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ERIC PREVEN’S NOTEBOOK - Friday’s council meeting in Van Nuys was brought to you by the City of Los Angeles Department of Irish Distraction. There were jigs, fiddles, and a full-on scrollfest celebrating Irish Heritage Month—complete with a 20-minute performance by the Lyon School of Irish Dance. It was charming, yes. And just long enough to keep your eyes off the Olympic venue chaos nobody wants to talk about.
Councilmember Traci Park, to her credit, asked LA28’s Reginald Hoover why the public still hasn’t seen the revised venue list. Hoover responded with the confident vagueness of someone paid not to know. Then Tim McOsker took a hard pivot into Harbor boosterism, pitching San Pedro as the rightful sailing venue for the 2028 Games. Passionate stuff. Not a single dollar amount mentioned.
Meanwhile, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson continued his crusade to ban certain words during public comment, because nothing says progressive leadership like scrubbing inconvenient language from the record. Speakers were not having it. They cited Judge Dean Pregerson’s federal ruling from 2013, reminded the council that public meetings are not cotillions, and warned of yet another lawsuit in the making.
But the real action? Coming Tuesday.
Dancing in council chambers...
Buried in the April 1 City Council agenda: seventeen nuisance abatement liens, racking up thousands in fines against property owners who failed to clear violations. And guess which district tops the list?
That’s right—Council District 8. Harris-Dawson’s district. Four liens totaling over $8,100. So while he’s clamping down on what you can say at the podium, his constituents are quietly getting slapped with the most code enforcement penalties in the city. I don’t know if that’s irony or just on-brand.
Is anybody listening? Apparently not.
And if you thought the scrollery ended there, wait until you see the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. They’ll be proclaiming no fewer than a dozen awareness months and days—Sexual Assault Awareness, Autism Acceptance, Black Maternal Health, Denim Day, Invincible Day, Child Abuse Prevention, Armenian History, Arab American Heritage, Public Health, and more. April, it seems, is officially the month of everything.
They’re also rolling out a new County Department for Homelessness, shifting millions toward post-fire recovery, and taking credit for programs that haven’t started yet. Supervisors Solis and Horvath are expected to tangle over the ongoing crisis in Probation. Expect long speeches, long scrolls, and very little oxygen for the public.
In summary: If you’ve got a decent Irish jig and a gold medal in performative governance, there’s a place for you in LA politics.
If you’ve got a lien? Tuesday’s your day.
Public Affairs:
Former L.A. City Councilmember Mike Bonin has been appointed executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., effective May 1. Bonin, known for his "What's Next Los Angeles" podcast, brings over 25 years of experience in government and public service to the role.
In other city news, Mayor Karen Bass unveiled the new MyLA311 system, designed to streamline service requests for issues like potholes and graffiti removal. The revamped platform offers 86 service request types and supports 243 languages.
Meanwhile, the Information Technology Agency (ITA) has developed a new system to monitor council members' engagement during meetings. However, the system reportedly crashed when it detected a complete lack of activity. Perhaps it's time for an upgrade—or a wake-up call.
Bookmark:
All of these student-designed bookmarks are imaginative and charming—but if we’re picking a single standout, the bookmark by Valeria Gómez (12th grade, Lennox Library, Second District) titled "Transport Our Minds and Inspire Our Dreams” is a knockout.
All of the bookmark finalists were great, but this 2nd district entry was wow!
It's Always the Same Players Running the Same Plays
There are a few things that every Angeleno knows to be true: Traffic on the 405 is eternal. Honorary scrolls far outnumber Metro restrooms. And in Local government, it’s always the same insiders pulling the strings.
Let me tell you a story about Paul Krekorian — a man who’s always known whose team he’s on, and spoiler: it’s not yours.
Back when he was taking in 24 maxed-out campaign donations from trustees of Harvard-Westlake, none of them disclosed their trustee status. Just names and addresses, as if they were ordering a pizza, not backing a candidate with business before the city. Connecting the dots? That was left to the public. Even Nathan Hochman spotted the problem.
Now, Krekorian serves as City Council’s Olympic czar. His longtime aide, Karo Torossian, was recently spotted strolling in Studio City near the River Park with David Weill, Harvard-Westlake people and a couple of lawyers — possibly Edgar Khalatian. A cozy little walk-and-talk just before the lobbying ban kicks in.
Karo Torossian putting 'certain' communities first.
Torossian’s set to leave public service and is barred from lobbying for a year. But nothing says “welcome to the private sector” like a pre-transition site inspection to a potential Olympic venue. If the rumors are true — that Harvard-Westlake could get 50% of its construction costs reimbursed if River Park is Olympic-designated — this isn’t pay-to-play. It’s pay-to-build, play-for-free.
Meanwhile, two City Planning Commissioners with deep HW ties, Samantha Millman and Caroline Choe, didn’t recuse themselves from voting on the project. Choe, who claimed to be “far removed,” helped found HW’s Korean-American Alumni Network. That’s not far. That’s family.
This isn’t some one-off. It’s the LA playbook: insiders fund each other, filings get fuzzy, watchdogs snooze, and the public — especially Valley residents who actually use the park — are left in the dust.
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What happened to Weddington?
The Olympics were supposed to unite the city. Not bankroll a private school’s field of dreams. Krekorian’s salary for managing Olympic prep? Still undisclosed. Because why start now?
Look at the LA28 board — stacked with Harvard-Westlake alumni, parents, and trustees. Eric Garcetti (’88), Casey Wasserman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, David Simon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, Alison Ressler, Jamie Lee, and Mark Attanasio. It’s less a civic endeavor than a Wolverine tailgate. The real decisions get made long before any public meeting starts.
Until there’s real accountability — not just for the electeds, but the shadow circle pulling strings — it’s the same rerun. And we’ve all seen this episode.
Gift of Public Funds
In France, politicians get caught, occasionally. Marine Le Pen and her party were convicted of siphoning millions in EU funds to pay staff doing party work. The court didn’t buy the excuses. “No one is on trial for engaging in politics,” the judge said—just for using public money to do it.
Here in the U.S., it happens all the time—and they get away with it.
Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Mark Ridley-Thomas in L.A., pressuring Regional Planning to send out election mailers to boost his son Sebastian’s campaign. The story was airtight. Should’ve won a prize. Instead, Shelby Grad, Davan Maharaj, and Paul Pringle killed it.
The Five C’s and the Death of Reform
If you're wondering why everything in Los Angeles seems broken despite record-breaking budgets, this is why: we’re not fixing problems—we’re feeding them. LA’s reform machine isn’t reforming. It’s expanding. More staff, more offices, more departments. It's a government as job program, not public service.
At the center of this dysfunction are the Five C’s:
City. County. Collaboration. Competition. Corruption.
A slick, well-funded loop where responsibility is always shared, but accountability never lands.
Take Maria Chong-Castillo—pulling in $286,121 a year to oversee potholes and fire trucks in a system already bursting with redundancy. Multiply her salary across departments, across districts, and you start to see the scale. Now add four more supervisors, as Measure G proposes, and the gravy train grows longer.
This isn’t about reform. It’s about metastasis.
LA County has a $50 billion budget, bigger than most states. Homelessness is up. LAHSA burned through $10 billion and can’t account for $2.3 billion of it. Mental health services are fragmented. Probation is in shambles. So what's the solution? More layers. More staffing. More Zoom calls from oat-milk command centers.
Meanwhile, the public gets one minute at the mic—if they’re lucky. Say the wrong thing, and you’re muted for “decorum.” But if you're a lobbyist or Olympic consultant, the door’s wide open.
The moment public service becomes a career, it becomes a business. Ethics rules become speed bumps. And instead of confronting failure, we create new departments to manage it.
This isn’t a scandal. It’s a structure.
The fix isn’t more government. It’s a better government. Put district staff in the field. Audit providers. Cancel contracts with no deliverables. Fire the unaccountable. And stop pretending that more bureaucracy means better outcomes.
Measure G won’t bring reform. It’ll bring four more Maria Chong-Castillos.
Until we confront the system itself—City, County, Collaboration, Competition, Corruption—we’ll stay locked in the same cycle: spending more, doing less, and calling it progress.
Post Script:
I've never been super into Twitter, but the exodus of journalists and politicians from the platform is irksome. Take The Times reporters—where have they all gone? Now, legislators are jumping ship. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and a majority of California Assembly Democrats are abandoning X (formerly Twitter), decrying its descent into a cesspool of disinformation and vitriol. Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry pointed to the platform's role in spreading falsehoods during crises like the L.A. fires, leading some to reject federal aid. This fragmentation of communication channels is troubling; shunning spaces where opposing views exist undermines the very essence of democratic discourse.
Interestingly, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson maintains a presence on X, though his activity is sparse. His last post was in April 2024
(Eric Preven is a Studio City-based TV writer-producer, award-winning journalist, and longtime community activist who won two landmark open government cases in California.)
