On January 6, the Housing Committee of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates led by Barbara Ringuette met with Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) for a brief rundown of their program and funding. LAHSA is an independent agency established by the County and City of Los Angeles whose primary goal is to coordinate funding in providing services to homeless people throughout the City and County of Los Angeles. 

“We are a pass-through entity,” said Stuart Jackson, Chief Finance Officer of LAHSA. “We receive funds from the City, County, and the federal government –U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and we pass it on to nonprofits in the community to do the foot work.”

LAHSA works with the City and County of Los Angeles, and HUD partners to do an Annual Needs Assessment for the community. Last year, their collaborative effort culminated in the County Homeless Initiatives and City Homeless Strategies. Additional partners include the County Department of Health Services, County Department of Mental Health and the United Way. 

“We came together with a needs assessment of what types of programs are needed to address homelessness in our community, and created the Homeless Initiatives and Strategies that were approved by the County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council,” said Stuart Jackson. Based on the programs of need that were identified, the County and City provided funds to LAHSA. 

“We fine tuned the programs of need. Put them into a working process, then asked our nonprofit partners to submit proposals for funding following the guidelines of the program that they’ll be doing,” said Stuart Jackson. 

The challenge is the timing of going through the process with the nonprofit partners: Creating a list for proposals, opening a window for submission, and the scoring of the proposals that require both time and the funding. Most of the programs were ready to be funded by October 1st, said Jackson. He added that because of the lengthy process, in a sense it seems as though “we’re just getting started.” Nonprofits that were funded have experienced growth in a short period of time, as LASHA has also, he said. 

Agency funds services that range from street outreach to several different shelter types for families and singles. It includes several housing intervention types – from supportive rapid and transitional housing with short-term financial assistance to permanent supportive housing with in depth services and ongoing rental subsidies, explained the Director of Programs Paul Duncan. 

Jackson added that the main increases in funding this year have been for Rapid Re-Housing accommodating Singles and Youth Systems. In the past, United Way funded these Rapid re-housing through fundraising and other activities as a pilot program. Now that Rapid Housing has become a proven system of excellence for the community, it’s been incorporated into our government structure. Last year was the first year that the City and County funded rapid housing for singles and youth, Jackson said. 

Staffing

This year, LAHSA’s staff increased 100 %. Personnel doubled from 100 to 200 to manage the increased funding we have received from the City, County and HUD, said Jackson. 

Director of Communications Tom Walden added that LAHSA has 80 emergency response team members in the field, “a doubling from last year.” There are now more field workers dispersed throughout the City and County of Los Angeles engaging everyday with the homeless in the streets, and especially where there’s a concentration of homelessness such as Venice, Downtown, and Hollywood, said Walden. 

Funding Increase for Fiscal Year 2016-2017 (Per Records viewed on 01/06/17) 

• LAHSA’s funding from City, County, State, and HUD for FY 2016-17 increased 35% or slightly over $34.5 Million. The total funding for the whole Program and Operations was slightly over $132.1 Million. 

• There was a 53% increase or an additional $20.3 Million from the City of Los Angeles’ General Fund, totaling $58.5 Million. 

• While some County funding programs for the homeless dissolved others emerged.  The County’s Homeless Strategy Initiative dedicates nearly $12.9 Million for services to the homeless. In addition, a new state grant with funds nearing $1.5 Million has been committed by the state. 

• Department of Public and Social Services for families increased funding to the homeless by 51% or $5.7 Million, totaling about $17 Million. Also, the Department of Children and Family Services increased funding by $861,180. totaling nearly $3 Million. “The latter funds are for foster care youth,” said Jackson. 

• HUD increased funding by 12% or nearly $2.9 Million, a total of $26.9 Million for the Continuum of Care Program that includes: Permanent Housing, Rapid Re-Housing, Transition Housing, and Supportive Services.     

Coordinated Entry Systems

The fastest growing homeless population is women said Walden. We’ve seen an increase in the last three years, and often single women with kids, he said. 

Walden explained that using the Coordinated Entry System (CES), LAHSA is able to coordinate the different populations serviced: Homeless Families, and the Singles and Youth System. It tracks histories, shows where individuals are in the process as well as the assistance each individual received. 

“This is a better way to coordinate our services throughout the continuum of care for individuals,” he said.

Service Planning Area (SPA) 

There are seven Service Planning Areas in Los Angeles County. Each SPA covers nearby communities. For example, SPA 4 ---North East Los Angeles (NELA)--- encompasses 13 neighboring communities. LAHSA allocates funding across the county based on the geographical need of the particular SPA, said Duncan. “We try to distribute funds based on our homeless count,” he said. 

Winter Shelters 

LAHSA’s Winter Shelter Program provides homeless adults with overnight shelter, meals, showers, and case management services from December 1 – March 1. Free daily transportation is available to and from the shelters by going to any of the pick-up locations. Shelter Hotline: 1(800) 548-6047 

“I can’t force someone to move into housing. Therefore, I have to build a relation and through that relationship, hopefully, I built a trust that I’m looking for their best interest,” Paul explained. “We have success that we can quantify.”  

(Connie Acosta participates in the neighborhood council system and frequently reports on Neighborhood Council matters.)

@THE GUSS REPORT-Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz has a new way to squander the city’s already strained legal and financial resources on a solution in search of a cause, namely his floundering re-election campaign. 

At a time when the City of Los Angeles faces really big problems -- when does it not? -- ranging from the usual crime, traffic, housing, homelessness and how to pay for public pensions to the very real possibility of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars when it has to borrow money to pay wrongful death claims, Koretz wants to force gun store and shooting range owners to post suicide hotline notices -- force being the operative word. 

Koretz did not provide any hard statistical data, opting instead for his standard vague claim: “suicide is the leading cause of death among Californians who have purchased a firearm within a year.”   

The specifics Koretz failed to provide are: 

1. How many years back is he counting? The most recent year? The past five or 20 years? 

2. Is he talking about first-time gun buyers? Koretz’ claim goes out the window if he is counting people who bought otherguns more than a year before and did not commit suicide within a year of those purchases. 

3. How does the city define suicide? We know Koretz’ definition of deathis funky when it comes to killing thousands of healthy, adoptable shelter animals and still managing to call LA “No Kill.” Does Koretz’ definition of “suicide” include, for instance, suicide by cop, where someone entices a law enforcement officer to shoot them by pointing a gun, or a gun replica, in their direction without actually shooting it? Dollars to donuts it does…or he doesn’t know. 

4. Why is the message limited to suicide while excluding homicide and other misuses? 

5. Why did Koretz choose the one-year timeframe, since someone purchasing a gun for the purpose of ending his life is probablyintent on doing it imminently, rather than waiting a year? Does someone plan a suicide a year in advance, or is this Koretz’s way of casting an illogically wider net so that his claims are contorted to fit his goal? 

6. And what exactly isKoretz’ goal? Is this Koretz’ Trumpian effort to create a distraction and get his name out of the way of a much bigger story this very same week? 

So what is that other story? It’s how Koretz enabled wealthy real estate developer Rick Caruso to build yet another oversized luxury building in his Council District despite an affordable housing crunch, and despite an outcry about its quality of life impact by Koretz’ constituents and opponents in the upcoming City Council primary where he seeks a third and final term.   

Recently, when pressured, Koretz (who never met a real estate developer’s donation he didn’t embrace) reversed his earlier support for Caruso’s luxury project, but then voted in favor of it when some square footage was lopped off -- even though it still violated long-established community guidelines. That is Trump 101. 

If Koretz is genuinely interested in pursuing nanny-state interests, as he has done throughout his career, perhaps he will consider doing it in ways that might have far greater benefits for Los Angeles.  

For instance, he could try to force Jack-in-the-Box, Fat Burger and other fast food joints to post messages about how fat, sodium and cholesterol in its products lead to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks. This is another form of suicide that impacts infinitely more Angelenos, especially in the poorer reaches of the city. Former Councilmember “Hamburger” Jan Perry tried to ban new fast food restaurants a few years back. How did that turn out? 

Maybe City Hall can force CVS and Target to post overt notices warning of opiate addiction, sexually transmitted diseases and sugar in the pharmacy, condom and candy aisles -- just to cover all bases. 

If Koretz really wants to save us from ourselves, he should first force Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile to warn of the hazards of texting while driving. They already do, but Koretz’ love of having government creep into our lives should make it mandatory; he could also dictate the size, location and color of the signs. 

Koretz would serve us much better if – rather than spending copious amounts of money on lawyers forcing private business owners to take action – he simply created a program where posting such notices is voluntary. Cooperative awareness is more affordable than attorneys, and it is probably as effective. 

For what it’s worth, I don’t own a gun and never have. I believe we need infinitely more effective gun control laws, crisis screening and stronger, mandatory penalties for people possessing guns without a license.  

It isn’t Koretz’ message that is objectionable. It is his priorities, method and motive.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatch, Huffington Post, KFI AM-640 and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ALPERN AT LARGE--It's very cute, if not a bit appalling, to see our local and state leaders falling over each other to prove how "with the people" they are while making laws and backroom deals that fly in the face of fiscal transparency and good government.  And obeying the law. So we're supposed to believe that the local/state anti-Trump pols are ANY better than the Orange Man they're pillorying? 

You like big projects?  I like big projects.  Most of us like big projects.  Except when they're unnecessarily (and potentially harmfully) big.  And when they're too darned expensive (NOT as in, they cost a lot but worth it, but costing 2-3 times or more the reasonable cost of those big projects. 

1) You like high-speed rail?  I like high-speed rail.  Most of us, in the right setting, want those trains we ride (or hear about, at least) to go as fast as is reasonable and as safe as possible.  Amtrak and Metrolink and Caltran to be speedy and cost-efficient...of course! 

A California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) blasting through budget projections.  Well, the outgoing Obama Administration might have cut the CAHSR Authority some slack, but it's doubtful the Trump Administration will be any kinder to cost overruns than they are to Boeing or other air/military contractors who charge too darned much to the taxpayers. 

And it's doubtful that the contracts for the CAHSR to Senator Feinstein's husband's firm, or to bait-and-switch extraordinaire Ron Tutor will make too many of Trump's opponents too happy, because they want the high-speed rail built cost-effectively as well. 

So to the high and mighty state authorities who love the CAHSR but hate Trump (but who will certainly want him to approve money for this Trump-style big project), maybe you should just...go...Trump yourself! 

2) You like the Wilshire Subway?  I like the Wilshire Subway.  Most of us, for that matter, want that project built like...yesterday!  So who does the Metro Board of Directors vote to give the construction contract to extend that project to Century City? 

Why Ron Tutor, of course!  He of the bait-and-switch, substandard construction and master of the "better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" style of doing business!  After his legal battles with Metro for his past subway work, why he'd be even allowed anywhere near Metro is anyone's guess.

Funny how this was approved AFTER Measure M was just passed.  

So for those who are now flush with taxpayer dollars (from those, like myself, who hesitatingly supported Measure M), maybe you should just...go...Trump yourself! 

3) You like Good Planning?  I like Good Planning.  You like Good Government?  I like Good Government. You like the City obeying its Bylaws and Charter?  I like the City obeying its Bylaws and Charter. 

So imagine why those of us community/volunteer activists have concluded that Measure S, which would force updating of Community Plans (rules for zoning and height and density in each region of the City), and which would force megadevelopers to pay for traffic analysts who are impartial and not just "hired guns" to accurately predict impacts of development, is the only way to go. 

Obeying the law.  No longer threatening our environment, finally establishing affordable housing, creating a sustainable infrastructure.  Imagine having reasonably tall and dense development throughout LA in a matter of years to address the housing shortage, and to address affordability and access to our City. All do-able with respect to quick, easy, approvable projects that obey the law and establish neighborhood-friendly and neighborhood-compatible new projects, and which create gobs of jobs. 

And yet WE who support Measure S--the neighborhood council and neighborhood association leaders, and the affordable housing advocates--are the ones pilloried by the "fake news" by the high-and-mighty City Council. 

So while the Mayor and City Council are ramming lawless overdevelopments down our throats (which are ALWAYS thrown out in court if they ever are challenged), and while they're giving us all sorts of "head fakes" to show us how they'll protect us from President Trump, maybe the REAL question is: 

WHO WILL PROTECT US FROM THE MAYOR, THE CITY COUNCIL, AND THE PLANNING POLITBURO? 

So for you Downtown clowns, and you Sacramento clowns, so very used to stepping on the necks of the taxpayers and residents of our city, county, or state, maybe enough of us are finally on to you, enough to tell you to: 

GO TRUMP YOURSELF!

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at   [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.) 

DEEGAN ON LA-It’s hard to find building projects that create no public outcry about zoning variances, no destructive impacts to neighborhoods, and no challenges to developers and politicos. But these projects are everywhere – hiding in plain sight -- in downtown Los Angeles. The reason they are unseen is because all of the work is being done inside already constructed buildings. 

While downtown Los Angeles is exploding with lots of new construction projects, it is also recapturing the past through adaptive reuse of many old buildings. These projects provide an increase in housing stock and remind us that there are many forms of development. Repurposing what's already there does not generate the type of community blowback and the bad vibes caused when developers announce new projects that set off struggles with communities opposed to uncontrolled growth -- especially when the developers destroy older buildings to clear the way for the new ones. 

Specialists in the adaptive reuse of buildings are capitalizing on new laws such as the city’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance with dozens of downtown projects. While this ordinance was designed to cluster housing, retail and workspaces around transit stops, theoretically lessening traffic, it is also establishing multiple “new urbanism” hubs in downtown. This is transforming repurposed buildings into mixed commercial and residential uses where you can work, play, shop and be entertained within easy reach of each other. Cutting down traffic may be a planner’s goal; living in a cool, adaptively repurposed building with some embedded historic character with many of your needs locally met, could be a tenant or owner’s dream. 

The city’s Office of Historic Resources describes the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, approved for DTLA in 1999 and extended to a few other neighborhoods in 2003, as “one of the most significant incentives related to historic preservation in Los Angeles, facilitating the conversion of dozens of historic and under-utilized structures into new housing units,” pointing out that “it provides for an expedited approval process and ensures that older and historic buildings are not subjected to the same zoning and code requirements that apply to new construction.” 

The impact is that “several thousand new housing units, with thousands more in the development pipeline, [are] demonstrating that historic preservation can serve as a powerful engine for economic revitalization and the creation of new housing supply.” 

Architects and designers face a new hurdle, though, in aligning historic codes and principles with modern requirements for building safety and fire department codes. 

"Regulations of LAFD and Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety are my biggest challenges, not neighborhood blowback,” explains Karin Liljegren, the Principal and Founder of Omgivning Architecture and Interior Design. “Trying to find the fine line between liability and historic codes that allows a project to go forward with historic integrity can be difficult. Sometimes, developers will pull out of a project when it becomes too much.” 

Those stress points have not slowed down Omgivning, as evidenced by a visit to its downtown office that is overflowing with workstations, workers as well as several friendly dogs roaming through the space. A look at their project list is exhausting. While Liljegren does not follow the Frank Lloyd Wright practice of building and then furnishing structures in holistic harmony, her teams of architects, designers and urbanists are capable of providing everything from the heavy lifting of architectural visioning to the tiniest design details. 

Off-menu is exorcisms, like expunging the ghosts from one of their projects, the Cecil Hotel, (photo above) which has had a reputation over the past 90 years as a very creepy place -- allegedly home to murders, suicides, missing persons and serial killers. This building needed not only some adaptive reuse, but some proactive P.R. There will likely be a waiting list for occupancy after its makeover. 

The new urbanism is experienced on an intimate scale at the rooftop “farm garden” at the repurposed 801 S. Broadway building, providing fresh vegetables to the several restaurants on the ground floor. One of Omgivning’s biggest projects (at 1.1 million square feet) is the former Hamburger's and May Company Department Store which has also seen service as a garment factory and a branch library on its third floor. According to Omngiving, it is being repurposed into “a large and small retail, a market collective, creative office, and hotel, with a 110,000 SF rooftop that will include a public park, two pools and seven restaurant/bars.” Talk about new urbanism and having everything local: all they need is a curb cut for Uber pick-ups and drop offs. 

New Urbanists, a lifestyle group slowly progressing from cult to broader acceptance, will find lots of opportunities to live, shop, work and play within a small radius at any one of the several repurposed buildings adapted by Omngivning and others in DTLA. 

Best of all, the new urbanists will move into unique and historic housing stock that has not been marred by the contention between communities and developers, negative energy that has affected a great swath of Los Angeles. All those bad vibes, much like what once suffocated the Cecil Hotel, will not be part of their move-in package.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].)

CAPITAL & MAIN SPECIAL REPORT-Fernando E. Hurtado scrolled through photos on his mobile phone in a pristine new examination room of South Los Angeles’ federally funded St. John’s Well Child and Family Center. Nearby, his wife, Amy Areli, waited with two of their four children as the younger boy fidgeted nervously. 

“He’s getting his immunization shots today,” Hurtado grinned at the 3-year-old before pausing at a close-up of a woman’s forearm and what looked like a mosquito-bite-sized bump surrounded by a patch of ruddy inflammation. The next image revealed a gaping, half-dollar-sized crater where the bump had been.

“My wife got a tiny cut on her arm that became infected,” Hurtado explained. “It was [Methicillin-resistant] staphylococcus. She spent nine days in the hospital. They told me that if we hadn’t had Medi-Cal, the bill would have been more than $100,000. If this would have happened without medical coverage, there would have been no way for us to afford to pay that kind of expense.” 

On the same day that congressional Republicans set the stage to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the 35-year-old father, who installs artificial lawns, grimly reflected on the shadow that his family and the majority of St. John’s patients have been living under since the election of Donald Trump signaled the coming end of the law that has dramatically transformed California’s health-care landscape. “Before my wife got the infection,” Hurtado said, “our 2-month-old baby was also in the hospital, with an infection for [chicken pox], when he got an infection in his head and he was hospitalized for four days for the same [staph] bacteria. I imagine them not having medical coverage. Yes. Of course I’m worried.” 

Though the form that Trumpcare will take remains vague, for Hurtado and his family -- and the more than 50 percent of their newly insured South LA neighbors, who now rely on the state’s ACA Medi-Cal expansion for their health coverage -- the future remains frighteningly uncertain. They are not alone. 

Over five million Californians have received coverage under Obamacare -- 3.7 million through Medi-Cal and 1.4 million through Covered California -- and the state has logged the largest percentage-point decline in its uninsured rate of any state, dropping from nearly 17.2 percent in 2013 to 8.6 percent in 2015. 

St. John’s alone has enrolled over 18,000 previously uninsured Angelinos, nearly all of them black or Latino, and more than doubled its insured-patient base. The health center has aggressively embraced the new ACA population to dramatically expand preventative and primary care throughout the region, which before the law had been ground zero of California’s uninsured crisis. 

“We provide free medical, dental, mental health and support services, and case management in about 300,000 patient visits a year at 14 sites and two mobile [clinics],” St. John’s Well Child and Family CEO Jim Mangia told Capital & Main.  “We provide health-care services to the homeless. We serve thousands of homeless folks through two mobiles that go into the riverbeds and to help buy homeless shelters. And we’re the largest health provider in South L.A., which is the largest area of contiguous poverty in the United States.” 

But with Trump now in the White House, those gains are in the crosshairs of the new president and the Republican congress. At stake for Californians is $20.5 billion a year in federal ACA subsidies. The murkiness surrounding what will happen next has left the state’s political and public health leadership with little choice but to brace for the worst and hope for the best. 

“It is almost impossible to develop a contingency without knowing exactly what we are dealing with,” state Senate Health Committee Chair Dr. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) told Capital & Main in an email. “A loss of federal funding would be devastating for low-income and middle-class Californians who rely on the ACA for their health insurance. We plan to do everything we can to protect the people of our state and ensure stability in the health insurance market and Medi-Cal program.” 

St. John’s spotlights a lesser-known aspect of the Affordable Care Act — namely, its role as a conduit for $12 billion in construction infrastructure spending and operational funding for the expansion of private nonprofit health centers, which are known as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). These provide low-income and immigrant communities with quality health care, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. That makes the center both an exemplar of how much California stands to lose, as well as an unexpected harbinger of what resistance to the abolition of the ACA might look like. 

“I started that literally the day after the election,” Mangia said about planning for the Trump era, “and now I’ve got all of these players. There’s a lot of special interests that benefited from the Affordable Care Act. … We’re talking about, ‘Okay. What’s our advocacy need to look like? Who do we need to be talking to? Who do we need to bring to the table to craft a solution in the state?’” 

Forty-five percent of St. John’s patients are ineligible for insurance under ACA because of their immigration status. According to Mangia, who was part of President Obama’s health policy committee when the Affordable Care Act was first being drawn up, addressing the plight of those ineligible for Obamacare because of immigration status was always part of the plan. Care for the undocumented is partially paid by My Health LA, a no-cost health-care program run by L.A. County. Private fundraising makes up the rest. 

The FQHCs have been instrumental in braking the country’s decades-long expansion of America’s health-care inequality gap, which continues to be one of Obamacare’s most significant achievements. 

Even more transformative, perhaps, is the quality of the medical care and the innovations that ACA has delivered. The law reorganized payment methodology and radically re-prioritized the health-care system with pay-for-performance measures that shifted the focus of providers from end-of-life and sick care to prevention and primary care. It encouraged innovations like the patient-centered “medical home”  -- a holistic delivery model designed to improve quality of care through team-based coordination of care, for the “whole” patient. Tying Medicare payments to the quality, rather than the quantity, of care that characterized the pricey, pre-Obamacare fee-for-service model, created efficiencies and surpluses for health centers like St. John’s that could then be used to serve California’s estimated 3.3 million uninsured, along with its undocumented population. 

“These relatively modest reforms actually ended up being revolutionary in all sorts of different ways,” recalled Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy coalition Health Access California. “There was all this really exciting work to provide people medical homes, and have early intervention to keep people healthy before they got sick in the first place. There was exciting work about how to treat issues around substance abuse and behavioral health medically, rather than criminally, which was starting to have profound benefits to not just our health system but to our criminal justice and corrections systems. If we undo the Medicaid expansion, we undo all that progress in one swoop.” 

Preserving that expansion has been the focus of California resistors, including consumer groups, labor unions and Democratic lawmakers, since election day, both in the current campaign by patient advocates, to bring public pressure on Trump and Republicans, and in anticipating the full extent of the damage to California’s Medi-Cal expansion that will need to be controlled. 

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to resist what is still unknown. And the extent of that damage won’t be clear until the plan is unveiled sometime after Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Georgia Representative Tom Price, is approved by the Senate. 

Recent promises by Trump for a speedy and concurrent repeal and replacement of ACA with “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better” have only further muddled the picture. The broad strokes remain at odds with what has been outlined in separate ACA alternatives by Price, who opposed ACA’s fundamental reforms, and by House Speaker Paul Ryan. And Price’s Tea Party antipathy to federal entitlements makes future attempts to cut Medicare and Medicaid likely. 

“Both of [the plans] would repeal most of the regulations under the ACA, but they would restore some aspects of the law, including subsidies for people to buy health insurance,” explained Gerald Kominski, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research. “But their subsidies would be substantially lower than those currently available under the ACA, and would [go] back to a market that’s largely regulated at the state level rather than [have] the layer of federal regulations [that has standardized] the individual insurance market. So it’d be a little bit of a free-for-all.” 

California resistors are divided as to whether the state would have the political will or financial wherewithal to make up the federal government’s $20 billion share of the Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California, should it be cut, or to even go it alone with a version of single-payer. 

“I have always believed that health care is a right for everyone in California and the country,” state senator Ed Hernandez said. “The dilemma arises on how to finance it and whether the public supports it. … The state would be unable to backfill the loss of $20 billion in federal funds without massive tax increases or major program reductions.” 

Wright illustrated California’s difficulty in translating a moral imperative into a health-care entitlement by pointing out that the recent passage of Proposition 56, the two-dollar cigarette tax that, beginning in April, will generate a billion dollars annually for Medi-Cal, had faced three ballot fights — and $200 million in opposition spending by tobacco companies — to become law. 

“Before we get to what California does,” he cautioned, “we all need to be focused on the federal fight. The framework and financing that they provide is going to be very determinative about what is possible for California to do, whether it is an Obamacare lookalike or single-payer or anything else.”

Mangia expressed what might be the ultimate vision of California resistance. “I think it would make a very, very strong political statement across the country if the Republicans repeal [Obamacare] and California says, ‘Okay. Well, we’re going to keep it.’ Democrats control two thirds of the legislature. There’s a Democratic governor. I think we have a real opportunity.”

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted at Capital & Main.)  Illustration by Lalo Alcaraz. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS--Why a vote for Steve Zimmer in the LAUSD Fourth Board District is like bringing to life an avatar for RESISTANCE. 

Apply to the County Registrar before the close of February for your ballot to be counted here!

Point of order:

‘Resisting’ means here: Refusing to be manipulated deviously by plutocrats. (Plutocrats are those whose power derives from their wealth.)

Resisting signifies here: Refusing to abdicate your vote, which is your portkey to democracy.

Several “Independent Expenditure’s (IEs) have been made by Political Action Committees (PACs), and unlike forcing notrump in the game of Bridge, these are no paeans to subtlety or finesse.

Everyone should be aware that former-mayor Richard Riordan just plunked down $1m to establish a PAC brazenly titled “LA…Opposing Steve Zimmer for Schoolboard”.

Remember Dick Riordan? He’s LA’s octogenarian, thrice-divorced, Irish-American, Republican, self-styled “tough-guy”, the 39^th Mayor, who reigned from 1993-2001. He has been agitating to emasculate Los Angeles’ popularly elected schoolboard for decades. He’s not the only major contributor to IEs opposing Zimmer, and there are more such crocks of gold. Riordan contributed $15,000 to an IE for Nick Melvoin and donated $22,000 (total), the maximum allowable personally to each of Steve Zimmer’s other two LAUSD4 opponents. Like this race, his political machinations are nonpartisan.

And unbounded by moral compunction either; just last summer Riordan was fined $11,250 by LA’s Ethics Commission for shenanigans of incomplete disclosure during the previous LAUSD elections.

Dick Riordan’s net worth is estimated at a mere $100 million, which sadly doesn’t put him anywhere near Forbes’ Fortune 400 list, home to so many of today’s other Education “advocates”.

But nevertheless he is a card-carrying member of the über-rich, a constituent of the immensely wealthy upper echelon, where a wide swathe among the 1% have lately become preturnaturally obsessed with Education Opportunities for the rest-of-us. In particular, this national cabal of multi-millionaires and billionaires is inordinately interested in throwing the outcome of a local populist candidate, to a populist post, in a populist election: Steve Zimmer.

So every single last one of us recently-Berned, Left Without, and rendered outraged electorate should be asking ourselves: Why? Why are the super-wealthy so intensely interested in Public Education? And why are they *particularly* eager to see Steve Zimmer unseated? What does it mean to vote for the plutocrats’ pick?

We should be excruciatingly vigilant against unwittingly empowering yet another pivotal sycophant.

But more to the point, we should be acutely sensitized to beholden money and the consequences of empowering a politically compromised leader.

Ironically, simply having the most money does not immunize against indebtedness; operating through firm moral grounding with an ideology derived internally – not externally – matters.

Independent expenditures may be employed properly to support a candidate but the donors ought never to shape, own or direct the elected’s ideology.

That external rogue influence is what characterizes our Trump crisis, and resisting its furtherance is what understanding the power working to undermine Zimmer’s candidacy will inoculate us against, protecting us from the jeopardy we now face nationally.

So that is why voting for Zimmer is an act of resistance: it protects us from stealth, undisclosed and pernicious, gratuitous agendas.

What clues signal threat from among the supporters of Zimmer’s opponents?

The funders of the PACs supporting Zimmer’s two opponents are constitutionally ambiguous; the same organization chips in $20,000 for one, $25,000 for the other (1/1/16-1/26/17), seemingly without care or ideological conviction regarding which paired endorsee exhibits stronger ideological compatability. From this funder’s dispassionate point-of-view the goal is not to recognize or identify merit but to draw votes from Zimmer thereby forcing an expensive, inefficient electoral run-off less likely to advantage the incumbant than in a primary. This outfit seeks to elevate any non-Zimmer, the better to secure that board seat for their staff. The actual corporeal realization of Zimmer’s loss is irrelevant to them; their indebtedness is not.

And the group running this ambivalent opposition? It is the California Charter School Association (CCSA), equivalently and disingenuously – if not illegally through copyright infringement – conferring advantage through a front group aka “Parent Teacher Alliance”.

Do not imagine for a moment this is the iconic “PTA”, the national Parent-Teacher Association in whose shadow your parents raised you. This copycat Parent Teacher “Alliance” is a Gorgon of a wholly different composition and end-game. It should be enough to note the unapologetic and deliberate replication of the CA State PTA’s moniker, (“CAPTA”, as it’s known here in this state). Observe the palpable difference between this CCSA-“sponsored” and funded, professional web-presence and PTA‘s – a genuine grassroots parent-organization powered by volunteers, who give freely of their time (from many into the thousands of hours sometimes) in service of “children, families and education”.

In contrast CCSA’s “PTA” is a group supported by IEs, dedicated to CCSA’s special interest in seating LAUSD board members. This disclosure anchors the homepage in small print but the implied association clearly piggybacks on the 120 year strong reputation of PTA – and that connection is simply not valid.

So far CCSA has invested $94K toward this special interest of theirs in the LAUSD election. Half this devotion supports the ‘lets-see-who-sticks’ candidate-pair opposing Steve Zimmer. Despite authorizing more charters than anyone anywhere, even in the face of defiance and deception, CCSA deems it intolerable that LAUSD should exercise the oversight of charter schools which it is mandated by election and law to conduct.

And in addition to this “PTA” wannabe group, CCSA funds a network of associated but shrouded special-interest support groups. SpeakUp.com is a parent-branded ‘alternative-news’ website that evades PAC rules for transparency because they are nominally informational and not political. The personnel among these and previous iterations of the same ineffective Edu®eform tropes are abidingly static. But the connection with Trumpism remains: who funds CCSA and why do their initiatives betray common cause with destructive billionaires like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Trump’s nominee for the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos?

While excoriating Zimmer’s acceptance of PAC money from legitimate interests that never were “special” or tangential to teaching and education – that is: Teachers (via their collective association, UTLA), meanwhile “special interests” that truly are dark, obscure and undisclosed actually do underlie Zimmer’s opposition. Ten times that scraped together by his fellow education-professionals – an entire order of magnitude more money – has been spent (so far) by America’s wealthiest-of-the-wealthy to occlude Steve Zimmer, via money funneled through private contributions and the aggregated-money PACs of CCSA and others.

Refusing to accept the cherry-picked candidates of the 1% is precisely the resistance to Trumpism we must engage.

Zimmer’s opposition are all candidates hand-picked by the billionaires. We must resist the temptation to empower them no matter how slick the astroturfed literature that champions support from the faux- or misled grassroots

(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)