LA WATCHDOG--The Los Angeles Rams are returning to Southern California, 35 years after they left Memorial Coliseum for Anaheim and 21 years after ditching Anaheim for St. Louis.  But most importantly, the return to the Southland is not being financed with taxpayer money which is why the move to Inglewood does not make economic sense for either the San Diego Chargers or the Oakland Raiders. 

The Rams will be playing in an 80,000 seat stadium that is projected to cost $1.8 billion. But this futuristic, high tech venue is only part of a 298 acre, $3 billion entertainment complex that will consist of not only the football stadium, but over 4 million square feet of retail, office, hotel, and high end residential space as well as a 6,000 seat performing arts venue and a 25 acre park. 

This entertainment complex that is located in Inglewood, just south of the refurbished Forum that is now managed by New York based Madison Square Garden, is owned by Hollywood Park Land Company, a joint venture between two sophisticated, well-heeled partners, San Francisco based Stockbridge Capital, a real estate investment firm with almost $10 billion of assets under management, and The Kroenke Company, a commercial real estate and development company founded in 1985 by Rams owner Stan Kroenke. This family enterprise controls over 60 million square feet of space, including shopping centers, warehouse facilities, residential real estate and entertainment venues in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. 

However, if the Chargers or Raiders decide to relocate to Inglewood, the second team in the market would have to pony up $900 million, an amount equal 50% of the cost of the not-so-profitable stadium.  However, this team would not have the opportunity to participate in the upside of the joint venture unlike Kroenke, the owner of the Rams and one of the principals of the Hollywood Park Land Company. 

As a result, both the Chargers and Raiders would be better off by staying in their respective cities, leveraging the threat to move to LA with the cities of San Diego and Oakland for new stadiums, saving their $900 million needed for the Inglewood stadium, foregoing the payment of a substantial relocation fee, and taking the $100 million that the National Football League has offered each of them to stay in their existing markets. 

The relocation of the Rams to Southern California, the second largest media market in the country, is a huge win for the NFL as the 17 million residents in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (including the Inland Empire) will more than offset of the loss of 3 million people in the St. Louis metropolitan area where the Rams play second fiddle to their beloved Cardinals. 

Kroenke will benefit not only from his investment in the Inglewood entertainment complex, but also from the increase in the value of the Los Angeles Rams (v. the St. Louis Rams) over and above the $550 million relocation fee that the NFL will extract from the team.  

While the economics of the relocation of the Rams to Inglewood (and not the City of Los Angeles, contrary to the impression left by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti in his Sports Center interview) is of paramount interest to the 32 billionaire owners of the NFL, our question is when will we have winning team?  Fans may not be bothered by being forced to buy a personal seat license for thousands of dollars and pay over $100 for a nose bleed ticket, but putting up with another losing team is unacceptable, especially now that the Lakers have lost almost 80% of their games this season.  

The Rams have not had a winning record in 12 years.  Over the last five years, the team has won less than 40% of its games and over the last ten years, less than 30% of its games.  So the question to Stan Kroenke and Coach Jeff Fisher (a home town boy who graduated from Taft and USC) is: “What is the plan to produce a winning team, especially in a division that features the Arizona Cardinals and the Seattle Seahawks?”

(Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee and a member of the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council.  Humphreville is the publisher of the Recycler Classifieds -- www.recycler.com. He can be reached at:  [email protected])

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 19, 2016

GUEST WORDS--By the time Tom LaBonge [photo] termed out of the City Council in June 2015 his City Hall office was a mess. Shades of the fall of Saigon, file cabinets were emptied and records were shredded or just vanished. Not a single piece of paper was left for the incoming David Ryu administration. Council District Four residents who had been asking for assistance with problems or filing complaints were out of luck because there were no records for Ryu’s staff to respond to.

To make matters even worse, LaBonge had gone on a last minute spending spree. He promised to hand out over $600,000 in discretionary funds to various groups with no documentation to show how these expenditures had been earmarked or why.

When those of us who closely follow City Hall found out that LaBonge had emptied the CD 4 bank account we were stunned because the use of discretionary funds had been a major issue in the runoff election between Carolyn Ramsey, LaBonge’s former Chief of Staff, and David Ryu. For many voters LaBonge passing out money like Halloween candy was the straw that pushed them into Ryu’s camp. Ryu won the election hands down. (We can only speculate if those funds and files would have been left intact if Ramsey had been elected.)

In order to bring some sanity to the situation, on his first day in office Councilman Ryu filed motions to have LaBonge’s spending spree rolled back. On July 28, 2015 the City Council voted 15-0 to do just that. They cancelled LaBonge commitments and declared that these funds were unencumbered. Ryu then appointed a committee of stakeholders to advise him in this effort to review LaBonge’s pledges, but with no paperwork to go on the effort has been extremely daunting. The committee has been diligently trying to help the Councilman examine the requests and appropriately reallocate funds. But the task is complicated. Did the groups listed by LaBonge as needing public funds actually apply for them or was this LaBonge’s peevish attempt to empty the coffers before he left office?

There are legitimate and pressing needs for discretionary funds in CD 4: trees to be trimmed, potholes to be filled, sidewalks to be fixed, and the list goes on! Which of the projects on LaBonge’s list should be funded, which should not?  This is public money and each group should have to step forward and make their case for the funds to the Council office – and to the public.

The list of LaBonge’s giveaways ranged from Parent Teacher Associations to museums. It also appears that some funds were earmarked for projects outside of  Council District Four – these are probably the most egregious items.

The amounts on LaBonge’s list range from $2500 to $50,000. Some names are recognizable while others are not. All are just a simple line entry on  a page that lists the names and amount. There are no supporting documents illuminating why one group was to get money and others were not. To many this is the perfect example of a slush fund: opaque, arbitrary, and subjective.

One name and amount on LaBonge’s ledger immediately jumped off the page: Museum Associates was to get $50,000 to finance a way-finding project involving signage along Museum Row.

I had to look at it several times to make sure I was really seeing what I was seeing. Museum Associates is a privately owned 501(c)(3) non-profit doing business as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This group receives around $30-million a year from the County to run LACMA and is also slated to get another $125-million from the County to build its new museum on Wilshire Boulevard. Museum Associates also owns the old May Company property were the Motion Picture Academy is being built – as well as its Spaulding parking lot and 6006 Wilshire Boulevard. So, the first thought that came to mind was does LACMA really need $50,000 from the CD 4 discretionary fund and if so, why?

In a letter LaBonge submitted to the City Council on July 28, 2015, he asked them to leave his financial gifts in place and not return the funds to Councilman Ryu. LaBonge claimed he was fulfilling a $ 100,000 commitment to Los Angeles County by giving $50,000 to LACMA and $50,000 to the Ford Museum. That actually should be fairly easy to check out. An inquiry to the County should turn up something that references such a commitment.  

Museum Associates should also be of help as they have a personal service contract with an independent contractor detailing plans for a way-finding plan to promote LACMA and other Miracle Mile museums. That contract mentions a grant from the city that will be used to pay the contractor. Surely there is something in writing that Museum Associates can produce that details the conditions of such a grant? The project may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but what elevated it above all the other needs in CD 4?

Again, these are public funds and there must be a paper trail documenting the basis for this grant. Without that the specter of quid pro quo will forever hang over all of these funds and projects.

David Ryu is committed to an open and transparent process in this matter. He promises to come up with a grant proposal system that all must comply with. There is already a template that many Neighborhood Councils use to help them in this process. Whether a Neighborhood Council or a Council Office, there needs to be a rational and fair way to vet the expenditure of public money. After all, it’s our money – not Tom LaBonge’s.

(James O’Sullivan is Vice President of Fix The City and President of the Miracle Mile Residential Association. This perspective was posted first in the MMRA Newsletter, edited by Ken Hixon.) 

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 19, 2016

COUNTY WATCH--The LA County Counsel Annual Litigation Report and the Chief Executive Officer’s Annual Risk Management Report will be heard on Tuesday at an atypical 1pm Board of Supervisors meeting.   

The Board of Supervisors is the defendant in county lawsuits and in FY2014-2015 roughly $61 million dollars or half of the county's total litigation bill was deployed toward fighting the Sheriff's myriad legal battles. 

Supervisor Solis described the reports as “an urgent call for introspection and action."  Self-analysis is critical but the county residents who have been footing the clearly escalating bill for such litigations are entitled to basic information.  That's because the dirty little secret that no one at the county wants us to know, is that half of the county's liability costs goes to lawyer fees, much of which is paid to outside white shoe law firms who have repeatedly refused to disclose their hourly rate or provide anything close to the kind of itemized bill one might expect from a plumber. 

Abetting such preposterous non-disclosure, the County has long been invoking Gov code 6255, which states "the public interest served by not making the record public clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record." Why?  The City of Los Angeles, hardly a paragon of transparency, provides such information.     

The truth is, however, that the only interests served by the county's non-disclosure are those of the outside law firms themselves.  An important example of this fact relates to Richard E. Drooyan who was at first hired pro bono (an arrangement in and of itself, highly unorthodox and fraught with potential conflicts of interest) as General Counsel for the Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence but then was hired by the board to be the Implementation Monitor responsible for enacting the CCJV's recommendations.   

Apparently, Mr. Drooyan's compensation went from zero to a salary so unorthodox as to be made a virtual state secret by the board of supervisors who to date have spent thousands of dollars opposing a simple public records act request for the basic terms of Mr. Drooyan's contract.  Even though every one of the County's more than 100,000 employees has their salaries disclosed.  

It’s the salary that they dare not speak of, but it's important for us to know, because frankly we should get our money back. 

Perhaps the most important of the  CCJV recommendations requiring implementation was also the "deliverable" …  whose quality could best be assessed, and frankly, the document-- critical to the well-being of both deputies and inmates --is a disgraceful mess, full of embarrassing typographical errors and until recently, lacking page numbers.  Much more importantly, by not stripping out certain problematic sections, it has had the effect of actually legitimating them.   

One of several egregious examples can be found on page 90 of the revised manual we are told "Sworn personnel may demonstrate a “sparking” of the weapon in an effort to gain voluntary compliance of the suspect."   

How much did we pay to have that rule slip through the cracks?   

Which one of the 63 recommendations of the CCJV did that fall under?  How is sparking a Taser not something like cracking a whip?  

Until we are given such information, the public is left groping in the dark for sane policies on all of the above.  

Until our representative leaders get their house in order there is little chance that the jailhouse will be put in order.   

So, maybe that's a good excuse not to kick meaningful reform down the road any further, but rather kick the 2+ Billion dollar jail plan down the road until the many diversion programs focused on reduction before construction can get funding and get to work. 

While the OIG Max Huntsman's website has a terrific piece on deputies shooting themselves in the foot, one wonders what our OIG thinks of the "Use of Force Manual" and in particular, the language regarding Tasers?  

(Eric Preven is a Studio City based writer-producer and public advocate for better transparency in local government.  He was a candidate in the 2015 election for Los Angeles City Council, 2nd District.)

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 19, 2016

HERE’S WHAT I KNOW-It’s been over 86 days since the Southern California Gas Company first reported the Aliso Canyon gas leak in the Porter Ranch community of the valley. The gas well, not expected to be contained until late February or early March at the earliest, has disrupted lives for many families in this suburban neighborhood. Over 2,200 residents have been temporarily displaced, housed in hotels and apartment buildings as far away as Warner Center and Westlake Village.

When students at Porter Ranch Community School and Castlebay Lane Charter School returned to classes after the winter break, they were no longer housed in their home schools. Back in December, the LAUSD board declared an emergency for these schools, both located within two miles of the gas leak. About 1,100 K through 8^th grade students at Porter Ranch Community School are now housed on the Northridge Middle School campus; and 770 kindergarten through 5^th grade students from Castlebay are housed at Sunny Brae Elementary School in Winnetka. In the months after the gas leak was first reported, absenteeism and visits to the schools’ health offices had increased; families had begun to choose independent study for their children. 

Could anything have been done to prevent the gas leak? Attorneys representing Porter Ranch families report that Southern California Gas Co. knew five years ago about the leaking wells in Aliso Canyon and had received a ratepayer increase to fund upgrades in 2013 -- but never replaced safety valves on its gas injection wells. 

LA County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich is asking fellow board members to join him in possibly curbing residential development in parts of the northern San Fernando Valley until, as Antonovich said in a statement released last week, “a thorough investigation can take place as to what caused the leak and what safeguards will be put in place to avoid a failure of this magnitude again.” 

One of the caveats involves halting development in Deerlake Ranch, a 314-home tract approved sixteen years ago. And Newport Beach-based Foremost Companies is in the process of pulling building permits for the 230-acre development north of the 118 Freeway at Topanga Canyon Boulevard, just 10 miles west of the entrance to the storage facility. Antonovich has asked county agencies to re-designate the area as permanent open space. 

Way back in 1989, before the area was developed, locals opposed overdevelopment, fearing traffic, depletion of water, and a strain on sewage lines and landfills. Environmental reports that outlined plans for the just under 3,400 homes that would be known as Porter Ranch contained no obvious references to the massive natural gas storage facility about a mile away. Despite the concerns of locals, the 1,300 acre development was approved by City Council in 1990 and became one of the largest residential and commercial projects in LA history. 

Twenty-five years later, families are squeezed into hotel rooms, surviving on takeout or restaurant meals. Kids must adapt to new schools and do their homework in tight quarters, unable to play with friends after school, play soccer or take karate in the neighborhood studio. Residents have suffered from various health issues caused by the methane gas exposure. 

Mothers and fathers, residents and business owners, activists and attorneys continue to mobilize to fight for what was lost and for the future. We must look at what has happened in Porter Ranch as a cautionary tale -- a tragedy that should not be repeated. Until the gas company can stop the leak and ensure the area is safe, any further development there should be curtailed.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles-based writer and CityWatch contributor.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 19, 2016

HERE’S WHAT I KNOW--The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative targeted for the November ballot picked up an endorsement from former mayor and top philanthropist Richard Riordan on Thursday. The initiative would place a citywide two-year moratorium on projects that attempt to circumvent existing land zoning in Los Angeles. 

Riordan has expressed disapproval with Mayor Garcetti’s policies. “If a person moved to the city now and heard Eric Garcetti talk, they’d assume he’s a member of the Tea Party,” the former mayor shared. “He isn’t doing anything for the poor but helping the rich get richer – through these zoning deals on land development.” 

The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, sponsored by the Coalition to Preserve LA (CPLA) would prevent spot zoning by individual city council members that paves the way for developers to bypass existing zoning laws to build taller, denser buildings across the city on land zoned for less dense development. 

Should the initiative make the November ballot, stakes would be high. In attempt to address rising rents in Los Angeles, Garcetti has promised to add 100,000 housing units by 2021. A second piece of Garcetti’s plan is to place housing within proximity of rail and bus lines to encourage mass transit. 

On the other side, supporters of CPLA and the Neighborhood Integrity Commission argue that mega-development adds to street traffic and has a negative impact on both neighborhood character and livability with developers cutting deals to build larger structures than the city’s infrastructure can handle. 

Riordan cautions against placing too much zoning control in the hands of single council members. “That person is being lobbied by the developers and getting campaign money or campaign promises and this just has to end,” he warns. (Photo right: So-called Palladium Project that prompted the ballot measure.) 

The former mayor also questions the impact of positioning developments near bus, rail, and subway lines, noting that traffic congestion surrounding “elegant developments” near mass transit has worsened rather than improved. “You’re going to have more and more traffic around these over-developments,” he adds. “You cannot put in expensive condos and rental units and hope to attract people who will use public transportation. You will have two cars in each family.” 

The issue of affordable housing is crucial as LA moves forward. Tying development to encourage residents to use mass transit is an ambitious plan but spot zoning is unlikely to be the panacea. As Riordan predicts, the working class and poor will continue to be driven out, a historically prevalent outcome of gentrification. “Los Angeles is not a fast-growing city and it won’t grow all that much in the future but it’s going to switch to wealthier people under current policies,” Riordan observes. “It’s like San Francisco – a lot of wealthier people and a lot fewer minorities.” 

Riordan reflects on his own record as mayor. “When I was mayor, we prevented people from taking industrial land and turning it into high-rises because we still needed factories and manufacturing – for the good jobs it provides to the working class in LA.” 

He believes the moratorium to end land flipping and spot-rezoning is necessary to stop the net loss of existing, older affordable housing units in LA and he challenges Garcetti to define affordable housing. 

“It has zero to do with housing the homeless. It has to do with creating solidly middle and upper-middle class condos that area $4,000 a month,” he concludes. “Garcetti’s affordable housing will probably go for close to $3,000. So I want him to define it because the working poor in L.A., without question, can’t afford City Hall’s ‘affordable housing.’” 

Changing the landscape of affordable housing in Los Angeles, as in cities across the country, is complicated. Developers are more likely to build multi-unit projects that will capture rents that the market will bear. If we don’t curtail the power of individual city council members to assist developers in bypassing zoning restrictions, we aren’t likely to see that landscape change. We need to address the affordable housing issue in Los Angeles. Paving the way for developers to work around existing restrictions is not the way to do it.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles-based writer and CityWatch contributor.)

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 29, 2016

METHANE MAYHEM-It’s early December, and I’m sitting in a mega-church packed with more than 500 people. They’re here to listen to an update on the efforts to contain an enormous natural gas blowout that occurred more than a month before. Gas from the leak is being blown by prevailing winds right into their community of Porter Ranch, in Los Angeles County, CA. 

People are mad. 

Hundreds of families have left their homes to get away from the rotten-egg smell of the gas, and moved into temporary homes elsewhere. Children are attending other schools further from the leak, which is spewing some 110,000 pounds of methane per hour from a broken well less than a mile from the neighborhood.  

Trust between the gas company, regulators, and community members seems absent. 

People question what else is in the gas that might have long-term health impacts. They want to know why many are suddenly reporting headaches and bloody noses.

I’m sitting in this church because my colleague Hilary Lewis and I were invited to Porter Ranch with our infrared gas-finding camera to see what this high profile disaster actually looks like. Before we arrived, the public had no access to images or video of the gas itself, as it’s invisible to the naked eye. 

We meet a local organizer in a supermarket parking lot, exit the vehicle, and even my horrible sense of smell instantly reacts to the scent of the gas more than two miles from where we stand. It’s coming from a well at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, an 8,000-foot deep sandstone formation — a depleted oil field — that SoCalGas uses to hold vast quantities of gas. In fact, it’s one of the largest gas storage fields in the nation, comprising some 115 extraction and injection wells, some of which operate at pressures above 2,000 pounds per square inch — a hefty load for well casings over 60 years old. 

We hike the hills and document the gas blowing sideways and downhill into town. Later that night, we see a plume of gas at least a mile long spanning Aliso Canyon. Of all the sites I’ve shot as a certified infrared thermographer nationwide, this is, hands down, the largest volume of spewing methane gas I’ve ever seen — and I’ve visited nearly a hundred sites around the country, including the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. Each day, the leak is releasing the same amount of greenhouse gases as the average daily emissions of more than 7 million cars.

This video footage — aired nationally on NBC’s The Rachel Maddow’s Show and many other media outlets — has helped to draw widespread attention to the leak, and has assisted local residents in their efforts to get justice and to hold industry, regulators, and policymakers accountable.  

Just ten days later, I return to Aliso Canyon to shoot additional infrared footage for the Environmental Defense Fund from a small chartered aircraft. We fly as close as is safe, seeing a plume nearly 1,000 feet high under calmer wind conditions. The pilot can’t help but note the pungent smell not long after gaining altitude. 

We get a view of the well pad itself — a mangled looking mess coated in mud. This mud was used to try to “drown” the well during the first several attempts to plug the leak. Nothing worked. There are huge craters around the well, and no one wants to get too close with machines for fear of a spark turning the entire scene into an enormous fireball.

The footage I shot for EDF makes an even bigger mark on the national consciousness. Soon thereafter, California Governor Jerry Brown declares a state of emergency regarding the leak, and the Los Angeles Times editorializes against fossil fuels, referencing the Aliso Canyon leak. 

Right now, as the leak enters its tenth week, the underground pressure has been reduced by half of its original rate, due to the gas escaping from the leak and other actions taken by SoCalGas — the company operating the facility — to withdraw gas in a controlled manner.  

It will be months before the leak is repaired. SoCalGas is currently drilling two relief wells to divert the gas below the leak source, much like what was done during the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But by the time the wells are drilled, most of the gas will be gone anyway. 

Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 87 times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. So far, an estimated 79,000 metric tons of methane have escaped from this one facility — so much that California’s goals to reduce climate pollution have been seriously compromised. It’s estimated that, at its height, the leak increased the state’s daily methane emissions by 25 percent.

What has this disaster taught us? For one thing, it’s yet another affirmation that fossil fuels are not safe or clean, and that things often go horribly wrong when it’s least expected. But more specifically, it highlights the woeful state of regulatory oversight on underground gas storage facilities such as Aliso Canyon. For example, the well casing at the site of the blowout failed hundreds of feet below the surface, likely due to the predictable corrosion of 60 year old well casings. To add insult to injury, the safety shut-off device for this well was removed long ago and never replaced.

So there you have it — a well operating at the upper limit of its pressure tolerance, with a safety valve deliberately removed long before, and a well casing that failed with no safeguards in place to prepare for when that time might come. Aliso Canyon has 114 other wells that could fail at any time unless adequate safeguards are in place.

Thankfully, Governor Brown’s declaration of a state of emergency will force a number of much-needed steps — both immediate and medium-term — that will address the situation. His declaration was much needed because, for example, the California Air Resources Board is considering new regulations that would address leak detection and repair for natural gas infrastructure, but these wouldn’t have applied to underground facilities like Aliso Canyon. Yes, you read that correctly. Now, due to Brown’s declaration, California regulatory bodies, including the Air Resources Board, will be required to assess the long-term viability of natural gas storage facilities in California.

It’s long past time to regulate these facilities properly, or take them offline entirely. Hundreds of underground natural gas storage facilities exist throughout the nation, and many of them could also experience catastrophic failures, in addition to other problems already occurring, such as groundwater contamination. 

To prevent more disasters like Aliso Canyon in California and around the country (there are 326 similar facilities nationwide) we need an emergency statewide effort to shut down facilities that lack basic safety equipment, including Aliso Canyon. Gas storage wells that lack shut off valves should be taken offline before other Porter Ranches happen. We also need increased oversight and management of these facilities, not to mention support for residents affected by pollution, including health care and financial compensation.

Moving forward, we also need a rapid transition away from gas. The Solutions Project, an organization working to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, has mapped out a plan for California to achieve 100 percent fossil fuel-free energy by 2050. This transition would protect communities from underground storage risks, gas line leakage, and explosions like the one in San Bruno.

Because nearby communities — and the global climate — cannot afford any more disasters, Earthworks, a nonprofit that works to protect communities from the adverse impacts of energy development, is working hand-in-hand with community groups to push for significant regulatory changes and enforcement. Learn more about Earthworks’ work here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

(Pete Dronkers is the Southwest Circuit Rider for Earthworks. He is an ITC-certified thermographer. This piece was posted earlier at the excellent Common Dreams.)  Photo:   EarthWorks. The first (and to date only) direct overhead photos of the leaking Aliso Canyon well pad polluting Porter Ranch community; taken on December 17, 2015. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 6

Pub: Jan 19, 2016