MY WAY--I like to think I am an equal opportunity critic and cheerleader but, of late, I’ve been more of a critic. So, I am happy to play cheerleader this week in writing about something that seems to be bringing neighbors together. 

If you are like me, you receive -- on a daily basis -- what seems like hundreds of emails that are of no interest. Aside from the spam, the scam, and other sexually charged missives, there are the commercial messages that I can easily do without. Still can't figure out how I got on the list for Viagra and beautiful Russian women! 

There are, however, certain emails I read on a daily basis. One of them is the Nextdoor Daily Digest. I bring up this particular website because of a conversation I had with some friends who are paranoid about their privacy. They use the internet in their business and personally, but mention sites like Facebook, Linked In, Instagram and Nextdoor etc., and it’s obvious they are not interested. 

The reason given for this loathing is, "I don't want people to know who my friends are or what I am doing." Yes, the age factor does make a difference. Millennials and Baby Boomers, at least the younger Boomers, don't have the same privacy issues. I must admit I enjoy Facebook because it allows me to keep in contact with my friends all over the world. I seldom post anything other than my CityWatch articles but admit to making comments, likes, and I've even learned to use the emojis. 

Nextdoor is a completely different type of social media. I learned about it when the City of Los Angeles entered an agreement with Nextdoor about three years ago. EmpowerLA introduced it to the Neighborhood Councils and encouraged them to set up an NC Nextdoor pages. Gradually it broke into smaller and tighter geographical areas. My group has 149 members with more joining every week. 

The site defines itself as the free and private social network for neighborhoods. On Nextdoor, neighbors create private online communities for their neighborhoods where they can ask questions, get to know one another and exchange local advice and recommendations. A recent Pew survey reported that a Facebook user has only 2% of its neighbors as friends. So this is more targeted. 

It was started by several Silicon Valley "techies" in 2010. They were wondering how they could bring their Menlo Park neighborhood closer together. In 2011, they went national with this concept and now have a 65% representation in 112 communities in the U.S. There are no ads and the sign-up and postings are free. How do they make money? Right now they don't generate any income but are conducting some pilot programs which should end up making the site profitable. This will undoubtedly please their various capital venture investors. They insist that the basic concept will remain free. 

There are more than 500 different Nextdoor groups in the City of Angeles and more than 5500 in the greater Los Angeles area. Aside from the 112,000 plus sites throughout the U.S., they are in the Netherlands and this week opened officially in the UK. 

It’s easy to get started: simply visit www.nextdoor.com and enter your email and home address. If Nextdoor is already available for your neighborhood, you will automatically be invited to join that neighborhood. If not, you'll be given the option to create one by drawing the boundaries of your neighborhood on a map, naming your Nextdoor site, and inviting your neighbors. You must have at least ten sign-ups in twenty-one days. You must use your real name and street and there are three ways to authenticate that you are who you say you are.

Nextdoor communities are self-moderated by the neighbors who live in the communities. Needless to say, all Leads and Founders are volunteers. This can include the Founding Member who started Nextdoor in his or her community, as well as the Leads of the neighborhood. In addition, any member can flag content to their Leads or contact Nextdoor’s support team. They have what they euphemistically call a conflict resolution team to handle improper posts. 

Posts are divided into categories in the daily digest and on the website. Topics of discussion on Nextdoor are as varied as local events, school activities, plumber and babysitter recommendations, recent crime activity, upcoming garage sales or even lost pets. Breakdown of conversations on Nextdoor is as follows: 7% events; 8% lost & found; 8% free items; 16% crime and public safety; 19% classifieds; 26% recommendations; and 16% other. 

As an example, here is what is in my Nextdoor digest today: 

Cat to a Good Home

Looking for Lost Dog (with pic)

Recommending a great fence builder

Need an Animal Crate

LVN wanted for Weekend Invalid care

Car broken into parked in front of my house

Just moved here from Michigan looking for friends 

I asked the Head of Communications, Kelsey Grady, if they have many improper or nasty postings. She replied that they do get some. There are one or two "leads" for each neighborhood site. These are volunteers who keep an eye out for problem posts and answer questions. 

One of their recent challenges has concerned "racial profiling." The company is confronting a tough problem: How do you stop an activity when people can't even agree on how to define it? Jaywalking and speeding are easy. Racial profiling does not have a universally accepted definition, as experts in criminology have noted. 

If you go to their website you will see the large amount of press coverage they have received on this issue. Nextdoor decided to create a working definition that is relatively broad: anything that allows a person to stereotype an entire race. Throughout this summer, CEO Nirav Tolia and his engineers have been testing ways to put a stop to it online. He says that they have managed to decrease racial profiling by fifty percent; he looks forward to eradicating it completely in the near future. 

People engage in racial profiling "often not on purpose," Tolia says. It's implicit bias. For example, he says that a user might think, “‘If I look out my window, and I see someone breaking into a car, and the only thing I see is that they are dark-skinned, why can't I post? That's all I see.’” 

Tolia continues, "The problem with that post,” — ‘a dark-skinned man is breaking into a car’ —, [is that] while the activity sounds like a crime, the description of the alleged perpetrator lacks any useful detail, like what he was wearing, his sneakers, his hairstyle or height. 

"Because that message goes out to the entire neighborhood, where presumably many of the neighbors reading the post are dark-skinned, that would be considered racial profiling," Tolia explains. 

Nextdoor has been no stranger to such posts. The end effect, he says, has been more hurtful than helpful, generating animosity among neighbors instead of offering useful tips for law enforcement. 

In a pilot project running in select neighborhoods across the U.S., the company has altered the rules for posting. When a user wants to post about a crime or suspicious activity, in the Crime & Safety section, a new form requires two physical descriptors — e.g. Nike sneakers, gray sweat pants, bald — if the user chooses to include the race of the person." 

An algorithm under development spot-checks the summary of the suspicious activity for racially charged terms, as well as for length. If the description is too short, it is presumed to lack meaningful detail and is unacceptable. 

If a draft post violates the algorithm's rules or the form's mandatory fields, the user has to revise. Otherwise, it's not possible to post. All 112,000 U.S. communities have been sent the new regulations. 

The move to block posts sparked heated internal debate, Tolia admits. "It's highly unusual for a social network to say: If you don't do this, you cannot post. Highly unusual. I mean, think about Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat. There's no friction at all in the process of posting." 

In tech, "friction" is a dirty word. Engineers rack their brains over how to shave seconds off the time it takes to broadcast your post to the world. 

Some Nextdoor engineers argued that the company should just politely suggest, not require, a better description. They pointed out that when people complain — about bullying, hate speech, revenge porn — on other social networks, those companies don't change their product. 

Nextdoor recruits police and city agencies into the network as an added feature, a kind of Community Policing 2.0 that many users want. In the wake of the Dallas shootings, the police department there turned to Nextdoor to communicate safety updates to residents, and later to recruit for the police force. The network says it's partnering with more than 1,600 public agencies in the U.S. 

How many people do you know in your immediate neighborhood? This is a way to find recommended suppliers and services, to keep track of things-both good and bad going on in the community and best of all ... to bring people together. 

As always comments welcome.

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRANSPORTATION BREAKTHROUGHS-With all the technological improvements coming along with vehicles it is fitting that an advanced roadway architecture should be developed as well. This is so they work together and make even greater transportation service and efficiencies regarding congestion elimination and GHG reduction. 

A full range of small to large vehicular roadway solutions are feasible and attainable short term and can provide further roadway structure for continued technological improvement and planning efficiencies supporting SB 32 environmental goals. 

These improvements would be very affordable and integral with what exits today and would continue the desirable characteristics of travel that we want into the future while bringing about efficiency to the overall roadway network. 

A new breakthrough urban roadway architecture utilizes existing street rights of ways and begins by making higher capacity from selected regular boulevards by using “continuous flowing traffic on urban interrupted streets”, (the interruptions are for cross traffic.) 

In addition to capacity related problem solving, the continuous flowing traffic can be managed to provide safer speeds for drivers, bikers and considerations for pedestrians as well while making the significant reductions in GHG emissions. These are extra benefits beyond giving shorter travel times at low speeds related to the environs that are being traveled through. 

The improved structuring of how communities work can give urban design “place making” opportunities as well. The innovative roadway architecture that allows continuous flowing traffic is a dramatic improvement by essentially doubling the capacity of normal street lanes that presently have stop and go driving. The LA Automatic Traffic Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) system gives the necessary signal timing and brings integration with other related existing 4400 controlled areas of the street network. What would be taking place is the “digitization of roadways’ in selected portions of the vehicular network with the new roadway architecture facilitating “continuous flowing traffic” (CFT). 

Eventually vehicles would communicate with the roadway and the roadway would communicate with vehicles in making even safer, managed mobility with even higher capacities if so needed and desired. 

Bus transit would be truly rapid with CFT and coordinated with communications to minimize first and last mile connections from origin to destination. The continuous flowing traffic boulevards would attract ridership and bring greater frequency and dependability of bus service. 

An example of improvement with CFT would be the elimination of the 5 mph traffic congestion on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. That utter traffic failure every work day, can be eliminated by an increase in capacity. Todays failing 5 mph peak period stop and go speed has a capacity of around 300 vehicles/lane/hour and is emitting GHGs at about 2.5 times the amount as when there is flowing traffic at 30 mph. A managed speed of 30 mph (not allowing slower or faster traffic), gives CFT capacity at about 1200 vehicles/lane/hour, four times as much than the 5 mph failing traffic. 

What that means is a shorter peak period with uncongested flowing traffic and a much freer spacing of vehicles one to another which would be safer and have less stress on drivers. This is the result of designed and managed free flowing traffic. 

As a larger case example, the I-405 bottleneck in West LA can be eliminated as well with selected roadways having continuous flowing traffic to add capacity to the I-405 corridor. 

Metro suggested a solution that a tunnel under the I-405 freeway going from south of the interchange with the I-10 freeway, then north on past the West LA area while still in a tunnel and into the San Fernando Valley (likely beyond the I-101 interchange as well). Thankfully it is not a solution and such a boondoggle can easily be avoided. 

The tunnel proposal comes from a view that does not recognize the travel demand which brings about the 405 bottleneck. The problem is not the amount of traffic that is exchanging between the San Fernando Valley and south of the I-10 (approximately just 8% of the Westside 405 corridor traffic). The problem is the massive amount of traffic that is exchanging with all the areas beyond the Westside, going to and from the Westside, within that short distance between Sunset to Pico Boulevards. 

The I-405 corridor and its related cross streets going under it from Sunset to Pico Boulevards, essentially comprise a daily traffic volume of around 680,000 trips per day. It’s a problem that a tunnel for vehicles, or a single line of rail transit however configured, cannot address. The congestion is inherently a vehicular problem. 

There are three major functions where the 405 is insufficient; 1/ backed up traffic on the 405 because the Interchange with the I-10 has been out grown, 2/ there is a lack of signal and ramping capacity to deal with the intensity of distribution and collection of commuters to the Westside which backs up traffic on the 405 and related crossing boulevards coming and going, and 3/ with the 405 failing, commuters then cut through the arterial grid such as between the Valley and the City of Santa Monica by going through Brentwood instead of using the freeways as intended. Cut-through traffic is excessive throughout the Westside because of that breakdown where the major corridors do not contain the travel demand due to inadequate capacity. 

The clear evidence of that is the backed up commuter traffic, some half mile or more for hours, on all the crossing roads with which the commuters are waiting to get on the 405. A plan using a frontage road with continuous flowing traffic along with minor improvements to the 405 and 1-10, can provide good access by solving these three deficiencies. 

The Santa Monica Boulevard corridor would be an included improvement for adding capacity and would have a connection to an improved 405 corridor. The result of the CFT frontage road, and related minor freeway improvements would be in effect the adding of 120,000 person trips per day capacity to the corridor. That would contain the traffic to the corridor and eliminate backed up traffic and the intrusive cut-through traffic into adjacent communities. 

Roadways and Planning! 

From a community viewpoint, future planning for the LA Basin must protect the character preserving and livable community standards by having limitations on development to keep the relationship of travel demand to land use in balance with available transportation infrastructure. This is also reasonable given the need for developing a mix of urbanizing land uses elsewhere in the County. 

Limiting future growth in the congested LA Basin then would direct the majority of future job and community enhancing growth to the suburbs which they need. This secures suburban urbanizing as well as the reduction of VMT by making shorter trip length on average because jobs, shopping, institutions and services are closer to the housing in those communities. Suburbs and cities would use CFT corridors to structure growth and maintain good land use to infrastructure relationships. 

With the 90 million miles currently made by vehicles each day in LA County, reducing average trip length from 15.5 miles in length to 12 miles would be a 22% reduction in VMT and GHG emissions. That is a significant approach to meeting the transportation share of GHG reduction to reach SB 32 goals and for providing good mobility. 

Structuring better planning with an extensive and efficient improved roadway system makes sense, whereas the supposed increase in rail transit implied by Proposition M brings about greater concentration of development in the LA Basin. The proposed rail is directed to the LA Basin which already resists over development. And the ‘coup de grace’ is that light rail can’t be put into existing boulevards without creating greater congestion and GHG emissions. Metro’s plan would not work! 

Vote NO on Proposition M so that affordable and good “bottom-up” planning can be incorporated into overall County plans to secure livable communities, towns and cities.

(Phil Brown AIA, has invented the CFT roadway system improvement by research and development that has occurred over the last twelve years analyzing the Westside traffic problems and the socio-economic needs of Greater Los Angeles. Contact is available through the website FlowBoulevardPlan.com) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOICES--Former students of the recently shuttered, for-profit ITT Technical Institutes announced Wednesday they have no choice other than to not make payments on their federal student loans, as they denounced the "immoral system that profits from our aspirations." There are 7 Technical Institutes in the Los Angeles area. 

As of the writing of this article, 176 former students are taking part in the action. One of them is Niki Howland, who said she was the "perfect prey for the predator that is ITT Tech." She said the school recruiter lied to her about the total cost of the school and the pay she could earn after receiving her degree.

"These were all lies," she said. "All I have is a revolving cycle of outrageously high interest debt with a useless piece of paper ITT Tech calls my AA 'degree' in Applied Computer Science—Computer Network Systems." She added that the "student debt crisis ruins lives."

ITT Tech announced earlier this month that it was closing all its campuses nationwide—leaving the students "in limbo"—and blamed the move on "actions of and sanctions from the U.S. Department of Education." 

As the Wall Street Journal reported:

ITT Tech, among the nation's largest for-profit college chains by revenue, had been facing accusations from its accreditor of chronic financial mismanagement and questionable recruiting tactics. It is also under investigation by more than a dozen state and federal authorities, including the Massachusetts attorney general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last month, the Education Department said it banned the school from enrolling new students with federal aid. That was a "death blow," the WSJ added, as "The company got 80% of its cash revenue from Title IV federal aid, including Pell Grants and student loans, in 2015, according to securities filings."

In their letter addressed to President Barack Obama and Education Secretary John King Jr. posted online Wednesday, the former students write that they are taking part in the "debt strike," which is organized by Debt Collective, to "begin to collect on your obligation to erase [the debts]."

"Each of us is still left with tens of thousands of dollars of debt to you, the very agency that was supposed to have protected us from ITT's scam," they write. They say they are following in steps of former students of now bankrupt Corinthian College, who began their own debt strike.

"We trusted that education would lead to a better life. And we trusted you to ensure that the education system in this country would do so. Instead, each month you force us to make payments into an immoral system that profits from our aspirations. This is a profound betrayal."

"These are debts we cannot pay and should never have been forced to. Erase them now. Return what we have already paid. Our debt strike will continue until justice is served," they conclude.

Secretary King wrote that the former students may be able to have their loans discharged but as Marketwatch reports, some of those saddled with debt "say that the Department’s decision to sanction ITT indicates that its students were victims of wrongdoing and should be eligible for automatic loan forgiveness."

(Andrea Germanos writes for Common Dreams  … where this report originated.) Image: Debt Collective

INFO: California Campuses 

1. Bay area campus - Concord, CA
2. Bay area campus - Oakland, CA
3. Fresno area campus - Clovis, CA
4. Los Angeles area campus - Oxnard, CA
5. Los Angeles area campus - San Dimas, CA
6. Los Angeles area campus - Sylmar, CA
7. Los Angeles area campus - Orange, CA
8. Los Angeles area campus - San Bernardino, CA
9. Los Angeles area campus - Torrance, CA
10. Los Angeles area campus - Corona, CA
11. Sacramento area campus - Rancho Cordova, CA
12. San Diego area campus - National City, CA
13. San Diego area campus - Vista, CA
14. Stockton area campus - Lathrop, CA

SPECIAL TO CITYWATCH--It's been an incredible few weeks for the Coalition to Preserve LA, a citywide movement of tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents who support the historic Neighborhood Integrity Initiative that, in a few days, will be officially certified by the LA City Clerk for placement on the March 7, 2017 ballot. 

We've been honored by endorsements from working-class Latinos in MacArthur Park, Westlake and Elysian Valley (the longtime residents don't actually call it “Frogtown,” a disturbing indicator of the days when brutal gangs controlled the area) who are watching a frenzy of “zone changes” by the City Council that let developers build as big and as ugly as they wish, setting off gentrification and displacement of longtime residents that robs Los Angeles of its crucial working-class neighborhoods. 

We've been delighted by endorsements from Westside professionals, attorneys and, yes, even developers, who make up such groups as the Brentwood Hills Homeowners Association and the Westwood Neighborhood Council.  Their members, people such as Debra Hockemeyer, Sandy Brown and Steve Sann are watching staggering new surface street gridlock from the Santa Monica border to La Cienega, traffic that radiates out one, two or even three miles from the mega-developments approved by City Council members during widely acknowledged backroom deals that break the zoning rules to profit a single developer. 

We've been humbled by endorsements from important journalistic voices in South Los Angeles and Mid City, from two inspiring women who publish small, but respected, newspapers — Gloria Zuurveen of Pace News, and Dianne Lawrence of The Neighborhood News, and from the iconic Los Angeles Sentinel columnist Larry Aubry. All of them are appalled at plans for Cumulus, a 30-story luxury skyscraper in a single family neighborhood of South LA on La Cienega Jefferson Boulevard that sped through the rigged system that lets developers build whatever they wish, regardless of the zoning and rules. 

We've been energized by endorsements from Richard Close and Cindy Cleghorn, who represent the trademark activism of the 1.8 million people in the San Fernando Valley and its foothills., a polyglot working-class and middle-class world where $2,500 one-bedroom buildings fashioned like inhumane glass cubes, approved in backroom deals with individual City Council members, are creating a devastating domino effect, prompting other landlords along the same blocks to slap on a coat of paint and dramatically raise their own rents, too, now that the area has been made “hot.” 

We've been thrilled by surprise endorsements from film stars Leonard DiCaprio, Kirsten Dunst, Garrett Hedlund, Chris Pine, Joaquin Phoenix and Chloe Sevigny, who are watching attempts by developers to transform such wonderfully livable areas as Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz and Studio City — all at risk of becoming the next Hollywood, California's most richly historic district that is now being methodically destroyed by the City Council to make way for skyscrapers. 

We've been invited to meaningful meetings and phone chats with aides to City Councilman David Ryu (the sole Los Angeles City Council member who is interested in reforming that body's broken system of planning and developing Los Angeles), we've met with Mayor Eric Garcetti in his gracious and huge Old World conference room, and we've sat down with City Council President Herb Wesson. The meetings were all at their request, all to determine whether any serious reforms of City Hall's rigged system could be rushed into law, to stop the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative from appearing on the March ballot. 

And during all of this time, we've been pummeled by much of the Los Angeles media, whose political reporters have yet to raise a finger to conduct any credible investigations of how these backroom deals between individual City Council members work, in which the council member accepts money, gifts and wining and dining from a developer. What actually goes on, and how, when City Council members privately agree to help that developer break the rules to build an outsized project such as the Martin Cadillac development in congestion-jammed West LA, or the towering Frank Gehry blob at the already gridlocked entrance to Laurel Canyon, yet another community under threat of destruction? 

In the current state of Los Angeles journalism, of which I was an avid member for 35 years, business reporters have yet to produce a single report on how the backroom game pencils out, in which global financiers and developers have flooded LA with unwanted and unaffordable luxury rentals, yet still bring in plenty of profits while sitting on empty $8,000 penthouses, ghost condos and half-rented $3,500 rental towers. The city housing department admits to at least a 12% vacancy rate in these overbuilt glass boxes with which the City Council is fixated, their key source of campaign funding and evenings on the town. Yet for everyone else in living in Los Angeles, the vacancy rate is close to zero. 

But that's OK, the campaign itself will probe these greed-driven deals, thanks to our crew that includes award-winning journalist Patrick Range McDonald, and the folk hero who stopped the $465 red light camera tickets by investigating the city's phony claims about what causes auto accidents, Jay Beeber. 

All of this makes even more compelling the evening I spent on September 14 in a church in Westwood, where the Westwood Neighborhood Council endorsed our measure 8 to 1 — a key victory in the block by block battle to reform City Hall. 

The room was oddly stacked with men from hipster neighborhoods east of Hollywood, who argued with passion that Los Angeles must become a city of towers and skyscrapers and give up its unique big-city, small-city lifestyle. Our paid opposition was there as well, a team slickly financed by three global development billionaires who have everything to gain from keeping City Hall's rigged backroom dealing intact: The Lowy family of Australia that controls $68 billion worth of Westfield Malls globally: Miami developer Sonny Kahn who controls, with his cousins, Crescent Heights Inc., which has filled Florida’s beachfront with skyscrapers; and Robert J. Lowe, the billionaire multinational luxury resort developer based in Los Angeles. 

For me, among the voices who spoke eloquently for the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, including respected former LA Building and Safety Commission Chairman Joyce Foster, and lifelong community defender Sandy Brown, the one who stood out was a soft-spoken developer trained in economics at UCLA who asked the Westwood Neighborhood Council to endorse our citizen initiative. John K. Heidt explained that “I am committed to following the rules, but I am competing in a system that favors the developers who create special relationships and are exempted from the rules.” 

Heidt serves on the Permanent Supportive Housing Committee of the Ocean Park Community Center to help move the homeless into meaningful housing, and is not the first decent, fair-minded developer to back the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. Heidt didn’t want to talk to the Westwood Neighborhood Council about the sexy and most-discussed element of our measure, which bans for two years the 5% of development in Los Angeles that is breaking the rules, destroying neighborhood character and jamming up the narrow or already overwhelmed streets where these projects do not belong. 

Heidt wanted to talk instead about the profound reforms at the heart of the measure, that force our pay-to-play City Council members to end their backroom deals that soak up an enormous amount of their time and their staff’s time, and pivot back to their real jobs— long abandoned — of planning what Los Angeles should become during the next few years. 

This planning, which is done in every well-run city but, incredibly, is not done in Los Angeles, means the writing of a General Plan that explains where and how the City Council plans to provide us our long-promised and far too rare city parks and protect our open spaces, how our council members plan to overcome their repeated failure to address our streets, sewers, water availability and overtaxed safety services, and — just one element among these many pressing needs — where and how Los Angeles will add office buildings, stores, restaurants and rental units over the next five years. 

Even more important, through the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, voters will force the City Council to update the city's 35 Community Plans, the Airport District Plan and the Harbor District Plan, and as a new lever of power, we will require the City Planning Commission to hold all of its Community Plan meetings out in the neighborhoods --- and the meetings must be held at night and on weekends only. 

This deceptively simple new lever of power brings the debates over what Los Angeles should become directly back to the neighborhoods, a radical change that will all but end the sparse downtown City Hall 10 a.m. hearings that few working people can attend, and which I, as a journalist, noted were dominated by the “suits,” the paid lobbyists for the developers. 

It is through the Community Plans that the city's badly backfiring policies will finally be debated and influenced by the residents themselves, on such topics as Small Lot Subdivisions (city records from 2005 show that these towering, skinny, $1 million homes were supposed to be affordable housing for first-time buyers), Mansionization (the latest fix falls far short for many areas of the city), Airbnbs (city planners and the City Council are clueless about how many affordable units are being lost to this trend in touristy areas such as Venice that cannot afford to lose a single apartment unit), and Granny Flats (city planners and the City Council are unprepared in their rush to correct their illegal “second dwelling” policies, quietly implemented without community debate in a backroom meeting years ago). 

Wonky, yet far more important than anything else, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is behavior modification aimed at the Los Angeles City Council. This historic citizen initiative forces these 15 elected leaders to do their jobs, requiring them to pivot away from their wildly inappropriate roles as closed-door real estate dealers — a job for which they are woefully unqualified. 

The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative hands power to the communities, something that should have been done decades ago.

(Jill Stewart, a former journalist,  is campaign director for the Coalition to Preserve LA, sponsor of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.)

-cw

REMEMBERING ED EDELMAN-Toward the end of the film “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) has just lost his case defending a black man, Tom Robinson, who had been unjustly accused of raping a white girl. Dejected, and bearing the heavy moral burden of having failed the local black community, he walks down the aisle to leave the courtroom. As he does so, all the black townspeople segregated in the “colored” balcony solemnly rise to their feet out of respect for his effort on their behalf. His young daughter “Scout,” seated with them, peers over the rail, oblivious, until she feels a tap on her soldier and hears a gentle whisper from the Negro Baptist preacher, Rev. Sykes. “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” 

I thought of that scene when I received a call from a longstanding friend that my former boss, Los Angeles County Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman, had just died at the age of 85 a few minutes earlier. “I didn’t want you to hear it first on the news,” she told me. 

Ed had suffered terribly over the last several years from Atypical Parkinsonism, a neurodegenerative brain disorder that gradually robs those afflicted of the ability to move or even speak. It was almost too painful to imagine the man I spent five years working for in the County Hall of Administration, who played tennis regularly and always insisted on taking the stairs instead of the elevators up to his eighth-floor office, reduced to this enfeebled condition and utterly dependent on round-the-clock attendant care. I have to believe that his death came as a release. 

With his quiet and determined decency, Ed had more than a little Atticus Finch in him. He entered politics the old-fashioned way: attending public schools, serving a hitch in the Navy, graduating from UCLA in political science and UCLA Law School. He served as a staff counsel for legislative committees in Washington and Sacramento, and at the National Labor Relations Board, before making a successful bid for public office in 1965, running a mildly insurgent City Council campaign to score an upset victory against a popular establishment-backed incumbent. 

During his time on the City Council, Ed was a quiet but committed rebel. He criticized police abuse, stood up against censorship, defended civil rights, pushed to fluoridate the City’s water supply in the name of dental health, and tirelessly advocated to improve public services. 

Shortly after beginning his third Council term, a position opened up on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and after a hard-fought contest, Ed was elected in 1974 to represent the Third District, which at the time stretched from the northeast San Fernando Valley down through Hollywood and the Westside, across the city to take in part of downtown, and included unincorporated East Los Angeles and southeastern cities like Bell and Commerce. 

Though he lived on the Westside near his beloved UCLA, Ed was always proud of his service to his Eastside constituents. He didn’t speak Spanish, but his field staff did, and they made sure those unincorporated communities were properly taken care of. Thanks to Ed, the roads, parks, and public services were considered much better than in the neighboring cities. In 1990, after a successful voting-rights lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice, the ACLU, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a federal court scrapped the Board’s gerrymandered district map and redrew the lines, shifting Ed’s district west of downtown to include more of the San Fernando Valley, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the coastline, stretching from Venice up to the Ventura County line. He quickly embraced the issues and concerns of his new constituents—wilderness and open space preservation, fire safety, coastal environmental protections—with the same enthusiasm and commitment he had formerly served the Eastside. 

His signature issues centered on an abiding commitment to serving those in need, ranging from abused and neglected children and battered women to the medically indigent, the mentally ill, the homeless, and the transit-dependent. Representing the area of West Hollywood both before and after it formally incorporated as a city, he embraced the LGBTQ community and called for improved AIDS care and treatment and protection against discrimination long before it was popular or even acceptable in many political quarters. 

He was also a champion of the arts, representing a district that initially included the Music Center and the future site of Walt Disney Concert Hall (a County project he helped initiate thanks to generous founding gifts from Walt’s widow Lillian Disney and their two daughters), as well as the Hollywood Bowl, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An amateur cellist who practiced regularly on his lunch hour across the street at the Music Center, Ed was fiercely protective of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and LA Opera, and invigorated the County’s grant-making Arts Commission with dynamic new leadership and increased funding. 

Nor did he shy from confronting controversial issues that he deeply believed in. He reviled Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13 for its negative impact on local government taxing and spending authority, despite the measure’s enormous popularity with the public; he cajoled a reluctant Sheriff Sherman Block into embracing a sweeping set of reforms after a spate of alarming officer-involved shootings; and he tirelessly (but unsuccessfully) pushed to expand the number of supervisors to create smaller and more responsive districts, and establish an elected County Executive to emulate state and federal constitutional principles of checks and balances through a separation of executive and legislative powers. 

One of his final acts before retiring in 1994 was to successfully broker an agreement to end a contentious decade-long development battle in the Santa Monica Mountains and acquire and preserve nearly 700 acres of prime wilderness open space for the state parks system. 

Retiring by choice in 1994 well before the County adopted term limits, Ed went on to a successful career as a mediator and arbitrator, policy fellow at the RAND Corporation, and consultant on homelessness and other issues before he was felled by his illness. He was truly a committed public servant to the very end. 

On a personal note, I will always be more grateful than I can express for the opportunity Ed gave me as a former broadcast and print journalist, when he recruited me to change careers and join his staff as communications deputy. Apart from serving an honorable and honest public official, I experienced firsthand how much good the public sector could accomplish with capable and dedicated leadership and staff, and I made some of my closest and most respected friends. 

Working for a real-life Atticus Finch was a rare privilege that I will always cherish. So stand up, Los Angeles. A great man has passed.

(Joel Bellman is a former Communication Deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisors.  This piece appeared originally in Fox and Hounds.)  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS--Why? Why Is This A Thing? 

Why is the public afforded no right to follow its public monies behind the privacy hedge of unaccountable Charter Schools? What’s it feel like to wake up one morning and discover your school has simply closed? 

I’m guessing a whole jumble of feelings vie for primacy from angry, sad, betrayed, scared, anxious, small, vulnerable, unimportant … I’m guessing there’s a huge range of PTSD symptoms, none of which encompases, critically, any feelings at all that happen to be conducive to learning: supported, encouraged, bolstered, trusted, buoyed, secure, powerful, competent.

If the high schoolers of City Charter School on Olympic Blvd in West LA weren’t so busy scrambling to enroll in a new school one month after the start of the school year, we could ask them. Because over last weekend, reportedly, or perhaps as late as Monday night for some, that community was gathered together and informed it would imminently be no more.

As the mother of teenaged high schoolers, I can testify personally to their fragility, susceptible to hormones and insecurities and a pressurized academic system at the mercy of Big Testing, High-Stakes, Big Business.

But as a veteran of some 18 years of overwrought admissions-induced panicking parents, it is worth remembering that empirically, kids command remarkable stores of resilience. Subjecting kids to a churn of insecurity will affect their immediate learning achievement, but it is the crisis of vulnerability that determines their plight as political collateral.

Expendable accessories to Education is what these kids have become. 

Because for all intents and purposes, Charter schools are corporate educational entities that are not accountable to anyone, and sustain no corporate responsibility for the welfare of their constituent client-students. There is no accountability for Charter School’s finances, not for their academic integrity, not for their functionality, nor for betraying their – our – kids.

We do not know why City Charter HS closed its doors, and because it is not a public entity, we cannot compel verification that low enrollment is a precipitate. Unlike in a truly public enterprise there is no means to investigate the school’s financial jeopardy. Meeting minutes from 2015 reference ongoing enrollment and extreme financial hardship but financial data is not presented and there is no surety that these vestigial minutes will not disappear anon. There is no way to monitor the institution and its public monies for efficiency, fraud or equity.

So even as “public Charter Schools” pocket public monies privately and insist on the fallacious moniker, and even as a boardmember of this de facto private corporation campaigns for a seat on the public schoolboard he has pledged to dismantle, yet as members of the public we have no mandate to scrutinize the foundational hallmarks of nominally public Charter institutions: financials, constituency and governance.

Time and again Charters unveil what is truly pernicious about them. They are designed as entities to circumvent accountability and reassert politically unacceptable advantage. It should not be a surprise when repeatedly they are felled by hubris and disregard. 

The political history of mankind is a struggle between limiting malfeasance and unleashing the human spirit. There never has been an institution public or private that does not require checks and balances, for these institutions are run by people with vested and competing interests. Until we design our schools’ top priority to be the educational interests of our students individually, and not their derivative monetary value, our children will inevitably be burdened and disserved, with the cost of their betrayal shouldered by the public, borne by each and every individual child personally.

Best of luck to the flood of City Charter students dissplaced, midyear. The good news is that our public schools are still here, still excellent (if flawed), available and open to welcome them as learners.

I apologize as a voting citizen, for unleashing on them this Charter school system which is so unaccountable to you my children, its students.

(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com)

-cw