PLATKIN ON PLANNING--Los Angeles may have an aging, out-of-date General Plan, but it, surprisingly, does have a planning process. It might not be the one taught to professional city planners in graduate school, and it might not be the one required by the State of California, as formulated in up-to-date General Plan Guidelines from the Governor’s office of Planning and Research. Nevertheless, it is there, warts and all.  

The real planning process is totally ad hoc, and the best way to understand it is through the metaphor of a football field. At the line of scrimmage – which corresponds to real estate speculation -- are elected officials, for the most part hand picked by one of the teams. On one side of the officials is a team of professional football players, what seasoned observers call the urban growth machine.  On the other side is the junior varsity, which is corresponds to neighborhood and environmental groups. 

As they battle each other to move the line of scrimmage, at City Hall this translates to the permitted size, height, and use of buildings. The professional team usually wins, which means that the elected officials routinely approve their projects. 

Sometimes, though, the scrappy junior varsity pulls off a victory, and it is able to stall or even stop plans, zoning ordinances, and individual projects because they are out-of-scale, out-of-character, or out-of-synch with infrastructure and service systems. With the help of outsiders, such as lawyers, the junior varsity occasionally scores a big win, like AB 283, which puts the planning process back on track for several years.  

But, while the football game is played for control of privately owned land, the stadium itself is wobbly and on the verge of collapse. This means that even when the pros have a winning streak, which is most of the time, the stadium and its surroundings are still in bad shape. Failure, in fact, is only a question of time, as explained below. 

The major steps of this rickety process 

Macro-level Planning: The following is the logical sequence of events, but in Los Angeles many steps are conducted out-of-sequence. For example, the City is now redefining local zoning through re:code LA, prior to any official updates of the General Plan and local Community Plans. In a great sci-fi time-travel plot, City Hall is implementing plans that have not yet been prepared and adopted. 

• The City Council approves the General Plan, including its mandatory and optional elements. The mandatory elements are stipulated by State Law, while, optional elements, such as the General Plan Framework, are initiated by the City Council. 

• The General Plan is then implemented by zoning ordinances, municipal budgets, and Capital Improvement Programs. 

• Public agencies, both municipal and external (LAUSD), engage in their own sectorial planning, budgeting, and work programs in parallel to the General Plan. They each operate in a silo, independent of other City departments and outside agencies, oblivious to the City’s official planning process. 

• While State law has detailed General Plan monitoring report methodologies and requirements, they are ignored by the City of Los Angeles, which does not systematically monitor its General Plan, departmental and agency sectorial plans, and the City’s five year Capital Improvement Program.  

Micro-level push back against planning: In response to top-down macro level planning, at the level of private land use there are many forces pushing in the opposite direction. 

• On a lot-by-lot basis developers apply for parcel-level discretionary actions, such as the spot-zones and spot-General Plan Amendments that the Neighborhood Integrity Ordinance intends to stop. 

• Aggrieved parties, usually neighbors or local civic organizations, appeal these discretionary actions. The adopted discretionary actions then fold in many conditions of approval, most of which are beyond the authority of City Planning and the concern of Building and Safety. 

• Communities push back against over-development through local zoning overlay ordinances, such as Specific Plans and Historical Preservation Overlay Zones. 

• Developers also push back against adopted plans and zones with their own pro-development zoning overlay ordinances, such as Transit Neighborhood Plans.  

• Developers also push back against adopted plans and zones through bootlegged and illegal construction. When residents report these code violations to the Department of Building and Safety, the Department sporadically mails out notices to correct or issues citations. The buck usually stops at this point though since the City Attorney seldom pursues zoning and building code cases. 

One consequence of this convoluted planning process is that the city’s public infrastructure and services -- like the football stadium in our analogy -- are ignored. The Department of City Planning defines their day-to-day planning mission as the efficient processing of developers’ requests for discretionary actions. It is not comprehensive, rigorously monitored planning, but what the executive suite calls the “development process,” and what they publicly define as promoting foreign and domestic investment in quickly approved Los Angeles real estate projects.  

Because this outlook has been regularly shared with Neighborhood Councils and other community groups in recent years, they, too, have gradually accepted this truncated definition of city planning. Rather than holding City Hall’s feet to the fire to make sure that planning includes carefully monitored goals and programs related to air quality, public facilities, parks, streets and sidewalks, mass transit, libraries, climate change, emergency services, and the full spectrum of municipal infrastructure, they too often but unwittingly abet the real estate speculation agenda of the City’s elected officials, especially Mayor Eric Garcetti. 

Luckily, this minimalist approach to municipal governance is now peaking, like it did in the 1980s and 90s, because of public push back. The City not only regularly loses law suits over illegally granted zoning entitlements, but from March 2017 onward, the City’s voters will most likely force City Hall to start planning Los Angeles through the Neighborhood Integrity Ordinance. The era of market forces substituting for the planning process is finally coming to an end, and you can lend a hand to make it happen. 

(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles City Planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. Please submit any comments or corrections to [email protected].)

-cw

PLAYING WITH CALPERS (PART 3)--Now that we have examined the who’s who of CalPERS Board and Staff in my previous CityWatch articles, how does the system function? On the one hand, we have Board President Rob Feckner; he chairs the general meeting. This is the guy who fatuously remarked upon Fred Buenstroso’s “retirement,” that “he was talking to us for a while about retiring and seeing about doing something else.” Yeah, like going to jail. 

Rob’s latest (August 3, 2016) has been a couple of videos and a PR piece entitled, “CalPERS is Well-Prepared for Market’s Ups and Downs.” Sure they are. His written commentary was printed in the Sacramento Bee in response to getting hammered in the press over a 1% return for last year, as well as questions about future returns. 

Clearly Mr. Feckner is either living under a rock or he simply functions as a front for the CalPERS staff. I vote for the latter, and that was the reason for my last article on the Executive Staff team structure and the staffing that Ann Stausboll created during her tenure. 

There are serious questions as to whether or not the CIO, Ted Eliopoulos, and his Private Equity staffer, Real Desrochers, are up to the job. My favorite blog, Naked Capitalism, has been calling them out for years. Check out this article from Fortune Magazine. 

Equally, there are substantive questions as to the legal advice given to the Board by their General Counsel, Matthew Jacobs. At a recent Investment Committee meeting, he gave seriously flawed legal advice about limiting public comment and whether or not it has to be allowed for each agenda item. 

The subject matter prompting the bogus advice couldn’t be more important -- dealing with the pitiful rate of return on CalPERS investments, which has formed the core basis of naysayers’ attacks on the pension system. To read about those into details, Naked Capitalism called him out on it in a lengthy and damning piece. 

Next, as I wrote some time ago in CityWatch, the hiring process that CalPERS followed in obtaining outside fiduciary counsel for the Board smelled to high heaven and resulted in the Board hiring a sleazeball Florida lawyer named Robert Klausner. He, by the way, isn’t even licensed in the State of California as an attorney, even though he’s been giving the Board legal advice! 

It was within this context that I raised the question at the end of last week’s article, as to why CEO Ann Stausboll would suddenly retire at age 59 1/2 -- with the caveat that I am not a part of the 1%, so I don’t know what goes on in the minds of CEO’s making $300,000 per year or above. However, unless you are a safety employee, whose pensions are mostly based on a retirement age of 50, few people in CalPERS or any other California public sector pension plan retire at age 59 1/2. The trade-offs between age and benefit amount are simply too high. The “sweet spot” is usually age 62 and the 100% gold standard is age 65. 

Finally, and we won’t know the answer to this question for some time, there is the fact that as her last major act prior to announcing her retirement, Stausboll brokered a real estate deal in New York City; a 51-story office building at 787 Seventh Avenue, to the tune of $1.9 billion. This in a frothy market. 

RIABiz, a financial services advisory industry blog, evaluated her tenure at CalPERS with a big question mark. 

Cracks and Attacks on CalPERS and Defined Benefit Plans in General 

Quite aside from CalPERS’ ability to shoot itself in its collective foot, there are fundamental issues here that go to the core of our society and public service. 

Remember, the cratering of our economy in 2007/08 by the financial services industry was not a one-off. If it were not for our government and the central bank (The Fed) handing out money at 0% like candy corn, and buying up most of their toxic assets, most of the financial services industry would have gone broke. And they are still being propped up by the Fed and our government, which has failed to jail a single one of the crooks that caused this catastrophe. 

Imagine if you and I had access to 0% interest “we don’t care about credit scores” money, and the government would buy up every one of our toxic loans. Wow! Never happen, of course. 

So the same forces that tanked our economy have to look around for targets other than themselves to blame. Otherwise, a lot of us might start asking why our 401-k plans that were for “retirement” suddenly lost half their value and were suddenly declared “not a retirement plan,” – so much so that a lot of people may never get to retire. 

Well, the last places that actually have tangible assets to strip away are the public sector defined benefit pension plans. So once they stopped playing with hedge funds and private equity scam artists, the relentless move to do away with them really began in earnest. 

Of course the end game is not pretty. First, you make these systems subject to ordinary bankruptcy processes. Then you go in, declare them insolvent, strip out the assets, and leave the empty shell and the troops to fend for themselves. After all, bonuses are once a year for the top of the food chain. 

Lest you think I am joking, look at private sector defined benefit plans from the big companies back in the 60s and 70s. Corporate raiders like Carl Icahn would go in with their Mergers and Acquisitions buddies, would use borrowed money to buy the companies, then strip the pension plans to pay for the deal, leaving the carcass to rot. Net result: no mas defined benefit plans in the private sector and no pushback from the U.S. government. 

Fueling the Attacks 

To be fair, public employees and public sector management bear a good chunk of the blame for inviting the demise of one of the last decent pension plans in the U.S. I posit two specific areas which offer free low hanging fruit for those who want to go after CalPERS. 

First, take the case of the “3@50” pension plan for public safety members -- essentially, police and firefighters. The formula provides that at age 50, these employees can retire with a pension based on taking 3% of their highest years’ earnings, and multiplying it by the number of years of service. With the minimum 10 years of vesting required for full benefits, and 50 years of age, that would mean that the officer/firefighter would receive 30% of highest year’s salary. If you were 20 when you hired on and had worked for 30 years at age 50, that percentage would rise to 90% of your highest years’ earnings for life. 

By a couple of other mechanisms, referred to as “pension spiking” and playing with what hours of “work” count towards salary, the dollar amounts for some individuals have reached fairly irrational levels. Take the police officer who suddenly gets “promoted” to Sergeant, or the firefighter who suddenly gets “promoted” to Battalion Chief, each a little more than a year before he or she retires. It all counts in their final compensation number for calculating the retirement amount. 

The articulated premise behind the “3@50” formula was that these are very arduous professions, and employees are just plain physically worn out by age 50. Of course, you could make the same argument for hard physical labor like construction or assembly line plant workers. 

Some individuals who have really gamed the system offer terrific photo opportunities to attack the entire CalPERS system, even though the average pension for the average employee is more like $3000/month at age 65. And, by the way, many of these employees do not receive Social Security benefits at all, for reasons too complicated for this article. 

My second example of low hanging fruit for the naysayers has to do with high level public sector managers. It is not unusual these days for the City Manager of a small city to make something like $300,000 per year or more. And that doesn’t count the brazen crooks like Robert Rizzo, the former City Manager of Bell, now sitting in jail for 12 years in a massive corruption scheme. 

When managers start to get paid like CEOs of large corporations, ordinary folks start wondering what the heck is happening to the concept of “public service,” and they have a point. Add to that a spate of corruption charges against high level public managers, and you once again have wonderful photo ops for those interested in taking the system down. 

The LA Times Series 

I truly believe that the Times series is ideologically based. Take a look at a revealing section of the first article on The Pension Gap:  

“In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, persuaded the legislature to raise the retirement age for new employees and reduce their benefits slightly. That will save money decades from now, when those employees retire, but it will not reduce the cost of benefits already locked in for active and retired workers.” (emphasis added) 

Similar loaded comments abound in the other pieces. For example, in the one called A CalPERS Primer, we have the ominous header, “Has anyone tried to dilute labor’s influence?” Gee, guess the answer. 

And finally, at least until further installments, there is a piece about how CalPERS is faring in the court system, with a clear message that the courts have a duty to reverse existing case law and break the promises made to existing beneficiaries. Read between the lines; what they are really talking about is the ability to reduce the cost of benefits already locked in for active and retired workers. This includes, one presumes, the ability for court ordered bankruptcy and the abrogation of all kinds of things. 

What Can Be Done 

Believe it or not, there are a couple of things that can be done to slightly modify the current system and allow these plans to survive on a go forward basis. In the last of my CalPERS article next week, I will provide some details and give my reasoning.

(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.

THE EPPERHART REPORT--Propositions, initiatives, measures, referenda, annoying – call them what you will, but they have been an integral part of California democracy for more than a hundred years. More than any other state, California relies on its citizens to propose and make law. 

It all started when Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican, was elected governor in 1910. He crisscrossed the state in an automobile railing against the power of corporations, particularly the Southern Pacific Railroad. Big money determined who would run for office, who would win, and how they would vote once they got to Sacramento. 

Johnson won his election and pushed through a number of reforms reducing the power and influence of corporations in the Golden State. Most notably, in 1911, the people got the right to introduce legislation in the form of ballot initiatives and decide at the polling place whether or not they would become law. 

Even now, 105 years later, Proposition 59, asks voters to urge legislators to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case and allow restrictions on campaign contributions and spending. Some things never change. 

Perhaps the greatest impact made by a ballot initiative occurred in 1978 when, by an overwhelming majority, Californians adopted Proposition 13. It rolled back property tax rates and capped annual increases. It also required a two-thirds vote to approve certain tax increases. In the years since, despite ongoing criticism, the impact of Prop. 13 has only been expanded and never reduced. It is known as the “third rail” of California politics. Touch it and you die. 

In 1994, Proposition 187 called for denying government services to undocumented aliens. Despite passage with 60 percent approval, it was never implemented due to a court injunction that stands to this day. What’s notable is not the measure, but the effects of the campaign supporting it. The pro-187 advertising run by the Republicans was viewed by many as racist and is considered to have triggered a mass movement of Hispanic voters to the Democrats. 

In 1998, voters passed a law, Prop. 227, to outlaw bilingual education in public schools. This year, Prop. 58 would repeal most of that ban. If it passes, it will be a clear demonstration of the demographic shift in California’s electorate.

++++++

If adopted, two initiatives may have the most far-reaching consequences. 

The first, Proposition 62, proposes abolishing the death penalty in California. Currently, there are 741 prisoners awaiting execution, more than any other state. There have been 13 executions in California in the last 40 years. The reality is that a death row inmate is more likely to die of old age than lethal injection. (Another measure, Prop. 66, seeks to speed up the appeals process in an effort to ratchet up the number of executions.) 

The second, Proposition 64, would legalize the recreational use of marijuana. It many ways, it merely recognizes what is already a fact of life. But, acknowledging that fact legally and normalizing its use in the same manner as tobacco and alcohol is a big step for government. 

Finally, the state Democratic and Republican parties disagree on just about every measure. However, they both recommend a no vote on Proposition 60, which would require the use of condoms in adult films. In this time of political polarization, it’s good to know there’s something that can unite us.

(Doug Epperhart is a publisher, a long-time neighborhood council activist and former Board of Neighborhood Commissioners commissioner. He is a contributor to CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected]) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--The consumer technology boom, largely responsible for a resurgence in California’s economy after the tech wreck of 2001, seems to be coming to an end. The signs are widespread: slowing employment, layoffs from bell-weather social media companies, the almost embarrassing difficulty of finding buyers for Twitter, the absorption of Yahoo by Verizon and the acquisition by Microsoft of LinkedIn.

This is not to minimize the great things which have been accomplished over 15 years of massive investment in these technologies. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, and is now worth some $55 billion, up $15 billion from last year. In 2015, more than 1 billion people globally used Facebook applications every single day. The “app economy” created by Steve Jobs and Apple is equally impressive. What would we have done with our free time if it were not for Farmville, Angry Birds and Pokemon Go?

The tech boom has changed the face of wealth in America. Tech oligarchs, mostly clustered in the Bay Area, which dominates some 40 percent of employment in search and web publishing, now account for one quarter of the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. This tilting of wealth is not going away, and may shape the business world for a generation.

Concentration and contraction

Overall though, the economic impact of these technologies has been limited. Google’s Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. together employ fewer than 75,000 people, one-third fewer than Microsoft, worth only a fraction its value. Snapchat, the star of Silicon Beach, employs several hundred people, hardly enough to reverse a long-term decline in Southern California tech employment.

More troubling still are changes in the Bay Area tech culture. In its 1980s heyday, Silicon Valley was a Wild West of start-ups, new companies and ideas, and lots of jobs. Today, it resembles increasingly the cozy and fundamentally uncompetitive world of Detroit’s Big Three — Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. The Valley is increasingly dominated by a handful of companies — Google, Facebook and Apple — while conditions for startups, even well-funded ones, have deteriorated markedly.

Despite the hype surrounding the possible IPO for Snapchat, new firms raised $15 billion in venture capital during the third quarter of 2016 — ending in September — down 28.6 percent from $21 billion for the same period one year ago. The third quarter of 2016 marked the fifth straight quarterly decline in completed financings and the lowest number recorded by PitchBook since the fourth quarter of 2010, signaling that investors are writing bigger checks for fewer deals.

Rather than the Wild West, we are seeing consolidation in social media, which depends largely on advertising revenue. Google and Facebook claimed 64 percent of that revenue, according to Pivotal Research. Google scooped up $30 billion and Facebook gathered $8 billion, while other smaller companies have lost market share over the last five years.

As promising start-ups are swallowed up at an alarming rate, the likely scenario, as we have seen in other industries, may be secular stagnation. With less competition and innovation, the track record of oligarchies, particularly regionally incestuous ones, is not a great one, as anyone who deals with new Microsoft or Apple operating systems, can attest. Even Sergei Brin, a co-founder of Google, recently suggested that start-ups would be better off launching somewhere else.

One door closes, another opens

The preponderance of evidence is pointing to the end of the boom era in social media growth. Already, there are clear signs of slowing, with layoffs growing rapidly and more companies looking for space in less expensive, less highly regulated areas.

Yet this shift from social media may prove a long-term benefit both to the national economy and California. The sad truth is that for all the billions earned in stock market value, social media, unlike past tech booms, has done precious little to boost economic productivity. According to the Pew Center for Internet, Science and Tech, 56 percent of workers who use social media platforms for work-related purposes agree that social media distracts from the work they need to do, with 30 percent agreeing strongly.

Rather than thrilling tweens with their first Tweets, technology companies may be shifting to far more important callings. In the Bay Area and elsewhere, firms are delving into promising fields including autonomous vehicles, machine learning, artificial intelligence, financial technology, biomedical research and even space exploration. These endeavors do more than simply keep people entertained and informed about their friends. They may create the basis for longer-lasting growth in the productive economy, not only here in California, but around the nation.

Will California be able to maintain its innovation dominance in this next tech cycle? The Golden State faces the twin headwinds of high housing prices and restrictive regulations. These growing technologies require interfacing with the analog (aka real) world, relying more on 30-something, experienced engineers and data scientists than the millennial hipsters and coders who have fueled social media and casual gaming. California needs to make housing affordable and lessen regulatory burden for business if it plans to lead the next wave.

(Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Marshall Toplansky is senior advisor to Chapman University in the area of Data & Analytics, as well as an adjunct faculty member at the Argyros School of Business and Economics. This piece appeared most recently at New Geography.) 

-cw

CORRUPTION WATCH-While we know that Lord Acton was correct in 1887 when he said power tends to corrupt and we also acknowledge that corruption tends to destroy, we seldom trace out exactly the relationship between excessive power, corruption, and destruction. We now have a case example with the Urban Blox project in Valley Village, called the Hermitage Project. 

But first, let’s remember that Lord Acton was not the first to complain about the corruption which comes with power. In fact, the Founding Fathers tried to work out this problem, which is how we ended up with a government of checks and balances. A monarchy proved to concentrate too much power into one person’s hands. In the 1770's, everyone was familiar with feudal life and how the aristocracy ruled over its serfs. Each feudal lord had absolute control over his fiefdom so long as he pleased the Prince above him. 

America rejected the feudal form of government so it’s notable that in 2006 it was resurrected by Eric Garcetti in our own City Council with the “Voting Trading Pact.” Under the City’s government, each council district is a fiefdom, subject to the absolute rule of the councilmember. That control is rooted in the pact to never Vote No on any project in another’s district. Thus, each councilmember is guaranteed that, no matter what atrocious behind-the-scenes deal he makes with a developer, the LA City Council will unanimously approve the deal.   

This is why the City Council unanimously approves each agenda item over 99.9% of the time. The power of each CM to be able to guarantee a developer that his project will be unanimously approved by the City Council -- no matter how many laws he violates -- is huge. It also closes all the serfs (formerly known as “constituents”) out of the political process. If a councilmember wants to construct an illegal project that will be very harmful to his own district and to surrounding districts, it will pass unanimously. 

The City does not care that “Vote Trading” is a form of bribery which was criminalized by Penal Code 86. Buying a vote with a return vote is bribery just like buying a vote for cash is bribery. There is, however, no way that these councilmembers will relinquish the power to do whatever they want within their own districts. 

The Urban Blox-Councilmember Krekorian Project in Valley Village 

We see the lawlessness that is visited upon Angelenos in the case of Urban Blox’s Hermitage Project in Valley Village where it wants to demolish rent-controlled cottages in order to construct high-end units. 

Urban Blox dispensed with the need to own the property. With the backing of Councilmember Krekorian, Urban Blox decided that it would simply coerce, deceive, and cajole people into handing over their properties. CityWatch has previously written about this project.    

Basically, Urban Blox wanted to tie together three pieces of property along Hermitage Avenue in Valley Village containing only rent-controlled units. Councilmember Krekorian knew that pretending to care about poor people was only political posturing and demolishing these homes so that a developer could make a few million bucks while savaging what is left of the quaintness of Valley Village was far more important to him. After all, Krekorian’s the one who engineered the destruction of Marilyn Monroe’s Valley Village home so that it could not be moved to a safe location. Naturally, the City Council unanimously approved that demolition since there was nothing in the world more important than building five more high-end condos in the San Fernando Valley. (Yes, that was attempted sarcasm.) 

The Urban Blox Hermitage project is right across the street from where Krekorian had Marilyn’s home needlessly destroyed. 

The problem is that Urban Blox does not own the property where it wants to demolish the rent-controlled cottages. In fact, the developer is suing the property owners to compel them to sell the property. It takes a very corrupt City Hall to pretend that a developer has Site Control when he is suing the property owners to force them to sell to him. 

The City Attorney’s Office has known about this game stopper for months but told the Planning Commission to just ignore it. When a councilmember wants to push a project, he’s got the power to tell City departments what to do. Also, Planning has never checked to see if Ellis Act payments were made to the renters. Planning’s excuse for skipping this step was, “We relied on the professionalism of the housing department.” In other words, as far as Planning knows, none of the Ellis Act payments were made. Why should the developer follow the Ellis Act in a lawless society where no violation will ever deprive the developer of unanimous approval? 

After Urban Blox sued the property owners, it decided to sue another entity with claim to the property. That’s how the public found out that Urban Blox has no enforceable right to the property! This is what happens in a society where anyone can do anything and still get unanimous approval. Urban Blox never had any contract with the property owners to buy the land. But, why should Urban Blox follow basic law when it has a city council which always approves everything anyway, no matter what? 

It turns out that a non-registered LLC purported to buy the property, but non-registered LLCs are forbidden from doing business. A contract with a non-registered LLC is a contract with no one. Since Urban Blox based its rights upon nothing, it has no rights to enforce. 

But wait, it gets worse. Since Urban Blox has no rights to the property, it has no Site Control and there is no basis to have Weddington Street vacated and given to the developer. Assemblywoman Patty Lopez has been questioning the propriety of this entire deal for a few months, but Councilmember Krekorian has been blowing her off. Had Krekorian shown elementary courtesy to the State Assembly, this huge defect would have been brought into the light months ago. Instead of following the law, though, Councilmember Krekorian and Urban Blox chose to press ahead, relying on the fact that unanimous city council approval was guaranteed. So, now it seems that Urban Blox owns only one third of the property. But the rights of other people count for naught. 

People wonder, “How did the top 1% end up owning so much wealth, while the rest of us are struggling to survive?” Corruptionism based on the criminal vote trading system at City Hall is part of the answer. 

If the councilmembers knew that they had to justify their actions in order to get a majority vote on the City Council, then they would not feel secure about trampling the law to death. Would Krekorian have wantonly destroyed Marilyn Monroe’s home if he had known that he would have to justify its destruction in front of the entire city council? Probably not. Would Krekorian be trying to push through the destruction of all these rent-controlled units while pretending to be a friend of the homeless? Probably not.   

The criminal vote trading in the LA City Council gives each councilmember way too much power. It means he or she can evade and break any law and still get everything he or she desires. There is no accountability for the tens of thousands of people who have and are being thrown out of their homes and onto the streets so that millionaire developers can build luxury units. And now, the City Council has the nerve to ask the tax payers to give these same developers $1.2 billion under City Measure HHH to build “affordable housing.” 

Krekorian’s and Urban Blox’s attempt to destroy the homes of poor people in Valley Village is sufficient reason to vote “No” on City Measure HHH this November 8. There is something immoral about demolishing the homes of poor people and then using their homelessness as justification for tax increases that, in turn, will end up giving those same developers billions of dollars.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PROP 57 … RESTORING DISCRETION IN SENTENCING-Just how much discretion should we give to officialdom when sentencing people to prison for crimes? It’s a hard question, and, as I’ve learned firsthand, the answer can change through time. Forty years ago, I was a principal proponent of the determinate sentencing law (DSL), which made felony sentencing more predictable, thus reducing the discretion of judges and parole officials. Today, I’m supporting a state ballot initiative -- Proposition 57 -- to modify that legislation and restore some discretion to sentencing. 

And I’m hardly alone in seeing this issue change across time. The leading backer of that 40-year-old law, and of today’s ballot initiative to change it, is the same person: Gov. Jerry Brown. 

Back in 2003, Brown, by then the mayor of Oakland, testified before a state commission that DSL was an “abysmal failure” for which he shared responsibility. In this regard, I also share responsibility. But I think the governor is being too hard on himself. To his credit, he has stuck with the issue and is leading (and largely funding) this year’s campaign for Prop 57, a ballot initiative to ameliorate some of the problems of the last 40 years. I don’t think we were totally wrong in the 1970s. The context was just different, which a brief history demonstrates. 

The 1970s was a decade of tremendous social unrest, especially in prisons. In 1975, legislative hearings concluded a major cause of prison unrest was the “indeterminate” sentence law (ISL) then in place. The ISL prescribed broad sentences (such as five years to life) and gave enormous discretion to the parole board, operating with few rules or regulations. This board had the power to determine the specific sentence by granting parole, including the ability to release a prisoner before the prescribed “minimum” sentence. A prisoner granted a hearing sat before one of multiple parole board panels. If denied parole, a prisoner waited for the next parole hearing, conducted by a different panel, reflecting the whims of the new panel’s members. As a consequence, a prisoner often received contradictory advice from one panel to the other on how to “earn a release date” (learn a trade, gain insight about behavior, earn a GED, get religion, etc.). This experience was problematic for the prisoner, their families, and planning a future. 

The ISL had another feature: It gave the governor control over prison population. Whenever prisons became overcrowded, the governor would quietly issue a “relax release decisions” directive to the parole board to reduce the number of prisoners. Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown’s predecessor, once reduced the prison population by over 25 percent virtually overnight. The arbitrariness of this opaque practice resulted in uncertainty and disrespect for a process intended to “rehabilitate,” the stated goal of the ISL. 

In 1975, Brown, then newly elected as governor, decided he wanted to stop using this sleight of hand and change the law rather than kick the can down the road, while addressing any concerns of Republicans and law enforcement. 

I participated in the negotiations with the Governor’s staff and interest groups. The DSL was passed in 1976. Its sentences were based on median time served for crimes under the ISL. It made sentencing predictable and limited discretion. The judge could add or subtract a year based on the circumstances of the crime. The DSL was initially touted as a historic reform and praised by correctional experts. 

What went wrong? By increasing transparency around sentencing, the DSL also added to public awareness of the actual lengths of prison sentences. Soon, outrage flared when a heinous crime was considered too lightly punished, and the legislature responded by prescribing ever-longer sentences. 

The prison guards, who gained power, became organized and advocated for longer sentences and more prison (it was good for their business.) And the voters, in their public request for retribution for crimes, adopted initiative measures to add to sentences -- most notably the prison industry-funded “Three Strikes.” Under that measure, a person convicted of shoplifting a package of cheese as a third strike was given a life sentence. 

Today, the number of prisoners serving Three-Strike sentences rivals the total number of prisoners incarcerated in 1976. Indeed, before DSL, California had nine prisons holding approximately 30,000 prisoners. Those numbers eventually increased to 33 prisons with a population at times exceeding 150,000. 

This rising prison population resulted in growing expenses and significant overcrowding, which in turn led the federal courts to intervene and demand a reduction in the number of prisoners. Even after that reduction, the high costs (around $60,000 per year per person) remain. The 2016-17 California budget appropriates 8.1% to prisons, a greater percentage than the 5.3 combined percentage appropriated for both the University of California and the California State University. 

Our budget-constrained era thus presents a difficult choice: Should the taxpayers maintain the greatest public universities or the biggest and costliest prison system? Voters are beginning to conclude, not just in California but in places like Texas and Georgia, there can be too much punishment, which isn’t cheap. 

Proposition 57 is straightforward. The initiative measure simply allows parole consideration for non-violent offenders who have already served their base sentences. It gives prisoners an incentive to earn an earlier release after serving a substantial portion of their sentences. It’s not radical, and not a complete reversal of DSL. Those not granted parole will continue to have their cumulative DSL sentence as a cap on how long they serve. If the initiative were to pass -- and the parole authority were to adopt effective regulations -- the changes would be a long overdue refinement of DSL. 

Did we get DSL wrong? In some ways, if anything, the DSL worked too well. But the larger lesson of the last 40 years is not about one sentencing law. It’s that it remains very hard to rehabilitate felons, a challenge we need to better address. I’ve learned it’s unrealistic to expect a modification of sentencing law -- whether that law is ISL, or DSL or Prop 57 -- to yield rehabilitation. Getting to effective rehabilitation would require a sea change in how we do corrections. 

But DSL wasn’t a mistake. It responded to the real problems of ISL. And the experience of DSL was necessary to show the need for the reforms of Proposition 57. It also helped to have a governor with enough longevity and experience to recognize DSL’s shortcomings, and the political will to address them. 

We’re now, 40 years later, trying to get to a better place -- where we can have a more realistic discussion of what really happens in prisons, and of how much we are willing to pay and sacrifice for punishment.

(Michael B. Salerno is a law professor and director of the legislation clinic at UC Hastings College of the Law. In 1976, he was principal consultant to the California Senate Select Committee on Penal Institutions, the committee responsible for the DSL legislation. This piece first appeared on Zocalo PublicSquare.org.) Primary Editor: Joe Mathews. Secondary Editor: Sophia Kercher. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.