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.<\/p>\n
It is a hopeless task. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Over the next 10 years, the elected officials did everything in their
\npower to keep the NCs as weak as possible, blocking initiatives from the
\n community and the leadership of the Department of Neighborhood
\nEmpowerment to make the system stronger and more effective.<\/p>\n
And yet hundreds of extraordinary people – true heroes of the struggle
\nto save LA – worked tirelessly to learn how city government operated and
\n to affect its directions constructively.<\/p>\n
As long as they knew their place, city leaders were content to treat
\nthem patronizingly as if they were nothing but do-gooders who had to
\ndesire beyond getting an abandoned car removed or speed bumps to slow
\ntraffic on residential side streets.<\/p>\n
Freedom and power are infectious things and natural born leaders emerged
\n like Len Shaffer who put together a coalition of remarkable people to
\nhear from insiders and experts what the issues were. They learned from
\nthat and began to push for changes.<\/p>\n
People like Dr. Soledad Garcia stepped forward and brought her knowledge
\n and expertise to bear on the heart of this Chinatown story, the
\nDepartment of Water and Power.<\/p>\n
She organized smart people into a group and spent endless hours with the
\n man who invented the machinery of City Hall that still operates today. <\/p>\n
Over the years, I have called Ron Deaton every name in the books, names
\nlike Master of Machiavellian Manipulation, and yet I always respected his brilliance and integrity and know he never would have let what’s happened to
\nthe city occur. <\/p>\n
Deaton, as head of the DWP, cut a deal with Soledad and her team to
\nbring their NC committee inside the utility as partners, limited
\npartners to be sure. <\/p>\n
It was a breakthrough that established that ordinary citizens weren’t
\nNIMBYs saying no to everything but people who could understand the
\ncurrents and cross-currents and help navigate the troubled waters of
\npublic policy.<\/p>\n
Nothing ever came of it. The deal was betrayed when Deaton retired. <\/p>\n
But the seeds of empowerment were planted. Today, NCs, homeowner and
\nresident groups and others active in community life form hundreds of
\ncells of energy creating a new LA.<\/p>\n
They have come together to create something greater than themselves,
\nsomething most of them don’t yet fully realize has happened. They are a
\nforce that counter-balances the special interests that run City Hall, a
\nforce to be reckoned with, a force to be feared.<\/p>\n
So the response of the Mayor and Council is to crush them. <\/p>\n
To take away the small amount of money doled out to them. To take away
\nthe small staff that supports them. To humiliate in public the man
\ndesignated to lead them, DONE General Manager Bong-Hwan Kim. <\/p>\n
That’s exactly what Greig Smith did last week when he suggested on
\ncamera during a Council crisis meeting on the budget that BHK should be
\nfired for failing to carry out the incomprehensible directives of the
\nMayor and Council, the same kind of directives that have every capable
\ndepartment head at City Hall whispering to anyone who will listen that
\nthey are dealing with incompetents who are destroying their ability to
\nprovide adequate public services.<\/p>\n
Ignore the Reform City Charter and kill Done. Take away their funding.
\nThrow their elections into chaos. Get rid of all those inside City Hall
\nwho actually believe in community empowerment. Stop them before they get
\n so strong that the throw out the seven Council members up for
\nre-election in a year and thwart the plan to shutter parks and
\nlibraries, sell off future revenue streams, borrow heavily against the
\nfuture, double power rates to pay inflated salaries and buy renewable
\nenergy at any price to meet artificial goals.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t matter what the city’s leaders do. They are headed down the
\nwrong road and every step they take only makes matters worse and awakens
\n more people.<\/p>\n
The genie is out of the bottle.<\/p>\n
It isn’t just the gadflies, crazies and obsessives anymore. They can no
\nlonger ignore the voice of the people.<\/p>\n
There are four million voices in this naked city and every one of them
\nwants to be heard or will demand to be heard soon enough.<\/p>\n
Old-fashioned ideas like freedom for all and equality under the law are
\nlike viral infections once activated. <\/p>\n
There is only one possible ending to this LA story. Sooner or later, we
\nwill all have to sit down together and have honest conversations about
\nhow we get out of this hole we have created for ourselves. <\/p>\n
The only question is how much damage will be done before that happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}