we can afford and their pensions and health benefits
are too extravagant.
The unions need to take a step back financially to scale payroll costs
to revenue. They won’t
do that unless there is real job security and a commitment from the
public to pay a share of the cost of fixing the city’s financial mess.
A short-term tax of some sort on sales or property combined with reduced
payroll costs could right the ship of the city and preserve the quality
of our lives and our hopes for the future. Power sharing itself would
change the city’s political dynamics and actually give us the
chance to do a better job of managing our affairs for success as
partners instead of as victims of a political machine that has lost the
confidence of all sectors of the city.
As the Los Angeles City Council grappled with eliminating the Human Services Department and other humanistic agencies, the debate moved to how much can be saved and what services can be preserved
Finally, Councilman Paul Krekorian asked the right question: What are the core services the mayor has identified, the services he wants preserved? Deputy Mayor Larry Frank dissembled and doubletalked his way through his answer.
He demanded to know whether since the infamous Dec. 17, 2008 memo that first warnedt 4,000 layoffs were needed if the mayor or Council had done anything to identify what are the core services that must be protected.
Deputy Mayor Larry Frank was paying no attention to him when he spoke so Krekorian repeated his question but all he got was meaningless double-talk
In the course of the discussion, Councilwoman Janice Hahn scored points on Frank as well, making it clear that the City Charter requires the mayor to explicit detail what services will be provided and how whenever any department is eliminated.
The Department of Water and Power is at the heart of the story of Los Angeles’ transformation into the city it is today, the light and the dark of it, the play of good and evil.
It is the soul of LA, the shimmering lights and hopes of the city and the dark side of its “Chinatown” past — and present.
Writer Yasha Levine in an article on Alternet.org today and excerpted on OurLA.org captures the origins of this story from the theft of the water in Owens Valley a century ago that turned the spectacular beauty of the area into a dust bowl to the DWP’s plan now to cover the lake bed with 80 square miles of solar panels, the largest such installation in the world.
“L.A.’s New Scheme to Plunder Owens Valley Water, This Time with Solar Panels” reads the headline. “L.A. has sold the idea of enriching the residents of the Owens river valley before, while ripping them off in the dark. Will the residents buy into it.”
The story links back to an article at SierraWave.net about the visit to Owens Valley in January of David Freeman, interim general manager of the DWP, a post assigned him after he served as Harbor Commission president and deputy mayor for energy and the environment. Freeman is the darling of environmentalists, the apostle of solar energy — and a profiteer in clean energy like the mayor’s behind-the-scenes political operative Ari Swiller and others who have found Antonio Villaraigosa an easy mark for their hustles.
With his cowboy hat and sweet-talking good old boy southern malarkey, Freeman was resurrected by the mayor with the help of his business partner, Swiller.
It’s dirty little power games these clean energy advocates and investors play.
Apart from his connections, Freeman has the credibility to get away with
lying through his teeth, telling whoppers so big and so smoothly that he is one of the greatest con men in a city filled with con artists. It’s that quality that got him fired by Mayor Richard Riordan a decade ago as DWP general manager. It’s that quality that allowed him to preserve his reputation despite wasting tens of millions of dollars on green energy without actually generating any.
Back in January, Freeman brought his act to what he regarded as easy marks in the Owens Valley.
About 200 people came to a Methodist Church to hear his pitch to pave the dust bowl with solar panels and make them all rich, according to SierraWave.net
“He made them laugh and he made some mad,” reported Bennett Kessler, describing Freeman as being “viewed as a man with the personal power to push projects through and
manipulate people in the way.”
The next day before the County Board of supervisors, Freeman used “the same country charm … found mostly a positive response until Supervisor Susan Cash laid out the colonial
failures of DWP to treat the Owens Valley as an equal, to treat people
and the land with respect,” Kessler reported..
Cash seized on a comment by Freeman regarding his refusal to release DWP land around Inyo that strangles its economic development, saying, “You closed that door. More conversations need to be had. This
is not pristine land here.”
She challenged him on DWP’s failure to live up to its 20-year-old agreement to restore the area to its “pristine” past and other issues, “I feel like you’re bringing me flowers and won’t show up for the
rest of the dates.”
Finally, she threw in Freeman’s face that he had told KABC that DWP owns Inyo
lock, stock and barrel. “Don’t you see that’s offensive?” said Cash.
Freeman denied saying it. Cash called his hand on the lie. “I saw you
say it on television,” she said.
Freeman reached for an excuse.
“I was making a joke.” That didn’t fly with Cash. “The internet words
‘epic fail’ come to mind,” she said. “Some people don’t like our
style,” Freeman said.
Freeman is a liar who will say anything to get his way and with the bottomless pit of DWP ratepayer money and the political clout of LA, he will undoubtedly be able to pay off the folks in Inyo to let the DWP plunder them again. It’s why he fits in so well as part of the mayor’s team.
This is an administration that thinks only of its own political, and
in some cases economic, advantage without regard to the public
interest, without regard to the quality of life in the city, without
regard to the future.
It’s why the irritating David Nahai was
fired and the seductive Freeman was brought in.
The mayor tries
to portray himself as the green mayor of the “greenest city in America”
when he actually has done precious little to deserve the title,
initiated not a single major green energy project — until now.
Now,
the mayor and the DWP are desperate.
LA has the dirtiest
coal-burning power portfolio in America, a rotting infrastructure for
water and power, the least renewable energy of any major utility in the
state, and rates that have been rising rapidly despite its advantages to
keep them low.
It’s biggest problem, apart from a long history
of sweetheart deals with contractors and mismanagement, is its labor
costs. DWP workers are paid 30 to 40 percent more than other city
workers for comparable jobs, paid 20 percent more than other utility’s
workers for most jobs. That’s why the infrastructure is rotting and
there’s so little green energy.
The desperation comes from the
state mandate for utilities to generate 20 percent of the city’s energy
by the end of this year, and by the mayor’s boast to reach 40 percent
and get rid of the coal-burning power plants by 2020/
When you’ve bankrupted the city to the point basic services are being
slashed and you’re selling off the city’s assets to your friends at a
fire sale, you need to do something to save your political career. If
you’re in that position, your name is Antonio Villaraigosa.
So he has bet his career on David Freeman’s ability to sell the City
Council, which lives in fear of seeing their own careers go up in the
smoke of their gross financial mismanagement, on approving spectacularly
higher rates for decades to come without a ratepayer rebellion.
Billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, are needed but there
is no plan, no long-term methodical approach on how to rebuild the
infrastructure and generate clean power and provide clean water.
There is only desperation and a plan to just get through this year and
possibly next — just like there is no plan to get through the budget
crisis beyond this year and next.
The mayor wants every ratepayer to cough up just $2.50 a month to
generate all of $30 million a year to replace the dirty coal-burning
plants. At that rate it would take most of a century to get the job done
— at which Freeman says with poetic flourish the planet will be dead
because LA didn’t go solar fast enough without regard to cost or
efficiency.
Of course, the $2.50 surcharge will soon by $5 and then $10 and then
whatever it takes to save himself and keep up the myth of his
leadership.
The DWP has its own plan for the next year. It’s called the ECAF (Energy
Cost Adjustment Factor) and is supposed to allow for quick increases in
rates to reflect fluctuations in gas and coal prices. The ECAF is now
limited to 1 percent per quarter and Council approval isn’t needed.
Back in September, the DWP tried to increase the ECAF to 20 percent per
quarter but Council members panicked at the prospect of public outrage
and squelched that.
So now the DWP has come back with a new plan to impose and 8 percent
ECAF increase on April 1 as part of an overall 20 percent increase in
the next 12 months, a 33 percent increase over the past two years that
amounts to $700 million a year in extra revenue, $130 million of which
will go directly into the general fund to help bail the city out of its
budget crisis..
There is no plan beyond next year — at least none that the public, the
ratepayers are allowed to know.
Given the DWP and City Hall’s desperation, there is no doubt this is
just the beginning, the years ahead will be worse for the public with
rates doubling and tripling by 2020.
Contracts to buy solar and wind energy are stacked up waiting for the
DWP to find the money to pay for them to meet the 2010 goal of 20
percent renewable energy goal.
The DWP is paying premium open market prices for this energy and doesn’t
own it although officials justified their rooftop solar energy plan
under Measure B — a plan that would have required all $3 billion in
solar being owned and maintained by the DWP and its union, IBEW Local
11.
Voters saw through the costly lie and rejected Measure B but the mayor
has so little respect for the people, he has greenlighted the same plan
anyway because IBEW bully boss Brian D’Arcy provides much of the
campaign cash that keeps him and the Council in office.
So his future, the DWP’s future, the city’s future, is in the trembling
hands of none other than David Freeman.
Unfortunately, Freeman is the problem, not the solution.
He took over as interim GM with the promise that a qualified utility
manager would take over within six months. The six months is up because
nobody qualified will take the job since they are well aware that
Freeman’s next post is going to be president of the DWP Commission or
once again Deputy Mayor for energy and the environment.
Why would anyone take over a utility with as many problems as the DWP, a
utility that has lost the confidence of the people, when they would
facing constant interference from Freeman and the politicians and a
union that has all the power?
The Chinatown story was about the rape of the land and water from the
Owens, land we still own and water we still use, the theft of the entire
San Fernando Valley to store the water in natural underground caverns
and for real estate developments that made billionaires of insiders.
Chinatown II is about the rape of Los Angeles itself to enrich a new
group of insiders, to protect politicians who have failed us in every
way. If we don’t resist this assault, it won’t matter much whatever else
we do.
My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail, or the mailman was afraid to get close to the house. I think it’s something about my personality. The pool guy feels the same way. I can’t imagine Antonio not inviting me. But then again, maybe it’s something about my personality.
Or maybe the guy just can’t a joke.
The invitation in question is to Antonio’s pre-Oscar party at Getty House this week. Sounds like a super affair. And since I own a part of Getty House, along with my dog house, and I’ve featured the place in several of my posts – the mayor’s girlfriend’s pooch, Monkey, frolics in the yard for photographers – I should be there, if for no other reason, to cover the canine angle. I wonder who Monkey will be wearing?
I had to find out about the party from the very snarky Dennis Romero of the LAWeakly:
“Now comes word that Mayor V., ever the man with his priorities straight (witness December’s trek to Europe or this month’s cameo on All My Children), will be hosting a pre-Oscar party at the city-funded mayor’s residence Thursday night. Because, when the city’s on its last dime and you can’t find a cop when you need one, what it really needs is a red-carpet event celebrating the ultra-rich of Hollywood.
“The event, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, is called Nominees’ Night at Getty House and will honor Oscar nominees (it’s not clear yet who will show). THR states that Microsoft Bing, L’Oreal Paris and the city of Veracruz (THR has it as “Vera Cruz,” but we’re assuming it’s the Mexican city) are sponsoring the event.”
That Romero is a sarcastic son of a gun. Looks like Bruno has come competition. Bet he wasn’t invited either.
But like I said, I’ve got a four-legged friend of a very special friend of the mayor and I’m making a call this morning. If those two wackos in Washington can sneak into a state dinner, I can get into this shindig.
And I’ll bring Ron Kaye. He can ask Antonio about the budget, while I beg at the buffet.
As the City Council goes through the charade of pretending to actually understand the nitty-gritty of the city government they rule over and their inevitable acquiescence to the mayor’s plan to destroy it, there seems to be a growing awareness that what they are doing is a big mistake.
Even Ed Reyes gets it, worrying in public about what kind of city LA will be in the future, what kind of city it is today.
He didn’t even bring up his usual hand-wringing, gut-wrenching poverty pandering monologue Monday in questioning city finance bureaucrats and LAPD kingpin Gerald Chaleff, the former courtroom defender of serial killers turned administrative honcho.
If you listen closely, you can hear Chaleff whispering to city financial advisers not to answer Reyes’ rhetorical questions as if he was still advising criminals in how to beat the rap.
They ignored his advice and pointedly noted that hiring more cops to keep the number close to 10,000 at the expense of decimating parks, libraries and other critical services really wasn’t necessary in the name of public safety.
Sharon Tso noted there are 300 more cops on patrol today than last June 30 and giving up training of 100 new recruits would immediately save nearly $3 million this year and $15 million next year when the deficit will be dramatically worse.
Chaleff naturally tried to fend off such ideas but without the passion of an experienced barrister.
CITY OF LOS ANGELES INTER-DEPARTMENTAL CORRESPONDENCE Date: December 22, 2009 To: The Council From: ~ Miguel A. Santana, City Administrative Officer
Subject: DISTINGUISHED BUDGET PRESENTATION AWARD FOR 2009-10
The Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada (GFOA) awarded a Distinguished Budget Presentation Award to the City of Los Angeles for the 13th consecutive year for our 2009-10 annual budget. We are the largest city in the United States to receive this award.
This award is the highest form of recognition in government budgeting and represents a significant achievement by the City of Los Angeles. To receive this award, the City must publish a budget document of the very highest quality that reflects both the guidelines established by the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting and the GFOA’s recommended practices on budgeting. The City budget must meet mandatory GFOA criteria as a policy document, as an operations guide, as a financial plan and as a communications device. It reflects the commitment of the City to meeting the highest principles of governmental budgeting.
A Certificate of Recognition has been received and an award plaque has been presented to the City. A copy of the certificate will be published in the 2010-11 budget document.
We will continue to improve our budget documents and will submit the 2010-11 budget to GFOA for consideration for next year’s awards program.
There never was a doubt about what the mayor and the City Council were going to do to bail themselves out of the crisis they created.
The DWP was always the answer.
Where else could they turn in their desperate need for big bucks than the most wasteful and politicized agency in city government, the cash cow that keeps the public in the dark and can raise rates spectacularly without even needing approval of anyone but the Board of Commissioners, a rubber-stamp group accountable to no one except the mayor who has made it clear that obedience to his orders is mandatory or you’re out.
The true crime of Antonio Villaraigosa and his current henchman Chief of Staff Jeff Carr is that they have put every department head in City Hall and every commissioner on notice that they will be fired if they get the least bit out of line, dare to tell the truth instead of lie, actually try to fix things instead of sweeping them under the carpet.
This is Antonio’s City Hall, everyone in it is complicit. The daily City Council meetings are nothing but a charade, a pretense of debate when they will all go along with the plan to borrow billions, sell off the assets, pack the DWP and other special funds with unneeded workers and stick the public with the bills.
Inside the bubble of false consciousness of City Hall, there is no awareness everyone in LA is hurting. More than a quarter of the people are jobless or underemployed, homes are worth 60 percent of their value, foreclosures are at record levels and so are business bankruptcies.
But all they can see is themselves. The City Hall “family” is all that matters, the people are nothing.
They drool at the prospect of bleeding the public dry for water and power. Every two months that DWP bill comes to every house and every business. That’s where the money is, money for the taking to pay the ridiculously inflated salaries of the DWP, to pay for their featherbedding of the one agency that keeps on hiring even when others are losing their jobs.
While the heads of the Harbor and Airport have cautiously opened a few jobs despite the sharp declines in their revenue, the jaded David Freeman has publicly promised to create hundreds, maybe even thousands of jobs to create room for civilian city workers who will get giant pay raises to join the DWP even as he mercilessly pushes for giant rate increases.
On Friday, OurLA.org revealed the DWP consultant’s report that calls for an 800 percent increase on April 1 of the pass-through Energy Cost Adjustment Factor which is now limited to 1 percent a quarter.
It’s the first step toward more than a 20 percent increase in power rates in the next 12 months. Next year, the rate hikes will be even worse and they will double and triple in the years ahead.
It’s the mayor’s doing. He talks a green game but he hasn’t done anything to create green energy or even develop a plan to do so.
The DWP has a wretched record for wind and solar energy despite
squandering millions of dollars and now it is desperate for money to buy
renewables at premium prices from companies that have it so it can meet
the state-mandated goal of 20 percent by year’s end.
The main
reason for the lack of renewables is long-term opposition from union
bully Brian D’Arcy whose members are paid 30 to 40 percent premiums and
just got raises of up to 4 percent for the next four years despite the
city’s financial crisis.
The vehicle for
disseminating this proposal is the mayor’s dishonestly named Committee
for Government Excellence and Accountability. It should be called the
Committee for Political Corruption and Public Deceit.
It is
nothing but a slush fund for developers to buy “access,” which is why
they have poured
$4 million into it in recent years, money that helped fund the notorious
group ACORN, to fight for the failed Measure B solar energy plan
and pass the mayor’s illegal takeover of the schools among other things.
The
surcharge supposedly will help DWP meet the mayor’s artificial goal of
eliminating the utility’s heavy dependence on coal power plants by 2020.
To
give you an idea of how high this surcharge will go, consider this:
$2.50 generate $30 million a year in revenue compared to the $700
million the ECAF will generate by driving up electricity charges from
the 11.8 cents per kilowatt hour charged last year to 15.8 cents they
are seeking.
With one in five DWP customers getting heavily
subsidized rates, the burden is put entirely on the middle class, the
same people who are watching the few services they use like parks and
libraries decimated, the same people who have been getting hit for years
with all the increases in fees, rate and taxes.
If you won’t go
to the wall in fighting against this ripoff, you will get what you
deserve.
On Saturday, the DWP advocacy committee led by Jack
Humphreville will take up the issue at 12:30 p.m. after the LA
Neighborhood Council Coalition meeting in Glassell Park.
What do
you think should be done? What are you prepared to do? Let me know your
thoughts at [email protected]..
It is a sign of the times that the mayor has actually been forced to engage the public in discussions, preliminary as they might be, about how LA is going to survive as a city even as it brings spending into balance with revenue for the first time in years.
A sign of his own weakness and the failure of the city’s leadership, to be sure, but a positive step toward actually coming to respect the public and share power with the civic, business, labor and community leaders.
Deputy Mayor Larry Frank, assigned to co-opt and calm the anger of Neighborhood Council members, was assigned the unenviable task of meeting Saturday with Budget LA, the group that has been brought dozens of community activists together every Saturday for weeks to try to develop a strategy for saving the Charter-created civic empowerment movement from destruction.
The mayor has fired the head of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment and plans to eliminate the department entirely with the full support of the City Council to reduce this year’s $212 million deficit by $2 million.
It is Frank’s job to make it look like this is being done in the name of efficiency and cost saving, to hide the truth that it is being done because they fear the growing influence and organization of community groups across the city.
Frank, in a lengthy and detailed explanation, laid out the mayor’s plan such as it is to fix the massive budget deficit as if he were talking to fourth graders.
But it’s nonetheless instructive because it’s the first time anyone from the mayor’s office has actually tried to explain why nearly 7,000 jobs of people who run the parks and libraries, do the community planning and building code enforcement, and provide dozens of other basic services to the general public are proposed for elimination.These are more than half the jobs in those positions.
I know most of you will not actually watch these videos and see for yourselves what a fairy tale Frank spun for the Neighborhood Council people on Saturday, a fairy tale that does not have a happy ending.
So here’s the takeaway: Setting aside the obfuscations and outright false statements, the mayor’s plan is to slash basic services, sell off valuable assets like parking structures and the Convention Center to his pals, and borrow billions of dollars just to get through this year and next.
He has no plan to deal with the $775 million deficit the year after or the more than $1 billion deficit equal to more than 25 percent of the city’s operating budget the year after.
If you believe in miracles, economic miracles in this case, everyone will live happily ever after. If you don’t, maybe you better watch these videos and know for yourself what is going on.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read the consultant’s report recommending massive DWP
electricity rate hikes at OurLA.org.
You don’t
know nothing if you didn’t know this was coming: Massive DWP rate hikes.
How else
did you think they were going bail out the sinking ship of the city except by
socking it to you?
It’s all
been a setup, planned for a long time and now it’s being executed: 800 percent
increase in the “energy cost adjustment factor” pass-through on April 1, 20
percent increase in the next 12 months, 33 percent with last year included.
And from
there, you can be 100 percent certain your power rates will keep going up and
away, doubled and tripled.
You are
sitting in the DWP’s electric chair and they are about to pull the switch. I’ve
been telling you this was coming for months so don’t be shocked when your
electricity bill soars higher than your mortgage.
Don’t kid
yourselves: It’s the people who have mortgages that are paying the bulk of
these rate hikes.
They
jiggled the rate tiers to punish the 40 percent of residents who live in single
family homes while keeping bills low for most apartment dwellers and tripling
the number of customers with heavy subsidies to 250,000 households – a sixth of
DWP’s customers.
They
squandered tens of millions of dollars pretending to go green but have the
worst renewable energy portfolio in the state so they are desperate to buy wind
and solar power from anybody who has some no matter what it costs to meet the
20 percent goal mandated by the state by the end of this year.
They have
painted themselves into a corner and don’t know any other way except to slug it
to the middle class, from those just getting by on two family incomes to those
in the upper middle class who have seen their wealth decline sharply and their
incomes fall.
This is
their cockeyed theory of municipal socialism laid bare, a redistribution of
wealth that gives pennies to the poor and feeds the insider culture that has
feasted so long on the public treasury.
The DWP
is the city’s cash cow. It has hired 1,400 workers since the recession began
and now has transferred 300 city workers facing layoffs to its payroll with
most of them getting raises of 20 to 40 percent.
When
other city workers gave up raises, City Hall rewarded DWP employees with 3.25
percent lump sum cash payments and guaranteed them raises of up to 4 percent
for the following four years – raises for people who already are the highest
paid utility workers in the nation.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills for all this featherbedding and over-indulgence, and
that’s you.
Somebody
has got to pay for all these sweetheart contracts for contractors, consultants
and power purchases, and that’s you.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills to rebuild the water and power infrastructure that is
bursting and blowing up from neglect while they put the money into the pockets
of workers and insiders, and that’s you.
And every
time you pay more, don’t forget that nearly 20 percent of your money goes
straight into the general fund to bail out City Hall from its deficits that
total billions of dollars and are going up every week by millions of dollars.
Somebody
has got to pay, alright. I say make them pay. If you want to help me do that,
go up to the right-hand column of this page and see how you can donate to OurLA.org,
my non-profit community news and networking site so I can hire a reporter who
will work full-time to penetrate the secrecy of the DWP and expose where your
money is really going.
Or you
can just get used to paying more and more of your hard-earned money for less and
less.
The long-awaited consulting report on pass-through electricity
charges was released Friday, calling for an immediate 800 percent
increase in the energy cost adjustment factor and increases every
quarter that will raise overall power rates by more than 20 percent
within a year.
The massive increases are being sought as DWP
officials face intense pressure to have a revenue sream to be able to
lose at least four deals to buy solar and wind energy to meet the
stand-mandated goal of 20 percent renewable energy by the end of this
calendar year.
For the year ending June 2009, the residential rate
was 11.8 cents.
For the year ending June 2010, the residential
rate per the budget is projected to be 13.1 cents.
A 2.7 cent
increase is a 20.6% increase based off of the 2010 number, or 22.9% off
of the 2009 number.
If you add the 2.7 cent increase to the 13.1,
you arrive at 15.8 cents — a 33.9% increase over the 2009 rate.
The charges leveled by fired LA County Planning chief Bruce McClendon a year ago got credence from a just completed outside consultant’s audit of alleged improper influence in decisions on development by Supervisors and their staffs.
It’s how politics works in the insiders’ game of public policy in both the city and county.
Yet, the report largely whitewashes what went in, citing the fact county employees were not under oath, feared for the loss of their jobs and McClendon didn’t record private conversations.
Those reasons for the failure of the report to come to a clear conclusion ought to justify a Grand Jury investigation — which is what should have happened from the beginning.
Once upon a time, there were mice who lived in a house and were terrified of the cat who lived there too.
So one day, the mice all got together to figure out how to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at
last a
young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought
would
meet the case.
“You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief
danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy
approaches
us.
“Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could
easily
escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be
procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this
means we
should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she
was in
the neighborhood.”
This proposal met with general applause, until an old
mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the
Cat?”
The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old
mouse
said: “It is easy to propose impossible remedies.”
I share this fable that a reader sent to me because of all the talk about firing 4,000 city workers in a manner that will force parks and libraries to close and many of the services we all pay for to be sharply reduced even more than they have been, from tree trimming to street repair.
It is easy for the Mayor and City Council to toy with such an impossible remedy because once elected, they think they have cushy jobs for life and don’t have to care about what the people say anymore.
They all know, or at least most of them do, that they massive elimination of all those jobs and all the early retirements affect only the 20 percent of the city workforce that provide direct services to the public for the most part
Police and Fire, revenue producing jobs, jobs that support the system itself are exempt from this remedy and the shutting down of public services will make LA even less attractive to business and lead to even more unemployment and decay.
So they look for ways to avoid the 4,000 layoffs by padding the payrolls of the Harbor, Airport, DWP and special funds.
But that too is an impossible remedy. It might save many of those jobs but the services they now provide will still be lost and the financial burdens those transfers impose will simply be passed on to business and the public, particularly in DWP rate increases.
The mice who are our leaders keeping trying to bell the cat of the budget deficit created by their mismanagement of the city’s business.
The system itself has failed. We cannot any longer afford the nation’s highest paid elected officials or the sweetheart contract that have cut with unions, developers, contractors and consultants who have put them in office and kept them there.
The remedy that is possible, that is within their ability, is to share power with labor, business and the community, to bring us all to table. It is only way that faith in government can be restored, the only way we can work out the only solution to the problems that threaten the future of our city.
Firing or transferring thousands of workers doesn’t solve anything.
Only by city workers, particularly in those drawing exorbitant salaries in elected office, top positions and the DWP, must take a step backward financially — pay cuts and pension reforms.
Workers would be fools to accept such a deal after getting the runaround for the last year unless it was part of deal the provided long-term job security.
It’s my belief that, despite the skepticism about the public’s willingness to accept new taxes, taxpayers would step forward and agree to share the sacrifices if power were really shared.
The mice can’t bell the cat because mice can’t work cooperatively for the common good. We the people aren’t mice. We are capable of cooperation. Working together as equals, we can do the impossible. We can bell the cat and remedy the city’s financial crisis.
