BILLBOARD WATCH-Earlier this summer, the bus shelter pictured above displayed an ad for the movie, “Central Intelligence,” which depicted two men brandishing and blasting away with guns. But after complaints were raised about the bus shelter’s proximity to nearby schools, the ad was changed to a public service message featuring Smokey the Bear. 

It’s probable that the city’s street furniture contractor, a joint venture of billboard giants Outfront Media and JC Decaux, gets considerably more revenue from movie ads than public service messages. That may explain the very temporary hiatus between the offending “Central Intelligence” ad and the gun-displaying ad for the movie, “Suicide Squad” in the bus shelter less than 300 ft. from the grounds of an elementary school and charter high school. 

In fact, despite an ongoing debate about gun violence in the U.S., it’s business as usual for billboard companies and the marketing departments of companies like Warner Bros., which produced Suicide Squad.  Bus shelters, billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising display often-menacing figures armed to the teeth with pistols, assault rifles, and even more extreme forms of weaponry. These displays of violence, both explicit and implied, can be found near schools, libraries, playgrounds, and other places children and young people congregate. 

Violence, and especially, gun violence, obviously sells tickets, or so media companies like Warner Bros. and Universal apparently believe. However, not everyone in the entertainment business agrees that such ad campaigns are appropriate. Lena Dunham, creator and star of the popular HBO series, “Girls”, recently objected to ads for the movie, “Jason Bourne,” calling on people to alter the ads in New York City subways. And closer to home, Venice neighbors and their children recently altered a construction fence plastered with “Jason Bourne” ads by covering the gun images with flowers. 

(Dennis Hathaway is the president of the Ban Billboard Blight Coalition and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CALIFORNIA FORWARD--Lawyers, public servants, students, academics, good government reform groups, and concerned citizens made Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday the center of a statewide discussion to modernize California's landmark political ethics law and encourage more people to participate in the political process.

They joined the Fair Political Practices Commission, California Forward and the University of California Berkeley School of Law yesterday for the first of three small discussions being held throughout the state regarding the Political Reform Act Revision Project.

"This is our best shot at cleaning up the law after 40 years," said Jodi Remke, Chair of the FPPC. "We’re trying to get the act into a shape where it’s easier to read, easier to understand and easier for you to make further suggestions and comments."

The Political Reform Act was approved by voters in 1974 and governs political activity in California like campaign finance, lobbying, and governmental ethics. Since then it has been amended numerous times. That's made the rules harder to understand and navigate, placing a hurdle in front of people who might want to seek public office and making it more time-consuming to enforce.

To give act more clarity, the FPPC has partnered with CA Fwd and the law schools at UC Berkeley and UC Davis for a comprehensive revision of the law. 

One of the co-authors of the original version of the Act, Robert Stern, participated in the discussion and congratulated the project's partners on taking on such an important task.

"This [act] should not be locked in stone," said Stern, former president at the Center for Governmental Studies and former General Counsel of the FPPC. "We thought it was very important for this act to be a living act. Clearly it needs to be easier and consolidated."

The gathering served to call attention to the first of two public comment periods and to empower interested individuals to voice their perspectives regarding updating the more than four-decade-old act.

"If we can encourage and empower the public to understand how to engage in this process we will end up with a better product," said Jim Mayer, president and CEO of CA Fwd.

Before beginning the project, the FPPC and CA Fwd recognized four important goals in order to achieve a robust public process: 1) to provide practitioners, public servants and citizens an opportunity to understand the vitality of the law, 2) to incorporate and include parties who deal with the law on a regular basis, as their feedback would only serve to strengthen the revision, 3) to model what an inclusive and transparent process is, and 4) to apply a high level of rigor to the comments received.  

"We wanted some qualitative understanding -- how are people feeling about the law and the project so that when we look at these comments we have context," said Mayer.

The first phase of the project spanning nearly eight months was for the UC Berkeley and UC Davis Law Schools to clean, re-organize and simplify the language without making substantive changes and create a revised draft for review. According to Remke, this is only the first of multiple steps to engage the public and only the beginning of a process that will take several months.

To help with the process, Remke said additional tools to assist the public with understanding proposed revisions will be made available on the FPPC website soon. 

There are two more discussions scheduled for August. To register, visit the event registration page.

NEED TO KNOW

Tuesday, August 16 at 1-2:30 p.m.
Fair Political Practices Commission, 8th floor hearing room
428 J Street
Sacramento, CA 95814

Thursday, August 25 at 1-2:30 p.m.
Oakland City Hall, Hearing Room 4 (2nd floor)
1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza
Oakland, CA 94612

For more information about the project including an introductory webinar, a packet of materials with the latest draft of the act, and to learn how to submit a comment, please visit www.cafwd.org/pra. 

The California Political Reform Act Revision project is supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.

(Jania Palacios writes for California Forward whose mission is to restore the California Dream, we must create more middle class jobs, promote cost effective public services and encourage accountability for results.)

-cw

LA WATCHDOG--If approved by a majority of the voters, Proposition 53, the Stop Blank Checks Initiative, “all revenue bonds issued or sold by the State in an amount singly or in the aggregate over $2 billion for any single project owned, operated, or managed by the State must first be approved by the voters at a statewide election.” 

ALPERN AT LARGE--Whether it involves initiatives ranging from the Expo Line to the Green Line/LAX connection to local Planning and Transportation issues, being fair and honest and credible is everything.  When someone does good, they deserve credit...and vice versa.  Hence, for the benefit of all Angelenos, we have to pass a Neighborhood Integrity Initiative (LINK: http://2preservela.org/) this spring. 

All ethnicities, all regions, and all socioeconomic groups of fair-minded, open-minded, and civic-minded Angelenos are being attacked.  Our services are lower than ever, our economy is producing a two-tiered rich/poor divide that no minimum wage diversion can prevent, and a wealthy and connected few are thriving while most of us who (gasp!) want to play by the rules and laws of LA are being told that WE are the problem. 

Maybe it's "affordable housing", and maybe it's "transit-oriented development", or maybe it's "urban infill", but Los Angeles has the ability to perform the "elegant densification" of Former-Mayor Villaraigosa without shredding environmental laws that were passed for a reason (actually a lot of reasons, but livability is at the center of them all). 

Angelenos are all about REAL affordable housing, transit-oriented development and urban infill--but they're also into sustainable, neighborhood-preserving and neighborhood-enhancing rules that are the hallmark of a modern, civilized, and kind-hearted society. 

The former mayor of Los Angeles, by the end of his tenure, was rightfully-perceived as bought out, a sell-out, and corrupt to the core.  Our current mayor is more affable and friendly...but Mayor Eric Garcetti and his Planning Politburo are killing Los Angeles in the same way his predecessor is doing, and it gives me no joy in saying that. 

As a human being, I kind of like Mr. Garcetti--but his actions are really turning LA into a Wild Wild West, whether they were under his watch as LA City Council President or under his watch as a man who really has the ability to rev up the City Bylaws and the Community Plan effort.   

As fellow CityWatch editor and transit advocate Damien Goodmon posted recently, there is just NO reason why we need a Cumulus skyscraper at Jefferson/La Cienega. 

Damien Goodmon and the Crenshaw Subway Coalition are rightfully, along with the Friends of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, filing a lawsuit to stop this 320-foot skyscraper...which raises a host of issues and talking points that are as timely as we could ever hope for. 

It's no secret that Mr. Goodmon and myself (and a host of others) had different visions of the Expo Line--he wanted more of it to be a subway, while others (like myself) recognized the costs and need for the Expo Line to be at-grade or elevated for a light-rail trolley of 100,000 passengers maximum.  

But we both wanted an Expo Line. 

And neither of us wanted bad planning and neighborhood destruction throughout Los Angeles as a result of the transportation initiatives we fought for.  Adhering to the law is something that African-Americans in the Mid-City, Latinos in the Eastside, and Whites in the Westside all want.  And it's pretty darned tough to be pro-transit when there's all sorts of people who will use that effort, and other venerable ideas like affordable housing to ... 

... BREAK ... THE ... LAW! 

There are plenty of ways we can have lower and slightly-densifying building throughout the City, but if we create Downtowns here, and there, and everywhere, we'll end up with the same disjointed traffic problem that the Expo Line and other lines were built to mitigate. 

There already IS a Downtown, and the Downtown Light Rail Connector offers a host of new options for high-rise residential and business endeavours.  Another "Downtown" is Wilshire Blvd., and maybe another is Century Blvd.   

There ARE places for high-rises, but otherwise it's just it's just a battle against Common Sense, Common Decency, and Common Cause, as I recently opined to make Los Angeles one big Downtown and a new, 21st-Century traffic hellhole.

But let's be honest, Mr. Mayor--you may smile while the rest of us rule-abiding taxpayers are getting hurt, and threatened, and name-called when we call out law-breaking for what it is--we're still being hurt.  If you're going to be Antonio Villariagosa with a smile and kind-hearted face, then why wouldn't threatened citizens push back? 

Hence we have the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, with all sorts of volunteer neighborhood advocates like Dick Platkin and others weighing in. 

I also again call for a new part of LA City government where LA citizens can go to inquire as to whether they can take legal action against any Downtown efforts that violate the bylaws and policies of our City.  My guess is that it should be part of the Neighborhood Councils, or a change in the rules of what the City Attorney is with respect to the job description of that office. 

There is no legal office to protect citizens against their elected officials when that latter group goes rogue--the City Attorney is for the City Council, and NOT for the rest of us ... especially those of us who don't have tons of money and time to sue for our rights. 

But for now, we've got a City to take back.  And if THIS Mayor is going to behave like our LAST Mayor, then we've got no choice but to slam through a Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.

(Ken Alpern is 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 Mr. Alpern.

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY--One has to wonder whether the adults in charge of the LA Times Editorial Board were part of the recent mass exodus from the Times. The question is raised because of a most recent rambling editorial concerning the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, demonstrating yet again the Times’ antipathy towards law enforcement. 

In an editorial ostensibly concerning a delay in the Board of Supervisor's implementation of a "Civilian Oversight Commission", the Times took a bizarre turn and pontificated about several recent shootings involving Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies. The Times questioned the "training" and "fitness" of the deputies involved, wondered aloud whether they were "trigger-happy deputies" whose "tactical training" may have been lacking, and for good measure threw in a random sentence asking if the Sheriff's Department disproportionately targets African Americans. 

That the Times editorial writer didn't know the complete facts of the three shootings it questioned was no hindrance to making accusations against the hard working deputies involved and the Sheriff's Department as a whole. 

Of course, the Times is hardly a supporter of law enforcement, and it clearly pains them to say anything positive about law enforcement officers. Witness, for example, the July editorials following the assassinations of five police officers in Dallas and three officers in Baton Rouge.  

Following the Dallas cold blooded murders that shook the nation, the Times wrote a nine-paragraph, 836-word editorial. Exactly one paragraph and 81 perfunctory words were devoted to officers brutally murdered before the Times segued into what it would rather discuss: "police brutality", "police shootings" and "racial disparities" in the criminal justice system. 

The reporting of the ambush murder of three law officers and wounding of three others in Baton Rouge illustrated how difficult it continues to be for the Times Editorial Board to express concern over the killing of law enforcement officers. This time, the Times could only muster up a scant four paragraphs concerning the killing, with a mere three sentences devoted to the death of the officers before the Times editorial once again turned to what it would rather discuss, devoting the majority of the editorial to pontificate on "accountability" for law enforcement and the "friction" between police and the community they serve.  

The Times view as summed up by the repulsive headline "Cops killing civilians, civilians killing cops.  How do we fix this" -- suggesting some moral equivalence between police shootings and the cold-blooded and calculated murders of multiple law enforcement officers! 

Finally, as to the Editorial Board's belief that accountability will only come from "Oversight Commissions" filled with political appointees, it conveniently ignores the fundamental way citizens of this great country determine the direction of their public agencies, including the Office of the Sheriff. It is called elections. Every four years, elected Sheriffs  must justify their performance and that of the department they lead, with anybody who has a different view with law enforcement experience free to run against the incumbent Sheriff in support of a different vision. That is real accountability!

(George Hofstetter is President of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. ALADS is the collective bargaining agent and represents more than 8,200 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County.  He can be contacted at [email protected]. Mr. Hofstetter’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

DEEGAN ON LA-A mega-development on Sunset Boulevard and a big project on Wilshire Boulevard are being erected in what could be seen as northern and southern anchors for the “towering” of Crescent Heights Boulevard, a secondary highway that runs through the heart of well-established, charming neighborhoods west of Fairfax Avenue. Will these two projects, UDR at Wilshire Crescent Heights (photo rendering above) and 8150 Sunset Blvd become bookends, making the 2.5 mile stretch of Crescent Heights Boulevard between them the next “canyon of towers”? 

Lots of people in the neighborhoods surrounding these two projects are uneasy. Is it possible that more of Crescent Heights Boulevard will be dotted with similar mixed-use towers? Will there be a north-south canyon of tall buildings strategically placed at key intersections like Wilshire, Third, Beverly, Melrose, Santa Monica, and Sunset? The upside could be that these major east-west major streets intersecting with north-south Crescent Heights could become the spokes connected to the Crescent Heights spine, helping to create a pocket of hubs for “new urbanism” communities in Beverly Grove, West Fairfax and parts of West Hollywood. 

The goal of “new urbanism” is to live, work, shop and play all within the same neighborhood, enabling residents to rely less on cars and use alternative forms of transportation, like walking, biking and mass transit to get around. Considering its central location, these attributes could make the increased development along Crescent Heights attractive. 

Some very good north-south rapid transit lines (the 780 express, the 217 local and the DASH Fairfax) run on Fairfax, just a couple blocks east of Crescent Heights. And each of the major intersecting boulevards has its own rapid transit routes, providing east-west mobility. 

That kind of mass transit access is one of the criteria for Transit Oriented Development (TOD), the development model for creating a mixed-use tower of residential and retail close to a transit route, reducing reliance on automobiles. 

The twenty-four possible corners of Crescent Heights on six major cross streets that can be targeted as ideal spots for towers could have great allure for developers. That would provide lots of mixed use housing, retail and gentrification for the thirty streets between glamorous Sunset Strip and commercial Wilshire Boulevard. The fact that most TOD projects offer minimal affordable housing, with tenants still relying on their cars, has not stopped planners and politicos from approving these projects. They continue to justify them by pointing to the convenience of adjacent mass transit, a useful fiction to keep the buildings coming. 

Right now, Koreatown, Silver Lake, Boyle Heights, Highland Park and South Los Angeles are receiving a lot of gentrifying, towering attention. Vermont, La Cienega, La Brea, Vine, Highland, and Western are some of the major north-South streets that are currently being “towered.” Add on to that Crescent Heights? 

In an era when no community is an island it’s open season for developers. Can it be long before Fairfax, one of the really badly traffic-snarled transportation corridors on the west side of town, is skipped over in favor of Crescent Heights? Are the developers already mapping this out? Only those that protect themselves with Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) status can feel safe. 

Of these tracts, Beverly Grove (with boundaries of Wilshire-San Vicente on the South, West Hollywood on the north and northwest, Beverly Hills on the west and Fairfax on the east) may be at risk. With the exception of a few protected residences and small apartment buildings, it has very little city-backed historic cultural monument status, or HPOZ protection, that would block tearing down houses. 

However, neighborhood activists have been successful at modifying what goes up by using other measures to control development, implementing solutions like Interim Control Ordinances, the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance, Floor Area Ratio (FAR) ranges, and the prospective Neighborhood Conservation Initiative. While these efforts may affect what might go up, it does not stop the wrecking ball from bringing structures down the way historic cultural monument status does. 

If there is to be growth in this area of town, coveted for its central location and attractive housing and close-by amenities, Crescent Heights and adjacent neighborhoods may be a sleeping giant waiting to be woken by developers. The neighborhoods along Crescent Heights could be caught by surprise, with cranes and work crews arriving sooner than anyone expects. The city’s out-the-window zoning codes are no match for aggressive developers who see enterprise potential where others see charm and community. 

Ideally situated in old neighborhoods with lots of 1920’s era Spanish-Mediterranean houses, this tract of less than two square miles along Crescent Heights could be transformed into clusters of “new urbanism” that are easily accessible to the clubs, shopping, restaurants and the nightlife of West Hollywood and the Sunset Strip; to the historic Farmers Market; to the Grove dining, shopping and entertainment complex; and to the multiple cultural offerings of Museum Row, which itself is undergoing a huge transformation. Having a Metro Purple Line Subway stop at Wilshire and Fairfax will add to the allure of living in the Crescent Heights pocket. You could live here as a “new urbanist” and not have to go very far for most everything you desire. It might be just what a future, younger demographic will want. It could easily be styled as the Echo Park or Silver Lake of the west side. 

The two and a half mile distance between 8150 Sunset and UDR at Wilshire Crescent Heights is very low-density right now. Is that a good thing? Or, rather, is it a good sign that the area is ripe for growth into “new urbanism communities” that will be anchored by mixed use towers and all the amenities that drive transformation? 

(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].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.