LOS ANGELES

BELL VIEW-Years of banging the podium at City Hall for my allotted sixty seconds of screaming into the abyss have taught me one basic truth: Whenever a problem -- or a "crisis," as most problems are referred to these days – needs fixing, the people trying to fix the problem have to answer one question before anything can happen. Not "How do we fix this problem?" or "How do we solve this crisis?" Not "Where do we get the money?" or even "Can this problem be solved?" The first question that must be answered before absolutely anything can happen in 21st Century America is "How will the rich get richer?" 

Before we decide what we're going to do to, say, cure cancer, or save an endangered species, or stop the planet from killing us off, we, first, need to figure out how the solution is going to make the rich much richer. 

Luckily for us, our elected officials have been working hard at coming up with an answer to this central question of our time. 

War, for example, is a no-brainer. The rich always get richer off of war. War makes money coming and going. The rich get richer blowing things up. Then get richer again putting things back together. The rich have even figured out how to get rich on things like addiction, disease, and poverty: just declare war on them and the cash starts rolling in. 

And say what you will about the qualifications of our current Secretary of Education, at least she has solved the basic conundrum of how the rich get richer off of public education. 

Unfortunately, once the rich have taken their share – there is almost never much left to solve the problem we wanted to solve.

On the local level, the rich have a juicy housing crisis to feast upon. You don’t need a degree in economics to figure out how the rich get richer off of a housing crisis. But homelessness – ah, that’s been a tough nut for the rich to crack. How, exactly, do the rich get rich off of the homeless? For the longest time, I struggled with this question. 

Now, it looks as if Mayor Garcetti and the City Council have found a solution. Remember the $1.2 billion we decided to raise for the homeless in Measure HHH? Remember how the bulk of the funds were earmarked for “Supportive Housing” – the kind of housing the chronically homeless need? The drug addicted, the mentally-ill, the elderly. Remember being told that no more than 20% of the funds raised would go to “affordable housing” – designed to help people who had not quite ended up on the streets, but were headed in that direction? 

Well … that’s no fun at all. And, since it doesn’t make the rich richer, it was basically a non-starter. Now, it turns out, only 50% of the “supportive housing” needs to be supportive housing – and only 50% of that needs to be reserved for the chronically-homeless. Get it? So the 80% of the $1.2 billion that was supposed to be used to help the most desperate of LA’s massive homeless population will now be sliced up into smaller and smaller chunks with only about 25% of it going to the people it was meant to help. 

When I lived in East Hollywood, a real do-gooder rehabbed an old apartment building and put a dozen formerly-homeless families into real homes. These are families with kids that were living in their cars before they got a hand up. No one in the neighborhood even knows the place is "homeless" housing. It's a model that could succeed all over the city. 

But the threesome cooking crack in a tent in the alley behind this place? They're not exactly candidates for this type of solution. 

So, when someone tells me that "studies show" the homeless do better when they're integrated into the community -- I don't disagree. I just need to point out that not all the homeless are the same. Anyone who thinks people are going to pay market rent to live down the hall from a crackhead are smoking something.  

No. Something tells me this new market-based solution to chronic homelessness will peter out just after Job One is accomplished. The rich will get richer and the truly desperate homeless will still be looking for a place to land.

(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-It goes by many names – the free market, trickle-down economics, supply side economics, market magic, market fundamentalism, and neo-liberalism – but its content is the same. Let the private sector maximize its profits through deregulation, bailouts, tax breaks, and financial incentives. Then the ensuing rising tide of investment will lift all ships. It will create jobs aplenty, while also building affordable housing. The resulting glut in pricey housing will not only drive down all housing prices, but grants to non-profit affordable housing corporations and inclusionary housing programs, such as LA’s density bonus program, will fill LA’s affordable housing vacuum. Just sit back, and market magic will fix what ails us, like a vibrating waistband that peels off extra pounds at the flip of a switch. 

The basic supply-side argument, whether articulated by the Mayor, the City Council, academics, realtors, LA Times editorial writers, dependent non-profit organizations, Chamber of Commerce boosters, or anonymous Internet trolls, is as straightforward as could be. Planning and zoning laws restrict housing production, and this is the main cause of expensive housing in Los Angeles. 

Therefore, if City Hall loosens up land use regulations, developers will march into LA, build oodles of housing, which increases supply and supposedly reduces prices to the point that housing again becomes affordable. 

What trickle-down got right and got wrong. 

Whatever the name, it is a superficially convincing theory, and one part of it is even correct. The deregulation of zoning and environmental laws has allowed real estate profits to soar in Los Angeles. Trickle-down has really been trickle-up, and the market fundamentalists at least got that part of the equation correct. 

But, as for the other part of the equation – fixing LA’s housing crisis – their theory has been a bust. Despite years of granting real estate developers every zoning request they request, as well as notoriously lax enforcement of the City’s building and zoning codes, LA’s housing crisis has continued to worsen, especially since the 2008-9 Great Recession. Gentrification, housing prices, and income inequality have all soared, pricing out many residents and newcomers. 

To begin, there is no evidence that trickle-down generates jobs. Real estate projects built through zoning deregulation -- such as pay-to-play spot-zones and spot-plan amendments, wide-scale up-zoning through Community Plan Updates, Community Plan Implementation Ordinances, re-code LA, or indirectly through slipshod code enforcement -- have not resulted in net gains of short-term construction jobs or long-term building management and maintenance jobs. 

In fact, this often repeated jobs claim has only served two other purposes. The first purpose is to justify City Council votes to deflect dangerous Environmental Impact Report findings with the untested claim that a project is really a major job-generator. The second purpose was to lasso trade unions and non-profit groups to oppose Measure S in LA’s recent March 7 election. 

But, that still leaves the second claim: an uptick in housing construction leads to greater housing affordability. Even if the new units are expensive apartments, condos, and houses, they supposedly pull down all housing prices. The result is alleged to be more affordable housing. In fact, according to this theory, some of LA’s 50,000 homeless  should finally be able to get a real roof over their head. 

Like other missing benefits of deregulation, there is still no evidence that increasing the supply of expensive apartments somehow increases the supply of affordable housing. One of the reasons should be obvious; the widespread gentrification of many LA neighborhoods has not missed a beat. In fact, since 2001 the LA Times reports a loss of 20,000 official affordable units. What took their place? More expensive housing, of course, for the new urban gentry. 

Gentrification: This gentrification process is now painfully obvious in Los Angeles neighborhoods experiencing mansionization, small lot subdivisions, and Ellis Act evictions. In all these cases, older housing, some of which is subject to LA’s rent stabilization ordinance, and all of which is less expensive than the new housing that replaces it, is sacrificed for new, expensive houses, apartments, condos, and townhouses. The evicted residents must then scramble for replacement housing, spending a higher percentage of their income to find a place to live. In fact, in Los Angeles, over 59 percent of renters are now officially cost-burdened because they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. 

The other reason why trickle-down economics has led to a housing market crisis should also be obvious. Luxury housing and affordable housing are separate housing markets. Developers rake in sizable profits by building, selling, and renting expensive housing. But, they would commit financial suicide if they went into the affordable housing business. This is why they don’t do it. Even when they overbuild at the expensive end, such as in DTLA, they never drop selling prices or rents to the point that their new units become affordable. Instead, they hold on to the vacant units until the market changes, turn to Airbnb short-term rentals, or offer modest incentives such as free parking. But, they never rent out expensive units at a financial loss. Never. 

This is why supply-side economics trickles down to a dry stream bed when it comes to affordable housing. The real process should be called trickle-up, which explains why the supply-side beneficiaries spent $11 million in LA’s recent Measure S election to perpetuate their trickle-up business model. 

Now, with memories of the March 7 fading away, the free market campaign slogans are not faring well. Campaign bluster can go a long way, but ultimately reality asserts itself; Los Angeles has had a continuous affordable housing crisis since the end of most Federal housing programs over 40 years ago. 

More empty claims about beneficial market forces: 

In case there are still a few true believers clinging to their faith in market magic, here are several more realities they should consider when the supply-siders resurrect their empty claims. 

1) They don’t work. Since the elimination of most HUD public housing programs in the 1970s and 80s, every county in the entire United States has a demonstrable shortage of affordable housing. Regardless of supply, demand, local land use regulations, local wealth or poverty, the private housing market is simply not capable of providing affordable housing. It never has and never will. 

2) Measure HHH is trickling-up. Until a few years ago, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) filled some of this funding gap by devoting 20 percent of its budget to quasi-public housing. But the California State legislature dissolved all CRA’s several years ago. Since then, the closest the trickle-downers have come to replacing the CRA is Measure HHH. But as Patrick McDonald reported in the April 18, 2017, CityWatch, HHH funding is quickly moving into the “croneysphere.” City Hall now wants to use the affordable housing bond issue to bankroll mixed-use buildings and mixed-income housing. The trickle-down from this bond issue is, as expected by critics such as myself, already trickling up to real estate speculators. 

3) Un-tapped zoning potential. The free marketeers also claim that LA's housing crisis results from wide-scale downzoning since the 1980s, but this is bunk. According to detailed City Planning studies from the early 1990's, which are still the most recent official data, Los Angeles could reach a population of 8,000,000 people based on existing zoning. But, led by UCLA's Prof. Greg Morrow, these trickle-downers declare that Los Angeles has virtually no more un-used zoning potential for housing. But, this is simply not true. In addition to lots zoned R-3 and R-4, Los Angeles is filled with long, low-rise transportation corridors (e.g., Pico, Olympic, Washington, Vermont, Hoover) featuring commercial zoning. 

Since all of these commercial zones can be used for by-right R-4 apartments, Los Angeles still has an enormous untapped potential for housing construction. Furthermore, these future apartments could be built up to 35 percent over the zoning code's requirements. Based on SB 1818, developers could set aside 20 percent of their units to become affordable. They then obtain incentives that raise the overall number of market and affordable units. 

4) Developers’ Business model is the real culprit. The basic problem is, therefore, not LA's zoning build-out potential, but the private developers’ business model. They must make a serious profit, and this is only possible through pricey housing. We could totally eliminate planning and zoning laws in Los Angeles, like Houston has, and these real estate investors would still build expensive housing. They would simply build it in more locations.   

5) Short-term fixes. In the meantime, though, there are several things we can do in Los Angeles until the real fix appears, the restoration of Federal and local public housing programs: 

• Eliminate vacancy de-control from LA's Rent Stabilization Ordinance.  

• Apply the Rent Stabilization Ordinance to all rental units, not just those built before 1979. 

• Prosecute the speculators who illegally evict people from small apartment houses in order to demolish the buildings and replace them with expensive housing. 

• Demolish all speculative structures built through code violations. 

• Properly fund and monitor LA’s Department of Building and Safety, LA’s Housing and Community Investment Department, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and LA County Public Housing to ensure that zoning, building, and health codes are enforced.

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

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Since Campaign 2016, a chasm has erupted and the fault lines continue to crack. As protesters gathered on April 15 from Fifth Avenue to Pershing Square to demand President Trump release his tax returns, heated -- and violent -- exchanges ensued between pro- and anti-Trump camps at a Berkeley park that was the scene of a stabbing, as well as at least 20 arrests for assault with a deadly weapon and several felony assaults. 

Police say seven protesters had to be taken to the hospital and at least eleven were injured. Between 500 and 1,000 were gathered in the park at the height of the protests with about 100 moving the fights to a nearby intersection. 

This melee was a three-peat -- following earlier episodes of violence and vandalism in February after UC Berkeley cancelled a scheduled talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor of Breitbart. Last month, a mix of about 500 pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators resulted in punching, spraying and clubbing.

This Saturday, a pro-Trump group had scheduled a “Patriots Day free-speech rally and picnic” in Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley. Anti-Trump protesters responded with a counter-rally. Police banned any potential weapons, including pepper spray, mace, baseball bats, and glass bottles. A Farmers Market held next to the park was cancelled.

Fights broke out despite the precautions as police in riot gear worked to keep sides apart and members of a citizen militia protected Trump supporters. The two sides were separated by a barricade, which did not stop people from throwing cans and bottles.

While our First Amendment Rights of Speech and Assembly are essential to democracy, the disturbing trend that appears to be happening in Berkeley is hopefully not the harbinger of violent exchanges across the country.

Many of us have experienced divides and rifts between family members and friends over politics and more deeply, over the values that are represented by those politics, whether protection of human and environmental rights or globalism vs. isolationism. The violent protests are symptomatic of these deep divides -- and the divisiveness in our country is profoundly troubling.

With hope, we can heal as a nation and we can put these days of hostility and violence behind us. The 1^st Amendment promises the right to speak freely, not the right to fight. Reminder: Democracy is not a bystander sport. Closing the divide begins with me … and you.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)

-cw

BUDGET ADVOCATES--On Thursday April 20, at 10 a.m., Mayor Garcetti will present the 2017-18 budget at City Hall.

TAX DAY: THE NUCLEAR OPTION-"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value," said former Vice President Joe Biden, quoting his father. He knew that a budget reflected the values and priorities of our nation. Each April our country funds its priorities. Ultimately, as the Rev. Jim Wallis has said, "Budgets are moral documents." 

Each year Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles calculates how much money the United States spends on nuclear weapons programs for the current tax year. The Nuclear Weapons Community Costs Project has identified that for tax year 2016 the United States spent $57.6 billion on nuclear weapons programs. California contributed more than $7 billion to this amount while Los Angeles County sent approximately $1.8 billion to the federal coffers to fund weapons that can never be used. In Flint, Michigan, where we have allowed our children to be poisoned by lead in their drinking water, $9 million was spent. In the nation’s poorest county, Buffalo County, South Dakota, they spent more than $142,000 on nuclear weapons. 

Every dollar spent on nuclear weapons is a dollar taken from programs that support the health and well being of our country, our communities, and our loved ones. These are critical funds that we can never get back. 

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic increase in the budget for nuclear weapons while simultaneously proposing a dramatic decrease for social and environmental programs. This is in addition to the nuclear grand bargain of the Obama administration's proposed buildup of our nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1 trillion over the next three decades. This is the opening salvo as other countries follow suit in this new nuclear arms race.  

Having grown weary of our actions and failure to meet our legally binding commitment to work in good faith toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, the non-nuclear nations are refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear states any longer. Taking their future into their own hands the vast majority of the non-nuclear nations will complete negotiations at the United Nations this July on an international nuclear ban treaty that will outlaw nuclear weapons just as all other weapons of mass destruction have been banned. This will leave the United States and other nuclear nations once again in breach of international law.  

Fortunately, a world under constant threat of nuclear apocalypse either by intent or accident is not the future that has to be. But change will not happen on its own. Each of us has a role to play. Ultimately it will take the people of the United States to awaken from our trance and join the rest of the world in demanding that our leaders work to abolish nuclear weapons and to redirect these expenditures to secure a future for our children and address the real needs of our country. 

The time for action is now.   

Contact your representatives at: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

(Robert Dodge is a family physician practicing full time in Ventura, California. He serves on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles serving as a Peace and Security Ambassador and at the national level where he sits on the security committee. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions. He writes for PeaceVoice. This piece appeared most recently in CommonDreams.org.)  Prepped for City Watch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren D. Price Jr. has been implicated for fraud and perjury, perhaps unwittingly, by his own attorney Stephen J. Kaufman. 

And that’s the least of Price’s problems. 

The backstory is this: In a misdated 2012 affidavit, Price and his then-divorce attorney Albert Robles (who is the current Mayor of Carson, CA) claimed that Price’s first wife Lynn could not be located for the purpose of serving her divorce papers, although they repeatedly tried to serve her at her residence at 4519 Don Arturo Place in Los Angeles. 

The problem is, Lynn Price never lived there.  

A bigger problem is that Curren Price knew that Lynn Price never lived there. 

That’s because the property was and remains owned by Price’s second wife, Del Richardson-Price, since June 21, 2001. 

Yet, as documented in Mr. Price’s and Mr. Robles’ affidavit, they repeatedly sent his process server, Antonio D. Inocentes, to that address on January 18, 19 and 21, 2012 to document multiple attempts to serve her – to a location at which Mr. Price, and perhaps Mr. Robles, knew she never lived. 

A few days ago, I got an email from Mr. Price’s current attorney, Stephen J. Kaufman, in which he echoed a call he made to me a few days earlier, perhaps without understanding the implication of his words. “Lynn Suzette Price never lived at 4519 Don Arturo Place,” he reiterated to me. 

Was it Mr. Price’s goal in misleading the court his desire to obtain a divorce from his first wife Lynn without serving her notice of it? His reason for doing that may have been to shield the assets of his second wife, Del Richardson-Price, and his own assets (worth millions of dollars combined) from being split as community property.

Why would the assets of Price’s second wife, Del, be subject to community property splitting with his first wife, Lynn? 

Because records suggest that Curren D. Price, Jr., a Los Angeles City Councilmember, is concurrently married to both women.

While Mr. Price has denied being a bigamist in media reports, he refuses to state when he married his second wife, Del. According to some of their sworn documents, he and Del wed between August 8, 2008 and April 1, 2014, without his first divorcing his first wife Lynn. The big “if” is whether their sworn statements on real estate and other documents are truthful. 

According to Mr. Price’s LA City Ethics forms, at the time he claimed his first wife Lynn resided at the Don Arturo house, he simultaneously received more than $10,000 in annual rental income (possibly a great deal more) for its occupancy from Dr. Josephine B. Isabel-Jones, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, and her family, whose residency at the hillside home-with-a-view has been confirmed. 

So sit with that for a moment.  

Knowing that his first wife Lynn never resided at the house on Don Arturo Place, Mr. Price still had his process server repeatedly go to that address, disrupting his paying tenants, the Jones family, in order to willfully mislead the divorce court that he was making an attempt to serve Lynn there. 

A few months later in 2012, the Los Angeles Superior Court didn’t buy Price’s and Robles’ claim that they could not locate Lynn Price and denied their request to instead serve notice with a paid newspaper advertisement. Lynn Price’s address was readily available on the website of her Trenton, N.J., law firm, on the California and New Jersey Bar Association websites and through other sources. The divorce file has been in limbo ever since, and is overdue for a housecleaning update, or an “Order to Show Cause,” by the court. 

While District Attorney Jackie Lacey and apparently the FBI investigate Price’s activity in this mess, what those agencies may not yet know is this: 

According to Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder records, the voter registration of Mr. Price’s first wife Lynn has been dormant for all elections from 2002 to the present. But in August 2010, in the midst of Mr. Price’s unsuccessful and dubious attempt to get a divorce from her, someone changed Lynn’s address on her voter registration to – you guessed it – 4519 Don Arturo Place, without her ever living there, and without her using that address to vote in that year or in any year since. (Lynn Price has for years been registered to vote in New Jersey.) 

Mr. Price’s current attorney Stephen J. Kaufman denies that his client or anyone close to him had anything to do with changing Lynn Price’s voter registration, claiming that it was automatically changed through the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address System.

But that’s not possible, according to both the USPS and the LA County Registrar-Recorder’s office.

“The Postal Service’s National Change-of-Address system does not reach out and ‘change’ a customer’s address” without explicit direction from the person or someone pretending to be her, said Evelina Ramirez, a USPS spokesperson. And the USPS doesn’t change someone’s voter registration, at all. The LA County Registrar-Recorder’s office in Norwalk echoed that sentiment. A voter registration is only changed when they receive a mail-in affidavit or DMV change, which is scanned and saved, or via correspondence, which is not. 

Because Lynn Price’s change of voter registration address has no stored affidavit or DMV transaction, it is believed to have been changed through correspondence. 

Attorney Kaufman, when told that his client Mr. Price claimed on his 2012 affidavit that Lynn Price did reside at the Don Arturo address, stopped talking altogether and did not respond to the following questions:

1. Could he identify anyone other than Curren Price or Del Richardson-Price who stood to benefit from that change of Lynn Price’s voter registration address? 

2. Why, if Lynn Price never lived at the Don Arturo Place house, did the National Change of Address system just happen to choose his client’s second wife’s house as the new address for her voter registration? 

3. Why does he believe that the National Change of Address system changed Lynn Price’s long-dormant Los Angeles voter registration, but not her active one in New Jersey? 

4. Why, if Lynn Price never lived at Don Arturo, did his client have his process server attempt to serve her there three times in January 2012? 

Kaufman’s deflections are not only ludicrous on their surface, but also statistically questionable. 

There are 3.267 million residential housing units in Los Angeles County. The odds of Lynn Price’s voter registration being randomly and illegally transferred to an address owned by her husband and his second wife are significantly worse than her odds of winning a high-end grand prize in a California Lottery scratcher game, which is about 1 in 3,000,000. And this just happened to occur at a time when Mr. Price and Mr. Robles tried to convince the court that they could not locate her at that exact address. 

Further, throughout a five-year correspondence that Del Richardson-Price had with the IRS from at least June 2010 to July 2015, Del used Don Arturo as her address at the time Lynn Price’s voter registration was changed to the same address in August 2010. 

Mr. Price refuses to state where he lived during this time. 

The can of worms that that opens is this: if Del Richardson-Price told the truth about her residence address on her years-long communications with the IRS, why was she registered to vote, and still is, at a different address, in a different LA City Council District, far below her admirable, affluent economic status? 

The Don Arturo house is located on a nicely manicured cul-de-sac in a hillside community with a sweeping view befitting someone of a doctor’s, or Curren Price’s and Del Richardson-Price’s, professional success. But it is located in LA City Council District 8. 

Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren D. Price, Jr., represents Council District 9, aka, “The New 9^th,” and it is illegal for him to reside outside of the community he represents. Just ask former LA City Councilmember Richard Alarcon what happened when he did that. 

According to Curren Price’s and Del Richardson-Price’s current voter registrations, in stark contradiction to their address on IRS correspondence as late as 2015, they reside in a downscale, multi-family rental property in a working class community with a flock of roosters cock-a-doodle-doo’ing across the street and an inexpensive, conspicuously license-plated car, parked where millionaires with two six-figure incomes generally do not live.

Is something that started out as a simple inquiry of whether Mr. Price is a bigamist about to morph into something with far bigger consequences? 

The evolution of this story can be found in my earlier CW articles: 

February 27: “LA’s Own Bigamist-ery.”  

March 2: “LA Sentinel Throws Up a Smoke Screen for Councilman Price on the Bigamy Mystery.”  

March 6: “LA Times Tiptoeing Around the Price Bigamy Allegations.”  

March 27: “Curren Price Plot Thickens: Councilman’s Problems are Bigger than Bigamy.”  

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport.  Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

DEATH PENALTY WATCH-Ghoulishness envelops Arkansas’ decision to pump deadly drugs into eight men over the next fortnight. Although two of the eight scheduled executions have definitively been stayed and a temporary restraining order has been issued as to the remaining six, the state plans an emergency appeal. 

Articles about “midazolam,” the drug whose expiration date prompted Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson to schedule this unprecedented mass execution are abuzz on the internet and social media. By this point many Americans have heard or are generally aware that while midazolam is supposed to render the condemned unconscious and insensate, it has been linked to a number of gruesome and botched executions in the United States. 

These are lethal injections where instead of drifting into a sterile, serene, slumber-like death, the condemned have for minutes and even hours, convulsed, coughed, clenched their fists, writhed and thrashed their bodies, murmured, spoken, or cried out in obvious distress; some have gasped for interminably long periods of time mimicking the discomfiting death-throes of still-live fish thrown flat on a sunbaked pier, to suffocate and to burn. 

Importantly, torturous executions linked to midazolam have occurred when just one or at most two executions have been scheduled at one time. This is why a chorus of lawyers, law professors, medical experts, ethicists, and former correctional officials, have all raised their voices in the last few days against Hutchinson’s mass-killing decree. 

“Multiple executions create rushed circumstances. Rushed circumstances risk error,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. In other words, the assembly-line nature of Hutchinson’s expediency-centric execution schedule exacerbates the risk that one or more of the men to be executed next week will suffer an excruciatingly painful execution; an execution plainly in violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. 

In January 2016, I wrote about the then-impending execution of Christopher Brooks in Alabama – an execution likely botched by the controversial use of midazolam – a drug that according to competent medical experts, is inappropriate for use in executions. 

Specifically, I wrote: “In the United States, we rightly condemn barbaric executions in other countries, like in North Korea, where, in front of an audience, Kim Jon-Un executed his defense minister with an anti-aircraft gun, or, in Saudi Arabia, where beheading remains a common practice. We have especially condemned ISIS executions, executions that have included burning and burying people alive.” 

Highlighting Brooks’ federal defenders’ arguments that, because of the documented problems with midazolam, Brooks would feel like “he is [both] being buried alive” and “burn[ed] alive from the inside”, I plaintively demanded: “How can we countenance the fact that we, as Americans, may also be subjecting human beings – irrespective of their crimes, even heinous ones – to that same end? Can the fact that US executions are not broadcast to the masses from some windswept desert in the Middle East, and occur, instead, in sterile prisons, under the color of law, really make such a difference? Isn’t it morally wrong to execute someone by reproducing the sensation of being buried alive followed by burning them from the inside out?” I lamented, “Aren’t we, as a nation, and as people, better than that?”   

Next week, if Arkansas’ state-sanctioned killing spree goes forward, the answer to that question will resoundingly be “no.” It’ll be no, no, no, no, no, no. 

And as far as the title of my one-year-old Huffington Post blog, “When Will the United States Stop ‘Tinkering With The Machinery of Death?’”, based on the monumentally-high level of depravity promising to be on display next week in Arkansas, not soon enough.    

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Saturday morning federal Judge Kristine G. Baker of the Federal District Court in Little Rock, AR, halted the state’s plan to execute the eight prisoners. The Arkansas Attorney General has vowed to appeal the decision.)

(Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on Twitter #SteveCooperEsq.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-When medicine bottles are filled with poison, people die. The most famous incident was in October 1982, when someone laced Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area with cyanide, resulting in seven deaths. While the nation moved quickly to guarantee the safety of over-the-counter medicines, the adulteration of our judicial system has been pandemic for generations. 

From civilization’s beginning, mankind has striven to develop institutions that ensure an honest and just society. In the beginning of Genesis, we learn about the corrupt judges in Sodom. Their abuse was so destructive that they were named Liar, Habitual Liar, Deceiver and Perverter of the Law. According to Jewish tradition, these judges so adulterated Sodom, that God destroyed the city and all its inhabitants. From a moral stand point, filling political institutions with poisonous men is as lethal to society as putting cyanide in medicine. 

One difference between lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide and allowing corrupt people to have positions of importance is that corruption is slow acting and spreads insidiously until the entire society becomes morally bankrupt. The first injustice by a Sodomite judge did not cause fire and brimstone to hail down on Sodom. Cruelty and injustice enriched some Sodomites, causing extreme harm to their victims. As the corruption spread, evil dominated without any thought that a day of reckoning would arrive. 

During the 1770s, people in the American British Colonies became displeased that the Crown was contaminating British institutions. The colonists believed there should be no taxation without representation. They believed they were entitled to impartial courts when they had just grievances against the Crown. But King George and Parliament believed otherwise and saw no reason that their “Tylenol” bottles should not also contain tyranny. The King’s courts were a farce. Like in Sodom, truth, honesty, and justice had been supplanted by power. The colonists expressed their displeasure with this adulteration of the judicial system in the Declaration of Independence, stating: “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”   

Our Declaration of Independence posited that all individuals have certain inalienable rights and among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We drafted the U.S. Constitution to secure the Blessings of Liberty, not to continue the rule of tyrants. The foremost objective of the judiciary is to protect an individual’s fundamental rights. The legal system is not to be manipulated for the benefit of the rich and powerful.   

For decades, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was an abusive occupying force in South Central Los Angeles (aka Watts) where, in 1965, police brutality after the stopping of a black motorist triggered six days of violence and civil unrest. There was $40 million ($308 million in 2017 dollars) in property damage and 34 deaths. The unrest was fueled not only by the racist nature of the former LAPD, but also by the courts when they backed up a police department that engaged in the brutalization and criminalization of the Black community. 

Twenty-six years later, in 1992, Los Angeles again erupted in violence with the worst civil unrest since the Civil War – with 54 dead and $1.5 billion (in 2017 dollars) in property damage. Again, a poisonous judiciary had been crucial in the breakdown of civil society. 

While the acquittal of the police officers was what sparked that violence, the foundation for the death and destruction was laid months before by the appellate court’s manipulation of the location of the police officers’ trial to Simi Valley, a bedroom community for police officers. The appellate court claimed that due to publicity, a fair trial could not be had in LA County. Thus, the trial was moved to Ventura County, where the media coverage was as extensive as in Los Angeles County but the jury pool was extremely pro-police. In brief, the appellate court concocted a ruse to place the police officers’ trial in a place where the jury would be overwhelming sympathetic to white police officers and hostile to their Black victim. 

After decades of police brutality and a corrupt court system, the Black Community believed that with the video of the beating of Rodney King, there would finally be justice in at least one case. The appellate court knew better. The Simi Valley jury consisting of 10 whites, one Hispanic and one Filipino acquitted all the officers. 

As the violence mounted in South Central Los Angeles in response to the acquittals, the police pulled back, leaving citizens and businesses defenseless to marauding thugs. When a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was yanked from his truck at the intersection of Normandie and Florence, no police or National Guard responded. Instead, local people (Bobby Green, Lei Yuille, Titus Murphy and Terri Barnett) who saw the brutal attack on TV, rushed from their homes and saved Reginald Denny’s life. Many people do not want to acknowledge the social disintegration unleashed on Los Angeles that was caused by the appellate court’s moving the trial to Simi Valley. 

Decades later, in 2015, when three federal judges told us our State Court system has suffered from an epidemic of misconduct, we shut our ears and allowed the sadistic abuse to continue. In January 2015, the Federal courts complained about state court prosecutors’ committing perjury in order to obtain convictions, but their real target was the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Tani Gorre Cantil-Sakauye. 

The three judge federal panel identified the cause of the epidemic of misconduct as the California court system itself which turned a blind eye to lying jailhouse informants, prosecutors who took the stand and committed perjury and a host of other misdeeds. If Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye, who has held her position since July 22, 2010, had taken remedial steps in the intervening four years, one of the three federal judge would have taken note. 

However, since January 2015, the Chief Justice seems to have done nothing to remove the poison from our judicial system. According to The Orange County Register, “The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department on Thursday (December 15, 2016) over allegations that prosecutors and deputies withhold evidence and use jailhouse informants to illegally obtain confessions.” 

A significant number of judges are former prosecutors, so they are very familiar with these illegal tactics and recognize when they are deployed in their courtrooms. The complaints of the cyanide in the Orange County courts pre-date the complaints by Judge Kozinski in January 2015. Nonetheless, it takes another federal agency to investigate the same type of vile betrayal of public trust which we saw 4,000 years ago in Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Angelenos should not become complacent by thinking that these abuses are relics of bygone eras. Facts and fiction are still fungible commodities in courtrooms. No fact can be too firmly rooted in reality for a judge to proclaim that its opposite is an Undisputed Fact; perjury which favors a judge’s position is preferable over truth. Just as no one knows when the weight of economic frauds will again crash the economy, no one knows when judicial corruption will cause another outbreak of violence.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. 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.

TNN REPORT--Five years ago when the City of Los Angeles Redistricting was finalized, residents of  Koreatown launched a lawsuit, Lee v. City Of Los Angeles (15-55478). It challenged the redrawing of district boundaries with the primary intent of increasing the African American vote within Council District 10. (Photo above: LA Councilman Ryu, standing.)

Redistricting happens every 10 years after the US Census identifies population numbers within particular districts. In order to have fair elections district borders have to be redrawn to ensure that each district has the same number of residents.  In the last census the boundaries had to be redrawn to contain 252,000 residents per district. 

The Redistricting Commission of 2011-12 requested input from residents. The Koreatown community organized and mobilized in an unprecedented manner, bringing out  thousands in total to more than three dozen Redistricting Commission board meetings and town halls. They were adamant and clear over their displeasure of their historic use as a donation funding bank for CD 10 Council members including Councilman Wesson -while their issues and concerns remained minimized or ignored.  They introduced a letter allegedly from a local business begging to be released from the constant need to donate. 

Research by TNN showed that over a third of the donations to Councilman Wesson came from Korean residents while they represent only 10% of the district. (Redistricting Awakens Koreatown). They were requesting to be released from CD 10 and included in CD 13 the next district over. This would also solve the problem of their Neighborhood Council being divided into multiple council districts. 

But by granting this reasonable Koreatown request, a ready source of funding to Councilman Wesson through allegedly pressured donations, would end. 

The final result approved by the Redistricting Commission (which was headed by a man who quit his job with Councilman Wesson to head the commission) ignored their request and instead redrew boundaries to not only keep Koreatown and its donations in place but to increase African American voter numbers. The lawsuit contends that using the criteria to increase African American votes is illegal while the City argues it was not used as a criteria.  But evidence might prove their undoing.

From TNN report Aug 2, 2013 -  “A secretly taped video at a Los Angeles Baptist Ministers conference is not going to help Wesson's cause. Despite claims he had nothing to do with redistricting, when Councilman Wesson was asked to come and explain his rumored influence on the breakup of their district, he admitted he had a hand in it. ‘I did the best I could to retain ‘assets’ for all of the districts. One person. Alone. Every member came to me to discuss what they wanted ...’ He went on to claim he had secured assurance that three of the districts would have African-American representation for the next 30 years.”  Article can also be found here.

In addition, in a smoking gun email, a Herb Wesson redistricting appointee said:

“We attempted to protect the historical African American incumbents in this district by increasing the black voter registration percentage and CVAP #s accordingly. As you can discern on the attachment, we were able to increase the numbers to 50.12% and 42.8%, respectively.  This was a significant increase in the black voters in CD 10 which would protect and assist in keeping CD 10 a predominately African-American opportunity district.  ... This move would allow CD 10 to divest itself of this diverse populated area, and increase the AA population to the South.”

Because the Redistricting Commission claimed they were going to give priority to keeping the 95 Neighborhood Councils whole, the Koreatown community used the boundary of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council (“WCKNC”) district and sought, along with other Asian American communities, including Historic Filipinotown and Thai Town, to be kept together in a single council district in order to keep similar immigrant populations with similar language needs.  

The Koreatown community provided the Commission with abundant and compelling testimony for the unification of WCKNC in Council District 13. But, as the final map shows, the Koreatown community’s unprecedented efforts were ignored while the map that was selected focused on increasing the number of African American residents in Council District 10. 

In 2012 Koreatown residents filed a lawsuit accusing the city of redrawing the boundaries for a predominantly racial intent. It was denied but Lee v. City Of Los Angeles (15-55478) is still ongoing and awaiting a ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  The three judge panel led by the Honorable Alex Kozinski heard oral arguments at the stately Pasadena Courthouse in January 2017.  But the appellants’ attorneys requested that the judges wait until the United States Supreme Court ruled on Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections before ruling on the Lee v. City Of Los Angeles matter.  

The Virginia Legislature had redrawn district lines packing more than 55% African American voters into various districts in order to minimize the African American presence in other districts.  This would dilute the vote of neighboring districts with less African Americans allowing the voter numbers to skew Republican. The legislature argued that they used traditional criteria such as keeping equal numbers of people within the districts and that boundary lines were continuous avoiding strangely shaped districts, often a sign that gerrymandering had occurred. 

On March 1, the United States Supreme Court ruled and it doesn’t look good for the City of Los Angeles. It was unanimous in its decision held in Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections that even if traditional criteria were met it didn’t mean that racial criteria wasn’t a predominating factor – which isn’t allowed. 

The United States Supreme Court decision bolsters the Lee appellants’ arguments that the City’s boundary lines for City Council District 10 were drawn for unconstitutional racial purposes and therefore should be void.  The City’s argument- that since traditional redistricting criteria were met, the racial intent claims have no merit - is no longer a winnable argument after the Bethune-Hill decision.

No amount of rationalization of traditional redistricting criteria explanations will be able to obfuscate what was plainly and openly done during redistricting.  The LA Times Editorial Board called it “an exercise in power politics, not democracy.” LA’s flawed redistricting process, Los Angeles Times Editorial, February 17, 2012

and

“...Angelenos should by now recognize the gap between the official story -- that the process was transparent and decisions were made publicly -- and the all-too- obvious reality: Line-drawing was the result of backroom deals, using private criteria, and Wesson and the other officials who drew the maps protected themselves from accountability for their decisions by cynically hiding behind their redistricting commission appointees. Some of those appointees no doubt intended to be independent; others no doubt knew full well they were on the panel to do the bidding of the elected officials who appointed them.”

From LA, redistricting done wrong, Los Angeles Times Editorial, August 12, 2012

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling should come out soon and will certainly be worth reading.  Hopefully, the Lee v. City of Los Angeles matter will be remanded allowing a trial to go forward.  

Justice is not easy nor quick, but worth the fight.  Justice comes at the cost of perseverance and tenacity.

As of this date, a judgment had not been reached.    

(Dianne Lawrence is the editor and publisher of The Neighborhood News.   Grace Yoo is an estate planning attorney, who attended more than 90% of all the 2011-2012 Redistricting Commission meetings, and was a 2015 candidate for city LA Council District 10.)

-cw

ANIMAL WATCH-On April 6, 2017, the U.S. Postal Service announced that dog bites to mail carriers in Los Angeles soared to #1 in the country in 2016, with a total of 80 attacks.

This was a 43% increase from 2015, when Postal workers in LA incurred only 56 total bites.

Houston, TX, was #2 with 62 bites in 2016. The number of Postal Service employees attacked by dogs last year nationwide reached 6,755 — more than 200 higher than in 2015, USPS reported, with LA at the top of the list. 

Looking back to 2011, GM Brenda Barnette’s first year at LA Animal Services, there were only 44 bites for the entire year, almost one-half of the current rate. Los Angeles is definitely catapulting in the wrong direction. 

This is not only a danger to the public, but also to LAAS Animal Control Officers who suffer serious bites and risk other injuries attempting to avoid attacks. In 2015, Director of Field Operations Mark Salazar announced at a Harbor Neighborhood Council meeting that workers' compensation claims for LAAS had risen 350%. 

Reports of loose dogs (categorized as "dogs-at-large") -- owned or strays -- need to be addressed when complaints are received by the department and before the first bite occurs, in order to keep residents and service employees (including mail and package delivery) safe. The primary function for which municipal animal control agencies were established under State law was to insure the impounding of stray (loose) dogs for public health and safety. This was prompted by rabies epidemics. 

Dogs are territorial and, when allowed to roam streets and neighborhoods, their "territory" is expanded. If the dog is aggressive by nature and, especially if it is also an unaltered male, it is statistically far more likely to pose a serious threat to the community. 

However, "Dogs-at-large" (running loose or escaped from yards) are No. 18 on the priority list authorized by Brenda Barnette for her field officers.

Although animal attacks are a #2 priority, officers state that they are so busy that they rarely arrive at a dog-bite scene before the victim has been assisted by LA Fire Department and/or transported for medical care. They also confirm that attacks happen almost daily in Los Angeles, including the maiming or killing of someone's beloved pet.

According to Assistant GM Dana Brown, there are still only 50 Animal Control Officers working 24/7 from six shelters to serve 469 square miles with almost 4 million residents and their pets. Eight officers are on long-term leave or restrictions and 25 positions are vacant. She explained at the April 11 Commission meeting, that they had only been able to start four new ACO's during the past two years because of a “glitch” in the hiring process.

Adding to this is the failure to replace the 2001-2003 fleet of dangerously malfunctioning animal control trucks that the city's fleet manager told Councilman Paul Koretz publicly in 2015 were already "falling apart." Assistant GM Brown admitted at the meeting that there had been "miscommunication" in the ordering of the 17 new trucks authorized. She added that now the department is facing budget cuts and the extra funding to correct the errors in the functional design might not be available. 

DOG BITE STATISTICS NOT KEPT BY LA ANIMAL SERVICES 

GM Brenda Barnette admits she does not keep stats on dog bites/attacks in the city. There is widespread speculation that this is to evade revealing the actual frequency and severity. It could also be a tactic to avoid filling LA’s shelters with aggressive dogs that might need to be euthanized and, thus, destroy the myth of the “No Kill” city.

This is very disturbing not only because LA stakeholders paid over $44 million in taxes, and $230,000 for the GM's salary in 2016, but also because victims of attacks or those who are threatened by menacing dogs have nowhere else to turn for help except LAAS. 

Equally if not more alarming is that no one in City government seems to care.

CITY OFFICIALS IGNORE THE USPS REPORT -- DISCUSS FERAL CATS 

On April 11, five days after the widely publicized USPS report, the Board of Animal Services Commissioners met. This is a Board of five volunteer residents appointed by the Mayor and designated by the City Charter as head of the Los Angeles Animal Services Department, with the General Manager setting policy. 

Not one of the Mayor's appointees mentioned the upsurge or dangers of increased dog bites -- not even to request it as a future agenda item.

The Commission, GM Barnette and a room populated with representatives from various city departments, including the offices of the Mayor and City Attorney, were there to discuss feral cats and a proposed city-funded TNR (Trap/Neuter/Release) program to allow free-roaming, unowned, unsocialized cats to be released into neighborhoods citywide.

This plan hinges on the successful results of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s tax-funded $800,000 Environmental Impact Report (EIR) by the City’s Bureau of Engineering, which they hope will show that a Trap/Neuter/Release (TNR) program that results in tons of cat feces and urine excreted on streets and yards of residential areas; the spread of parasites and diseases such as toxoplasmosis; and rampant destruction of birds and other small mammals by colonized cats all over the city will not have a negative impact on communities.

WHY USPS “DOG-BITE” STATS ARE IMPORTANT 

The USPS annual dog-bite statistics during “Dog Bite Prevention Week" are headlined in media reports and TV news across the country as a significant indicator of neighborhood safety.

Any increase should be regarded as warning of a deficit in enforcement and/or effectiveness of the officials in charge of animal control, along with the elected or appointed representatives who seek positions with the responsibility for guarding the public’s interest and welfare.

Expecting government officials and agencies to be concerned about injuries inflicted by dogs, which can be as damaging as those incurred during robberies or gunshots or car accidents, is not asking for a special favor.

The lack of reaction by GM Brenda Barnette and the entire political hierarchy of Los Angeles to the USPS alarming report of increasing dog-bites -- while they focus on releasing feral cats into communities with no regard for homeowners' opinions, or impact on quality of life, or public health and safety -- is just another indicator of Los Angeles' lack of leadership and systemic disconnect with reality. 

The feral cat issue was fast-tracked to the Personnel and Animal Welfare Committee for discussion and further approval on Tuesday, April 19, with no discussion of the USPS dog-bite report on the agenda.

(Phyllis M. Daugherty is a former City of LA employee and a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MCDONALD REPORT--In the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council have quietly perverted a much-needed housing program for homeless men, women, and children. And affordable housing advocates and the Los Angeles Times are not sounding the alarm. (Photo above: Mayor photo-oping with the homeless.) 

Los Angeles is currently facing one of its worst homeless crises in recent memory. It’s so bad, the Times reported, that LA has the highest number of unsheltered homeless people in the entire United States. 

As a 2013 mayoral candidate, Garcetti told an audience of affordable housing advocates that he would end homelessness. Now, in 2017, he essentially backed off that campaign promise, saying that homelessness was a “long-term crisis” that needed “long-term solutions.” 

One of those solutions was a $1.2 billion bond initiative to build homeless housing, known as Measure HHH. Voters overwhelming approved it in November 2016. 

Another was a kind of pilot project for Measure HHH, known as the Affordable Housing Opportunity Sites (AHOS) program. It will utilize several city-owned properties on the Westside and in Lincoln Heights and South L.A., among other locations, to build more housing. 

The LA Times has described AHOS as a program that will build “permanent supportive housing,” which specifically caters to the homeless and provides important services. 

The paper also reported that Garcetti and the City Council “spent months developing plans for converting as many as 12 city-owned sites [through the AHOS program] into housing for the city’s homeless residents.” 

Garcetti, City Council President Herb Wesson, and other council members also used their time to campaign against a development reform initiative called Measure S. It sought to fix LA’s severely broken planning and land-use system, which numerous critics say has fueled the city’s homeless crisis. 

To get LA’s liberal voters to vote down Measure S, Garcetti and council members repeatedly said the initiative would stop the city from building homeless housing through the AHOS program. 

In a January interview on the local ABC TV affiliate, for example, Garcetti said that “nine out of the 10 (AHOS) properties, the city’s going to build housing for the homeless on, couldn’t be built if Measure S gets passed.”  

City Hall politicians regularly linked the AHOS program to homeless housing — and to Measure HHH, which voters expect Garcetti and the City Council to use for homeless housing, not something else.

But only weeks after Measure HHH was approved on November 8, the betrayal of the homeless — and LA voters — was well underway at the hands of Garcetti, the City Council, and the City Administrative Officer. 

In December 2016, the City Council approved the final details of the AHOS program, which was organized by the City Administrative Officer with much input from the City Council and mayor. It had turned into something startlingly different from what City Hall politicians had been promising — and what the LA Times had been describing. 

The City Administrative Officer recommended, and the City Council approved, an AHOS program that now offered “affordable multifamily housing,” “mixed-income housing,” “affordable homeownership,” “innovative methods of housing,” and, finally, “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless.  

The City Administrative Officer also recommended that it enter into negotiations with developers who have proposed a “mix of supportive, affordable, and market-rate units.” Again, the City Council approved. 

On December 7, 2016, at the City Council’s Homeless and Poverty Committee, Yolanda Chavez, a top official with the City Administrative Officer, revealed another disturbing fact. 

An AHOS project that’s officially deemed “permanent supportive housing” only needs to earmark half of its units for the homeless. In other words, not even the homeless housing will truly be homeless housing. 

“You can have a project that has 50 percent affordable units and 50 percent supportive,” said Chavez. “They have to be 50 percent supportive, and 50 percent of those have to be reserved for the chronically homeless. So that’s the definition of permanent supportive housing.” 

Chavez talked as if everything was perfectly okay. Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, chair of the homeless and poverty committee, said nothing. Affordable housing advocates, who were present, also kept mum. 

Instead, advocates had only good things to say about the AHOS program — perhaps because they wanted city contracts to build AHOS projects. 

The LA Times was unconcerned, casually reporting that the “city initially planned to offer the [AHOS] sites for supportive housing, which would include on-site services. But the recommendation released Thursday said proposals could include affordable housing, mixed-income housing, market-rate housing and occupant-owned housing as well.”  

The fact that a homeless housing program, which Garcetti and City Council members touted as a vital first step to address LA’s homeless crisis, could now build market-rate housing did not alarm the LA Times in the least. 

All this is happening in a city run by liberal Democrats (Garcetti and Wesson included) in what’s considered to be one of the top progressive bastions in the U.S. — with the left-leaning LA Times supervising. 

Today, Angelenos remain largely uninformed about the specifics of the AHOS program. LA politicians quietly, and hurriedly, pushed it through; the LA Times never raised an eyebrow; and affordable housing advocates took a powder.  

City officials are currently sorting through the proposals for projects that will make up the AHOS program. With complete certainty, permanent supportive housing will not be built at every city-owned property — five sites in Lincoln Heights, which is represented by Councilman Gil Cedillo, have already been designated for “mixed-income” housing. 

As a result, the city’s use of Measure HHH money for the AHOS program will not go entirely to homeless housing, and homeless men, women, and children will not receive the full amount of housing and services that Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council had promised. 

Instead, an affluent professional, the only person who can afford market-rate housing in L.A., may land a nice pad on city-owned property in increasingly gentrified Lincoln Heights or near the beach on the Westside. It’s the very definition of a scandal. 

(Patrick Range McDonald, an award-winning investigative journalist, worked on the Measure S campaign as senior researcher and website editor. This perspective was posted most recently at washataw.com.) 

-cw

For the first time, on the day of March 23, 40 percent of Californian grid power between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. was generated by utility-scale solar plants. 

This proportion was a seasonal effect but not a fluke, and it certainly points to what will be routine in the very near future.

California has so much solar power now that sometimes the price of electricity turns negative. Natural gas plant owners actually have to pay the state to take their electricity when that happens. But they make up for it during high-demand periods.

The negative prices were not passed on to consumers because they get charged for the whole mix, and California electricity rates are among the highest in the country.

If you count in the electricity generated by r ooftop solar panels, then on that day at that time, California was actually getting 50 percent of its electricity from solar.

This level of solar electricity generation is new in California. During the past year, there has been a 50 percent increase in utility-scale solar generation.

California now has nearly 10 gigawatts of solar power. That is more than all of Britain. It is more than the entire country of France. Even more than the entire country of India. 

If you looked at all the electricity generated in California on the day of March 23, you’d find that 56.7 percent of it was generated by renewables—in addition to solar there are wind turbines, hydroelectric from dams, geothermal and biomass.

Jobs in solar energy in California expanded by 67 percent year on year. 

California wants a third of its grid energy to come from renewables in only 3 years, in 2020. It wants the proportion to rise to 50 percent by 2030.

(Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an occasional contributor to CityWatch. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia. This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s website.)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS--A state audit gave Alliance College-Ready Public Schools a mixed review last week, following an 11-month examination of spending and privacy issues related to Alliance’s two-year battle against teachers organizing a union at the charter network’s 28 schools. 

Though Alliance has been cleared of suspicions that it might have used public tax dollars in its heated anti-union campaign, the report did criticize the charter management organization’s compliance level with federal student privacy rules when it released protected student data to third parties.

The conflict dates to March of 2015, when a group of Alliance teachers and counselors announced its decision to organize a union and join the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). In that same month, according to auditors, the Alliance Home Office, which is Alliance’s nonprofit charter management organization (CMO), created a special account and spent nearly $1 million of a $1.7 million war chest raised from private donors.

Other findings include:

• In fiscal year 2015–16, philanthropy accounted for 63 percent of total spending by Alliance Home Office. The CMO took in $29.4 million in private giving against $46.5 million in expenses.
• The Alliance CMO donated more funds to its charter schools in fiscal years 2014–15 and 2015–16 than it had in fiscal year 2013–14, before the unionization efforts began.
• Classroom expenditures did not decline because of Alliance’s anti-union campaign.
• Alliance Home Office used private funds to reimburse its schools for staff time spent on anti-union activities.
• Alliance’s policies and procedures did not establish adequate segregation of duties over the Alliance charter schools’ procurement process to mitigate the chance of fraud and abuse.

Both sides were quick to claim wins in the findings. An Alliance spokesperson was quoted as saying the audit represented a vindication for the franchisor. For its part, California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), whose own role in using Alliance parent-student data was examined by auditors, released a statement commending Alliance but downplaying the audit’s privacy criticisms.

“The audit confirmed that all public funds received by the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools were directed to the classroom,” it stated, “and that per-pupil classroom spending at three Alliance charter schools reviewed for the audit had in fact increased during the period of 2013 to 2016.”

But Alliance teachers claimed a victory in what they said amounted to the first official acknowledgment by the charter that it was actively fighting unionization.

“The Alliance has been claiming over and over again that they’re not running an anti-union campaign,” said Alisha Mernick, an art teacher at Alliance Gertz-Ressler High School. “They’re really still sticking to this narrative that this is an illusion that we’ve painted as some kind of tactic. In this report, it says this is the anti-union campaign. This is dollars spent, documented carefully.”

Charter schools are publicly financed but privately operated, and fears by the state legislature’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee that the 12,500-student, 28-school Alliance network, which is the largest charter chain in Los Angeles, might be misspending tax dollars, became one of the audit’s objectives. But the committee also tasked the auditor to look at whether Alliance’s use of the confidential information about parents, students and alumni had violated the protections of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Those concerns were prompted by reports that part of the anti-union effort was led by CCSA, the state charter industry’s trade and lobbying organization. CCSA had recruited former Alliance students and paid them to work at a phone bank in an outreach program that asked Alliance parents to oppose the union drive. Parent and student phone numbers and addresses are considered protected data under FERPA, and parents have the right to opt out of allowing a school to share the information with third parties.

On the first allegation, the auditor found that although the school’s charter management organization, Alliance Home Office, had spent $917,759 as of June, 2016 on the union fight out of a total of $1.7 million in private philanthropy raised to block the union, that money was segregated in a separate account from tax revenues. Auditors also said that Alliance had used an additional $2 million in pro bono legal work in the campaign.

That grand total drew a sharp rebuke from UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl. In a statement, Caputo-Pearl blasted Alliance’s spending priorities, charging that “Raising funds for a war chest to fight your own employees is just plain wrong. Operators of publicly funded schools should be working to see that every available dollar is spent to further quality education for students.”

But giving student directory information to CCSA was another matter, according to auditors. The report rejected Alliance’s claim that under FERPA’s broad exception of “legitimate educational interest” it was free to share confidential student information without undergoing the cumbersome process that requires parents to annually opt out of waiving their privacy rights. The catch, auditors insisted, was that Alliance would have had to define the terms of the exception in annual notifications to parents, which it had failed to do.

But even had the charter sent out the notifications, the audit had no way to verify Alliance claims that it removed student data based on required parent opt-outs for the simple reason that the school hadn’t bothered to save any of the parent letters. Though that lapse effectively allowed the CMO to narrowly dodge a FERPA violation, auditors felt compelled to warn the operator in an addendum that its carelessness did not equate to following the law.

“Alliance is putting undue emphasis on the fact that the deficiencies we found related to its management processes do not violate specific provisions of law,” auditors reprimanded. “Strong management processes, sometimes referred to as internal controls, help ensure that entities do not misuse public funds or otherwise violate the law.”

Teacher Alisha Mernick remains skeptical that Alliance followed the opt-out process at all before the audit, insisting that in her six years at Alliance, she has only one memory of ever passing out the letters.

“I remember handing out those letters,” she asserted. “You know, ‘These are your privacy rights. This is the law. If you wish to opt out from this policy, you need to write a letter, asking to opt out and deliver it to the office.’ The one and only time I’ve handed out that letter was after we learned about CCSA phone-banking parents.”

Rosalba Naranjo, who has a seventh grade daughter at Alliance Richard Merkin Middle School, and was an early supporter of the unionization effort, told Capital & Main that she knew nothing about an opt-out letter or any other notification from Alliance informing her that the school reserved the right to share her child’s information with outside vendors unless she objected in writing.

“I never received a letter saying I had that option,” said Naranjo. “But I think it’s wrong that parents are receiving mailer after mailer, telling us that teachers forming their union is going to be bad for kids. What’s bad is kids being exposed to all that negative propaganda.”

UTLA currently represents over 1,000 educators in independent charter schools within LAUSD’s boundaries. Forming a bargaining unit at Alliance would require a majority vote by Alliance teachers and other certificated staff.

Mernick thinks that both momentum and the support of parents are on the teachers’ side.

“When parents are able to connect that teachers are going to be advocating on behalf of our students,” said Mernick, “and [that] teachers having a more equal say in how our [school] works is ultimately going to be good for the students as well, parents have been supportive. I’ve yet to meet a parent who reacts negatively.”

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted first at Capital & Main.)

-cw

RANTZ AND RAVEZ-If you check past California records, you will find that our voters have passed a number of measures to repair the roads, strengthen and repair bridges around the state and complete a variety of other transportation related projects in our so-called Golden State. While Governor Brown has dedicated billions of dollars to build the Bullet Train from nowhere to nowhere, we all manage our finances and tighten our belts to make ends meet.

EDUCATION POLITICS-A new study of public charter school funding has found that California’s explosive charter growth of the past 15 years has left school districts straining under a glut of new charter classrooms that are no better at educating California children than traditional public schools. Released Monday by the research and public advocacy group In the Public Interest (ITPI), Spending Blind reveals the extent to which tax dollars have been used to create privately held real estate empires — charter properties that, because they aren’t owned by the public, could, theoretically, one day be converted into luxury condominiums or shopping complexes. 

Subtitled, The Failure of Policy Planning in California Charter School Funding, the report zeroes in on the costs and impacts of the $2.5 billion in charter school construction and rent subsidies that has been made available to prospective charter operators in a taxpayer-subsidized system of 10 state and federal public funding programs mostly administered by the California School Finance Authority (CSFA). 

The report found that the facilities-funding programs had unintended effects, particularly that they 

• Incentivized adding classroom space to districts that didn’t need it. 

• Created charter schools that underperformed in comparison to their traditional public school neighbors. 

• Funded charters that in hundreds of cases were later found to have discriminatory enrollment policies. 

• Paid for privately owned real estate enterprises. 

• Enabled some of the state’s charter school scandals of last year. 

The charter school industry relies upon a system of state and federal grants, loans, tax credits, and state and district bonds to pay for classroom space. Spending Blind represents the first time, its author, political economist Gordon Lafer, told Capital & Main, that this system has been subjected to the kind of cost-benefit questions that the public school side of the equation is typically required to answer. 

“The most surprising discovery was just the total disconnect between the education policy goals of creating charter schools – [that] I think are still pretty much what people think is the point of charter schools – and how that money is spent,” said Lafer, who is also an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. “I expected that it would be like, you know, ‘We have these goals, we write the goals into funding.’ Instead, it was a total disconnect.” 

Charter schools are financed with the same taxpayer dollars that pay for public schools, but are managed by private companies. Passed in the early 1990s, the state’s original charter law created the charter school of the popular imagination -- a statutory zone of deregulation that allows boutique schools to develop superior curricula geared to persistently low-performing students. 

But beginning in the late ’90s, a flurry of changes to the law included generous facilities subsidies that effectively opened the door to charter management organizations (CMOs) — scaled-up corporate franchises whose overall performance has roughly mirrored that of existing public schools. From having fewer than 200 charters in 1998, California now boasts 1,230 schools with 581,100 students, giving it the largest charter enrollment in the nation. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has vowed to nearly double that number by 2022. 

In a prepared statement, CCSA brushed aside the report’s findings as an attempt to generate support for Senate Bill 808, a charter school reform measure authored by State Senator Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). It also accused ITPI of a “well-documented and biased point of view on the role charter schools play in the public education system.” 

Nevertheless, Lafer found that public facilities funding has been disproportionately concentrated among the fewer than one-third of schools that are owned by CMOs of between three and 30 schools. And it pointed to the state’s four largest California CMOs — Aspire, KIPP, Alliance and Animo/Green Dot — as claiming an even more disproportionate share. 

Lafer also alleged that Los Angeles’ Alliance College-Ready Public Schools network of charter schools also led the big CMOs in using public facilities financing to build up subsidized inventories of private real estate. Lafer’s study reports that Alliance alone has translated $110 million in federal and state taxpayer support into a portfolio of privately owned property “now worth in excess of $200 million.” 

“I don’t think anybody in the legislature ever intended — and I wouldn’t think most citizens or taxpayers intended or would approve of the idea —that public tax dollars are going to be used to buy somebody private property,” Lafer said. 

Yet California charter schools can become the private property of a charter operator when they are paid for with proceeds from the state’s three public conduit bond programs offered by the CSFA, the California Municipal Finance Authority (CMFA) and the California Statewide Communities Development Authority (CSCDA). An operator could also get the same result using private funding subsidized by California’s New Market Tax Credits program, or by getting the school’s mortgage payments reimbursed through CSFA’s Charter School Facilities Grant Program, more commonly known as SB 740. 

Should the authorizer revoke the charter, the state and the local school district would be left scrambling to house displaced students. The now-unencumbered former charter operator, however, would be free to turn the buildings into luxury condominiums or sell them at a profit. 

The danger, Lafer explained, is that because there is no meaningful cap written into California’s education code, any CMO bent on aggressive expansion could effectively become too big to fail. If a privately owned chain expands into a General Motors-like behemoth, then one day goes irredeemably bad, the district would be faced with the staggering cost of replacing those privately owned classrooms. 

“You potentially lose those choices if the price of making those choices is prohibitively high,” Lafer explained. “And the more of this [facilities financing] that happens, the closer to that situation we get.”

That scenario is more than theoretical. Tri-Valley Learning Corporation (TVLC) might be the poster child for California’s taxpayer subsidy program. It is one of three California case studies that Lafer features from last year’s charter scandals. The school, which operates two charters in Livermore and two in Stockton, collapsed last November after a run of poor managerial and financial decisions that included taking on $70 million in charter facilities bond debt. Though its schools are still technically open for business, the company’s death rattle continues to echo in Stockton, where both TVLC charters, Acacia Elementary school and Acacia Middle school, will be shuttered in May.

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

TONE DEAFNESS AT CITY COUNCIL- The vast majority of Angelenos who show up at LA City Council meetings to address their representatives have never been there before. They come from every corner of the city, from every age group, and for different purposes, but there’s one thing they all have in common -- genuine, heart-felt passion about their reason for coming. Without such feeling, these Angelenos would never find the impetus to take time off from or risk losing their jobs, might not find a caretaker for their young kids, or, as senior citizens, might never venture out into the unfamiliar and frightening web of buses and subways. 

The expectations these people have when they attend a City Council meeting vary as much as their reasons for coming. Many have no idea what will happen when they take those fateful few steps up to the public comment podium once the agenda item for which they’ve travelled all this way to speak with their representatives is called by the Council President. What none of them expect (but which happens at least half of the time) is that they won’t be allowed to address the Council at all.  

Sometimes the bad news is delivered politely by the Sergeant-at-Arms, sometimes curtly, but the effect is devastating nonetheless.  

And the reasons they are turned away? Most frequently, the cause is that the agenda item was already “taken up in committee”-- and the Brown Act says that if an opportunity for public comment is given at a committee meeting, then the Council doesn’t have to hear public comment at the regular meeting.  

Sometimes the reason for the bad news is that the Council has decided -- during the meeting -- to “continue” the agenda item to another date. That means they’ve decided not to address the issue that day but rather at a future meeting.  

Other times the reason for denial of public comment is that the item was “already approved,” as a result of Council President Wesson taking up the issue in the first few seconds of the meeting, even if the item appears near the end of the published agenda.  

In every one of these cases, Council President Wesson can easily make it possible for these Angelenos to make their comments. Yet he rarely does that.  

Even for the lucky ones who make it up to the podium to say their piece there is disappointment. They will find many of the Councilmembers -- often as many as half or more -- are missing or engaged in side conversations, or, as happened recently, holding a press conference.

It’s heartbreaking. It’s wrong.  

In October, on a motion by Paul Krekorian, the amount of time afforded to those who have journeyed down to City Hall to address their representatives was cut in half. How much time does that mean? Five minutes? Three? No, the answer is: one. A single minute. 

It’s no wonder that the respect level for politicians is at an all time low. It’s no wonder that voter turnout for Los Angeles elections is embarrassingly miniscule. It’s no wonder that more citizens than ever are going to court to get the attention of their representatives. As former LA Councilman Joel Wachs said in his run for mayor as far back as 1992, the people have become cynical about government and no longer believe anyone is listening or capable of understanding them. 

It’s interesting to imagine how successful politicians might be in today’s cynical climate if they were to include a promise of human compassion as a high priority in their political campaigns. Of course that would require that they possess that quality in the first place. And, based on the treatment of constituents in the Los Angeles City Council chambers, human compassion is running in short supply.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LOS ANGELES … ONLY THE RICH NEED APPLY--From Los Angeles to Berlin, developers and politicians, not to mention the “new urbanists,” are creating a global gentrification crisis – and it’s not just the poor who are getting hurt. We first came to understand the ugliness of gentrification in Los Angeles.

In LA, gentrification has been fueled by the City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s willingness to grant “spot-zoning” approvals to deep-pocketed developers who want to build luxury-housing high-rises. 

For example, the city’s General Plan and community plans lay out zoning rules for what can and cannot be built in neighborhoods. So a 20-story luxury-housing tower cannot go up in a community that’s only zoned for four-story buildings.

Over the past few years, however, developers have gone to the L.A. City Council and Garcetti, with checkbooks in hand, asking for zoning exemptions – or “spot-zoning” approvals. After taking thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and other political cash, such as money for a council member’s “officeholder” account, the City Council and Garcetti almost always deliver the favors.

Developers then demolish an older building with affordable housing units to construct a luxury high-rise with over-priced apartments or condos. Or, developers throw up a luxury tower on a piece of land that’s not normally zoned for that kind of project.

Developers make tens of millions, if not more, in profits from spot-zoning approvals. But residents and neighborhoods, especially if a luxury high-rise goes up in a working- or middle-class community, feel the pain.

Residents in an affordable apartment building that’s slated for demolition lose their homes from the get-go. And more times than not, there’s no way they can afford the exorbitant rent at a new luxury-housing tower that offers such fancy amenities as concierge service, a gym, and, believe it or not, a dog park. A senior citizen or housekeeper or struggling artist is out of luck while a happy dachshund gets world-class treatment. 

Adding to the displacement, the luxury tower jacks up rents for residents in other buildings in the neighborhood—and a once affordable community becomes less affordable. Not only are those residents forced out, but lower- to middle-income people can no longer move in.

We saw this disturbing trend take place across LA – from the lower-income, Latino Eastside to the middle-income, white San Fernando Valley to working- and middle-class neighborhoods on the Westside to lower-income, African American South LA More than 20,000 affordable units have been taken off the market in LA since 2001 to make way for some form of luxury housing.

It didn’t matter what color you were, although people of color often got screwed the worst. If you weren’t making an annual salary of $100,000 or more to pay for higher rents, you were displaced – and a one-time worki ng- or middle-class neighborhood became gentrified.

Similar scenarios are unfolding in London, Portland, Berlin, (photo left) and numerous other cities across the United States and the world.

It’s particularly pervasive today. Deep-pocketed developers are on a spending spree around the world, buying up properties in major cities and building luxury projects or converting affordable housing into luxury housing.

In the United States, according to Zillow, developers are building all kinds of high-end apartments and condos, but are not construct enough housing for lower-income people. Politicians allow this to happen by either failing to come up with land-use policies that prevent widespread gentrification or they approve luxury projects that are not normally allowed under a city’s zoning rules.

More and more, community activists are fighting back, which is happening in Berlin, London, New York, and Los Angeles, where numerous neighborhood groups supported a development reform initiative known as Measure S.   LA’s political establishment hated it, and developers spent millions to kill reform. After all, they didn’t want a broken system that helped them make billions in profits and millions in campaign contributions to be fixed. Measure S ultimately failed at the ballot box this past March.

But the initiative did jump-start a much-needed, citywide discussion about troubling land-use policy, gentrification, corruption at LA City Hall, and a severely broken development approval process. That discussion, and neighborhood activism, will only continue in LA.

Luxury-housing developers and politicians either ignore or refuse to acknowledge the serious, street-level problems they are creating. The same goes for the “new urbanists,” as they call themselves. They push for more dense cities regardless of what kind of housing is built. They just want density, density, density.

Many urban planning academics are just as bad. They say the best way to lower rents and to cure housing shortages is to simply build more housing—the supply-and-demand theory. Developers then cite the academics and new urbanists to justify their luxury towers to the public and politicians. With that political cover provided by the “experts,” the developers build more high-end housing.

Yet the academics, developers, new urbanists, and politicians often ignore specifics. Cities such as L.A., which is dealing with a shocking homeless problem, are not facing a “luxury” housing crisis, but an “affordable” housing crisis. It makes perfect sense to build more “affordable” housing, not any kind of housing—fix the problem at its root.

That’s what Zillow recommended — developers must construct more housing for lower-income people, which includes the middle-class.

Developers, academics, new urbanists, and politicians don’t want to discuss that. It messes with their economic, political, and/or ideological agendas. (Yes, “new urbanism” is an ideology.)  The affordable housing crisis then worsens, luxury-housing prices are sky high, rents in the neighborhood keep going up, and working- and middle-class folks keep getting pushed out.

If gentrification continues to go unchecked, it will have devastating, long-lasting, multi-pronged impacts, and the world’s metropolises will become luxury cities that only the affluent can afford. Everyone else will struggle to make ends meet – or get the boot. 

(Patrick Range McDonald, an award-winning investigative journalist, worked on the Measure S campaign as senior researcher and website editor. This perspective was posted first at LA Weekly and most recently at washataw.com.) 

-cw

TOMORROW’S MOVERS AND SHAKERS TODAY--Crespi Carmelite High School senior Justin Miller (photo above) says, “A year ago, I watched The Hunting Ground, the award-winning documentary by Kirby Dick about sexual assault on college campuses. Then, I watched it again. And again. It hit me hard. I could not shake it.” 

The 2015 documentary produced by Amy Ziering follows the experiences of college students raped on campus who face retaliation and harassment as they fight for justice. One in five women will be the victim of sexual assault during their college experience – and that’s a statistic Justin would like to see turned around. Eleven million women are currently enrolled in higher education nationally and of that number, 2.5 million will be assaulted. 

Inspired by the documentary, Justin founded Seniors With A Mission (S.W.A.M.), with the initial goal of producing Raise the Volume, a one-night event at the Saban Theater on April 27. The teen started a GoFundMe and raised over $6,000 to underwrite the event but due to some logistical issues, has decided to donate money raised to The Rape Treatment Center. To expose Los Angeles-area high school seniors to this crucial issue before they leave for college, Justin has appealed to Kirby Dick and the team at The Hunting Ground to allow the film to be screened for free at participating high schools, including Crespi Carmelite, Louisville, Marlborough School and other schools in Los Angeles. 

“I am going to ask each high school to screen the film for their seniors,” the teen says. “If we can make this happen, we will ultimately reach more high school seniors and be left with more money to donate to The Rape Treatment Center. Although I am disappointed that we had to rethink the Raise the Volume event, it might yield the most benefit for the overall cause, which is awesome.” 

Justin, a writer/director who will be studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts next fall, explains most assaults happen during the first weeks of freshman year, as students begin their college experience, forever changing their lives. The mission of the S.W.A.M. is to “change the College Campus Culture to one of Compassion and Respect.” A painful and difficult subject will be embraced by an entire generation and revolutionized into a message of dignity, hope, and transformation.” -- Raise the Volume 

The Rape Treatment Center at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center was established in 1974 and is nationally recognized for its pioneering work in the treatment, prevention and education arenas. The RTC provides free comprehensive and compassionate care for adult and minor victims of sexual assault and operates 24 hours a day. 

Services include emergency medical treatment, forensic services, crisis counseling, and longer-term psychotherapy, advocacy that includes accompanying victims during legal and court proceedings, as well as during medical appointments. The Center provides information about rights and options so that victims can make informed choices. Over 50,000 victims and their families have received this support services. 

In addition, The RTC prevention education serves thousands of Los Angeles middle school, high school and college students. Students learn about rape, sexual assault, peer sexual harassment and other forms of abuse. The students are also exposed to prevention strategies, including options in high-risk situations, safe intervention strategies when they witness a peer being sexually abused, assaulted, harassed or bullied, as well as how to get help. The center works with educators and administrators to best address sexual abuse, bullying, sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence on campuses, as well as to develop effective prevention policies and strategies. 

The center provides professional training and education programs that reach thousands of victim services providers each year, including police, paramedics, prosecutors, medical and mental health practitioners, and school personnel. An additional area of impact is Public Education and Policy Reforms.

To donate to S.W.A.M.: Raise the Volume, visit the Go Fund Me page.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

SKID ROW- (Editor’s Note: The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment did not respond to attempts by CityWatch to authenticate the charges made by the author of this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CityWatch.) Last week, there was an historic election of sorts in Downtown Los Angeles. The many historic moments start with the first-ever subdivision election in the history of the city. 

The Skid Row Neighborhood Council- Formation Committee, which began their formation effort in June of 2014, squeaked by the community of Hermon, who started their effort in 2011 and held their subdivision election two days later. 

While Hermon’s election was successful and went off without any hitches (beyond opposition from the larger Arroyo-Seco NC), Skid Row’s history books will forever overlook their election which was held in a physical polling place in Skid Row (with online voting becoming a last-minute additional option less than two weeks prior to the election day) and also had an energetic and well-attended “Uplift Skid Row Pep Rally” directly across the street, and instead will focus on the “Scandal in the Skid” which was originally leaked by an anonymous source connected to the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council (DLANC) who forwarded damaging e-mails to the Skid Row NC- Formation Committee, who initiated Skid Row’s bid to create a new NC that would’ve broken away from the DLANC and addressed it’s myriad issues directly with City Hall’s resources. 

The irrefutable evidence pointed out that DLANC created a front organization called “Unite DTLA” which then forwarded “Vote NO on Skid Row Separation” campaign materials to DLANC’s entire database via e-mails that connected directly to a DLANC-controlled URL, which is illegal by City regulations. It was also discovered that Unite DTLA also used DLANC’s mailing address- which is paid for by the City’s NC Funding System (taxpayer funding), and thus also a violation. 

The Skid Row subdivision election’s preliminary results saw Skid Row NC losing by a slim 62-vote margin. DLANC’s database registered at least 700 potential voters from their 2016 NC elections. This entire database was automatically registered in Skid Row’s 2017 subdivision election. Easily, the “NO” position e-mails (publicly stated by a current DLANC Board member on social media to have been sent “four times a day”) may have influenced 62 of their 700 voters, and possibly more. 

This week, the Skid Row NC-FC officially filed multiple actions, which include a recount (there are provisional ballots that have yet to be counted), a grievance against the DLANC and 5 separate challenges all filed with the City’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE). 

If DONE accepts any of the challenges, an independent grievance panel will be formed with a possible decision coming no more than 14 days from it’s convening. 

If each of the challenges are dismissed, the Skid Row NC-FC has indicated that they will explore all possible options, including “legal options” which imply the possibility of at least one lawsuit, possibly naming both DLANC and the City of Los Angeles. 

This unfortunate turn of events takes away from a tremendous and unexpected turnout in which over 760 voters voted in favor of creating a Skid Row NC and over 1600 overall. Even rap superstar Ice Cube and dozens of Hip-Hop artists recorded cell phone videos urging qualified voters to “Vote YES for the Skid Row NC” which formulated from a #HipHop4SkidRow social media campaign. 

With all this momentum, Skid Row was able to organize and activate a newly-established voter base that could have been much larger, but there are also claims of voter suppression, which may be addressed after the pending challenges through DONE. The oldest voter in support of Skid Row’s effort was a 96-year old Skid Row man who beamed with pride for his community. 

Still, DLANC’s devious acts overshadow Skid Row’s glory and a revealing video released on social media exposes an even greater concern of how people outside of Los Angeles will view this controversial election. 

Will the City of Los Angeles’ image, which prides itself on being diverse, inclusive, progressive and a “sanctuary city” be tarnished? 

Will international tourists see Los Angeles in an unattractive light because of it’s inhumane actions towards it’s homeless residents? 

Will the City’s 2024 Summer Olympic bid be negatively affected? Or the City’s effort to land the 2026 World Cup frowned upon? 

Or will this simply be just a local community tussle over the control of Skid Row? 

If the DLANC is to be punished, will it’s close ties to the powerful Downtown business sector be a factor in a soft “slap on the wrist”-type punishment? Or will the hammer be dropped to set an example of what will not be tolerated in any NC elections across the city? 

There is a lot at stake and the pressure is already mounting. 

It was reported that DLANC’s Executive Secretary stepped down this week. It is not yet known whether this move is related to the voting scandal, but surely the timing seems to come at a bad time. 

Can DLANC, which is considered one of the better NC’s of the 96 NC’s citywide, overcome this still-unfolding drama where things will simply return to normal or will major changes be inevitable? 

The Skid Row community is stunned and there is talk of the concerns regarding the possibility of long-term trauma, which would add to the many complexities associated with the area commonly known as “the homeless capitol of America”. 

Will Skid Row residents cower behind the results of this election and collectively decide never to get involved in politics again? Or stand up to the powerful land-use developers who aim to gentrify the area where they live? 

The results of DONE’s challenge review has great implications that will undoubtedly and instantly affect tens of thousands of Angelenos. 

A Skid Row NC could be the missing piece in all the new Measure HHH and Measure H discussions involving billions of taxpayer dollars, which could give the necessary credibility to subsequent decisions on homelessness that the DLANC just doesn’t have. 

Either way, history will again be made. 

Skid Row NC-FC members strongly believe they are on the right side of history. 

This will undoubtedly be a significant turning point in Los Angeles’ well-documented struggles to sufficiently handle it’s expanding homeless problems which include a lack of significant low-income housing, adequate storage facilities for homeless citizens and ineffective healthcare services for the ever-growing mental illness population and even help for those suffering in various states of addition. 

The new Homeless Count numbers will be released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) at the end of next month. 

The fight to create a Skid Row NC may still continue well past that. 

It is unknown what solutions the “NO” voters have planned to address homelessness in Skid Row, if any. 

Maybe they just got caught up in the moment of wanting to simply win an election. 

History books now await DLANC’s entry.

EASTSIDER-Let’s be honest. Since the late 1980’s, Council District 1 has been a district deliberately created to be a majority-Hispanic council district. You can check out the history at Wikipedia.  

The latest revisions to the District are the product of a particularly slimy body-swap political exercise presided over by the 2012 LA Redistricting Commission. It was so toxic that it only ended in 2015 with a federal judge’s ruling long after the 2013 election was over. 

Here in Glassell Park, I guess we should be used to being treated like serfs, since we have at various times been under Council District 13 with Eric Garcetti, Council District 14 with Jose Huizar, and Council District 1, initially with Reyes and now with Cedillo. 

The 2013 race to replace termed-out Ed Reyes was particularly nasty, with Cedillo, termed-out himself from the CA Legislature, running against Reyes’ Chief of Staff, Jose Gardea. You can get a taste of that debate in this LA Weekly article.  

Anyhow, the 2012 redistricting did not change the 70% plus Latino nature of the District. What it did do was provide a body swap between Huizar and Reyes so that CD 14 swapped its chunk of Glassell Park and environs out for Downtown LA where Huizar could make more money with the CRA and the business/developer community. It also let Council President Herb Wesson split Koreatown into four districts for his own purposes…including a piece landing in CD 1. 

With that background, it seems to me that the 800 pound gorilla in the room for the Council District 1 runoff, is whether gentrification, missteps by the incumbent, and voter turnout will flip this district to non-Latino. 

How We Got to a Runoff 

Between 2013 and now, many of our communities have been the beneficiaries of a gentrification tsunami in the Echo Park, Highland Park, Glassell Park and Cypress Park areas. Mt. Washington doesn’t count, since it had already been gentrified. 

As Silverlake became outrageously expensive, our hillsides from Highland Park to Glassell Park became the next “new wave” of gentrification, with single family homes suddenly going for $700,000 and up. Also, condos and small lot homes are popping up like mushrooms with exorbitant prices. All this is driving out a lot of longtime residents who can’t even afford their apartments. 

Regarding Gil Cedillo and Joe Bray-Ali, there is an irony in this race. When he ran in 2013, Cedillo talked to everyone; on the other hand, City Hall Insider Gardea was locked in to Ed Reyes “never met a development he didn’t like” (unless it was a single family home) remote style of governance. 

This time around, Cedillo is characterized as the incumbent who loves development and doesn’t talk to the troops, while Joe Bray-Ali is the young, fresh candidate who talks to everyone. As I wrote in an earlier CW column, “Joe Bray-Ali Cleans Up Nice!” 

Further, it was clear at the Sotomayor School debate that Joe had a shot -- the takeaway quote being, “of all the other candidates Joe Bray-Ali stands the best chance of getting in a runoff.” 

And the results -- although initially in favor of Cedillo -- were ultimately:

While it’s nice to guess right, the margins in this race were very tight, and the number of total votes cast in a district with some quarter of a million people in it, was not so good. 

The Runoff Its Own Self 

Clearly Joe Bray-Ali has momentum going for him, and is garnering unusual endorsements, such as CD 13’s Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, in addition to the Los Angeles Times and a number of environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters. And there is no question that the issue which brought Joe to everyone’s attention -- safe streets and the Bicycle Plan -- has galvanized supporters. 

Gil Cedillo also has a number of endorsements, from Jerry Brown and Xavier Becerra to Mayor Garcetti and Gloria Molina. Perhaps of more use in this race are the ones from the Police Protective League, the Firefighters, and UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles.) 

Joe’s difficulty will likely be in the area of Latino voters, inasmuch as his campaign has not achieved too much success in wooing this segment of the District to his cause. Of course Gil Cedillo’s problem is that, while the District is about 72% Latino, so far, that hasn’t translated into a huge Latino voter turnout. The trick may be how many of the Giovanni Hernandez and Jesse Rosas voters will come out and vote for Joe in the runoff. 

On the other side, it seems to me that a big difficulty Gil Cedillo has is that he actually likes to govern, as in introducing City Council initiatives and motions. This probably stems from his years in the California legislature, where they make decisions on statewide issues. Trouble is, most Angelenos I know could care less about what the City Council does -- unless and until their taxes go up, a monster development invades the neighborhood, or they actually need something from their Councilmember. 

The real name of the game in winning City Council Districts is going out and pressing flesh, having as many one-on-one contracts with each neighborhood as possible, and demonstrating that the Councilmember cares. Take Mitch O’Farrell as an example. He’s never met a development or developer he doesn’t love (even if the project is on a fault line) but has great constituent services staffing, and is out everywhere pressing the flesh all the time. And guess who won re-election in a walk? Mitch. 

Joe Bray-Ali is out and about everywhere, while Gil Cedillo labors under the handicap of being an incumbent with a track record. The rap on him is that once elected, his team slacked off on daily outreach to the various community groups and neighborhood councils, and it was difficult to get him to go out and press the flesh of constituents. It is difficult to turn around these perceptions at election time; on the other hand, the challenger can make any promise he wants before getting elected and having to deliver. 

Upcoming Events 

As we speak, the East Area Progressive Democrats (EAPD), now up to about 750 members, have endorsed Joe Bray-Ali, but many of them are not in CD 1. The Northeast Democrats (NEDC) have not endorsed; however, they have scheduled a meeting for April 19 to vote on an endorsement. Of course, they are a much smaller group, but at this point everything counts. 

There will also be an important candidates’ forum in the critical Westlake/Pico-Union area on April 17 at the Monsenor Romero Hall (2845 W. 7^th Street, starting at 7p.m.) It should prove interesting. 

Hopefully, there will be more candidate forums and events before the election, and I may write another column before the actual May 16 election date. 

The Takeaway 

Not only does Joe Bray-Ali clean up nice, but my initial observation stands: “…if Joe Bray-Ali can force Cedillo into a runoff, all the electoral math changes in a hurry. If an incumbent with all the advantages can’t put the election away in the primary, he’s viewed as wounded meat and all bets are off.” 

At the same time, never underestimate the value of incumbency. Mr. Cedillo did, after all, come within a hair’s breadth of winning the election outright, and I suspect that in a two-candidate race he would have won. At this point, his political back is up against the wall, and you can be sure that all stops are out. 

The real question has to do with voter turnout…and the Latino vote. 

Shortly after you read this article, vote-by-mail will start on April 18, and the actual runoff election date is May 16. Remember, as the primary election proved, EVERY VOTE COUNTS! If we don’t vote, complaints about the results won’t mean much.

PLEASE VOTE! We will be living with the results of this election for 5 1/2 years.

(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.

GELFAND’S WORLD--For sixteen years, Los Angeles officials have been telling us that the system of neighborhood councils exists to improve citizen participation in government. In fact, the City Charter leads off its section nine with the following purpose statement: 

To promote more citizen participation in government and make government more responsive to local needs, a citywide system of neighborhood councils, and a Department of Neighborhood Empowerment is created.  Neighborhood councils shall include representatives of the many diverse interests in communities and shall have an advisory role on issues of concern to the neighborhood. 

That seems pretty self-explanatory. In my home-council, we've been encouraging participation by our neighbors since February 2002, back when we held the first neighborhood council board meeting in the city. Over the ensuing years, public officials and LAPD Senior Lead Officers have added their own contributions. In fact, our public treats the chance to ask questions of the LAPD and of civic officials (or their representatives) as an important part of the meeting. In reality, this is their part of the meeting, because it provides members of the public a chance to engage with officials who have the power and authority to change things. Even when the visitor is an appointed representative (usually a staffer) rather than the City Councilman, it is a chance to provide feedback to the elected official. 

That's why I was so surprised when an old friend told me the following story. He was at his neighborhood council meeting (it's the council immediately adjacent to my home council) and he got up to ask the City Councilman's representative a question. This was nothing new actually -- it happens routinely at most neighborhood councils around the city. But this time, he was told that he could not ask his question. The rules had changed. 

He explained to me that he was told the following -- that only members of the elected board could ask questions of the City Councilman's representative during the public part of the meeting. If he wanted to have a private conversation with the rep away from the meeting, he was welcome to try. 

It's apparently the new rule. If this is an accurate description of a new policy, it certainly represents a terrible way of doing business. 

I called the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the city agency that oversees neighborhood councils. The DONE representative I spoke with explained the situation my friend had experienced. The Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council had a rather busy agenda that evening, so to save time, the board decided to abolish the public's right to ask questions of the visiting dignitaries. Thus my friend Bill was forbidden to ask Councilman Joe Buscaino's representative Ryan Ferguson a question in public. 

That this is a bad policy is easy enough to see. An essential element of public participation is providing members of the public a chance to cross swords with elected officials. This is what we have seen in town halls held by congressmen over the past couple of months. The reception that members of congress had at their town halls may be the reason that we still have the Affordable Care Act. 

The public Q/A session is the public's opportunity to communicate not only with the elected official, but also with each other. This is particularly important when the inquiry concerns a City Councilman's performance in office, analogous to the way it concerns a congressman's voting record. What is the councilman going to do about traffic or homelessness or home burglaries? Will he support the proposed sales tax increase? What does he think about the current trend to treat home burglaries as misdemeanors? 

It's not obvious that elected board members will think of the same set of questions as you or I would, and it's rather unlikely that board members will press their questions to the same extent that we might. In fact, there is a reasonable argument to be made that neighborhood council governing board members have different incentives than the public when it comes to discussions with elected officials. The board members are trying to maintain a cordial relationship with the elected official, something which is not conducive to aggressive public questioning over matters of performance or ethics or legislation 

The question of purpose 

In considering the radically different approaches taken by my home council (Coastal San Pedro) and the council in question (Central San Pedro), it's appropriate to ask what the whole system is supposed to be about. Which way is more likely to result in improved government as described in the City Charter's quaint wording? My rather partisan point of view is that shutting the public out of the process is less than optimal. Actually, it's the way to communicate to the public that they are second class participants. What's so outrageous is that the neighborhood council is the organization that is supposed to be the closest to the public in all of city government. How hard is it to point out that citizen participation means exactly what it says? 

But this point having been made, it is also necessary to admit that the night's agenda (see the link above) was in fact pretty busy. How do you rationalize the need to get through a long agenda with the public's right to participate in questioning of officials? 

I think that the honest answer is that for some agendas and some neighborhood councils, it's not always possible. It's necessary to make a choice. 

In order to make a choice rationally, it's necessary to consider the opposing needs. 

My view is that an essential function of the neighborhood council is giving the public the maximum opportunity to make its own views known. It's not unreasonable to dedicate a significant fraction of council meetings mainly to public participation. For example, my council held a couple of meetings dedicated to discussion of the homelessness problem, leading off with speeches by homeless advocates and devoting the bulk of each meeting to public comments. 

In addition, it's necessary to devote a sufficient amount of time for public participation at every other council meeting. Hearing from the public is a prime function of the neighborhood councils, and all of them should live up to this expectation. 

But what about all the other agenda items -- the items that require such a large amount of time? There are three possible answers to this question. The first is simple: Just don't put so much on your agenda. A lot of routine matters are sufficiently handled every two months, or even every three months. 

Another method is to learn how to use time management. In practice, this involves putting a time limit on each agenda item in advance. The board can extend the length of any item, knowing full well that this adds to the length of the meeting. It is between the board and the public as to whether this is acceptable. But absent an affirmative board vote to extend the length of any given item, it is over when it has used up its allotted time. 

I understand that most boards would feel strange about having an item die without taking a vote, but there again, there are methods for dealing with the situation. In brief, go directly to the vote at the end of allotted time, or put further consideration of the matter over until the next meeting, or quickly pass a motion to extend the item by five minutes. 

It's possible to handle your time effectively such that the rights of the public to participate are not hindered. That this requires of the presiding officer a certain skill set is not in question, and training in these matters is one of those obligations that should have been taken up by DONE years ago but never was. 

I should also like to add that lengthened board agendas are a symptom of a long term trend in neighborhood councils, the idea that every question should be sent to a committee, and there should be a committee for every question. It sounds reasonable at the superficial level, but a deeper look leads to some concerns. For one thing, committee work is usually carried out by a smaller number of participants, and committee meetings often happen at times and places that are difficult for many members of the public to attend. The result is that those few people who are most invested in any particular subject are the ones who become the committee members. The result is, often enough, a skewed recommendation from the committee to the board. Now add in a board meeting which limits public participation (one comment not to exceed two minutes is certainly to be limited) and the recipe is for an overall skewed result. 

It is of course possible for a committee to be made up almost entirely of people with a specific interest and still see a fair result. This happens when, for example, the downtown business owners can ask for certain changes that would benefit the community as a whole without damaging any other part of the community. 

But the primary functioning of a neighborhood council still has to include a maximum of public participation, and this remains the case whenever the choice is between hearing public comment and hearing the reports of committees. Or to be specific, Bill should have been allowed to ask Ryan his question.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw