EASTSIDER-The resignation of Xavier Becerra (photo above) to become California’s Attorney General has opened up a rare opportunity for some lucky Democrat. The prize is a lifetime sinecure as the Congress member for Congressional District 34. I say Democrat because the 34^th district is overwhelmingly a Democratic, carved out district. 

As proof, of the 23 -- that’s right -- 23 candidates for the Special Election on April 4, 19 of them are Democrats, with one Libertarian, one No Party Preference, and one Green Party hopeful. Just a single Republican. Need I say more? 

And speaking of opportunities, here in Northeast LA we now have two Democratic clubs -- the been- around-forever NEDC (Northeast Democratic Club), and the new EAPD (East Area Progressive Democrats.) The NEDC has something like 100 members, while the new group advertises around 600 members. Quite a feat for a new Democratic club. You can probably guess where the Bernie people tend to hang out.

What makes political life interesting here in Northeast LA, is that the Eastside Progressives have recently turned the Party on its head. They did it with a huge turnout for the January Delegate race (for the State Democratic Party Central Committee) in the 51^st AD. Something like 900 votes, a number more than triple the usual turnout for this event, and the EAPD candidates won all 14 seats!  

Anyhow, this special election offers up an amazing prize in a race where only a handful of voters are likely to pay attention and vote. Special elections tend to have even lower turnouts than City Council elections, if you can believe that. And a congressional seat has no term limits! 

It is also a wonderful opportunity to introduce the next group of Democratic politicians, that next generation of leaders that are looking for a way into the political system outside of the same old same ‘kiss the ring’ old party process. 

So What Did We Get? 

At the end of the day what we saw at the few candidate forums was mostly the same small group of insiders. Since the East Area Progressive Democrats did not endorse anyone, let me concentrate on the Northeast Democrats, who did. 

Three insiders (folks with a track record and some money) and a couple of unknowns were invited, ignoring the other 13 democratic hopefuls. The three I would characterize as insider favorites were Jimmy Gomez, Sara Hernandez, and Yolie Flores. We were at least spared former Assembly Speaker John Perez, who had announced that he was running early on, only to magically withdraw based on “health issues.”

For those who don’t follow politics, Jimmy Gomez is currently the Assembly Member from our 51^st AD in Northeast LA, and just won re-election in last November’s General Election with over 86% of the vote. He is also one of those carefully nurtured soon-to-be lifetime professional Democratic politicians the party loves so much. 

UCLA, Harvard MA, worked for Hilda Solis in D.C., came out of AFSCME, and then returned to California as the political director for UNAC (United Nurses of California) while awaiting his opportunity to run for office. Jimmy Gomez is personable and smooth. He also won the NEDC endorsement with 84% of the 58 ballots cast. 

Our other well nurtured Dem insider, “God’s Gift to the Eastside” Jose Huizar, evidently decided that he likes the City Council better than taking a chance on losing to Jimmy Gomez, so he dithered around, finally deciding not to run for Congress. He is another of the carefully created professional Democratic Party lifers. Backed by the establishment, he was handed a seat in the LAUSD before coming to City Hall. The LAUSD gig let him spend our school bond money as head of the District’s Public Works Committee, and even become President of the Board, all while getting tight with developers. 

Huizar’s presence is still on the ballot, however, in the person of a surrogate -- Sara Hernandez. She was Huizar’s Area Director for Downtown Los Angeles, getting to know the rich and powerful just as Huizar did with the LAUSD. She quietly rebranded herself with a little distance from Huizar, by leaving the Council office to become Executive Director of Southern California Coro in mid-2016, prior to announcing her run to replace Becerra this year. Less advertised is her stint with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). 

Sara Hernandez must have known that the Northeast Dems are death on Charter Schools, because she was a no show at their Endorsement meeting. On the other hand, she is well-funded and has hit the campaign trail with a whole series of TV ads, mailbox stuffers and phone banking. 

Speaking of Charter Schools, the third mainstream candidate was Yolie Flores, registered as a Democrat but really IMHO Monica Garcia “lite” when she was on the LAUSD School Board. She and Monica are deep pocket CCSA backed Charter School advocates, and for my money, they are Democrats in name only. The reason I know she has money behind her this time out is because I’ve had four calls from her campaign people, as well as a number of mailbox pitches. 

All top-down Democrats. 

And What Did We Miss? 

When I asked the President of the NELA Dems who decided who was going to be showcased at the Endorsement meeting, I was informed that the Executive Committee had met, looked at candidate resumes, and then determined a cut off for applying. Cut off indeed. How about a deliberate curtailment of small “d” democracy. 

Personally, I wanted to hear from at least two other candidates that could well be in that top tier for a runoff -- Arturo Carmona and Wendy Carrillo. It seemed to me that these two in particular represent the next generation of grassroots Democrats as opposed to top-down Democrats. 

Arturo Carmona represents the best of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, working tirelessly for the Senator’s vision of a small “d” Democratic Party. My kind of real deal working from the ground up small donor kind of leader we need in the party. You can read more about him here.  

Wendy is young, hails from the Boyle Heights/El Sereno chunk of Northeast Los Angeles, became a citizen by age 21, and went on to get a Masters at USC. Not too shabby. She is another real deal small “d” Democrat. You can check out the LA Times article about her here. 

The Takeaway 

Out of the 19 Democratic candidates for Congress in the 34^th CD, only a handful really got heard by anyone in this election. I think that potential voters were cheated by not being able to widely hear from Arturo Carmona and Wendy Carrillo, and that’s sad. It also raises a broader question. 

What about the other 13 candidates? Buried in there somewhere could be the next Xavier Becerra, but we’ll never know. I think a disservice was done to all of these candidates who did not get a chance to appear before a broader audience. They had the guts to go out and run for office, expose themselves to public scrutiny, and devote a huge amount of their time (and probably finances) to actually run for political office. 

If we are going to rebuild and rebrand our Democratic party into something more than a top down vehicle for the limousine liberals like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, we need to get going on actually building a grassroots party. Otherwise, it will be back to the ho-hum maybe 15% voter turnout that allows lobbyists, big developers, and other special interests to own our City, not to mention the Federal government. 

Bottom line, no matter what your political persuasion, get out and vote in the April 4 Special Election! Turnout is likely to be small, and your vote could make the difference in who gets to a runoff, if there is even going to be one. A large turnout could send a message to the Democratic establishment and our politically turned off Angelenos. 

Indifference has a cost. Just look at our current Council, Congress and President.

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--The Ralph M. Brown Act, first approved in 1953, is celebrated for its supposed guarantees that we citizens have a voice in the decisions of all our local governments. (Photo above: Carmen Bella, 76, a resident of Bell, Calif. yells at city council members.)

But today, it is little more than a gag rule.

Over the past six decades, the Brown Act—famous for its guarantee of a 72-hour notice for public meetings—has become a civic Frankenstein, threatening the very public participation it was intended to protect.

The act’s requirements of advance notice before local officials hold a meeting has mutated into strict limitations on the ability of local officials to have any kind of frank conversation with one another, even over email. Brown Act requirements that we, the public, be allowed to weigh in at meetings have been turned against us, by way of a standardized three-minute-per-speaker limit at the microphone that encourages rapid rants and discourages real conversation between local officials and the citizens they represent.

And by effectively prohibiting deeper exchanges among officials and citizens, the Brown Act has empowered professionals outside the civic space—lawyers, labor unions, and especially developers—to fill the conversation void.

At a recent UC Irvine conference on the Brown Act in which I participated, speakers discussed how local elected officials and their staff members, wary of talking to or even emailing each other and violating the Brown Act rules against unannounced meetings, often communicate with each other through developers, who are much freer to meet and talk.

This is one reason why allegations that developers have too much power are routine in California communities. But it is also why proposed reforms to limit the influence of developers—Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti just announced a ban on meetings between city planning commissioners and developers—never last. Under California’s Brown Act, developers are often the most practical conduit for local officials to get information to their colleagues.

“The Brown Act gives developers superior access, because it cuts [local government] staff off from talking to the decision makers in the same way,” said one California local official, quoted in a conference paper.

The problem with the Brown Act is not that the law has changed. It’s that the law has stayed too much the same, while California governance has changed radically.

Back in the 1950s, when the Brown Act was passed, local governments largely ruled via broadly applied laws, policies, and plans. But in subsequent decades, a combination of court decisions, state laws, and ballot initiatives like Prop 13 have limited the power of governments to control their own revenues, and to make and enforce laws.

So to retain some self-determination, local governments have worked around the law, ignoring plans and policies they once followed, and instead embracing ad-hoc decision-making, considering proposals on a case-by-case basis. The most important tool for today’s local governments is not the ordinance or the general plan but rather the closed-door negotiations that produce labor contracts and developer agreements. In the latter, developers typically receive exemptions from present and future rules in exchange for benefits they give to the city.

The problem with the Brown Act is not that the law has changed. It’s that the law has stayed too much the same, while California governance has changed radically.

In this era of government by negotiation, the Brown Act is unhelpful when it’s not beside the point. First, the act’s limits on meetings end up restricting the ability of elected officials to participate fully in such negotiations; such talks end up being conducted by staff or outsider lawyers.

Second, the Brown Act covers public meetings, and doesn’t get the public into closed negotiations. All too often the public hears about negotiations only once deals are done, and brought to a council or a board for approval.

At those late stages, public comments—especially public comments that are limited to just a few minutes—don’t matter very much. And the elected officials to whom they are complaining may have been left out of the talks. So California citizens typically and understandably respond either by checking out of the process entirely or by opposing their local politicians fervently and uncompromisingly. In this way, the Brown Act encourages the worst sort of NIMBYism.

The good news: There are many methods for encouraging earlier and deeper public participation in the deal-making that governs our local communities. Proven approaches to dialogue and idea-gathering should be tried. I personally like participatory budgeting—by which residents of some California cities decide directly how some municipal money is spent—and believe the same model could be applied to planning decisions. Regular citizens could be brought into negotiations and allowed to help decide the particulars of exemptions and community benefits in developer agreements.

The bad news is that such ideas require conversation between elected officials and citizens that would run afoul of the inflexible Brown Act. Indeed, some of the more innovative local government experiments in California—notably the neighborhood councils in the city of Los Angeles—have found their influence and ability to communicate limited by the meetings restrictions of the Brown Act. 

At the UC Irvine conference, many ideas were raised for amending the Brown Act. The state’s Little Hoover Commission has also suggested several changes in the law.  But the act has created a regime so antithetical to the goal of public participation that it might be better to scrap it and start over—with a new framework providing local governments with more flexibility as long as they pursue policies that enhance public participation in decisions.

The National Civic League has a model participation ordinance that suggests what such a law could look like. Such an ordinance might work even without repealing the Brown Act. Instead, the ordinance could be allowed to supersede the Brown Act rules, exempting from the act’s edicts any process that enhances public participation and civic conversation.

Who could oppose such sensible changes? Answer: Some civic and media organizations are suspicious that reform would limit access. And they claim local officials and lawyers are being overly cautious in limiting conversations because of fear of Brown Act violations. But local governments maintain the caution is well-advised, given how easy it is to sue for violations of the act, and thus block important projects.

While the debate over the Brown Act continues, the everyday reality of California public meetings grows ever more absurd. On a recent Saturday at my local school board, our city’s mayor—one of only a handful of people in attendance—rose to ask questions about the board’s management of a newly passed school bond, the largest in our small district’s history.

The mayor is a public works lawyer with long experience with bonds, and her questions were fair and straightforward. But the board members wouldn’t answer them. Instead, they tried to cut her off after just three minutes, noting that’s the limit on public comment. When one board member sought to answer the mayor’s questions, the school superintendent interrupted to say that any exchange could be a violation of the Brown Act.

Any law that won’t let a mayor and a school board talk about their city’s most important construction project—and at a public meeting—is a bad law. Until our local governments move past the Brown Act, Californians will find it hard to have the kinds of conversations that local democracy requires.

(Joe Mathews is Connecting California Columnist and Editor at Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Mathews is a Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010). Photo credit: Chris Pizzello/Associated Press.

-cw

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-It is distressing, but hardly surprising, that the Los Angeles Times would use a lead editorial to preach about planning the future of Los Angeles without cracking open the city’s adopted General Plan or mentioning climate change and its own articles on City Hall corruption and new earthquake threats. Apparently, their view of Los Angeles is not 600 amazing complex and vulnerable square miles, but a checkerboard of private lots waiting for real estate investors to swoop in from around the world for short-term profits. 

I will post my full critique of this lead editorial on my blog, Plan-it Los Angeles, but here are some of the paper’s more far-fetched claims, followed by my debunking: 

LAT: “For what may be a brief moment in Los Angeles, planning is hot. Measure S, the slow-growth, anti-development initiative, failed at the ballot box but succeeded in one very big way: It drew attention to the city’s broken land-use process and the need for a new comprehensive vision for how Los Angeles should grow.”  

LAT: “Every new project is a political negotiation and a fight over height, density and community impact, making housing construction a high-stakes gamble and turning residents reflexively into NIMBYs.” 

Debunking: Less than one percent of real estate projects in Los Angeles involve the City Council legislative actions that Measure S addressed. And only a small percentage of these cases involve any negotiations, appeals, or legal challenges. In these cases local communities want the City to follow its own planning laws and regulations, as well as the California Environmental Quality Act. 

This means local communities are in no way reflexive in challenging projects. To the contrary, they are highly selective in opposing illegal projects that adversely impact their neighborhoods and depend on City Council spot-zoning to become legal. 

LAT: “Can Los Angeles finally fix this broken system that doesn’t produce enough housing, erodes public trust in government and doesn’t result in well-planned communities?” 

Debunking: Public distrust in local government results from City Hall’s rampant pay-to-play land use decisions. The LAT’s own reporters carefully exposed these practices until several months ago. This is when the newspaper’s editorial page became LA’s highest profile voice championing the city planning status quo -- by leading the charge against Measure S. Furthermore, LA’s plans and zones are not the cause of insufficient housing production and poorly planned communities. The cause is the business model of real estate developers. They do not build affordable housing because it is unprofitable, and they do not follow adopted plans and zones to create well-planned communities because these laws interfere with their bottom line. 

LAT: “Los Angeles runs the very real risk of repeating what it has done time and again: The city develops a plan for growth, homeowner groups oppose it, and then elected officials ignore it.”  

LAT: “Los Angeles as a whole needs to be far more walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented, with most communities within easy reach of frequent bus or rail service and amenities such as parks, libraries and grocery stores.” 

Debunking: The Framework and all other General Plan elements, such as the new Mobility Element, are fully consistent with all alternative transportation modes, including walking, biking, and transit. The adopted plans already address these issues in great detail. Likewise, even though the City Council adopted the General Plan Framework in the 1990s, it is still a visionary document that addresses parks, libraries, and the location of retail stores. Furthermore, the Framework mandated (but never pursued) careful monitoring of its goals and policies to ensure the adequate construction of transportation facilities and other infrastructure categories, such as parks and libraries. 

To cite one of many examples that the Los Angeles Times is apparently unaware of, this is what the Framework proposed regarding parks: 

P14: Formulate/update a Recreation Master Plan (a Recreation and Parks Department document) to provide sufficient capacity to correct existing deficiencies as well as meet the needs of future population. Consider the following actions when developing/updating this Element: 

a.  Identify improvements to the recreation and park system including additional parklands and recreational programs. Priority should be placed on the identification of improvements for the underserved areas of the City. Both traditional and non-traditional solutions to the expansion of facilities should be considered, including the following: 

(1) Revise standards that permit the acquisition of parks smaller than five acres, particularly in those communities with the most severe neighborhood park deficiencies; 

(2) Acquire use, and maintain of properties for recreation and public open space, that are as small as 5,000 square feet in area; 

(3) Develop community gardens on small lots in residential neighborhoods and commercial areas; 

(4) Develop active and passive greenways along fixed rail transit lines and utility corridors, as well as for the development of open space along rivers and principal drainages (as depicted on the Citywide Greenways Network Map); 

(5) Adopt joint use strategies for recreational facilities, wherever appropriate; 

(6) Require for the inclusion of recreational facilities in multi-family residential and mixed-use development projects. 

Will the Los Angeles Times accept this scolding about its need to undertake basic research about LA’s plans and planning process before blathering on about a new planning vision? 

There is always hope, but there is no reason to think that the paper has or will ever give up its fundamental role in what I previously dubbed the Urban Infill Growth Machine. For over a century, even with its founding families departed, the paper has considered real estate speculation to be LA’s economic development machine. Even though conditions have dramatically changed since the 1970s, the paper’s unwavering support for real estate speculation has never faltered. But, the paper will eventually have its come-uppance when thoughtful planning cannot be reconciled with a welcome wagon for every global speculator targeting Los Angeles for its sand castles and Lego buildings.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch LA. Please send your comments and corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRANSIT WATCH--So here we are in spring of 2017--we've just had two elections that were both bruising and decisive, either in victory or in failure. The city and county of Los Angeles has a new president they overall do NOT like, but can legally drown their disappointment in a haze of legalized marijuana. Public spending on transportation and the homeless is up, and developers are encouraged to build affordable housing ASAP. 

Among other issues on voters/taxpayers minds: trains and mobility, and overall ridership.  We want to get from here to there.  Despite the knee-jerk tendency to complain about everything, Metro has a lot to crow about, and so do we--but we've got a lot to focus on with respect to improving and preventing operations at Metro and other transportation-related services. 

First, THE GOOD: 

1) Ridership is up on the Expo, Gold, and other light rail lines, in ways we kind of predicted but did so a decade ago with our fingers crossed. Ridership on the buses is NOT what we expected, but there's a confounding variable that NOBODY saw coming a decade ago: Uber/Lyft. 

Those who are transit-dependent and find it convenient will use the buses, but for all of us who were fearing doom and gloom because our buses weren't connecting to our trains (myself included!) there is an individual freedom and mobility with Uber/Lyft/Metro Rail that is being achieved by more than we realize... and probably isn't too easily measured. 

2) My teenage son, who I once brought to Friends4Expo Transit meetings in a baby carrier, is now big enough to carry me, and attended a Railroading Merit Badge event with his and other Boy Scout troops.  Interest was high, our trip on the Pasadena Gold Line was standing-room only, and a huge choice of restaurants now exist at Union Station where virtually none existed a decade ago. 

3) Downtown is rapidly becoming a place to go to, rather than a place to avoid.  Interest is almost as high in the Downtown Light Rail Connector as it is the future LAX/Metro Rail Connector. However, the southeast portion of Downtown remains ignored and unloved (more on that later). 

4) As awful as it is that the I-10 and I-110 freeways are, even on the weekend, for those who use them it DOES portend that our economy is coming back big time, in one way, shape or form. Whether it's with decent jobs and/or whether it's due to an underground, cash-only economy are two other questions not to be answered here. 

Next, THE BAD: 

1) It was such a struggle to build the Expo Line that it now goes too slow, and its impacts on traffic actually ARE as horrible--perhaps worse--than many of us had feared. 

Although thoughtful author Ethan Elkind has a lot of good ideas on how to improve our transportation investment after passing Measure M, he too often supports the point of view that gives the "thumbs up" to transit riders to an extreme that throws another, more hostile finger at those who must use their cars to get to work, errands, etc. 

2) Transit advocate Matthew Hetz also opines the need for single-family housing to use mass transit for environmental purposes, and it is hoped that greater awareness of our expanding mass transit system will encourage more to use mass transit. 

And our young Millennials and teenagers, as evidenced by demographic trends, are avoiding the stress of cars and using transit ... and Uber/Lyft ... and walking ... to the benefit of all. 

3) But the lack of elevated grade separations--pursued by too many at Metro, and opposed by too many next-to-the-track neighbors being of visual concerns--is hurting us all.  The trains are too darned slow, and the cars trying to cross the tracks are forced to wait 10-15 minutes or longer during rush hour.  

And ditto for pedestrian grade-separations with our need for pedestrian bridges over major thoroughfares! 

So the next time someone complains of a rail line, or the need for a visually-impacting bridge, either the majority of us (who, when polled, probably do NOT care about the looks of a bridge) and/or Metro should tell the immediate neighbors to "deal with it" or move.   

I'll wager that a bunch of us on the Westside and in Mid-City find the Sepulveda Blvd. bridge to be just beautiful and wish we had a lot more of them to allow our trains and our car traffic to achieve quicker and safer speeds to enhance our mobility, environment, and quality of life. 

Finally, THE STUPID: 

Simply put, using the underutilized Harbor Subdivision rail right of way for walking and bicycle paths instead of completing a direct LAX to Inglewood to the Blue and Silver Lines to southeast Downtown Los Angeles to Union Station is about as stupid an idea as ... 

... not connecting LAX to Metro Rail, or 

... not connecting the Blue, Expo and Gold Lines with an underground Downtown Light Rail Connector. 

Over the next few years, we will realize that our need for a second "light rail connector" is paramount and hideously overdue to serve the southern and eastern portions of LA County with LAX and Union Station. 

And we're blowing it. Big time. 

So there really IS a lot to crow about in the world of transportation.  And then there's a lot we'll be EATING crow about in that same world of transportation.  

Yet the hope for improving mobility in our future is always there ... as the crow flies.

(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 CD11 Transportation 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.)

TOO LITTLE DEMOCRACY-Los Angeles is solidly Democratic and has voted so twice in the past five months to prove it. However, it is a sad commentary on both the democratic leadership and our city that an overwhelming majority of voters reelected the mayor and six city councilmen, as well as stopped Measure S in its tracks -- and they did so with one of the lowest voter turnouts in history. It was a landslide, but from a very small hill. 

So what can be taken away from this kind of municipal triumph? Clearly the Berniecrats who were inspired to vote for a social democrat last June were not similarly inspired to vote out the Democratic leadership in a sanctuary city opposing #45notmypresident. This is a dilemma for party leadership here in the desert-city-by-the-sea, a city that likes to see its reflection as Hollywood and LA LA Land, but not Watts or Wilmington. 

The challenge for Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilman Joe Buscaino, who seem to be connected at the hip, is how to play their roles on the national stage while remaining relevant to the multitude of neighborhoods they represent. After all, Los Angeles is a collection of towns looking to find a city. Every mayor since Tom Bradley has tried to create a Los Angeles epicenter, but this hasn’t made those on the periphery very happy. Just look at the backlash to gentrification in Venice or East Los Angeles or the reactions to continued industrialization at the Port of Los Angeles and the expansion of LAX. There is deep dissatisfaction in the hoods that are distant from City Hall and that harbors an even deeper distrust of the “city family” — a distrust that this election has not resolved. 

However, grassroots democracy is not dead in this city. It’s just waiting for a vacant seat in which to run without the weight of an incumbent blocking the path. Council District 7 is a prime example in which 22 candidates ran for office. All of them learned the hard way about the impediments the city places in the path to running for elected office — not the least of which are the 500 qualified signatures of registered voters needed to get on the ballot. It only takes 50 signatures to qualify for elected offices at the county or state level. But the Los Angeles city clerk’s office can’t even get the petition forms right! 

With the city bureaucracy protecting the superstructure of incumbency and money-in-politics, those who vote with campaign donations often don’t actually reside in the city, but lean heavily on those in power. This was the issue proponents of Measure S made in this past election over spot zoning. While losing 66.72 to 31.28 percent in this election, Garcetti had to realize that nearly 250,000 Angelinos were not happy and he immediately issued an executive order banning ex parte meetings with developers by commissioners. Does that also apply to city councilmembers? 

I seriously doubt that we will ever really eradicate the influence of money in politics, but what we can do is vote for those who are highly resistant to legal bribery. Give us candidates who actually work for the greater good of the city’s citizens, rather than those who aspire to higher office. I sometimes wonder, if Jesus was elected mayor, just how long it would take for the Pharisees of this city to tempt him. All we can hope for is that the people we elect prioritize the greater good over pocketing the money that’s there before them. It’s not inconceivable. It’s just improbable considering that Los Angeles’ current power structure perceives criticism as a threat. 

Just one week after Measure S went down in defeat, Vincent Bertoni, Garcetti’s latest hero in the Department of City Planning came to San Pedro for an early morning chat with the local Chamber of Commerce. He has a great grasp on the challenges of city planning. He even has some profoundly good ideas on how to fix them. Yet, he said something quite peculiar. He said, “LA is a place.” 

Now, the only time that I, as a lifetime citizen of Los Angeles, have self-identified as an Angeleno is when I travel to some place abroad. If you go to Paris, France or Mexico City and someone asks, “Where are you from?” it’s easier to say LA because everyone knows where that is. But it’s relatively meaningless because LA is not A PLACE -- it’s a collection of places each with their own identities, cultural references, landmarks and history. And that is the challenge to citywide planning: one size doesn’t fit all. 

The problem in city planning is the same problem all the other departments have, which is how to have consistent rules and ordinances across the city when there are some reasons, possibly 35 (read community plans) or more, to have exceptions to these rules. This is the raison d’etre for the 95 neighborhood councils; this is among the many reasons for the growing dissatisfaction with City Hall -- too much government and too little democracy. And perhaps this is also the explanation for Donald Trump and the Democrat’s inability to effectively resolve his curious rise to power with their own inadequacies. 

Los Angeles just may be the testing ground for a new form of democratic politics called “Version 20.18.” Clearly, this will not happen if only 10 percent of the citizens continue to turn out to vote in city elections. For, as is said, all politics are local. If you want City Hall to pay attention to your part of this metropolis, you gotta turn up the heat at the ballot box!

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen…and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com.)

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-The day the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died, Appeals Court Judge and Scalia’s nominated replacement, Neil Gorsuch, said he could barely get down a ski run in Colorado because he was so blinded by tears at his death. This was not a private utterance or personal feeling of deep emotion that he shared with friends and family. He told of his profound sorrow in a speech in April 2016 at Case Western University. Gorsuch wanted the world to know that Scalia was more than just a heartfelt friend. He was a man and a judge whose legal and judicial mindset he was in total lockstep with. 

Scalia represented judicially everything that liberal Democrats, civil rights, civil liberties, women rights, and public interest groups regard as wrong with the Supreme Court. His opinions and votes on crucial cases read like a “what’s what” of legal horror stories. Scalia tipped the White House to Bush in Bush versus Gore in 2000, voted to gut voting rights, oppose same sex marriage and gay rights protections, scrap the checks on corporate spending on elections, whittle away at abortion rights and to give free rein to corporations to discriminate by narrowing down who could file class action lawsuits. 

The only reason that Gorsuch hasn’t matched his mentor and idol, Scalia’s, 19^th Century grounded voting record on key cases is because he hasn’t been on the court for the number of decades as Scalia was on the high court. But there’s enough in his thin resume on some cases that pertain to abortion rights, planned parenthood funding, a powerhouse federal judiciary, and most menacingly, the strictest of strict reading of the constitutionalism (branded “originalism”) to serve as fair warning of what’s to come if he gets on the SCOTUS. And, as with Scalia, it won’t be pretty. 

This is one of the few times that Senate Democrats can do exactly what Senate Republicans did with Obama’s pick to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland: use the filibuster to say no. The GOP concocted the blatant lie to justify their obstructionism that Obama was a lame duck president, and lame duck presidents don’t and shouldn’t have the right to put someone on the high court on their way out. They pooh-poohed the fact that the Senate has approved other lame duck president’s nominations to the courts, including Reagan’s pick of Anthony Kennedy in 1988, Reagan’s last year in office. 

They blocked Garland not because of protocol, propriety, or tradition, but because of raw, naked and brutal partisan politics. The GOP understands that the Supreme Court is not just a neutral arbiter to settle legal disputes. It is a lethal weapon to skirt congressional gridlock and serve a dual role as a judicial and legislative body. This has meant scrapping the long-standing tradition on the court in which justices based their legal decisions solely on the merits of the law, constitutional principles and the public good, and not on ideology. Trump and his hard-right conservative backers are fully aware that the court’s power to be de facto legislators could last for decades. After all, presidents and congresspersons come and go, but justices can sit there until death if they choose. Scalia was proof of that. He sat on the bench for 30 plus years. 

Gorsuch is young, fit, and conceivably could duplicate Scalia’s tenure on the high court. He would sit there long after Trump is gone, and long after other future Democratic presidents that might sit in the Oval Office depart. During those years, he will be a key vote, if not the key vote, on many cases involving labor protections, civil rights, civil liberties, gay and abortion rights, corporate power, environmental issues, education, the death penalty, criminal justice system reforms, voting rights, and many other issues that will alter and shape law and public policy for years, perhaps decades to come. 

Gorsuch was carefully vetted by the Heritage Foundation when it submitted its list to Trump of reliable ultra-conservative judges who would rigidly toe the ultra-conservative line. They took no chance of recommending any judge who might in any way be a high court turncoat, and experience a judicial conversion in philosophy as a few judges thought to be reliably conservative have done in the past. The stakes are simply too high to risk that in the relentless drive by ultra-conservatives to roll back the gains in civil, women’s and labor rights of the past half century. 

The pressure will be enormous on conservative Democratic senators in the Red states to cave quickly and support Gorsuch, by rejecting a filibuster. They’ll be hit with everything from the stock argument that presidents have the right to pick their SCOTUS justices to outright threats that they’ll be top targets when election time rolls around. It will take much for them to do what the GOP did with Garland, and that is to say no and back a filibuster. If they cave, they’ll be terribly sorry.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and a CityWatch contributor. He is the author of In Scalia’s Shadow: The Trump Supreme Court (Amazon Kindle). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.