The Emergency 🏀 Court Shortage

ERIC PREVEN’S NOTEBOOK - Los Angeles has declared a basketball emergency. Local youth face peril: asphalt scuffed to oblivion, rims with unacceptable wobble, courts bereft of biometric shot trackers or humidity-calibrated sneaker pods. The crisis is existential.

By dawn, donor tents bloomed across Studio City like luxury pop-ups at a desert festival. KTLA’s drones captured Brentwood teens training on sun-scorched courts, exposed to unfiltered UV rays. Eric Garcetti, summoned from Mumbai, descended in gym-issue slacks gripping a ceremonial Spalding, while National Guard units secured the last regulation hoop in Pacific Palisades.

Fear not. Harvard-Westlake has a plan.

Dominance on All Fronts (and All Surfaces)

Harvard-Westlake isn’t a school—it’s a feeder league with a side gig in AP Calc.

Baseball: Max Fried, Jack Flaherty, Pete Crow-Armstrong—MLB stardom spun as civic destiny. “A mandate from Cooperstown,” an athletic director murmurs, palming a commemorative Rawlings like a relic from a private canonization.

Basketball: Crowned with consecutive Open Division titles. Nikolas Khamenia, anointed for greatness. D-1 prospects generated at 1.7 per vegan poke bowl, each crafted by a Michelin-trained nutritionist on retainer.

Amir Jones ’26 dribbles past a defender during the Mission League Championship game Feb. 5 at home in Studio City.

Football: Silent dominance, with linemen wider than the 405 at rush hour.

For student-athletes, it’s a gilded dream. For the city, it’s an arms race they never enlisted in.

The Cultural Olympiad Begins at Home

Harvard-Westlake’s $200 million River Park complex—subterranean courts, hydration pod stations, sustainability-branded shade canopies—rises in a “low-impact” canyon once home to ancient oaks and public trails.

Residents who objected faced civic theater. Former councilmember Paul Krekorian, in a referee’s jersey, blew a whistle on dissent. “Technical foul on community voice,” he declared. “Wolverines take possession.”

The “public-private partnership” morphed into a private-private annexation, sealed with a ribbon-cutting streamed on Instagram Live. The Cultural Olympiad launched with “Synchronized SAT Prep” and a gala celebrating “Urban Redevelopment Studies.”

Where trees once stood, a sustainability mural looms. Where shade once fell, branded SPF 100 kiosks serve donor-tier guests.

Harvard-Westlake Saves the Border

While L.A. public schools reel from ICE raids and fractured communities, Harvard-Westlake steps up—consulting with L.A. County Probation to curb contraband among juvenile offenders.

“After neutralizing Juuls at Weddington,” a student in Patagonia fleece explains, “we’re disrupting fentanyl at Los Padrinos with a mindfulness app for border enforcement.”

Another adds: “We’re curating safer spaces… and blocking bad energy from high-traffic smuggling corridors.”

Civic engagement, AG Rob Bonta jumping in with an equity dashboard.

The Booster Committee’s Ten-Point Plan

A leaked Harvard-Westlake Athletic Steering Committee memo outlines a “globally elite athletic readiness matrix”:

1. Declare court shortage a humanitarian crisis.
2. Build a third gym with conflict-free Scandinavian hardwood, sanctified by a sports psychologist.
3. Pay whatever it takes—land use, legacy, or zoning exemptions.
4. Co-opt Olympic buzz with a Cultural Olympiad, featuring AI-crafted highlight reels for Ivy recruiters.
5. Host the Khalatian Regatta on the L.A. River, backed by Erewhon’s artisanal electrolytes.
6. Secure visa pathways for international seven-footers seeking humanitarian dunks.
7. Recruit from disrupted public schools under “opportunity equity” banners.
8. Host a gala with IOC officials, Wasserman, and drone-captured slam-dunk showcases.
9. Launch an NFT donor lounge, each token commemorating a felled canyon oak and paved-over public amenity bundled with a commemorative resin coaster.
10. Insist it’s all for the kids.

Two L.A.s, One Ball

At Belmont, Contreras, and Roybal, near MacArthur Park, basketball fades. ICE raids have hollowed rosters. Players vanish from summer drills. Coaches text into silence. A lone guard hones free throws under a flickering streetlight.

Across Coldwater Canyon, Harvard-Westlake’s climate-controlled gyms hum. NIL compliance coaches polish endorsement deals. Drones capture a sophomore’s crossover in 4K for Duke’s scouts.

The “court shortage” was never about scarcity. It was a pretext: to hoard resources, to craft a narrative, to dunk unchallenged.

Finale: Who Gets to Dunk?

A lone Eastside player, backpack heavy, rides two buses to shoot on cracked blacktop.
Across Coldwater Canyon, a Riverplex donor sips iced matcha and mutters, “That tree was never regulation height.”
Above, a drone hums, streaming Harvard-Westlake’s latest recruiting reel to Ivy League scouts.

In a city of dreams, the layup remains contested—just not by the ones who built the gym. 

The county routinely clears the room to silence IHSS workers demanding a raise.

A Lone Voice Against the Bulldozers

Wallis Annenberg.

Let’s give Lynne Plembeck her flowers.

At Tuesday’s L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting, while the department brass tiptoed through acronyms and Supervisors juggled “Type 2 permits” like they were brunch reservations, Plembeck didn’t blink.

She stood up for the obvious:
Don’t build 300 homes in a fire-prone canyon with one narrow underpass and no operational fire station.

She brought exhibits. She brought Condition 35, a requirement from 2019: if the second exit wasn’t feasible, a real fire station would be built in Phase 1. That’s what the developer agreed to. That was the deal.

Now? Condition 35 has mysteriously vanished, replaced with Condition 17, a vague promise to “transfer a lot” where a fire station might someday materialize. County staff confirmed: no station is required. Just the dirt.

It’s the public safety equivalent of, “We’ll leave the light on for you,” but without the bulb or the lamp.

And if you think that’s bad, we’re also greenlighting a major development in the middle of sensitive mountain lion habitat — yes, the very same species now listed as a candidate under the California Endangered Species Act.

Now pause for contrast:
Just down the freeway, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is nearing completion — a $90 million marvel designed to help mountain lions safely cross the 101, funded by philanthropists, government grants, and people who actually care.

Here? We get grading permits and wishful signage. The staff calmly assured us that a little landscaping and slower speed limits would help the “different kind of creatures” (Plembeck’s words) navigate the chaos.

It’s bureaucratic madness with ecological amnesia.

But not for Lynne. She’s doing the job the Planning Commission won’t do, defending the terms the County agreed to, protecting the people who haven’t moved in yet — and the mountain lions who can’t file a CEQA lawsuit.

The rest of us?
We’re just taking notes.
And yes...

We’re going to tell Wallis on you.

Wallis Annenberg.

Surprised that the county telecast was out of focus. cc - Ed Yen (Celia Zavala replacement)

Well, Lookie Lookie… Write a Bookie

It’s a hard job, shedding light on the government’s darker corners.

You show up. You read the fine print. You squint at the zoning maps and the ballot tabulations. And sometimes, when the light dries up, you get a little rain. You wipe your tears. And carry on.

But sometimes?
It’s nice to be right.

Like on Tuesday, Item No. 1, Zone 55 — Castaic North Bluff.

The County was trying to bump the lighting and landscaping assessment from $67 to $89, and stick $331 on every single-family parcel. I flagged it early:

“It’s not discretionary once approved — it gets tacked onto the property tax bill.”

Boom.
A majority protest materialized.
The Supervisors, 4-0, kicked it back to Public Works.

Look, I may not always catch every Palisades vs. Palos Verdes correction through the AT&T-sponsored static and Englander Knabe & Allen audio fog, but sometimes a library is a liberry and you just have to pick it.

I don’t do this for applause.

I do it so a lady in Malibu doesn’t get her water shut off five times by the estate next door.
So 300 families don’t get funneled through a single fire-trap underpass with a phantom fire station.
So the Supervisors have to at least pretend to remember their own conditions of approval.

And where was Supervisor Horvath during all of this?
Not a word. Not a vote.
Hurricane Horvath, presumably rerouted to Hurricane Harbor.

So yeah. It’s a hard job.

But someone’s gotta do it.

❝Quote of the Week❞

"When a ship is sinking, there’s value in knowing how fast and calling it out. When a country is self-sabotaging, ditto. So let me just say it: Shame on the White House. Shame on those who should be stopping this slide into autocracy and aren’t. (I’m looking at you, John Thune, Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio.) Shame on all of us if we let these ignorant purveyors of cruelty reduce this beautiful thing we’ve built over these hundreds of years to a hollow, braying, anti-version of itself."

— George Saunders, NYT Opinion

Freeway Fitness and The Right to Breathe
At LA Fitness—Cahuenga Pass, your daily mile swim in an outdoor pool comes with a side of PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide, thanks to the 101 Freeway roaring roughly 150 feet away. That’s right—you’re swimming in a high-risk air pollution zone.

Morning inversions in L.A.’s basin trap freeway fumes like a lid on a pot, especially under cloud cover. UCLA and EPA data show PM2.5—tiny particles linked to heart and lung disease—spikes near freeways. Swimmers, breathing 10 times deeper than couch potatoes, inhale the worst of it.

Why build an outdoor pool next to a freeway? It’s like hosting yoga in a smokestack. Here’s how to fight back:
✔ Check air quality before swimming—mornings are worst for smog.
✔ Demand LA Fitness and the city install air monitors and plant pollution-blocking hedges.
✔ Push for indoor pools to escape the freeway’s tailpipe soup.

This isn’t just about one pool—it’s about L.A.’s obsession with cars, even when it means soaking our lungs in exhaust. Your lungs—and your kids’—deserve better than a freeway smog bath.

Check the wind before you butterfly.
What’s the air quality like at your gym? Share your story.

L.A. Council’s Bomba Siesta Meets Gridlock
The freeway fumes choking LA Fitness swimmers are just one symptom of a bigger mess: L.A.’s gridlock disaster.

While the L.A. City Council sipped piña coladas at The Grove—just 50 feet from the 110 Freeway—D.C. stole L.A.’s crown as America’s worst traffic city, per Consumer Affairs’2025 rankings: 33.4-minute commutes to L.A.’s 30.5. Yet L.A.’s 8-hour daily gridlock keeps PM2.5 poisoning the air for everyone.

Back-to-office mandates turn commutes into cruelty. Worse, ICE raids have gutted Metro, with an estimated 1.5 million fewer boardings in June. Latino riders—60% of bus users—avoid stops like Pasadena’s Winchell’s, now an ICE trap. Metro’s response? Reroute buses, close stations, strand riders.

Advocacy groups demand fare-free transit and open turnstiles. Mayor Bass calls ICE’s tactics “terror.” The Council? Silent.

Robo-taxis are a pipe dream. Buses are reality. L.A. needs bus-only lanes, fare-free rides, and air monitors yesterday.

Council returns July 30. Skip the bounce-house photo ops. Fix traffic. Protect riders. Clear the air.
What’s your worst L.A. commute story? Drop it below.

Summer Recess Shenanigans

They vanished like shade on a 100-degree day.

The One-Five will be easing off the frosties and shouuld be completely sober by July 30th...

While L.A. battled heatwaves, budget cuts, and freeway fumes, our City Council slipped into summer recess—code for “gone fishin’,” minus the fish, plus a per diem.

No meetings. No agendas. Just city-issued flip-flops. So, what were they up to from July 1 to 29? Our unverified—but spiritually accurate—field report:

• Adrin Nazarian helped a 7-year-old lobbyist cut the Six Flags line, shouting “Public-private partnerships!” while waving a CEQA exemption and funnel cake.
• Nithya Raman led a “Haunted Housing Policy” tour at Universal Studios, vanishing into an SB9 fog machine, constituents clutching density bonuses.
• Eunisses Hernandez hosted an “Abolish Incarceration” poetry slam by Knott’s log flume, jam jars allegedly funded by Inside Safe.
• Tim McOsker piloted a “visionary” gondola from San Pedro to Catalina, ran aground, and blamed Metro’s budget. 
• Traci Park unveiled a “Ban the Shade” plan at The Grove’s Lobbyist Luau, sipping piña coladas while dodging the AQMD booth.
• Katy Yaroslavsky threw a “Decarb & Dine” at Disneyland with a Disney exec tied to three city commissions, ethics forms AWOL.
• Hugo Soto-Martínez crashed a County press conference in which Horvath wore gold stilletos and a sun dress.  

Kidding aside, while the Council played hooky, L.A.’s homeless population, gridlocked commuters, and smog-choked residents didn’t get a break.

See you next Tuesday.

Smart Speaker: Wednesday!  

This originally appeared in the LA Daily News

(Eric Preven is a Studio City-based television writer-producer, award-winning journalist, and longtime community activist. He is known for his sharp commentary on transparency and accountability in local government. Eric successfully brought and won two landmark open government cases in California, reinforcing the public’s right to know. A regular contributor to CityWatch, he combines investigative insight with grassroots advocacy to shine a light on civic issues across Los Angeles.)