![\"golf.JPG\"](\"http:\/\/ronkayela.com\/golf.JPG\")
<\/a><\/span>Isn’t that how the commies in China found a way around their doctrinaire past to become a global economic giant? That way they didn’t have to admit communism had failed. <\/p>\n
Showing his own political flexibility, Antonio Villaraigosa is using the same strategy to avoid admitting LA’s experiment in municipal socialism is a dismal failure. <\/p>\n
He is ready to turn over valuable assets like the Convention Center and the Pershing Square parking structure to private companies, undoubtedly friends and contributors, right when they are starting to turn a profit. <\/p>\n
This didn’t just happen overnight. <\/p>\n
The mayor made such a mess of the city’s finances with expanded social welfare programs, massive hiring, subsidized developments and sweetheart union contracts that the city seeing is running in the red and can’t pay its bills.<\/p>\n
So what else can he do but sell off assets and fire workers?<\/p>\n
As luck would have it, there is something else he can do and he took the bait Monday by agreeing to keep the “for sale” sign off the city’s nine golf courses and instead turn them into a business enterprise, the kind the makes money instead of losing it by being burdened with wasteful, and in to a great extent, fictitious costs.<\/p>\n
So when his henchman, Chief of Staff Jeff Carr, hauled Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri on the carpet Monday the conversation took an unexpected turn. Instead of eliminating huge chunks of his staff, Mukri cut a deal to spin off the nine golf courses into a separate “enterprise fund” rather than seek bids from private companies to run the golf program as the county does profitably despite significantly lower fees than the city.<\/p>\n
“Organized labor and organized golf have been working together on this for a long while,” Craig Kessler, executive director of the Public Links Golf Association.<\/p>\n
“The budget crisis is an opportunity for a team effort to make the golf enterprise fund succeed. We need to recognize the need for consensus, push for transparency and see what is working and not working.”<\/p>\n
There is no guarantee that the mayor or the rest of City Hall actually intends to do anything beyond getting the 165 golf jobs out of the general fund and into a special fund so that a similar numbers of jobs in the Parks Department is saved.<\/p>\n
Power sharing is a more threatening concept to City Hall than capitalism is to the commies these days.<\/p>\n
But there is real opportunity, as with Neighborhoods Councils and other agencies that are being gutted, for citizen activists, workers and bureaucrats to work collaboratively together and make city government work better at lower costs.<\/p>\n
Like the Chinese, the mayor finds the idea of sharing sacrifice and costs more palatable than sharing power. But that’s the heart of the question that ought to inspire those committed to specific areas of city government to work harder and work together for real change.<\/p>\n
For years, golf enthusiasts and union leaders have been pushing a plan to run the network of city golf courses into a profit-making business instead of the loser it has become because it’s saddled with millions of dollars in costs that have nothing to do with the facilities.<\/p>\n
The city’s budget crisis has created the opportunity to finally implement their proposal and preserve some youth and other programs and avoid closure of many parks because of layoffs.<\/p>\n
The challenge is to demonstrate that the golf courses can be run in a business-like manner by scaling their real costs to revenue, reinvesting profits into improvements and even generate income for other parks programs.<\/p>\n
That will take real participation from the Golf Advisory Council that too often have been ignored in the past and cooperation from the unions that too often have been inflexible in the past.<\/p>\n
“The wolf is at the door. The status quo is not sustainable,” said Kessler. “The Parks Department is a little bit of a fortress and that has to change.”<\/p>\n
Whether the mayor and meddling City Council will stand in the way of change, of power sharing, remains to be seen but this is one case where community activists and labor unions are on the same side and have worked together for several years to make it happen.<\/p>\n
While much of what the city does fails because of poor political leadership, bad management and work rules that encourage inefficiency, there are examples like the General Services printing shop as fully competitive with private companies on price and quality.<\/p>\n
The golf program is not in that category. <\/p>\n
The city’s response to the recession-caused decline in the number of rounds played is to sharply raise green fees under the same doctrine of revenue neutrality the mayor has used in running the Department of Water and Power. The less we use of water or power in the name of conservation the higher the rates go. The higher the salaries go the higher the rates go. <\/p>\n
Such policies go a long to way towards explaining why the golf courses are in worse condition, why the water and power systems are falling apart, why the streets and sidewalks are crumbling and just about everything provided by the city is getting worse, and the worst is yet to come.<\/p>\n
Neighborhood Councils, environmentalists, the disabled and many other segments of the community have tried to step forward as full participants in running the city.<\/p>\n
But like the unions who have been promised a full partnership, they mostly get lip service instead of respect. <\/p>\n
It would be ironic if it was golfers who teed up the model for a new Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
This isn’t just Chinatown, Jake, it’s becoming like China itself. There’s no other way to see what the leftist mayor is doing in finding a roundabout way to pull his quotes from the Reason Foundation and embrace free enterprise capitalism. No other way to understand what he is doing with the city’s golf courses by […]<\/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-421889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421889","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=421889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}