They’re coming after me and my four-legged brethren to help solve the city’s financial crisis! After perusing the Dog Trainer and Green Sheet this morning, I saw an LAWeakly story highlighted on the Westside White Guy’s blog that the dog catchers think could fetch an additional $3.6 million for the city by going after unlicensed pooches.
And who would rat them out? DWP meter readers! Apparently these guys have something called a “doggie database.” Sure, the homeland security folks can’t do racial profiling, but when it comes to dogs, the DWP can be Gestapo-like in their record keeping.
I knew there was a reason I didn’t like those guys, and the pool guy, and the mailman, and the UPS deliveryman, and the. Well, I don’t really like anyone coming near the house.
I am a watchdog, after all. And a good one! Ask Ron and Saint Deb last time someone burglarized RonKayeLA.com central.
My favorite part of the LAWeakly story was Tom LaBonge, one of the 14 city council members who got us into this financial crisis (Krekorian gets a pass cause he’s new), had to get his dog a license. Had it not occurred to him before? Someone might remind him – ex-motorcycle cop Dennis Zine’s the perfect candidate – that he also needs a driver’s license.
There is, of course, no mention of cats. I guess the DWP doggie cops don’t notice them.
Here’s a suggestion: let’s license everybody in City Hall and make it contingent upon them doing their jobs. And if they screw up, put them in one of our overcrowded animal shelters. I’m sure it will give them a new appreciation of our “no kill” policy.
I’m holding you all responsible — you elected these people and look what they’ve done to you. It’s a crime.
And since it’s a crime we need to look at what they knew and when they knew it and, more importantly in this case, what did they do about it.
The specific crime in questions — among the long list of allegations having to do with destroying our park, library and museum systems among dozens of others — is the 4,000 layoffs that has City Council members tearing their hair out and bleeding on their laptops as if the only people suffering hard times are city workers.
At least, they are the only people the politicians care about since the city workers with help help from developers, contractors, consultants and political operatives put them into office.
On Tuesday, Ed Reyes and Jan Perry sneered and snarled at Paul Krekorian who had the guts to ask how the Council could go into a back room session at noon for a catered lunch six days ago to discuss firing 1,000 workers and come out to announce a “technical change,” as Perry put it, that would result in 4,000 layoffs.
On Wednesday, Bernard Parks, Greig Smith and Perry once again carried on and on about how everybody knew as long as 18 months or two years ago that the city had to eliminate 4,000 jobs because of the deepening budget deficit. So newcomers like Krekorian and Paul Koretz should just shut their damn mouths and so should the liars among the press and public who can’t get their facts straight.
Methinks they protesteth too much, so I got hold of the document which they seem to think proves their innocence. In fact, it does the opposite. They are guilty as hell.
The 4,000 layoffs document (4000layoffs.pdf) actually dates to Dec. 17, 2008, 14 months ago, and came from Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and Interim City Administrative Officer Ray Ciranna with the title Structural Deficit Mitigation Measures.
They referred to the economic “meltdown” that was occurring and the likelihood things would get much worse, noting that the steps taken days earlier to erase an $86 million deficit involved one-time savings to paper over the problem.
The mayor’s own proposal on Dec. 12, 2008 spoke to that, calling for “a combination of budget reductions, expenditure deferrals, and expediting of revenue receipts to the current year.
The CLA/CAO report said tougher measures were needed:
“This deficit is not the first that the City has faced, nor will it be
the last, but due to the magnitude of the revenue loss, combined with
the dismal prospect for revenue recovery and the City’s escalating
operating costs it will be the most difficult deficit to resolve.
Business as usual is simply not sustainable. Absent the elimination of a
significant number of City positions, restructuring of City services
and programmatic cuts) City expenditures will continue to exceed
projected City revenues. Given that one time-revenue enhancements will
only delay the inevitable and the City has very few significant and
on-going revenue options.”
They estimated the deficit for this year would be $433 million and for
2010-11 reach $550 million but likely would go higher as they have. They
noted that police and fire cost $3.3 billion or 70 percent of the
general fund, meaning even the “entire.elimination of funding for the
Library and Recreation and Parks would not completely solve” the
deficit.
“In terms of staffing levels the elimination of over 4000 filled
civilian positions would be necessary to address the $433 million
deficit,” they added.
So there it is, the magic 4,000. It didn’t come out of thin air. It
was right in their face and they did nothing about it and now they are
wringing their hands and ready to sell the city’s assets, squeeze 10
percent discounts from contractors with threats they’ll never get
another city contract, bludgeon every dollar they can out of the public
through higher rates, fees, taxes and fines and take any other measure
they can to avoid actually solving the problem.
City government costs too much and delivers too little in public
services — and soon will deliver next to nothing.
How they think that making a big deal about when they were first told
the number 4,000 somehow exonerates them can only be explained by
acknowledging they are truly stupid or so intellectually and moral
corrupt as not to know the difference between right and wrong.
The document that are calling attention to is the smoking gun that
proves they are guilty of misfeasance in office, if not malfeasance.
Their best defense might well be they really are crazy and can’t tell
the difference between right and wrong.
Day after day now they are spending all their time looking for more
one-time solutions, pressuring the financially hard-pressed Harbor and
Airport to absorb workers transferred from the general fund and counting on
the DWP’s unlimited ability to raise rates to find a place for vast
numbers of city employees, all of whom will get handsome raises.
The 4,000 layoffs document on which they rest their defense contained
very different advice that they ignored and still ignore.
It called for the mayor and Council to delineate core and non-core
services, to understand that 85 percent of the overall budget goes for
salaries and benefits, and that police and police and fire account for
almost 70 percent of the unrestricted General Fund budget.
“The City will likely be unable to address looming shortfalls without
changes in the level of salary,” the CLA and CAO said.
Even city workers begging to keep their jobs during public comment on
Wednesday were urging the Council to work out a deal for reductions in
pay across the board, including police and fire and the DWP and
themselves.
Their pleas fell on the same deaf ears that didn’t head this report’s
recommendations:
1. Request the Mayor and instruct the CAO to submit to the Executive
Employee Relations
Committee (EERC) an Actuarial Report detailing the costs and benefits of
a retirement incentive plan. This report should include various options
for implementing such a plan on both a Citywide basis, and on a
targeted basis that takes into account revenue shortfalls projected for
FY 09-10. The actuarial study was not done until two months after
signed an agreement with the unions for the Early Retirement Incentive
Program.
2. Instruct the CAO and CLA working with the Mayor to submit to the
City Council a report
outlining a plan for restructuring departmental operations in a manner
that focuses resources on ‘core’ services, potentially in coordination
with the proposed retirement incentives. The restructuring plan has
only not come forward but without clear details and a clear focus on
core services.
3. Authorize and instruct the CAO to report to the EERC on the impact of
the negotiated COLA’s on the 2009-10 Budget. Contracts approved 10
months later without deferrals of cost-of-living raises and guarantees
of no layoffs, furloughs or other actions.
4. Authorize and instruct the CAO to report to the EERC on the potential
fiscal impact of COLA authorization in any of the upcoming sworn
employee negotiations. Contract with police signed 10 months later
but hiring continued until recently and promised cuts in operational
costs have not been achieved.
5. Instruct the CAO to report to the EERC with options for reducing the
long term costs associated with civilian and swom pensions. Slight
increase in civilian contributions, overall unfunded liability at $11
billion but no action steps taken.
OK, we’re all responsible for this but were not the guilty ones.
They are, and no amount of spinning and deceit will get them out of this
because everything they are doing is only making matters worse.
Don’t miss this video of exchanges between Ed Reyes, Paul Krekorian and Jan Perry — a rare few minutes where City Council members actually mix it up.
The issue is how the Council leaped from 1,000 layoffs that they opposed to approving 4,000 layoffs without any public discussion, study or documentation — a scheme Krekorian had the courage to vote against.
If you’re too lazy to actually watch this, tough. It proves that video says more than a thousand stories. You’ll never understand why LA is in so much trouble without seeing the level of leadership we have — and how a single Councilman can make a difference.
I know it’s hard to believe that Reyes and Perry think they are making themselves look good by telling the world that a report nearly 18 months ago said 4,000 layoffs were needed to balance the budget so it wasn’t a number plucked out of thin air.
They seem oblivious to the fact they ignored that advice and did nothing to balance the budget even in theory until now and self-righteous over Krekorian having the courage to break the code of silence by pointing it out.
The rest of the budget discussion Tuesday was even worse with Janice Hahn tormenting one of the city’s best managers in Rec and Parks’ Jon Kirk Mukri over the obstacles to her plan to have goats mow the loan in parks, and Alarcon foaming at the mouth against greedy capitalists and Koretz displaying his complete ignorance of just about everything.
Watch these videos and decide who is doing the better job, bureaucrats or politicians?
What’s going on in LA is a calamity of historica proportions — not the kind that causes catastrophic destruction like the day the levees broke in New Orleans. But the kind that just as surely damages a city physically and spiritually like a slow water torture.
Maybe that’s why I’ve spent the day watching City Council members prattle mindlessly and ignorantly about the city’s finances, posturing and preening as if they were both blameless for what has happened and had any answers on how to fix what they have broken.
The dark side of my soul took over and all I could see was the bleak outlook for the city I love if left in the hands of these foolish and selfish people.
And then I listened to the good and decent people, who unlike the nation’s highest paid and most pampered city officials, give their time and energy out of love, not money, to make their neighborhoods and their city better, appeal for a small measure of sanity.
They came before the Board of Neighborhood Councils for a special meeting just 24 hours after the Mayor had exercised powers he does not have to abolish their department — the central reform enacted 10 years ago to empower the community.
If it were me I’d have tried to get the more than 1,600 members of 90 Neighborhood Councils to resign in mass and tell City Hall to take their lousy money and shove it. Like homeowners and other community groups, they don’t need to be under the thumb of people who treat them with contempt even as they fear them.
But that isn’t how these people handled this crisis.
They have been meeting every Saturday for weeks and emailing all day long to generate ideas on how the movement they are part of can gain strength no matter how many obstacles are thrown in their way.
They were polite and constructive and persuasive and the BONC commissioners agreed with them in every regard to push forward even in the face of the treatment they are receiving.
Then, they took their message to Paul Krekorian and Dennis Zine on the Elections and Neighborhood Committee and spoke sincerely from their hearts about what they believed, even when they didn’t always agree.
Krekorian and Zine heard their message and voted to go forward with official elections of NCs that start next Tuesday.
The full Council will take up that issue on Wednesday and other aspects of the attempted assassination of the community empowerment issue in the days ahead.
To be honest, I’m just an old softie and tears came to my eyes at times as I listened to these humble voices of the people and I thought a time long ago when I was young and thousands of us stood together in protest and gave ourselves strength with songs of solidarity.
Once again, I came around and knew deep in my heart that I have never lost and never will lose my faith that the good does prevail over the evil, someday.
They’re protesting at the school board, they’re storming the City Council, they’re mad at the mayor, the teachers hate the charters, the charters hate the bureaucrats, the unions and the people hate everyone in government, the whole world of LA is festering with unhappiness.
With liberties from the Kingston Trio’s “They’re rioting in Africa,” it seems to me just about everyone who is even half aware in LA is mad as hell at someone.
It’s about time.
There is no mystery. It’s been building a long time through successions of mayors and City Council members and school boards and school superintendents, endless attempts at changing the forms of governance, studies, task forces, restructurings.
It’s still the same old, same old. Nothing really changes. We approved bond issues for schools, colleges, libraries, parks, police stations and things only get worse until now the bills have come due. There is not enough money for any of it. Such are the inexorable laws of karma.
When the interests of the few prevail over the interests of the many, it is a certainty that sooner or later things are going to fall apart.
Sweetheart deals and giveaways to developers, contractors and unions; policies that pander to poverty and punish the middle class; leaders that pay lip service to public policy and serve only themselves and the circle of lobbyists, consultants, operatives and PR manipulators who channel cash into their campaign chests — for too long that has been the nature of LA’s political system.
And yet, with the community in an uproar over plans to slash services, fire thousands of city workers, pad the payrolls of the proprietary departments, sell off the city’s assets and mortgage the future with massive borrowings, the mayor and City Council still admit to no failure and engage in a charade to protect themselves no matter how many get hurt.
People should be mad, a lot angrier than they are.
They pay the bills. They do the work. They care about each other.
The unions have sat at the table and bargained for the deals they got and suggested hundreds of ways of fixing what is broken.
Community leaders have come forward with reasoned and moderate solutions only to find what passes for a dialogue with officials is nothing but a sham.
What officials have set in motion has blown up in their faces for the last six months and it will keep blowing up because what they are doing only makes matters worse.
More and more people will wake up to this reality when they find parks and libraries closed, when there’s no one to respond to neighborhood eyesores or problems because city agencies are in chaos from loss of staff without any coherent strategy.
It’s already happening in little ways like the closure of Mulholland Drive because the city can’t afford to make the road safe even as they keep on spending on things that flatter their overblown egos.
The future is as clear as day and it’s not a pretty sight.
The only question is when — not whether — the anger that the school board and Board of Neighborhood Commissioners faces this afternoon and the Council faces in the days ahead boils over.
Hopefully, it will be sooner rather than later because the damage they are doing gets worse every day.
One of the more fascinating aspects of City Hall’s disastrous handling of the budget crisis our public servants created is the mayor and City Council’s sudden discovery that waste, efficiency, mismanagement, incomprehensible policies are major problems they never addressed.
Sure, they asked for reports, studies,analysis but they never bothered to act on them because none of it mattered because they was always money for sweetheart union contracts,developers and contractors.
Those days are over and on Monday,the Council got an earful on problems like the endless duplication of computer and Internet Technology systems that don’t inter-connect without heavy investment and thousands of hours of staff time over several years.
They also found out that their heavy subsidies of $1 dollar a year rent to non-profits in city buildings costs actual money and leaves the city liable as a landlord.
These videos will be instructive in understand just how screwed up your city government is and raise the question of whether you believe they really can fix what broke.
Three (Bronx) cheers for Antonio Villaraigosa — he boasts today that his decision to kill the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, the central reform that went into the new City Charter a decade ago, will save $2 million.
Only $210 million to go by June 30, $483 million to go next year, and $773 million to go the year after.
Of course, the deficit will be $2 million higher by the weekend so it’s not clear he achieved anything except to make it perfectly clear that his escalating assertion of powers he does not have under the Charter is as much a sign of things to come as his intention to keep Neighborhood Councils as weak and irrelevant as possible.
If the consequences were not so serious, you can have a laugh watching the City Council call in one department after another and express amazement, as they did today in their brief Monday meeting, that there are not enough mechanics to maintain police, fire and other vehicles and utterly no coordination between the many departments that service their fleets themselves.
One after another, Council members take the microphone to demand reports and studies, consolidation and reorganization.
The bureaucrats assure them that they are doing all they can with their great staffs and will set up a task force to achieve every new task assigned them even as more of their workers retire, transfer to the DWP and get layoff notices.
The same was true of the reports from the IT technocrats except they had to admit it will take years and millions of dollars to fix the dozens of different computer systems that can’t communicate with one another.
It’s just a made for TV unreality show so don’t take any of it too seriously.
Like the mayor’s elimination of the Environmental Affairs and Human Services departments on Friday and DONE on Monday, nothing is really achieved except savings on paper from the supposed elimination of jobs.
For the general managers of city departments it’s a nightmare.
Last Friday, the mayor sent them a missive that requires a semanticist to understand. As best I can figure he was telling them to come up with a list of people to fire to reduce staffing by 4,000 and report how their departments would operate with up to half as many people.
And on the other hand, he said they shouldn’t bother. He and the City Administrative Office would tell them which jobs and services to eliminate.
It is all chaos which should inspire Wall Street to lend the city the billions of dollars it needs to pay its bills over the next few years.
And why not? The city has assets — many of which will be sold off in the next few months at a fire sale — which can be seized when it fails to meet its debt obligations.
Already, many inside City Hall are murmuring that selling the P in DWP would bring in enough money to keep LA from sinking into bankruptcy.
Nobody is supposed to care about any of this as long as the garbage gets picked up.
With tree trimming, parks and youth programs, libraries, building code enforcement, community planning about to join street and sidewalk paving as obsolete city services, the average person isn’t likely to get much more than that out of the city for years, if not decades, to come.
Fortunately, the mayor is protecting the cops and firefighters for which we should all be grateful since they will likely be needed more than ever as the quality of life declines, jobs keep disappearing and the poor become ever more restless.
If this was a stock market crash instead of a city burning in the failure of its leadership, you would be hearing cries across the city from homeowners and business owners of sell, sell, sell.
What you are seeing in the LA bankruptcy melodrama is a calculated and deliberate effort of the Mayor and his colleagues on the City Council to silence the voice of the people.
It is a hopeless task.
The silent majority is awakening and beginning to realize that what is at stake in this crisis of confidence is their jobs and property, their businesses, their hopes for a better tomorrow for their families, the future of the city they call home.
Neighborhood Councils whetted the appetite of thousands of people from all walks of life for a say in their government, for policies that improve their lives and communities, for a measure of power.
It was supposed to take 25 years before NCs were able to flex their muscles and provide the margin that defeated the solar energy fraud Measure B and elected Carmen Trutanich and Paul Krekorian to office.
When the threat of secession by San Pedro, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley loomed leaders in the civic culture of the city proposed a system of boroughs the governed large chunks of the city and send their best to the full City Council.
Unions and other special interests watered that down to elected Neighborhood Councils with first authority over land use issues and then drowned it with powerless Councils self-selected by anyone who chose to call themselves a stakeholder.
And still the good and decent people who for so long had worked for reform accepted that as a place to stand to begin to move City Hall.
Over the next 10 years, the elected officials did everything in their
power to keep the NCs as weak as possible, blocking initiatives from the
community and the leadership of the Department of Neighborhood
Empowerment to make the system stronger and more effective.
And yet hundreds of extraordinary people – true heroes of the struggle
to save LA – worked tirelessly to learn how city government operated and
to affect its directions constructively.
As long as they knew their place, city leaders were content to treat
them patronizingly as if they were nothing but do-gooders who had to
desire beyond getting an abandoned car removed or speed bumps to slow
traffic on residential side streets.
Freedom and power are infectious things and natural born leaders emerged
like Len Shaffer who put together a coalition of remarkable people to
hear from insiders and experts what the issues were. They learned from
that and began to push for changes.
People like Dr. Soledad Garcia stepped forward and brought her knowledge
and expertise to bear on the heart of this Chinatown story, the
Department of Water and Power.
She organized smart people into a group and spent endless hours with the
man who invented the machinery of City Hall that still operates today.
Over the years, I have called Ron Deaton every name in the books, names
like Master of Machiavellian Manipulation, and yet I always respected his brilliance and integrity and know he never would have let what’s happened to
the city occur.
Deaton, as head of the DWP, cut a deal with Soledad and her team to
bring their NC committee inside the utility as partners, limited
partners to be sure.
It was a breakthrough that established that ordinary citizens weren’t
NIMBYs saying no to everything but people who could understand the
currents and cross-currents and help navigate the troubled waters of
public policy.
Nothing ever came of it. The deal was betrayed when Deaton retired.
But the seeds of empowerment were planted. Today, NCs, homeowner and
resident groups and others active in community life form hundreds of
cells of energy creating a new LA.
They have come together to create something greater than themselves,
something most of them don’t yet fully realize has happened. They are a
force that counter-balances the special interests that run City Hall, a
force to be reckoned with, a force to be feared.
So the response of the Mayor and Council is to crush them.
To take away the small amount of money doled out to them. To take away
the small staff that supports them. To humiliate in public the man
designated to lead them, DONE General Manager Bong-Hwan Kim.
That’s exactly what Greig Smith did last week when he suggested on
camera during a Council crisis meeting on the budget that BHK should be
fired for failing to carry out the incomprehensible directives of the
Mayor and Council, the same kind of directives that have every capable
department head at City Hall whispering to anyone who will listen that
they are dealing with incompetents who are destroying their ability to
provide adequate public services.
Ignore the Reform City Charter and kill Done. Take away their funding.
Throw their elections into chaos. Get rid of all those inside City Hall
who actually believe in community empowerment. Stop them before they get
so strong that the throw out the seven Council members up for
re-election in a year and thwart the plan to shutter parks and
libraries, sell off future revenue streams, borrow heavily against the
future, double power rates to pay inflated salaries and buy renewable
energy at any price to meet artificial goals.
It doesn’t matter what the city’s leaders do. They are headed down the
wrong road and every step they take only makes matters worse and awakens
more people.
The genie is out of the bottle.
It isn’t just the gadflies, crazies and obsessives anymore. They can no
longer ignore the voice of the people.
There are four million voices in this naked city and every one of them
wants to be heard or will demand to be heard soon enough.
Old-fashioned ideas like freedom for all and equality under the law are
like viral infections once activated.
There is only one possible ending to this LA story. Sooner or later, we
will all have to sit down together and have honest conversations about
how we get out of this hole we have created for ourselves.
The only question is how much damage will be done before that happens.
Editor’s Note: Since the Dog Trainer and the Green Sheet don’t have enough reporters, Bruno thought he’d help out with a preview of the big story that will break in the next few days. LA Mayor Eliminates Police and Fire Departments
LOS ANGELES – In his latest cost-cutting move to deal with the city’s financial crisis, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has announced he was shuttering both the Los Angeles Police and Fire Departments. The announcement follows the closure of Los Angeles International Airport and the Port of Los Angeles.
“I have great faith in Angelenos,” the mayor said on the lawn of Getty House, which he recently converted into a medicinal marijuana clinic to raise money for the city’s general fund.. “I’ve already eliminated crime in the city and anybody with a garden hose can put out a fire.”
The mayor said he wasn’t sure how much money would be saved by firing the cops and firefighters/
“I’ve never been good at math,” Villaraigosa said. “But I’m sure it will help.”
The majority of police officers, who will be allowed to keep their uniforms, were expected to be hired by movie and television production companies to block traffic on city streets during filming.
“Maybe the firefighters can do dog food commercials,” the mayor said somewhat bitterly, referring to the $3 million it cost to settle Firefighter Tennie Pierce’s lawsuit.
Community leaders were quick to react.
“It’s alright with us as long as he doesn’t screw around with Neighborhood Councils,” said an anonymous source involved with the councils who feared retaliation if identified. “He needs to keep his priorities straight.”
Analysts said the mayor and the City Council have confused the public by ignoring the growing financial crisis for years, and then taking action some saw as “drastic.”
“I don’t remember anything this bad since the Yorty administration,” said Sherry Bebich Jeffe, a senior fellow at the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California and the political analyst for KNBC.
“It makes you wonder what’s worse: a goof ball or a sleaze ball?”
Her name is Dr. Angel Barrett. She is the principal of Plummer Street Elementary School in North Hills, one of the city’s poorest and most gang-infested neighborhoods. Yet, Plummer Street has become a model of what can be achieved in a 60-year-old school with trailers for classrooms despite all the challenges.
At the meeting Friday with Neighborhood Council leaders, Deputy Mayor Larry Frank announced that the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment will be abolished and nearly all its staff eliminated.
DONE Commissioner and NC leader Al Abrams sent out an email Saturday explaining what the mayor’s plan is. Go to OurLA.org and read what happened.
So it’s come to this: Would we better off if Walter Moore or even Zuma Dogg bad beaten Antonio a year ago?
I can say with certainty that we wouldn’t be worse off. Think about it: The Mayor with 10 times the money as the other nine candidates narrowly won re-election and then spent the next 11 months traveling the world, wining and dining in restaurants only 1 percent of the people can afford, and living the life of a multimillionaire with bodyguards and servants nursing to his every whim.
Time and again, he was told the city’s finances were in desperate shape and yet he paid no attention and kept on spending the public’s money as if there were no tomorrow on sweetheart deals with unions and subsidizing luxury hotels and entertainments, expanding social welfare programs.
And all he’s offered is a blueprint for disaster, a strategy to do the bidding of Wall Street so he can borrow billions of dollars to conceal his failure while perpetuating the decline of the city for decades to come.
Tomorrow has already come and the bills are already coming due and all we get is a City Council following along this road to ruin like sheep. Their solutions are to fire 4,000 workers on top of the 2,400 handsomely paid off to retire — and all of them coming out of the 12,000 city workers who provide services to the general public at libraries, parks, community planning, building code enforcement.
City Hall is in chaos, our elected officials are in a panic and thinking only of themselves and their own luxurious lives even as poverty rates are soaring, unemployment is among the highest in the nation, property values declining, storefronts empty, homes being foreclosed with parks and libraries shutting down after fortunes were spent to build them.
They have betrayed the public trust but are without shame because we still treat them with a measure of respect they do not deserve when we should be storming City Hall by thousands and demanding a new deal because the one on the table stinks.
So I ask again: Would we better off if the Mayor and the Council were gone and we started all over again with a new set of faces drawn? You certainly could not be worse off.
They have gone too far this time — now it’s not 1,000 or 2,000 or even the mayor’s 3,000 layoffs.
It’s 4,000 — fully one-third of the narrow band of the 12,000 workers who they have deemed eligible for job eliminations
The other 40,000 city workers are exempted because they are in public safety, health and other social services or work for the Harbor, Airport or DWP.
We spent billions for libraries and parks, pay through the teeth for everything we get and now we will get nothing at all.
Wall Street says they must act to borrow the billions they need to get through this year and next so they have to gut the heart of the city.
They had their chance back in June when they knew the Early Retirement Incentive Program for 2,400 senior staffers was unaffordable but they gave the unions what they wanted.
They had their chance in October when they gave the unions all the power in exchange for concessions they didn’t even get them through December?
They balked at 1,000 layoffs so the mayor pretended he had the power to order them. So they figured out how to transfer most of those workers to payrolls that got them off the general fund.
He upped the ante to 2,000 then 3,000 layoffs and the unions said they had a four-month-old contract that protected them.
So the Council one-upped the mayor on Thursday and took it to 4,000 in a back room meeting and tried to squelch all debate. No study, no public discussion, no rhyme or reason except to bluff the unions back to the bargaining table in hopes they will make more concessions.
Fat chance. It’s a game of bluff and we will all lose. Those responsible must pay the price. r
It’s so much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing. The LA City Ethics Commission is a case in point. a perpetual one at that since it almost always does the wrong thing, or nothing at all.
In light of the Supreme Court’s abolishing laws barring corporations and unions from spending as much as they want directly out of their treasuries, the City Ethics Commission responded barely two week later by abolishing all restraints on their ability to buy elections. Not that they had any trouble doing so in the past.
What they didn’t engage — what they have never engaged — is various proposals from full public financing to complete and immediate full disclosure to make city elections fair and democratic.
The failure of city ethics laws to protect the public interest is the single most important reason why our elected officials have failed to serve the public interest for so long, why we have a fiscal crisis of such enormous proportions, why public services are being gutted and why the policies the mayor and City Council are enacting will lead to bankruptcy or the perpetuation of this crisis for decades to come.
Personally, I like all our elected officials and think they are decent people at heart. Of course, I feel that way about some murderers and mobsters I’ve known.
But they are beholden for their high stations and ridiculously high salaries to the unions and corporations that get them elected. So they routinely sell out the public interest to those special interests and, for the most part, don’t even see that what they are doing is wrong.
To residents looking in, their actions seem incompetent if not corrupt, a betrayal of the public trust. But within the bubble of consciousness at City Hall, it all seems normal.
Incumbents routinely win re-election against no opposition or virtually no opposition because all the campaign cash flows to them. They vote unanimously on almost all things and Council members who dare to speak with an independent voice put at risk their ability to look after their constituents’ needs and to achieve their own goals for the city.
It is a tight system and it has failed so badly that a groundswell is building to recall all 15 Council members and the Mayor, Controller and City Attorney as well.
I am participating in a forum on campaign finance reform in the City Hall Chambers at 9 a.m. on March 4. Councilman Jose Huizar is moderating and other panelists include Kathy Feng of Common Cause, Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies, Xandra Kayden of the League of Women Voters LeeAnn Pelham of the City Ethics Commission and James Sutton of Campaign Lawyers.
Notably absent from the group is a representative of the Clean Money Campaign that seeks full public financing.
My own view is there’s never been a law that can clean up our political campaigns and never will be. Smart lawyers for special interests will always find a way around them just as they did McCain-Feingold.
The Supreme Court has ruled money is part of free speech. So be it.
What we could do is require that all contributions be listed on the Ethics Commission website within 72 hours of being received with complete disclosure of what the financial interests are of contributors with regard to city business.
Penalties need to be stiffened considerably and appointments to the Ethics Commission need to be balanced by giving Neighborhood Councils the power to name one or more members, something that should be done on all commissions.
With full and immediate disclosure, the free speech issue would truly be brought to life.
Instead of waiting six months to find out who gave money without any indication of their interests, the public and the press would have the opportunity in real time to create a public discussion that inhibit many of the back room deals that now rarely come out, or come out long after they can impact elections.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written for the February edition of Nina Royal’s North Valley Reporter.
The most dangerous thing a politician can do is to raise the people’s expectations – just ask Antonio Villaraigosa what happens when you promise voters a dream come true and deliver a nightmare.
Paul Krekorian won election as the Council member for District 2 in the East San Fernando by convincing voters from Sunland-Tujunga to Sherman Oaks he would be a true public servant and meet their needs within the region and carry their values and interests into City Hall.
His first days in office were marked by a whirlwind of activity, immediately wading into the controversy over the Magnolia Project in Valley Village in search of a compromise, saving the McGroarty Oaks in Sunland-Tujunga from being destroyed for an unwanted road project, and reopening a park in North Hollywood.
Constituent services and local issues are the bread-and-butter of elective office. The tougher task is being able to affect the course of broader citywide issues – the budget, DWP policy, planning – in a City Hall political system that has run amok.
The City Council demands unanimity these days on almost all things of importance and those who get out of line usually find it is difficult, if not impossible, to get support for the needs of the people in their districts.
That’s the challenge Krekorian faces: Can he stand up for his ideals and fulfill his promises when all around him are men and women who have succumbed to back room deals and sold their consciences to special interests?
he battle for the soul of Paul Krekorian was very much in evidence at
his ceremonial swearing-in at Van Nuys City Hall on Jan. 17. Hundreds of
people were there: Family and friends, community activists and
supporters and a large gathering of politicians from the state, county
and, most of all, the city – few of whom backed Krekorian in the
election against Chris Essel.
The mayor, of course, took center stage recalling how he owed a debt of
gratitude to Krekorian for the critical support he gave him at the start
of his own political career – without mentioning that he and his team
led the campaign to defeat Krekorian in the Council race.
He reduced Krekorian to being nothing more than a political progressive,
his way of suggesting he would be a faithful and obedient member of the
team that has pushed the city to near bankruptcy and wrecked the
economy and now is begging, borrowing and stealing in a desperate effort
to pull the city out of its nosedive.
Garcetti, Smith, Zine, Rosendahl, Hahn, Greuel – they all had their arms
around the newest Council member now that’s he one of them, hoping he
will become just another cog in a failing political machine, just as
they are.
Krekorian’s words betrayed their hopes. He talked about City Hall’s
failure and the need to make hard decisions that will determine the
city’s fate for “generations still to come.”
Of all the crises LA faces, he said, “the most critical, urgent and
difficult … is the crisis of confidence that our people have in whether
their government can serve their needs.
“Our success is dependent on our coming together in common purpose,” he
said. “Too often the people feel their aspirations are denied… (by) the
influence of the wealth and power…the people are our bosses.”
Spoken like a true leader, the leader LA needs. It isn’t going to be
easy to live up to those words.
The problems are great and the mayor and Council have made them far
worse by the actions and inactions of the last year. We’ll find out soon
enough whether Krekorian can live up to expectations that he has
created.
He can’t do it alone. It will take the community in his district, and
citywide, to come together to give him the courage and strength to stand
up for the aspirations of the people – and create the political
pressure on his Council colleagues to fall into line.
Politics at its best is a dance, a balancing of competing interests, in
the service of all the people.
That isn’t the case now at City Hall where all too often it’s nothing
but a sellout to the highest bidder.
With a brash and independent City Attorney in Carmen Trutanich and an
ambitious and earnest new Council member in Krekorian, there is hope for
real change if the people rally and organize behind them.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written for the February edition of Wayne Adelstein’s North Valley Community Newspapers.Here’s a link to a new Wall Street Journal article on municipal bankruptcies across America.
Times are tough and there going to get tougher so it’s come down to this: We need to drop the country club membership, sell off the cars, hold a yard sale for everything but basic essentials, get rid of the gardener, pool man and maid, borrow every cent we can whatever the interest rate – and pray for a miracle.
A lot of people are in that spot these days and so are we all as the day of reckoning is at hand for Los Angeles and California after decades of living beyond our means
The unspeakable B-word, bankruptcy, is now on the lips of everyone even the city’s politicians who have been living high in a fantasyland where they actually believed they could redistribute the wealth of the middle class to the rich and poor without consequences.
The facts are these: Halfway through the fiscal year, the city has a $186 million deficit, and conservatively estimates next year’s at $400 million, $725 million the following year, $875 million the next, and more than $1 billion in 2013-14 – equal to roughly 25 percent of the operating budget.
We, collectively, are in the same boat as a lot of individuals who mismanaged their financial affairs, ignored all the warning signs and sound advice and hit a streak of bad luck. The result is there are only two alternatives: Bankruptcy or facing the truth ourselves and developing a plan of action to get us through this crisis.
Finally, the mayor and City Council say they are ready to do that after a year in which the steps they took – sweetened pensions and payoffs to city workers who retire early and sweetheart long-term contracts for city workers who stay – have made the problems worse, not better.
And now as the reality of what they have done strikes home, they are proposing this solution:
Beg the unions to agree to layoffs and reopen contract talks, raises rates and fees wherever they can, find the courage to actually manage city operations and privatize golf courses, the zoo, convention center, parking structures and meters, information technology, property management and Van Nuys and Ontario airports.
Can selling off the 1,300 acres of Chatsworth Reservoir, the DWP and LAX be far behind? You can be sure they would if they could.
They thought about the Chatsworth Reservoir for years but public
opposition is too strong and they can’t afford to get rid of the DWP,
LAX or the harbor because they intend to loot them of every dollar they
can to prop up the general fund.
Already, they have stolen nearly
every dollar in special funds earmarked for other purposes and put the
money in the general fund and borrowed heavily even as the city’s credit
rating was falling. The next step is to fill hundreds of vacant – and
unneeded – jobs in the Sanitation Department with other city workers
facing layoffs, making a mockery of their promise to use the tripled
trash fee to pay to hire more police officers.
Our officials have
failed us and must be held accountable. Every dollar must be accounted
for with complete transparency, and the public must be empowered to be
part of the dialogue about how we go forward.
That’s what a new
group of Neighborhood Council leaders who have built the website
BudgetLA.com intend to do.
No more back room deals. No more hidden
agendas. No more political pandering.
This is a real crisis that
affects all our futures, the value of our homes, our businesses and
jobs, the quality of our lives.
There’s no room sitting on the
sidelines, for apathy, defeatism or indifference. Your city needs you.
Get involved.
“I’m being perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about
how the city is going to be able to deliver services.” — Maggie Whelan, General Manager, Personnel Department, City of Los Angeles.
Leave it to the bureaucrats to talk truth to power, even when those in power do not listen and cannot see.
Today, our LA civic hero is a woman who has seen it all at City Hall, the longest serving general manager in a system of government that turns over its management for the slightest political whims.
Many who survived have given up entirely but there are some whose skills and detachment have allowed them to keep the system running despite the muddling and meddling from above and still preserve a measure of integrity and the ability to speak honestly, in a nice manner, to be sure.
Maggie Whelan is one of the best of those and her performance Wednesday before her City Council masters was an exhibition that should be watched closely to see what it takes to do a good job when all around you are those who could care less.
Bernard Parks was her straight man, giving nothing away in his expressions as he drew out the truth of what hell his colleagues have wrought with questions that begat facts, a dose of reality. Like Whelan, he spent his career in the stifled culture of City Hall and thrived until, in his case, he thought being Chief of Police, actually meant he was the Chief.
If your attention span ends here, this is all you need to know.
In response to Parks’ deliberately convoluted questions about the chaos caused by the shotgun approach of early retirements, the total confusion caused by layoffs where no one actually loses their jobs and a fiscal crisis that gets worse by the day, Whelan offered these words of wisdom:
“I’m being perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about
how the city is going to be able to deliver services. perfectly honest with you, I have very serious concerns about how the city is going to be able to deliver services.”
There it is. If Maggie Whelan whose job it is to juggle the 52,000 full-time employees into a functioning city government, doesn’t know how LA is going to deliver services, nobody does.
Certainly not the mayor who has done nothing except put 4,000 more workers on the payroll and into the bankrupt pensions plans and spent money as fast as he made hollow promises.
Two weeks ago he awakened from his long disengagement from his job of leading the city and exercised powers no one knew he had to order 1,000 job eliminations immediately.
It was a trick since the goal was to transfer most of them to special funds, Harbor, Airport and DWP jobs. Only 160 have been transferred out of more than 2,000 applicants who jumped at the chance to escape what was going on and, as Whelan notes, not a single worker has been laid off.
It was as if she were speaking in a dead language like Sanskrit. The reality didn’t matter.The Council is moving forward relentlessly to carry out a plan that in the end will lead to even worse financial troubles, and losses in services that will damage the quality of life for millions and jeopardize the future of the city.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch Maggie Whelan closely for the four minutes of this video and hear what she is really saying. And if you really want to understand what is going on more deeply, watch the full video at the City Clerk’s site. .
The long-awaited day has finally arrived and the mayor earned his star on the Walk of Fame and a SAG card as well, just in case he needs a job one of these days. And that’s exactly what he went to Pine Valley on ABC’s soap opera “All My Children” to get: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.
ABC’s soap opera “All My Children” to get: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.
The threads of the story have become so entangled it’s like a crazy dream that is so vivid you think it’s reality.
How dumb do they think we are?
That’s the question that has come to mind thousands of times over the years as I’ve observed the insanity that passes for our local government.
Today, what came to mind for the first time is “How dumb are we?”
The evidence is mounting everywhere that it’s us who are out of our minds, not them. They are just selfish little people who will do and say anything to protect and serve themselves. We are the fools who keep on paying the bills and electing them to office.
They conned us into paying billions, nearly $20 billion, to build mammoth monuments to miseducation that cost as much as $400 million each but now can’t pay the salaries of teachers to staff them so they want another tax for that.
It was all for the “sake of the children,” they said, so we taxed ourselves to build parks and libraries that will soon be shuttered.
But they’ve got money lying around to build yet another park to connect City Hall with the DWP, presumably so city and county workers will have a place to nap in the daytime and the homeless to sleep at night since they’ve been rousted from Skid Row so developers given huge subsidies can build luxury apartments that no one can afford.
How dumb are we?
I’ll tell you how dumb we are, we borrow a fortune to build a new Convention Center because the old one is a bust and subsidize it to the tune of $40 million a year and then when it starts making money, we are going to sell it to the billionaire who is getting even richer on Staples Center and LA Live that were built with our generosity to provide playgrounds for the rich.
We give slick operators like the CIM Group everything they want and when their deals flop, like Hollywood and Highland, we bail them out.
We cut secret sweetheart deals with the emirs of Dubai and New York billionaires for the Grandiose Avenue Project and we forgive them millions in penalties when they don’t deliver.
We watch our elected officials beating their breasts because their incompetence and cowardice puts the future of our city in jeopardy and sit silent as they piously talk about firing contractors and their workers to save the jobs of city workers they no longer can afford to pay. It would be wrong, they say, to make our horrifying unemployment numbers worse even as they make them worse.
Oh, the horror, the horror…
But instead of storming their palace of self-service, we come as peasants begging for a crumb from their lavish marble and gold table.
We are fools. We are dumb. We are slaves and they are masters. We have gotten what we deserve.
Nothing will change until we — business, labor and the community — get up off our knees and stand up like free men and women and show them who’s boss, show them we will not be fooled any longer.
