LOS ANGELES

NEW GEOGRAPHY--California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.

Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”

Virtually all the polices now embraced by Sacramento — from water and energy regulations to the embrace of sanctuary status and a $15-an-hour minimum wage — come right out of San Francisco central casting. Little consideration is given to the needs of the interior, and little respect is given to their economies.

San Francisco, for example, recently decided to not pump oil from land owned by the city in Kern County, although one wonders what the new rich in that region use to fill the tanks of their BMWs. California’s “enlightened” green policies help boost energy prices 50 percent above those of neighboring states, which makes a bigger difference in the less temperate interior, where many face longer commutes than workers in more compact coastal areas.

The new Bantustans

Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.

This disparity has worsened in recent years. Until the 2008 housing crash, the interior counties served, as the Kern EDC’s Chapman puts it, as “an incubator for mobility.” These areas were places that Californians of modest means, and companies no longer able to afford coastal prices, could get a second shot.

But state policies, notably those tied to Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate jihad, suggests Inland Empire economist John Husing, have placed California  “at war” with blue-collar industries like homebuilding, energy, agriculture and manufacturing. These kinds of jobs are critical for regions where almost half the workforce has a high school education or less.

Why the interior matters

In legislating against the interior, the state is trying to counter the national trend — evident in the most recent census numbers — that shows people seeking less dense, more affordable areas. Both millennial and immigrant populations are growing rapidly in these regions. Between 2000 and 2013, the Inland region experienced a 91 percent jump in its population with bachelor’s degrees or higher, a far more rapid increase than either Orange or Los Angeles counties.

By curtailing new housing supply, California is systematically shutting off this aspirational migration. Chapman University forecaster James Doti notes that, in large part due to regulation, Inland Empire housing prices have jumped 80 percent since 2009 — almost twice the rate for Orange County. Doti links this rapid rise to helping slow the area’s once buoyant job growth in half over the past two years. Population growth has also slowed, particularly in comparison to a decade ago.

Weighed down by coastal-imposed regulations, the interior is losing its allure for relocating firms. Many firms fleeing regulation, high taxes and housing costs used to head inland. Now, many are migrating to Nevada, Texas, Arizona and other states. “Many of the projects we saw years ago have surfaced in Phoenix,” lamented Mary Jane Ohlasso, assistant executive officer for San Bernardino County, in an interview. “The whole way California has grown has been hopelessly terminated,” she told me.

Over time, however, constraining the interior will backfire on the coastal enclaves. In recent weeks, coastal technology and professional service providers have raised a growing alarm about attracting and retaining thirtysomething skilled workers. Some have even suggested that new transportation infrastructure — for example, a tunnel between Corona and south Orange County — could provide an alternative for family-aged workers who cannot afford a residence closer to the coast. Others, to keep key employees, are purposely setting up offices in places like San Antonio for workers entering their thirties.

If this crisis of the interior is not addressed, the prognosis for California will be ever-growing class and race bifurcation and an ever-rising demand for welfare and other subsidies for those unable to pay for housing. California needs, in reasonable and sustainable ways, to keep open its regions of opportunity, not to seek to close them off to future generations.

(Joel Kotkin is the editor of New Geography  … where this piece was most recently posted … and is R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis-based public policy firm, and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.)

-cw

@THE GUSS REPORT-Aloof and incompetent government has been mocked by the masses since time immemorial. Outside of elections, it is sometimes the only way to have your dissent heard.

The increasingly antagonistic mockery of LA City Councilmembers at their thrice weekly gatherings has become a slapstick art form which has intensified during the five years that its president Herb Wesson has run the meetings, yet Wesson seems oblivious as ever to what he has done to increase the hostility in his quest to reduce civic participation. Specifically, he has: 

• Reduced public speaking time from a total five minutes to three for items on the agenda. 

• Reduced public speaking time from two minutes to one on any single agenda item. 

• Reduced general public comment (for items not on the agenda) from two minutes to one minute. 

• Moved general public comment from the beginning of the meeting, to the end of the meeting, back to the beginning and, now, in dribs and drabs, as filler throughout the meeting. 

• Consistently called for peoples’ speaker cards the moment they step outside of City Council chambers to go to the restroom, declaring their time forfeited. 

• Interrupted speakers, calling them “off-topic” without giving them a chance to make their point in their own way, including doing this to some whose primary language is not English and some who may be disabled or homeless and do not speak as swiftly as Wesson. 

• Repeatedly interrupted speakers while their already reduced speaking time ticks off the clock. 

• Called people to speak on a topic even though the agenda item is not yet ready to be voted on. 

• Allowed Councilmembers to mill around or even stray away from Council chambers during public debate, and set Council’s voting software default to an “aye” yes vote without paying attention to speakers’ concerns. 

• Squandered hours at the start of most City Council meetings with breathless, repetitious, fawning ceremony and celebration (which should be moved to a once-per-month weekend event) rather than put the peoples’ business first. 

• Misplaced speaker cards so that, when the person gets in line to speak, he or she is declared “disruptive” and thrown out of the meeting under threat of arrest. (Then he suddenly locates the cards once speakers have been ejected from the room. 

Just last week, on a day when City Council squandered hours on fluff before getting down to business, Wesson’s sarcastic, Napoleonic back-up, Councilmember Mitch Englander, told a disabled speaker who had an opinion with which he disagreed, “your prescription is now ready.” 

Where was Wesson’s reprimand for that? While Wesson and Englander whine, they give as good as they get. 

The situation is far worse now than during the years Mayor Eric Garcetti served as City Council president, although his interference with free speech resulted in a losing, costly-to-the-taxpayers federal 1^st Amendment lawsuit won by David “Zuma Dogg” Saltsburg. As a result, all new elected officials and commissioners who run public meetings are now warned about “The Zuma Dogg Ruling” before they enter the City Hall fray. And Mr. Saltsburg wasn’t the only critic to win a free speech battle in court against City Hall. 

Wesson’s restrictiveness and inability to find common ground is not only arbitrary and retaliatory against the City Hall regulars, it also hurts other people who may come to City Hall only one time in their lives to fight something like an unfair property lien, forcing them to wait hours for a paltry 60-seconds to speak, often without even being heard. 

Last week, Wesson dealt what will eventually become another losing hand for City Hall when he and the other Councilmembers instructed City Attorney Mike Feuer, who has cultivated his own retaliatory reputation, to figure out a way to (mis-)use trespass laws to silence critics.  

In typical Wesson-Englander fashion, they didn’t first hash out the specifics of how and where the legislation will be applied. From City News Service: 

“Vanessa Rodriguez, spokeswoman for Council President Herb Wesson, said that despite Englander's interpretation, the ordinance would not apply to public meetings.” 

According to Englander, the law will be applied to any city meeting or building where someone is deemed disruptive. He is the last person whose judgement should determine that. A year ago last week, Englander was swatted-down by a judge in his recent campaign for County Supervisor in an attempt to list on the ballot his profession as “police officer” even though he isn’t and never was one. 

Regardless, City Council unanimously approved its motion to suffocate criticism in Nancy Pelosi-fashion -- i.e., voting on it without knowing what’s in it.

While the gadflies love goading Englander into calling phony speaker names such as Mohammed Atta and this gem, to derisive laughter, things weren’t always this bad for Wesson. 

When Wesson first came to the City Council presidency as a skilled career politician who is fairly likable in one-on-one settings, he not only knew virtually everyone in the room, but in many instances, knew where they were headed once they left it. If he saw regulars in Council chambers on a given day, he instinctively knew that they probably wanted to get to another meeting up in the City Hall Tower, so he would reliably call on them early to make their points at City Council and send them on their way. It also helped Wesson get critics away from the Channel 35 cameras broadcasting the meetings sooner.

Now that is good political instinct! 

But over the course of time, Wesson has lost that sense of fairness -- to the detriment of the public and his ever-growling stomach -- whose churning can often be heard over his open City Council microphone. 

If Wesson returned to that more reasonable mindset and started running meetings in a more efficient and fair way, it might not halt the disruptions, but it would be a wise step in a better direction because where it’s headed now, the taxpayers and Wesson are going to lose in the end. And another 1^st Amendment win for the gadflies is fuel for the fire.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a CityWatch contributor, 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. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CALWATCHDOG--An immigration-enforcement headache anticipated by President Trump’s sister — federal appellate court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — is roiling law enforcement authorities in California. 

They say federal court rulings impede their ability to cooperate with demands from Attorney General Jeff Sessions that they cooperate more fully with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in turning over undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

At issue is how long jails and prisons can hold undocumented immigrants for pickup by ICE agents after their sentences are completed. The present practice in California is to give agents up to 48 hours. But especially in heavily populated areas with many jails — such as the Los Angeles region — ICE agents struggle to meet this deadline in picking up criminals set to be released.

Last month, Sessions blasted local authorities for being unwilling to hold these inmates up to 96 hours — four days — after their scheduled release and said failing to do so amounted to defiance of the federal government. A list released by the Justice Department cited eight California law enforcement agencies that it said had “refused” detainer requests: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department and local jailers in Alameda County, Madera County, Santa Clara County, Sacramento County, Santa Barbara County and the city of Anaheim.

Sheriffs say federal court ruling blocks longer jail detentions

But the California State Sheriffs’ Association says that only giving ICE 48 hours to get released criminals is not a matter of defiance. It’s to avoid costly lawsuits.

Association officials cited U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart’s 2014 ruling in a case from Clackamas County, Oregon, in which an undocumented immigrant accused of domestic violence, Maria Miranda-Olivares, was detained beyond the normal release time at ICE’s request. Stewart cited a federal appellate court ruling from earlier in 2014 that said ICE requests were just that — requests — and were not legally binding. She ruled that Miranda-Olivares could sue Clackamas County for unlawful detention.

The circumstances of the appeals case — Galarza v. Szalczyk — were somewhat different than the Oregon case. It dealt with a U.S. citizen who was detained at length by local authorities in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, then released by ICE agents after they determined he was a citizen, as claimed. 

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that threw out Ernesto Galarza’s lawsuit alleging illegal detention by Lehigh County. (Galarza had previously settled his lawsuit against ICE and its agents.) The opinion, written by Judge Julio M. Fuentes, cited a long list of precedents in which requests from ICE and its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, were treated by courts and the federal agency itself as nonbinding. Fuentes’ key finding:

“Under the Tenth Amendment, immigration officials may not order state and local officials to imprison suspected aliens subject to removal at the request of the federal government. Essentially, the federal government cannot command the government agencies of the states to imprison persons of interest to federal officials.”

Trump’s sister warned of ‘enormous ramifications’

But one of the three appellate judges who heard the Galarza appeal — Trump’s sister — dissented from Fuentes’ ruling and lamented the fact that the Obama administration had not filed an amicus brief:

“I am deeply concerned that the United States has not been heard on the seminal issue in this appeal, an issue that goes to the heart of the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. And make no mistake about it. The conclusion reached by my friends in the Majority that immigration detainers issued pursuant to 8 C.F.R. § 287.7 do not impose any obligation on state and local law enforcement agencies to detain suspected aliens subject to removal, but are merely requests that they do so, has enormous implications and will have, I predict, enormous ramifications,” Barry wrote.

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told the Los Angeles Times that state sheriffs had urged the Obama administration without success to appeal the Oregon ruling. Jones and other sheriffs interviewed by the Times said they had explained the bind they were in to Trump administration officials. But that didn’t deter Sessions from his criticism.

(Chris Reed is an editorial writer for U-T San Diego. Before joining the U-T in July 2005, he was the opinion-page columns editor and wrote the featured weekly Unspin column for The Orange County Register. This piece was posted originally at CalWatchDog.) 

-cw

NOISE POLLUTION NIGHTMARE-Nextdoor is lit up as neighbors in the West Adams community weigh in on the onslaught of air traffic noise over their community. Indeed, on the second day after relocating from one street north of the 10 freeway to 3 blocks south of it I recall thinking, "Oh no. I live under a flight path.” Jeff Camp, a West Adams resident spearheading local response, reported over 300 flights in one day, while neighbor Linda Marais stayed up and counted nine flights in the early morning, between 3 and 6 a.m., a practice that apparently is prohibited.   

According to the LAX website, it “is the fourth busiest passenger airport in the world, second in the United States. It served more than 80.9 million passengers in 2016 an increase of almost 8 percent from the previous year. As of March 2017, LAX offers 692 daily nonstop flights to 91 U.S. cities and 1,220 weekly nonstop flights to 78 international destinations in 41 countries on 66 commercial air carriers.  LAX ranks 14th in the world and fifth in the U.S. in air cargo tonnage processed, with more than 2.2 million tons of air cargo valued at over $101.4 billion.  LAX handled 697,138 operations (landings and takeoffs) in 2016.”

Technology is changing everything and the National Airspace System is not exempt. According to Wikipedia - “Between 2015 and 2025 they are transforming the air traffic control system in an effort to reduce gridlock in the sky and the airport. The project is dubbed NextGen [referred to as Metroplex in Southern California] and 'proposes to transform America’s air traffic control system from a radar-based system with radio communication to a satellite-based one.' GPS technology will be used to shorten routes, save time and fuel, reduce traffic delays, increase capacity, and permit controllers to monitor and manage aircraft with greater safety margins. Radio communications will be increasingly replaced by data exchange and automation will reduce the amount of information the air crew must process at one time.

As a result of these changes, planes will be able to fly closer together, take more direct routes and avoid delays caused by airport 'stacking' as planes wait for an open runway.” 

Aye. And there’s the rub.  

As the campaign is implemented throughout the country, the direct routes of airplanes following each other more closely have created noisy highways in the sky, a shower of pollution raining down onto communities below and a spike in complaints from 904 in February of 2016 to 3,247 in February of 2017. Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, New York, Phoenix, Culver City along with our adjacent community, and San Diego are primarily impacted and lawsuits have ensued. 

A local pilot weighing in on Nextdoor disputed that the Nexgen project has redirected flights over our community; rather, he said, it was the result of airport construction. It is both. So in October of 2016, Culver City decided to challenge the environmental review by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Southern California Metroplex Project. The FAA review conveniently found that there was no significant impact to the environment. Culver City filed a Petition for Review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit claiming that the FAA did not adequately consider the affect of noise and pollution on affected communities and did not do an adequate technical analysis before redesigning the airspace. 

“Our residents have already experienced a significant impact on their quality of life from current flight path changes. The citizens and businesses of Culver City deserve a full analysis and discussion of the location, altitude, and impacts of these new approach and departure procedures created by the Project, which are absent from the FAA’s Environmental Assessment,” said Culver City Mayor Jim B. Clarke.”

Numerous calls to Representative Karen Bass from the rising tide of Nextdoor activists, have resulted in an upcoming sit down and this statement from Representative Bass: “The continual barrage of airplane noise and pollution at all hours is absolutely unacceptable. My office has received numerous complaints over the past years about both daytime noise from frequent, lower flights, and about nighttime noise from planes landing over homes instead of over the ocean.  I encourage constituents to actively report the noise events to LAX noise management in order to build an official record of the problems. 

In the meantime, I have directed my staff to set up a meeting between the relevant agencies and affected constituents as soon as it can be arranged. I have also been working with my colleagues in the Congressional Quiet Skies Caucus to direct funds to address the airplane noise issues being felt across the country.  Please stay in touch with my office so I can continue to track how this is affecting our district.”

To file a complaint CLICK HERE. Complaints influence outcomes. 

(Dianne Lawrence is the editor and publisher of The Neighborhood News and an occasional contributor to CityWatch) Photo credit: Michael Kelly. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-The jury is no longer out. Our new President, Donald Trump, is the climate change denier-in-chief. He has called climate change a Chinese plot. He has appointed another unabashed climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a Federal agency established by Republican “moderate,” Richard Nixon. Trump has also withdrawn many Obama era climate-change regulations, such as restrictions on power plant emissions. Last, but hardly least, Trump nominated retiring Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, to become Secretary of State. On his way out the door, Exxon gave Tillerson a $180 million severance package, about six times what Exxon spent under his leadership to foster doubt about climate change.

If this situation strikes you as grim, you are correct, and given the upward trend of all climate change indicators, such as CO2 levels, extreme weather events, sea level rises, and the loss of polar ice caps, the world’s climate situation will only get worse. In fact, even before Trump, these trends were already quickly unfolding, which means his historical role is to make an already bad situation much worse.  

In light of these harsh realities, some Angelinos might become smug about climate change. After all, we live in a state, California, and a city, Los Angeles, where prominent elected officials, especially Governor Jerry Brown and Mayor Eric Garcetti, have assumed a major leadership role in opposing the Trump administration’s dangerous pushback against modest Obama era climate change programs. 

But, this smugness is premature. A closer look at LA’s actual climate change policies and practices issues reveals that our glass, too, is mostly empty. The following information should wipe the smile off anyone gloating about how forward thinking their city and state really are when it comes to climate change. 

Basic Environmental Programs where the City of LA falls short. 

CEQA: As I have previously written, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a potentially powerful tool to stop climate change. It provides appointed and elected decision makers detailed information on a specific project’s climate impacts, especially its likely generation of Green House Gases. Through CEQA, Environmental Impact Reports (EIR’s) also provide these decision makers with specific data on at least four project alternatives, including those identified as environmentally superior. Given the extraordinary dangers from climate change, some of which are already appearing, like mounting forest fires, most of us would assume that elected officials obviously opt for the environmentally superior alternatives. 

Wrong. In Los Angeles this does not happen. Instead, our elected officials reflexively select the most environmentally destructive alternative. This action, which sweeps hard evidence of unmitigatable climate change impacts under the carpet, requires the decision makers to adopt a Statement of Overriding Considerations. These statements sideline an EIR’s environmental findings through a text that routinely echoes a project’s claims about job and transit ridership generation. While these promises could conceivably be true, we will never know for sure because the approval process stops with the decision maker’s vote to adopt their Statement of Overriding Considerations. After that no approvals are contingent on evidence that a project actually boosts transit ridership or jobs, much less that these supposed outcomes offset the project’s actual generation of unmitigatable Green House Gases. 

Trees: The lowest hanging fruit in fighting climate is quite literally growing on trees, a basic infrastructure component that is, year-after-year, one of City Hall’s lowest budget priorities. As a result, most LA streets and parkways are either barren or haphazardly planted with inappropriate trees that are seldom pruned or watered. 

Nevertheless, when it comes to addressing climate change, trees are the closest things we have to a miracle cure. As we learned in high school biology classes, trees absorb CO2, sequester carbon in wood and leaves, and then exhale oxygen through photosynthesis. In addition, some trees, like Ficus, filter out other air pollutants, such as particulate matter. But, these benefits are just the beginning since trees also create beauty and a shade canopy. Both features promote walking in a city whose built environment remains auto-centric and whose natural environment is getting hotter.

Furthermore, trees also buffer another feature of climate change, heavier rains. Without trees these rains cause soil erosion and runoff. With trees, most of this damage is prevented because the rain hits the leave and then slowly percolates into the ground. 

Pedestrianization: Any successful climate mitigation program attempts to reduce automobile driving, the largest source of Green House Gases in California. This means that all alternative transportation modes, whether walking, bicycling, busses, light rail, heavy rails, commuter rail, and high speed interurban rail deserve more political and financial support. Among these, walking and bicycling are the low-cost alternatives. Furthermore, three other West Coast cities, notably Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have already demonstrated that walking and bicycling can become significant alternatives to automobiles. But, in Los Angeles the sidewalks are crumbling, and most do not have a proper tree canopy or ADA curb cuts. As for bicycling, even though Los Angeles has perfect weather, many wide corridors, and broad bicycle-friendly flat areas, LA ranks 24th in the United States when it comes to bicycling. 

Planning Documents: The City of Los Angeles has a Mayoral climate change document, pLAn, which markets itself as LA’s first climate action plan. This is an odd boast since Mayor Villaraigosa’s even more detailed climate action plan, Green LA, is still easily found on the City of LA’s website. But, such piddling details aside, the real problem with the City of LA’s overall approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation is that there is no there there. Other than another short-lived executive document, there are no legally adopted policy documents, implementing ordinances, or independent monitoring. 

Furthermore, the official city planning process, the General Plan, does not yet directly address the environment. While climate change related goals and programs are coincidentally scattered through many General Plan elements, especially Air Quality, Mobility, and the General Plan Framework, nothing links them together and nothing measures their effectiveness. 

While City Planning has resumed preparing its required annual General Plan monitoring report, the current document makes no mention to either the Villaraigosa or Garcetti climate action plans. For that matter, it makes no direct references to many existing City department climate-related programs, especially those at the Bureau of Sanitation. In theory, they all have a bearing on climate change adaptation (securing water) and mitigation (transit), but this is only implicit. They are never identified per se, and the monitoring report does not draw any climate connections from these programs to any executive climate initiatives or to multiple State of California climate mandates, such as AB 32 and SB 375. 

As for the preparation and adoption of a new General Plan Climate Change element that could build on executive documents and a vast array of city programs, we can always make a wish. After all, some California cities, like San Francisco, already have a General Plan environmental element, and the Governors Office of Research and Climate, has posted detailed policy guidelines and data bases for new General Plan environmental/climate change elements. 

Theoretical issues: The most common form of climate change denialism, exhibited by Donald Trump and his cronies, is rejection of the natural science climate consensus. The planet is now experiencing relentless climate change resulting from human activity. It has been observable for at least a century, and is now accelerating because of the increased generation of Green House Gases through industrial production, power generation, and transportation. 

But, one of the most astute climate change analysts, University of Oregon environmental sociologist, John Bellamy Foster, convincingly argues that there are two additional types of climate change denialism. They equally apply to the President, the Governor, and the Mayor. 

Foster’s second type of climate change denial is the belief that climate change is disconnected from the economy. Foster argues that “growth,” or what he terms capital accumulation, inevitably leads to climate change. By extension, he also argues that capitalism cannot be tweaked to allow perpetual expansion (i.e., growth), whether slow, like the United States, or fast, such as China, without adverse climate impacts. This is what he considers to be third level of climate change denialism, the belief that climate change can be controlled or even reversed without changing the economic system. 

Needless to say, California, including Los Angeles, does not yet have elected officials who link climate change to the country’s economic system. As demonstrated by their repeated efforts to undermine the California Environmental Quality Act in order to promote real estate speculation, it is clear that their pronouncements and their actions reject Foster’s contention that economic “growth” stands in the way of environmental protection. 

Final thoughts: This list of deficient programs, plans, and approaches to address climate change is hardly definitive. A closer look at Los Angeles reveals many more efforts to undercut policies and programs to reduce Green House Gases, such as exempting more real estate categories from CEQA. 

If smugness is creeping up on you, please stay tuned for a review of these programs.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatchLA. He has also taught courses of Sustainable City Planning at USC’s Price School of Social Policy. Comments and corrections welcomed at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EASTSIDER-Don’t misunderstand. I like Ron Galperin, and as both a lawyer and a budget guy, he is the real deal. Of course it is important to remember that auditors are numbers and data freaks, living in their own closed universe. On the plus side, their work product, within their “scope of work” parameters, will always add up. Which doesn’t mean the real world works like that. 

Case in point is the recent Audit by City Controller Galperin, which you can find here.  

The major finding of the audit, that made headlines in the LA Times, was the one about DWP training program has high costs and low graduation rates, audit finds. 

The other major finding tied in with this, was that many trainees leave the DWP after completing the program, lured by better deals from other Utilities. 

I have no doubt that the data supports these findings. What this actually means in the real world, however, is another thing entirely. I believe that the training costs are well spent to train employees in a very hazardous business -- the reliable delivery of power to us under any and all adverse circumstances. 

Training and the Power Employees 

Some 80% of the DWP training money goes to the Power System. That’s the folks who used to be called ‘linemen’ and are now called EDMT -- Line Worker, Cable Splicer -- the people who climb up to those humungous power lines stretching into three states (California, Utah, and Arizona), and the people who work the power generation plants, stations and substations, as well as on the telephone poles to our houses. 

This is seriously hazardous business, often performed 24/7 without respite, in the worst weather conditions. You and I can be without power for hours or days if these people do not perform their jobs efficiently. 

They are also being trained to perform their jobs in an era of rapid technological change, as we switch from traditional energy sources like coal and nuclear to wind and solar. 

The three major complaints in the Audit relate to the length of time that it takes to train these power system employees (up to 42 months), the dropout rate (about 67% for Line Worker/Cable Splicer), and the fact that a lot of successful employees are hired away from DWP by other Utilities such as Southern California Edison. 

The Safety Employee Analogy 

I use the comparison of training a power line worker to that of a police officer. Without stretching the comparison too much, in each case we have a system designed to take unskilled candidates, and through a rigorous, expensive and lengthy process, turn them into safe, skilled workers who can reliably function under sometimes dangerous or hazardous conditions, all while avoiding mistakes. In each of these systems, the goal is to perform under unpredictable conditions without errors that could result in injury or even death. Not to mention litigation. 

In the case of police officers, POST training is rigorous and expensive, just as apprenticeship training is rigorous and expensive tor the DWP. The goal is to wind up with highly trained employees who want to have a long, successful career, and to assure safety to these employees and to the public. 

Although it is rarely talked about, in each of these systems, one of the primary purposes of the training is to weed out potential employees who are unsuitable for a career in that field. We don’t want an employee who discovers that the job isn’t for him or her after completing the period of instruction. The potential risks are simply too high, and might not be exposed until the candidate is faced with a lot of pressure under really crummy, dangerous conditions. Thus the rigorous training. 

Please understand that I’m not making a case for equality of between police and Line Workers (sorry, IBEW) when it comes to their importance, their pay, or the two retirement systems. It is simply that long, expensive and rigorous training systems are critical for success in each field. 

Dropout Is Important 

Back when I was living in Lincoln Heights, I knew a number of young high school students who would not blink an eye at the thought of joining a gang, which always seemed to me to be a relatively hazardous life choice. But talk to those same young people about making a lot of money and have a good paying job climbing up one of those big power poles for DWP, and most of them would look at me like I was crazy and say, “No Way!” 

The point is that in any training program, you want to make sure that the candidate is a good fit for the job as early in the program as possible. While I did not see any statistics on point, dropouts are a normal part of doing business. The best programs will have the highest dropout rates early on -- before that huge amount of time and money is spent making candidates highly trained. 

In the case of DWP, with the high winds, rainstorms and crazy weather we have enjoyed over the last year, one major error can cause or extend a power outage to thousands of customers, not to mention cause injury or death. 

Wages and Benefits 

I know that all my friends on the DWP Committee will cringe at this one, but there is a certain poetic justice in the Audit Report. It (correctly) notes that DWP is being successfully poached by other utilities that grab successful employees who graduate from the apprenticeship program. 

Well, gee, that would have to do with wages and benefits, wouldn’t it? So it may be all well and good that, relative to certain benchmark positions, DWP employees are paid significantly more than other City employees. However, looking at the utility industry as a whole, that simply isn’t the case. Thus the poaching. I suspect that on the Power side, Galperin’s Audit Report is going to become Exhibit A in the ongoing negotiations between the IBEW and the DWP over a successor contract. 

Also, having opened that particular can of worms, someone is going to have to take a serious look at the Office of Public Accountability/Ratepayer Advocate’s (OPA) recent Joint Compensation Study, which you can find here.  

Generally, the DWP Pension plan for newer employees (Tier 2) makes no sense as compared to mainstream defined benefit plans, such as CalPERS -- even as most public sector pension plans are the reason employees stay until retirement. 

Regarding administrative types, their IT infrastructure might as well be written in Cobol or RPG (and some probably is), and like most of the City, needs major upgrades and integration. So while the Auditor correctly wants better data, the existing system is not going to be of much use. 

The DWP employment pyramid is upside down compared to everyone else. That is, there are serious compression issues that literally create dis-incentives for mid-managers and up to hire on or stay. In plain English, for most employers, wages and benefits go up geometrically the higher up in the food chain you are. Witness the executives making hundreds of times what a base worker gets. In the DWP, it is almost the reverse. 

The Takaway 

Truth is, large municipalities are the training grounds for everyone in the State. In LA City and County, the LAPD and the Sheriff spend huge sums of money in providing POST training, and in the end many of those officers leave for other agencies that simply can’t afford to provide the training. They’re poached. 

Same deal for DWP and its apprenticeship program. If utilities like SCE can swoop in at the end and lure a trained DWP employee away with sugarplum dreams and bags of cash, they will do so. It’s an economic fact of life, and it’s cheaper for them. 

Such is the cost of doing business in the public sector. On the plus side, it is also a tribute to the quality and value of the training programs, and that’s a good thing for all of us. 

For a real solution, maybe, someday, the Mayor and the City Council will let the DWP have its very own satellite Personnel Division, and fix some of this goofy stuff. Maybe Controller Ron Galperin will even support such a concept.

(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.

PERSPECTIVE--The first thought that popped into my mind when Governor Brown proposed his gas tax hike was former mayor Villaraigosa’s infamous trash collection fee increase.

You may recall, the fee was hyped as a means to hire 1,000 new LAPD officers.

Less than half that number were hired; the rest of the funds went to overhead,

As I told NPR’s Patt Morrison and the LA Weekly in interviews back in 2008, controls and reporting are insufficient  to assure the proper allocation of taxes and fees. 

This is especially true with state tax revenues, which are allocated to various funds, including those at the local level.  At every layer, allocations are made for multiple purposes. Such is the case with gasoline taxes. They are also used to fund mass transit and other transportation projects unrelated to automobiles. Gasoline excise tax revenue is also used to pay the debt service on highway bonds (Brown’s proposal is an excise tax), effectively relieving the general fund of the obligation.

This all makes for quite a trail to follow. Few individuals have the time or wherewithal to do so.

Determining how much of gas taxes actually improve roads is almost a fool’s errand. Politicians know this and use it to their advantage.  Lack of accountability gives them all the cover they need to divert funds.

This much is known: Brown’s plan would increase taxes by $52 billion; $7.5 billion would go to public transportation and another $1 billion for bike lanes and walkways, not exactly what you would call road and bridge improvements. 

It also includes a constitutional amendment requiring spending to be limited to transportation projects.  And Villaraigosa’s trash fee was supposed to cover hiring officers.

You can be assured that new definitions of transportation will abound if the proposal is passed. If it fails – and it could – don’t be surprised if it is resurrected.

Here’s an idea: instead of the tax increase, let’s just pass a constitutional amendment requiring all existing gas tax revenue be spent on roads and bridges.  We might then see a major decrease in the maintenance backlog.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-Not at the moment. All of the recent years for which final (“actual”) budget data are published show every single annual budget has finished in the black. While the entirety of the LAUSD budget includes various capital and internal funds, for the purposes of tracking the actual operating budget, the General Fund revenues and expenditures are of most importance.

Recent school board candidate’s statements casting shade on LAUSD’s current solvency are just wrong. But what about the future? Is the District simply swirling that bankruptcy toilet, circling inevitably toward the abyss? Even if currently flush, how well can past financial performance predict the future? 

The District’s Chief Financial Officer (who just resigned after 10 years of constitutional, if not justifiable, worry), publishes a projected budget for one and two years beyond the current operating year. That current operating year’s budget is finalized in June prior to the start of the upcoming schoolyear. And there’s a big accounting midyear to check up on things. 

So this means there are four forecasts for any given year -- snapshots of how budget forecasts stack up against the facts of what actually come to pass: (i) at mid-year, (ii) right before the start of a new fiscal/school year, (iii) one year out from that year and (iv) two years out from that year. 

Each one of these sets of guesses is expected to have different tendencies. They will vary by how far in the future the forecast projects, by what sorts of monies are considered, revenue or expenditure. And each can be assessed for accuracy, what direction these forecasts trend for any given point, etc.

The forecasts are key in assessing whether the “sky is falling” – the origin of the claim that LAUSD is sinking financially, whether it’s accurate, what has been and what should be done about it. 

Revenue projections, especially with increasing time in the future (by two years out,) have been conservative, or favorable to the bottom line; less has been anticipated and planned for coming in, than wound up coming in when all was said and done. That’s responsible and it makes for good planning. The relatively small percentages of unfavorable, negative variance for the upcoming year’s final budgets was always offset by underspending. Every successive year has maintained a positive carryover. 

It is in the expenditures that the district has carefully offset the volatility of state and federal monies so vulnerable to political caprice. LAUSD has consistently, favorably, underspent its budget in every year. What is clear is that the pessimistic, Henny-Penny terror of projecting a future so influenced by vagaries, is hedged through persistent projections of underfunding and overspending…which don’t then come to pass in reality. 

That’s OK, sort of. Life happens.

But what isn’t OK is insisting that forecasts – particularly the sort that are inherently conservative – are blueprints of tomorrow’s future. Because that’s the partisan agenda furthered by the voice of corporate Democrats and school privatizers in the guise of “Charter Reform.” 

That voice is prophesied by LA School Report and The 74 (“partners” of: Broad, CA Community, DeVos, Gates, Gen Next, Karsh, Simon, Triad and Walton Foundations; Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corp., Fisher Fund, Park Ave Charitable Trust, Sackler and Strauch,) and by the California Charter School Association-sponsored school board candidates Gonez (LAUSD6) and Melvoin (LAUSD4). And it’s asserted religiously, without ever cross-checking how past projections compare with future reality once it actually comes to pass. 

The data actually show two things: First, careful projections and husbandry of its funds has actually served LAUSD well fiscally. Despite tumultuous financial circumstances in our city, state and at the federal level, LAUSD has managed to keep a laudably steady keel. Its administrators have done themselves proud. 

Secondly, however, this fiscal responsibility in the face of predictive doom-saying has come at the expense of the District’s very own Commons. LAUSD’s students and staff cinch their belts every year on cue to defend the institution from the fallout of the partisan fake outrage at the risk of deficit. LAUSD has balanced the books every year despite tumultuous swings in funding, because the institution extracts an enormous carryover buffer from every year’s operations. 

During each of the five years in question, LAUSD’s carryover has been on average 12.5% of that year’s eventual actual revenue intake. In three of these five years, the carryover was never broached because revenues wound up larger than expenditures. In the two years when the carryover was tapped, 9% was used in 2011-12 and 17% was used in 2012-13. 

But that translates to hundreds of millions of dollars due for our students and teachers, money that, year after year, is never realized. Far from overspending our way to insolvency, there’s an important case to be made that LAUSD underspends each year. 

For example, for want of less than $2.5 million in 2012, then-Superintendent Deasy summarily cut all Title I funds to schools of middling diversity overnight, causing enormous financial hardship to schools of poverty percentage between 40%-49% (the burden was partially mitigated through a one year “hold-harmless” fund that has since been discontinued.) Twenty-three of these high-functioning schools weathered the unforeseen shortfall via privatization, converting their schools to “fiscally dependent” charters. 

And yet $687 million remained that year to rollover into the following year’s budget. That amounts to 12% of 2012-13’s eventual $5.7 billion revenue. That carryover could address so many worthy needs; it could lower LAUSD’s vital teacher:student ratio, for example – certainly more effectively than eventually came to pass.  There is no shortage of important needs to address, but one of these should be the size of the accounting cushion itself, because every dollar spent politically mollifying appearances, is a dollar not spend substantively at the school-site. 

It’s not clear what amount of carryover is optimal for a large government agency, or even whether there is any.  Certainly every budget is a political document and collateral choices are forced by the way it is designed. But those choices are also implied in the way the budget is interpreted. 

LAUSD isn’t going broke and the institution should have the courage to stand up to those who would wish to paint it so in order to further the narrative of “churn and disaster” that only leaves us poorer than when we started. Our public funds are to be spent on us the public, by us the public. And while we could use more of these funds, what we have is precious.

(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BELL VIEW-In 2009, I got involved in my first unsuccessful attempt to put an independent voice on the LA City Council. I didn’t run. A guy I’d met on the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council – a Harvard lawyer, a treasurer for two neighborhood councils, a community activist, and an all-around good guy – decided to challenge the incumbent councilmember. 

We lost in a landslide. At the election night get together in a small booth in a Thai Restaurant in East Hollywood, someone said “you just can’t beat the machine.” 

I thought – “machine?” I grew up in Chicago, where the Democratic Party built by the first Mayor Daley created a machine like no other. Daley would start the election with a million votes in his pocket. That’s a machine. In that 2009 LA City Council election, the incumbent won with a little more than 8,000 votes.

After that, I was snake bit. Eight thousand votes! This is doable, I thought. So, two years later, I worked my heart out for another candidate against an incumbent in another district.

Yeah – we lost. 

In that race, two supremely-qualified candidates went up against an incumbent that could barely put two words together. Between the two candidates, we couldn’t force a runoff.

This year, I supported an old friend of mine from my neighborhood council days who decided to make a run for it. The truth is: I liked three candidates in that race. On Election Day, I stood outside a polling place (beyond the 100-foot barrier) and passed out fliers for my friend. The cordiality of the voters heading in to vote that day really surprised me. I know how it is: I never want to talk to strangers on the street about anything. But the voters I met – with a few exceptions – were overwhelmingly polite, and a large proportion of them actually stopped to talk with me.

The conversation usually went something like this: I would talk about my friend, what he’d done for the community, and why I thought he would make a great City Councilmember. If I sensed I’d gotten through to them, I’d hand them a flier and they would be on their way. But, if I didn’t feel like I’d closed the deal on my friend, I had one last pitch. 

“You know,” I’d say as they were walking away from me, “there’s only one woman on the LA City Council.” Invariably, they would turn around. “That’s right,” I’d say, “one woman. And there are two women running today. I like them both, but I like one better than the other, and here’s why.”

I can’t tell you how many people I turned that day. I just don’t know. But, among the small percentage of Angelenos who actually go to the polling place on Election Day to cast their votes – the issue of women in government is on their minds.

That’s why Tuesday’s special congressional election in the 34th district is so disappointing. I don’t live in the district, so I couldn’t vote. But of the 300,000 registered voters who do, less than 30,000 of them bothered to vote at all. Of the 24 candidates, 12 of them were women. In the end, the two top fundraisers – both men – made it into the runoff. 

Without commenting on the merits of the two contenders, it’s a shame that in a year when the country elected a misogynist president; when we have a vice president who will not sit down with another woman outside the presence of his wife; when the fate of women’s healthcare is decided by a roomful of men – that barely 10% of the electorate could even bother to vote in an election that presented a dozen opportunities to put a woman in the U.S. Congress.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand people marched in the streets of Los Angeles for The Women’s March following the presidential election. Where did everyone go?

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

MY TURN-How about a change of topic today? I don't know about you, but the constant stream of nefarious political accusations is giving me heart burn ... literally. 

Looking back over the last few Presidents and their visions, I keep coming back to John F. Kennedy and the famous line from his Inaugural Address: "Don't ask what your country can do for you...ask what you can do for your country.” 

What if we bring it down to, "What can you do for your City?" Fortunately, there are Angelenos who are doing their part to improve living conditions here. But just as it is not enough to just feed and house your children, it is not enough to say, "I pay my taxes, so let the government make sure I have a good life.” 

We both -- private citizens and businesses large and small -- have a moral responsibility to participate in this effort. Usually we spotlight individuals or not-for-profit organizations that are engaged in making Los Angeles a more livable city. Recently, though, I came across a for profit company in South Los Angeles that is engaged in literally helping to "clean up" its community. 

Errol Segal, the Senior Recycling Consultant for Active Recycling and his program, is a good example of what companies can do to help the communities from which they benefit. He’s LA’s ‘Trashsamaritan’. 

He told me, "My business has been in South Los Angeles for over 40 years. We are a Trash and Recycling Center on Slauson Avenue. We have tried to be a good community partner and over the years have given away free Christmas trees, gasoline and other items to those in need within our community. 

"I reside in the San Fernando Valley and one day as I was leaving for work, I noticed a couch, a mattress and table along the street near my home. My first thought was that they were dumped illegally or had been put out for Bulky Item Pick-up day. These items were gone within three days. 

"As I drove to work along Slauson Ave, I began to notice the amount of illegally dumped items on the streets and in the alleyways. If caught it could result in a substantial fine, which wouldn't solve the root problem. I asked myself, what could I do to address the issue in South Los Angeles? 

"About one week later, I read an article in the LA Times about illegally dumped trash in the Black and Latino Neighborhoods of South LA. It was an investigative report that said bulky items and illegally dumped trash took weeks to be picked up... if they were picked up at all. It was very critical of the services being provided to the communities in South LA. In comparison it took three days in the more affluent parts of LA." 

Twenty-three months ago, Active Recycling started its Clean Up LA Campaign, allowing people to bring in trash for free rather than dump it on the street illegally or being forced to pay a fee to a recycling center. The community has responded and so far this company has processed over three million pounds of trash. (Photo above: Resident Charletta Butler poses with community trash that has been brought to Segal’s Active Recycling.) 

Since the study by the LA Times was done more than two years ago, some changes have taken place. The Mayor introduced a new program which will go into effect this summer to revamp and improve trash recycling throughout the City of Los Angeles. 

According to Enrique C. Zaldivar, P.E. Director of LA Sanitation, Zero Waste LA is a new public private partnership. It establishes an exclusive, zone-based franchise system that will offer regulated and customer friendly waste and recycling services to all commercial and industrial businesses, institutions and large multi-family buildings. 

He said, "Zero Waste LA” 

will be transformative for residents, customers, and businesses who have long sought to participate in and have more access to the City’s sustainability efforts. It will move the City closer to achieving zero waste through innovative waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery programs. Through coordination, collaboration, and communication, I am confident that we will meet the partnership’s goals: 

• Reduce city landfill disposal by 1,000,000 tons per year by 2025. 

• Set transparent and predictable waste and recycling service rates. 

• Offer accountability and quality customer services. 

• Enforce compliance with environmental mandates. 

• Reduce greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. 

• Decrease food waste and increase food rescue and donations. 

"In April 2014, the Mayor and City Council approved the ordinance establishing the new franchise system and delineated 11 zones. The franchisees for each of these specific areas were subsequently selected to partner with the City through an open and competitive bidding process that included extensive evaluation and negotiations over a two year period." 

LA Sanitation will continue to provide solid waste and recycling services to single family homes and small multi-family residences, and specific waste streams such as construction and demolition, medical, hazardous, and radioactive waste will continue to be serviced by permitted private waste haulers. 

Errol Segal will still be helping his community as all costs for the Free Trash Dumping project are being shouldered by Active Recycling; single and small multi-family residences are not covered under the new initiative. 

I know the topic of trash isn't exciting, but when we manage it efficiently it helps improve our quality of life. Come to think of it, maybe we could find a way to alleviate some of the political "Trash Talk" under a new initiative! 

As always...comments welcome.

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MEMO TO LAUSD--My grade school summer vacations seemed to last forever, pairing well with the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer double album I wore out on the record changer. During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair -- ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts -- while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. 

And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer. 

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp! despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank. 

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around January 15, just after the three-week-long Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation. 

Our daughter, now eight, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a week-long, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.  

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork. 

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves websites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens. 

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources -- public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries -- is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation. 

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again August 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling. 

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly. 

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD Board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move towards a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass. 

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position -- and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the State of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance. 

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained -- yes, abstained -- when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond. 

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy -- there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10 a.m. 

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?  

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

(David Gershwin is a Los Angeles-based public affairs consultant, Zócalo Public Square board member, and teaching fellow at UCLA Anderson School of Management.) Primary Editor: Joe Mathews. Secondary Editor: Sara Catania. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GELFAND’S WORLD--I have a scar running through my right eyebrow, and it symbolizes why I don't give a damn whether the NFL comes back to Los Angeles or not. I intend this column to be a polite response to the piece by Daniel Guss in which he faults the elected leadership of Los Angeles for losing the Raiders to Las Vegas. 

The unstated implication in that column is that it is a great achievement to get a professional football team for your city. And the further unstated assumption is that it makes a difference whether that football team is located within your city limits or just outside of them. Otherwise, the writer would presumably be jumping with joy over the return of two professional football teams to the L.A. adjacent city of Inglewood. There may be a further unstated assumption with regard to the relative merits of the Raiders vs. the Rams and/or Chargers, but I'm unable to identify whether that specific view exists. 

I disagree with the basic assumption. I don't think that having one professional football team (among so many others, all over the country) compares in any way with being the foremost town for movie making, being the nation's prime seaport, or being a world capitol of theoretical physics. Furthermore, my view is that the city of Los Angeles won this round with the NFL, just as it has won numerous rounds previously. 

Winning vs losing depends on what you are trying to achieve, and whether or not you achieved it. 

The payoff from watching sports, I would suggest, comes from our ability to identify with the athlete and the team. For one magical Saturday afternoon, we get to be the guy carrying the ball against Notre Dame, or the base runner on first against the Giants. I can still remember Craig Fertig throwing the winning touchdown pass against a previously undefeated Notre Dame team, and who can forget Gibson's home run? 

Magic moments, yes. We all get to be David battling Goliath for a few seconds. But there is a difference between fandom and city governance, because there is a difference between identifying with the team vs really being on the team or owning the team. One is make believe. The other isn't. 

There is also a difference between college sports and professional sports. I would argue that our ability to identify with the local college comes a lot easier than our ability to identify with the professional sports team that has just announced that it is leaving town. UCLA isn't going to pack up its buildings and move to a different town that makes a better offer. It's always going to be UCLA in terms of film studies, chemistry, and ancient history. 

So back to that scar and how it relates to the comments by Mr Guss about Las Vegas winning the battle for the Oakland etc Raiders. When I started college, one of my classmates mentioned that I might be interested in something called Rugby (technically it's Rugby Football) because that's what my college had, and it was something like American football. That last statement turned out to be only partly right. Rugby is something like American football if you leave in the tackling and leave out the blocking. Oh, and you also leave out the helmet and the pads, although being an American, I used a mouth guard. 

So over the years, Rugby was my game. After 17 years of playing rugby, first at the intercollegiate level and then at the club level, I no longer feel any urge to identify with professional football players. I just don't need to have a professional team at hand to provide me with self esteem. It's true that the pros are at a completely different level as athletes and hitters, but it also became true that I no longer had to prove something to myself along the lines of athletics and physicality. I had knocked heads with the Big Ten and with Cal, had been knocked cold a few times, and somehow avoided the big knee injury. I enjoyed sports a lot in my day, but at this point, having another team win for me (and for the strength of my ego) has lessened. 

And then there is that scar through the eyebrow. Why it is germane in this discussion is that it was inflicted on me by one of my teammates in a practice, and it was this same teammate who went on to become a famous professor who studied the impact of professional sports on local economies. Along with other careful observers, he found that adding a professional football stadium (and team) to the local economy may not do a lot of harm, money-wise, but it doesn't do much good, either. All those ticket sales? That money is taken away from other expenditures. People with enough discretionary income to go to professional football games could spend the same amount of money in lots of other ways. People who live in cities lacking a pro football team find ways to entertain themselves. Local boosters seeking a team always promote the economic benefits in terms of hotel occupancy and local sales taxes, but in the net, the results have been unimpressive over a large number of decades and over a lot of teams. 

In bidding on the services of a professional football team, we are trying to buy two things -- the entertainment value of the sporting events, and the emotional value of having the team to identify with. In the case of professional sports, that identification is at best a stretch, because the team is only committed to you as long as the money doesn't run out. Some leagues fold and some teams leave Baltimore in the middle of the night and drive to Indianapolis. How can we view Los Angeles as anything but a way station for NFL teams? 

It's up to the sports fan to decide whether the price of a pair of tickets and a couple of beers is worth the hefty price. That's a personal decision for you to make. But things get beyond the personal when a sports team wants the tax payers to subsidize the construction. Half a billion or a billion dollars is a substantial amount of money, even for a big city like Los Angeles. Whether the mayor should chase after a professional sports team by chasing after the City Council to invest tax dollars is a collective decision that belongs to the voters as a group. 

The history of the past several decades is that Los Angeles tax payers don't want to cover the costs of a new stadium just to service billionaire owners. We've got a couple of perfectly good fields if the intent is to watch a football game. The stadium boxes would only be there to serve the interests of the few. Our elected officials have held the line against such public expenditures. 

This is not to say that a lot of our elected City Council members didn't want to bring back the Rams (or some team, any team). They begged and pleaded, negotiated, got down on their hands and knees, and then begged some more. The one thing they wouldn't do was to shovel public dollars into a new billion-dollar stadium designed to service the wealthy. 

Even the die-hard fans who still were carrying a torch for the old L.A. Rams admitted that for the NFL, the function of Los Angeles was to be a threat to other cities. If those Minneapolis (et al) tax payers didn't come up with the big bucks, their teams -- the Vikings, Ravens, Rams, or Raiders -- would move to Los Angeles. The extortion racket worked pretty well. You had St Louis and San Diego begging like jilted lovers for One More Try. We'll try to find maybe three hundred million, and get some local billionaire to pony up another half billion. 

During the long winter of no professional football, Los Angeles mayors have been asked how much money they will support for the construction of that new stadium. Eric Garcetti was succinct: "Zero." Other L.A. mayors were equally straightforward. "Bring us back a team," they would say, "But don't expect the taxpayers to cover your team's costs." By refusing to get rolled by the NFL owners, the mayors and City Council of Los Angeles have won their end of the battle. The city didn't get a team, but the taxpayers didn't get fleeced, either. I think we can take pride in the fact that we have a greater sense of self worth than the cities which caved. Extortion victims like Minneapolis can't say the same thing. 

Every city which is in the running for a sports franchise has the same choice. It's a question of funding the existence of a sports team that we (as individuals) can learn to love, or saving our money. It's a balance between spending real money and expecting the taxpayers as a whole to engage in mass psychological identification vs. spending the money on something else. 

Like I was saying, the scar tells me that I don't have a need to identify with some other set of athletes anymore. Sure I will root for the U.S. soccer team in the World Cup and for the Dodgers if they ever get out of the first round of the playoffs. But I don't need to. If it happens it will be fun, and if it doesn't, so be it. 

Interestingly, I was chatting with a former professional athlete a few weeks ago. When I asked him whether he felt any need to identify with professional sports teams, he responded No. He only watches college football. It was obvious that he had proved himself to himself and didn't feel the same way that a frustrated adolescent fan would feel. 

I have to give Mr Guss credit for one observation. I think that there is at least a possibility that Las Vegas will break the odds and actually develop some financial gain from bringing in a professional football team. This would of course depend on Las Vegas merchandising football tickets to the tourist trade. Football would be one more entertainment option along with magic, lounge singers, and burlesque. It probably wouldn't add any money to city government revenues, but it would go well in the usual Vegas advertising blitzes. The point for Vegas is to bring in elbows to pull the slots and finger tips to add chips to the roulette tables. The taxpayers of Nevada can cover a little bit of football as part of that giant advertising machine that is the Vegas strip. 

But things are different here in greater Los Angeles. However you slice it, the existence of the Rams in Inglewood is unlikely to affect the local economy very much, one way or the other. The economists who have studied this question over multiple decades and dozens of cities have made this clear, and that includes the one who split my eyebrow with his forehead. If there is to be any contribution to the local economy, it will be to the region as a whole. A few tens of thousands of people who travel to Los Angeles will stay in hotels all over the area, not just in Inglewood. Yes, a Super Bowl is a big deal nowadays (the first one wasn't so big, even if it was held right here in L.A.), but LAX moves seventy million people a year, with or without a Roman Numeraled football game. 

And notice something else. New York nominally hosts a couple of pro football teams, but they play in a place called East Rutherford, New Jersey. That distancing doesn't seem to have depressed the price of tickets to Hamilton. San Francisco nominally hosts a pro football team, but it plays forty miles down the coast. This doesn't seem to have made the city any less desirable to Silicon Valley millionaires or to tourists. 

One interesting point raised by The Economist: Pro football teams not only cost the locals a lot of money, they result in increased crime. 

Just Breaking 

The next one to fall is Devin Nunes, who will step down from chairing the House investigation of Trump's Russian ties. At what point will the elected politicians start to realize that there is real danger in becoming associated with Trump's criminality?

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

-cw

THAT CEREMONIAL SPIRIT-In the Olympic spirit, the LA County Board of Supervisors and LA City Council have been vying to see which highly-compensated municipal body can more thoroughly cram its meetings full of vacuous ceremonial presentations. 

Vegas has all but written off the County -- for which tomorrow’s meeting is do or die. The City’s final “at bat” was Friday, when it shattered its own world record set on June 26, 2015.  If you subtract from the City’s past two Friday meetings the collective four hours of ceremonial commendations which took place, you are left with barely an hour’s worth of public business being done -- though that depends to some extent on whether you include as public business Councilmember Blumenfield speaking Farsi and/or Controller Galperin texting incessantly during the Nowruz celebration (Persian New Year.)  

Regardless, as he stated proudly at the second meeting, the Mayor hopes we can “incorporate a gender lens through everything we do now.” 

Meanwhile, those who would write off the County in this race should know that its agenda for tomorrow bristles with thirteen presentations plus a televised pet adoption appeal. To be sure, most of those commendation recipients -- ArtsforLA, Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 13 President, LA County Occupational Therapists -- won’t burn up much time, but one of the honorees -- SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A. (to be honored for their great work in reducing the number of children who suffer from tragic injuries in car collisions) -- could turn out to be a real doozy, if they bring some kids downtown. 

Moreover, if all else fails, Supervisor Ridley-Thomas can go thermonuclear with an “adjournment for the fallen,” which entails each Supervisor lecturing in remembrance of someone recently deceased. Not even half of a typical Janice Hahn encomium could tip the balance in favor of the County. 

In other words, this race is far from a sealed deal; and the fat lady, though slated for one-hour performances at both the City and County next week, has yet to sing.

(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.

ANIMAL WATCH-On March 15, after adopting a dog named “Emmet” from the Clinton Humane Society, Kris and Ashley Greene took their new pet to the home of Tyler and Holly Harrison, where the dog bit the Harrison’s 15-month-old son, Lucas, in the face, leaving massive facial wounds, the Clinton Herald reported.

With the increasing number of reports of aggressive dog attacks in Los Angeles and nationwide, there may be some important lessons to be learned. 

Although the dog in Clinton, Iowa, had been listed as a "Boxer-Labrador-mix," it was determined to be a Pit Bull  that had been transported from a Louisiana shelter. 

The dog was subsequently declared a dangerous dog by Clinton authorities, and Ashley Greene was cited for owning a dangerous dog. She pleaded not guilty on March 28, according to the Herald. 

The photos of the horrific disfigurement of this beautiful child are chilling. Lucas’ injuries are described and photos shown before and after surgery on the family’s GoFundMe page: 

He was airlifted to the University of Iowa Childrens' Hospital where he had a 6- hour surgery involving at least 3 surgeons. A large part of his gum/bone including permanent teeth were ripped out, most of his nose cartilage was destroyed, and he will have lifelong damage. He will not have any upper front teeth, will need dental reconstruction to hopefully support false teeth when he is an adult, and have more facial surgeries in the future. 

Colleen Lynn of Dogsbite.org did a thorough investigation of the background of the Pit Bull, Emmet, and describes the mechanisms by which dogs with a propensity for aggression are transported nationwide for adoption to an unsuspecting public. 

She writes, "Animals of IPAC advertised Emmet as a 'great dog with a great temperament.'" 

“Three weeks before the attack, a pit bull-mix named Emmet, was on death row at the New Iberia Parish Animal Shelter in Louisiana. On February 22, after social media rallied to "save Emmet," by raising over $300, the dog was "approved for transport."  (Read more)  

HUMANE SOCIETY SUED 

On Thursday, March 29, 2017, the Herald announced that a civil lawsuit against the Clinton Humane Society and the owners of the dog that attacked Lucas had been filed on Tuesday by Attorney John Frey, on behalf of the parents of Lucas Harrison. 

The following items are excerpted and summarized from the Herald report: 

The petition alleges one count against Kris and Ashley Greene for dog owners’ strict liability, and two counts against the Clinton Humane Society for product liability, negligence and breach of express warranty.” 

It states the “foreseeable risks of harm” posed by the dog could have been reduced or avoided by the provision of reasonable instructions or warnings.

Among these instructions should have been the precautions for bringing the dog into a home “where another dog, an infant and small children are present.”  

The petition asserts that the Greenes should have been warned that the Humane Society’s ability to determine whether a dog is child friendly is extremely limited, rather than “expressly warranting” that the dog was “child friendly.” 

The new owners should have been warned that the dog had been moved from a shelter in Louisiana to Clinton Humane Society after being impounded for over five months and was scheduled for euthanasia.  

The Greenes should have been warned that the dog in question could be a pit bull mix, even though it was allegedly advertised by the Clinton Humane Society as a Boxer-mix. 

The petition states "the omission of the instructions or warnings renders the dog not reasonably safe." 

The petition lists one count against the Greenes for strictly liability for all damages done by their dog, citing Iowa code section 351.28. 

WHY THIS LAWSUIT IS IMPORTANT 

Traditionally those who rehome unwanted pets -- mainly animal shelters and humane society -- have been held harmless from prosecution and/or liability for the future misconduct of the animal. Courts have taken a Caveat emptor approach, meaning, "let the buyer beware."

Findlaw advises this means "sold as is,” and the buyer assumes the risk that a product may fail to meet expectations or may have defects. However, implicit in this concept is the presumption that buyers will be able to inspect or otherwise ensure the integrity of the product before they decide to complete the transaction. 

Of course, with a shelter animal that is almost impossible. There is no way, based upon looking through the bars of a cage or kennel or taking a pet into an introduction area, that health or temperament can be accurately assessed.

Although some dogs adapt to a new home immediately, it can take several weeks, or longer, before a new pet has "settled in" and relaxes enough to express its true character and personality and/or begins to show territorial dominance. Therefore, in the past, shelters have been cautious about absolute, positive statements and have made notes on all observed behavior by employees visible on posted kennel cards or otherwise easily available, so that potential adopters could make a more-informed decision. 

But, the “No Kill” movement has changed that. The industry-wide competition to have the highest “live-save” rate and specific pressure from leading humane groups to not interfere with the right to breed and own combat Pit Bulls (“No BSL”), has resulted in withholding negative behavioral information and sometimes making misleading statements to get these animals adopted and so they don't inflate the shelter’s euthanasia rate.

To further this effort, Pit Bulls are commonly misidentified as Boxer-mix or listed as American Staffordshire Terriers, and referred to as “Nanny Dogs” that are “great with kids.” San Francisco SPCA tried calling them “St. Francis Terriers” and New York introduced “New Yorkies” -- a program which reportedly lasted three days. 

At first, “no kill” applied to humane societies, many of which are “limited entry” and have the option to only accept adoptable dogs. This gave them a heads up on receiving donations, because no one wants to support a "kill shelter." 

But the pressure to be "no kill" then shifted to the “open-admission” tax-funded municipal shelters, which must accept all strays and animals in need, regardless of temperament or condition. This has forced governmental agencies -- which have direct responsibility to protect the public -- into keeping alive animals that have serious aggression or behavior concerns and applying any remotely plausible description to them, except “dogs bred to kill each other.” 

Of course, not every Pit Bull unpredictably attacks and some can be loyal, loving pets; but the genetics and recent history of this breed requires an acceptance that, increasingly, the desire for winning fighting dogs has led to producing Pit Bulls that may react with unpredictable violence to almost any stimulation that "challenges" them.

This often includes pets, children, or even the hand that feeds them. On March 30, the NY Post reports, Man Fatally Mauled by his Dog during Interview with Film Crew. The article describes that this was not the first attack by this Pit Bull on his owner, but a neighbor said that Mario Perivoitos, 41, “loved the dog more than himself.” The Pit Bull was also described as generally quiet and never seen to be vicious. 

Thus, shelters are packed with Pit Bulls whose true natures begin to show usually between eight months to two years and often become such a problem or potential liability that they are just dumped in the streets or relinquished; in either case, these animals proliferate in animal shelters nationwide. 

The Michael Vick case created two new industries -- (1) “rescues” that thrive on donations for saving the “misunderstood" underdogs and which “pull” known aggressive dogs from shelters to save them; and (2) transport businesses that charge per animal to move these often-unadoptable animals to a shelter in another city or state. Thousands of dangerous animals that have already shown vicious or anti-social behavior are packed into trucks or airplanes and shipped to known or unknown destinations, rather than being humanely euthanized. 

This deceptive shell game allows shelters, humane societies and the rescuers bragging rights to a higher “live-save” rate (after all, the animals left alive) and the historical “caveat emptor” and governmental-immunity laws have allowed them to avoid responsibility for damages to a future adopter or harm to animals or humans. 

This could soon change, based on a lawsuit filed after the tragic event that occurred on March 15.

(Note: The above does not include the many responsible "rescues" nationwide who carefully screen both the animals and every potential adoptive home.) 

HOW "PRODUCT LIABILITY" IS ASSESSED 

I asked a local attorney who works for a government agency to explain “Product Liability" and also asked, if it is granted in the lawsuit filed on behalf of a 15-week-old Iowa boy, could all agencies or parties involved in impounding/rescuing or transporting homeless animals potentially find themselves liable for any future damages caused by these animals?

Here is his informal response: 

“Strict product liability "applies to everyone in the “stream of commerce." Everyone along the stream is jointly and severally liable for any resulting harm. Manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer -- in this case, each shelter that made the animal available for adoption, transported it or had any part in placing it in the stream of commerce -- could be liable even if it was unknown to any of those parities that there was a defect in the product or the product posed a hazard.  That is the nature of strict liability. 

“Additionally, any party who had knowledge of the propensity of a defect but did not warn or disclose that knowledge could also face liability for negligence. Liability for negligence may apply to anyone of those who moved the animal through the steam of commerce.   

“Anybody who  has knowledge of a potential defect or danger has a duty to warn or inform consumers (adopters) and failure to do so is breach of that duty, resulting in liability for harm that results from that omission.” 

For those seriously interested, the following comment is presented by Animal Law:

EVERY DOG CAN HAVE ITS DAY: EXTENDING LIABILITY BEYOND THE SELLER BY DEFINING PETS AS “PRODUCTS” UNDER PRODUCTS LIABILITY THEORY  

ARE ATTACKS BY SHELTER DOGS INCREASING? 

In a July 11, 2015 article, Pit bull from Asheville Humane Society kills six-year-old, Merritt Clifton of Animals 24-7, describes the tragic death of John Phillip Strother, 6, in NC, brutally killed by a Pit Bull adopted three weeks earlier. 

He describes the Asheville Humane Society as, "An adoption program promotion partner of both the Best Friends Animal Society and the American SPCA, both of which have long fought legislation meant to stop pit bull proliferation." 

He also provides some valuable statistics to that date, citing that Joshua Strother was, "...the 38th fatality involving U.S. shelter dogs from 2010 to present, in attacks involving 30 pit bulls, seven bull mastiffs, two Rottweilers, a Lab who may have been part pit bull, and a husky." 

"By contrast, there were no fatalities involving shelter dogs from 1858 through 1987. Two fatalities occurred, both involving wolf hybrids, in 1988 and 1989." 

He noted that, ". . .there were only 32 disfiguring maulings by shelter dogs from 1858 through 2009, 19 of them involving pit bulls." 

"From 2010 to present [July 11, 2015], there have been at least 138 disfiguring maulings by shelter dogs, 99 of them involving pit bulls. Nineteen shelter dogs have killed or disfigured people thus far in 2015, all of them pit bulls." 

On August 6, 2015, Buncombe County officials completed its review of the screening and transferring procedures by the Asheville Humane Society (AHS). Among other revisions, both parties "agreed to enhance current standards."

One of the revisions was, "Assuring that all adoption agencies provide complete information gathered on the adoptive animal through the sheltering process to all adoptive owners."

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

My April Fool’s column, Garcetti Says No to Higher Office, was based on the reasonable speculation that Mayor Eric Garcetti was not going to run for Governor or Senator in 2018. 

If Garcetti entered the race for Governor, he would risk a career-ending loss in a primary brawl with three well-funded candidates, Lt. Governor Gavin Newson, State Treasurer John Chiang, and former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  And he is certainly not going to mess with Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the State’s most popular and respected politicians. 

As for Garcetti’s side deals with Newsom, Chiang, and Feinstein, they were inspired by my love for April Fool’s Day, especially when it comes to poking fun at the political establishment and their self-serving side deals.  

But I should have continued the ruse by developing a scenario so preposterous that anybody in their right mind, including members of the media, would know that there was no way it could be true.  

If I wrote that Mayor Garcetti was going to focus on balancing the budget, eliminating the Structural Deficit (where personnel costs increase faster than revenues), developing a comprehensive plan for the repair and maintenance of our streets, reforming the City’s two underfunded pension plans, and establishing an Office of Transparency and Accountability to oversee the City’s precarious finances, everybody would know that our fiscally irresponsible Elected Elite and the leaders of the public sector unions would never allow this to occur. 

But this is exactly what needs to happen if LA is to be a world class city.  Otherwise, the next generations of Angelenos will be paying for today’s sins.  And that is not a joking matter. 

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

-cw 

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Last December, I first covered the social media-motivated attack on a West Hills teen. Jordan Peisner was on an after-school Wendy’s run when he was jumped by another teen he had never met while the attacker’s friend snapped images on her smartphone. The attack left Jordan with a fractured skull, a blot clot in his brain and ruptured eardrum. In a flash, Jordan’s and his family’s lives were changed forever. 

Jordan’s father Ed Peisner says his son is slowly recovering. “As for the hematoma, as of the last MRI, it was 19mm but we will have another this month to check the size. Hopefully, it has shrunk. His hearing loss is permanent and that is very hard to accept.” 

What happened to the alleged assailants? 

The girl arrested and charged with conspiracy to incite a violent act was moved to LA Teen Court, says Peisner, “because the probation department felt there wasn’t enough evidence to make her charge stick so a jury of her peers -- 14- and 15-year olds -- found her not guilty. We didn’t have a voice in the matter at all. We weren’t even allowed to be there.” 

The arraignment for the teen who physically attacked Jordan will be held on April 7, shares Peisner, “but from what the D.A. told me last week at the pre-plea arraignment, he will most likely receive probation for a certain amount of time. So, my son has permanent physical damages and emotional issues while the assailant gets to pick up trash.” 

The girl who filmed the attack to post on social media wasn’t arrested, says Peisner, because “that isn’t a crime.” 

An Interview with Rep. Matt Dababneh and Sen. Henry Stern: 

Rep. Matt Dababneh (D-Encino) has introduced a bill to change that. Assembly Bill 1542 would criminalize the act of conspiring with an attacker to take video of a crime and would also add a year to the court’s sentence for a criminal felony when the attacker conspires to have that assault recorded. 

I sat down with Dababneh and Sen. Henry Stern (D-SD 27) to talk about the assembly bill, how Jordan’s attack inspired the proposed law, and the importance of addressing social media-motivated attacks. 

BCK: What were your first thoughts when hearing about Jordan Peisner’s attack? 

Dababneh: When I saw the video on Facebook, it was heartbreaking. I was sick to my stomach. This could have been a neighbor or my nephew, one of my interns. I got the sense that this was mostly younger teenagers with a desire or need to be infamous, how many “likes” they have on their profiles. They’re willing to create violence to leave their mark. 

Stern: I was outraged when this all occurred and earlier than that, this ugly knockout club trend on the web. The internet can be used as a tool for incredible good and change but also the basest tendencies and ugliness. This is an evolution of that. 

BCK: What inspired you to introduce this bill? 

Dababneh: Right away, during Jordan’s recovery, Ed took the opportunity to be an advocate. I admire that.  Instead of what could have turned into vengeance, he has been tireless. 

Stern: As the resident millennial in the senate, I feel it’s my duty to stop the abuse of these kind of tools. I think young people say more social media is better -- don’t put any impediment to its use for filming for the purpose of social media. I disagree that it’s universally good. Watching Jordan go through this and getting to know him and Ed a bit, I think they are onto something, the way the community has stood up to bullying. We all think we have bright ideas in the Capitol but the ideas really come from the community. 

BCK: Can you explain the significance of the bill? 

Dababneh: We wanted this bill to be narrow and specific. Social Media is paramount to the issue and the bigger reality. We want to make sure our streets are safe against attacks, rapes of co-eds, attacks on transgenders. We want to send a strong message that the attacker will face legal consequences. When an accomplice helped plan and was a motivator, that’s no different from being the getaway driver. 

Stern: The perpetrator (who filmed Jordan’s attack) is not currently in violation of any law. That is inexcusable and needs to be remedied. We’ve narrowly tailored the bill to exclude Good Samaritan acts but to focus on those conspiring to do acts of violence with their phones. Technology has been evolving faster than our mores and laws. We’re playing catch-up. That’s the job of government. 

BCK: What are some concerns with getting the bill passed and how have you addressed those concerns? 

Dababneh: I’ve worked with law enforcement and education leaders, the ACLU so that free speech is addressed. 

Stern: I’m trying to be Matt’s lawyer in the Senate when it gets down to legal questions. I hope to be able to be a good second man. We want bystanders and citizen activists to use camera phone for recording protests or whatever incidents they see that need to be reported to the police. The computer is a powerful tool for good. I care about civil liberties and the First Amendment -- that we not chill any of those freedoms but address premeditated and actual acts of violence. 

BCK: What’s the next step for the bill? 

Dababneh: The Bill will first go through the committee and the Assembly before going before the state Senate, hopefully by the spring. If passed, we hope the bill will be on the Governor’s desk by late spring. 

Stern: Matt is doing the heavy lifting. I don’t believe there is any major fiscal impact but we have got to get it through the Assembly and through the Senate to the Governor’s desk. 

BCK: Is there a plan to raise awareness of Jordan’s Law? 

Dababneh: We’ve been working through the media, through Op-Ed pages, as well as introducing at town hall meetings. Jordan’s attack is well-known. Educators and parents will hopefully teach accountability and responsibility. 

BCK: Any other thoughts on Jordan’s Law? 

Dababneh: We want to send a very strong message. If you think about engaging in an action like this, think twice. Think of the consequences. Life is filled with choices. In ten seconds, a young life was compromised. Consequently, for many years, Jordan faces challenges. He’s resilient but he has a blood clot, hearing loss. This has been disruptive to Jordan’s parents and his family, his friends. We are committed to this position so that anyone considering these attacks is aware of the consequences. 

Stern: Matt’s done a great job at holding off opposition and is working closely with the ACLU and other folks who care about issues. This is about showing Jordan that he is not alone and this is not just a West Hills or San Fernando Valley issue but about building a campaign on this. There are victims of these crimes all over the state. It’s a universal issue. I applaud Dababneh for having real focus. It was his idea to work with Ed and Jordan. I hope to be a good lawyer and to help him. We’ve been leaning on Cool to be Kind clubs and young people are leading here, as well as parents. Kids on the El Camino campus, at Cleveland and Reseda, there’s a ripple out from El Camino to high schools all over the Valley. Kids are talking about this. It will be interesting to see if we can translate chatter into political progress.

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

NEW GEOGRAPHY-- To some progressives, California’s huge endorsement for the losing side for president reflects our state’s moral superiority. Some even embrace the notion that California should secede so that we don’t have to associate with the “deplorables” who tilted less enlightened places to President-elect Donald Trump. One can imagine our political leaders even inviting President Barack Obama, who reportedly now plans to move to our state, to serve as the California Republic’s first chief executive.

As a standalone country, California could accelerate its ongoing emergence as what could be called “the Republic of Climate.” This would be true in two ways. Dominated by climate concerns, California’s political leaders will produce policies that discourage blue-collar growth and keep energy and housing prices high. This is ideal for the state’s wealthier, mostly white, coastal ruling classes. Yet, at the same time, the California gentry can enjoy what, for the most part, remains a temperate climate. Due to our open borders policies, they can also enjoy an inexhaustible supply of cheap service workers.

Of course, most Californians, particularly in the interior, will not do so well. They will continue to experience a climate of declining social mobility due to rising costs, and businesses, particularly those employing blue-collar and middle-income workers, will continue to flee to more hospitable, if less idyllic, climes.

California in the Trump era

Barring a rush to independence, Californians now must adapt to a new regime in Washington that does not owe anything to the state, much less its policy agenda. Under the new regime, our high tax rates and ever-intensifying regulatory regime will become even more distinct from national norms.

President Obama saw California’s regulatory program, particularly its obsession with climate change, as a role model leading the rest of the nation — and even the world. Trump’s victory turns this amicable situation on its head. California now must compete with other states, which can only salivate at the growing gap in costs.

At the same time, foreign competitors, such as the Chinese, courted by Gov. Jerry Brown and others to follow its climate agenda, will be more than happy to take energy-dependent business off our hands. They will make gestures to impress what Vladimir Lenin labeled “useful idiots” in our ruling circles, but will continue to add coal-fired plants to power their job-sapping export industries.

Our housing crisis could get worse

For a generation, California housing prices have been escalating, particularly along the coast, at rates two to three times faster, relative to income, than its rivals. Regulatory policies aimed at reducing the single-family units that most Americans prefer will continue to drive people, notably younger families, to what liberals dismiss as “Trumpland.”

Before the election, developers in Texas and elsewhere fretted that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development would impose a California-style regulatory regime across the country. They recognized that if prices were driven higher in Dallas, fewer would opt to live in a physically less attractive, and less temperate, place.

Now the gap between Trumpland and California will likely grow even more. New “zero emissions” housing policies alone are likely to boost the cost of new construction by tens of thousands of dollars.

California’s alternate reality

Already the most unequal state in terms of incomes, education levels and standards of living, according to a Social Science Research Council report, California seems destined to become even more so. Our ultrahigh taxes do not seem to be driving the really rich away. Like the rising population of the dependent poor, the rich likely will always be with us.

Billionaires, of course, can afford to choose the most attractive places on the planet in which to live. Our state now has more billionaires, notes Forbes, than all other countries, excluding the rest of the United States and China. Nearly half of the 16 counties with the highest percentages of people earning over $190,000 annually are in the Golden State.

Our emerging Republic of Climate, of course, is not so amenable to those who live outside the upper reaches. Elite firms in the tech, entertainment or media industries may keep their headquarters and key operations here, but when companies like Apple employ middle-wage earners, they tend to do it in Texas, not Tulare.

For most inhabiting the Climate Republic, the future could well be low-end jobs. People from around the nation and the world, who could not afford to live here full-time, increasingly come to California as tourists so they can live like Mediterranean grandees for a week or two. In this sense, California, once the heartland of the American dream, increasingly will resemble Hawaii, a state largely dependent on serving the luxury lifestyles of retirees and out-of-state visitors.

For the state’s middle class, of course, working at a hotel or feeding tourists generally does not pay enough to rent, much less buy, a decent place to live. They will continue to leave, as they have for 22 of the past 25 years.

Whether as a new or a virtual republic, California seems destined to remain a paradise for the wealthy and well-established, while offering increasingly little for those who aspire to the American dream. Many, particularly in the younger generation, may be forced to sacrifice a perfect climate and glorious topography for the chance of a decent standard of living.

(Joel Kotkin is the editor of New Geography … where this piece was most recently posted … and is R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis-based public policy firm, and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.)

-cw

GUEST WORDS--A belated 98th birthday to California’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, indefatigable poet, bookseller, anti-Fascist, First Amendment activist, environmentalist, publisher, painter, creator of community, patron saint of the Beat artists, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, living monument to the arts, "old-ass anarchist" and dazzlingly prescient speaker of truth whose City Lights bookstore has served as a beacon of enlightenment, creativity and resistance since the 1950s.

Ferlinghetti inspired the 2009 documentary "A Rebirth of Wonder," he titled his 2013 collection of poems "Time of Useful Consciousness" for the vital moment a pilot is aware of coming disaster and can still act, and he is working on a stream-of-consciousness memoir he likes to call "Portrait of the Artist As An Old Red."

In a riff on Gahlil Kibran's "Pity the Nation," Ferlinghetti wrote his own searing version ten years ago; it could be today. Likewise prophetically, he began his 2007 prose book, "Poetry as Insurgent Art," with, "I am signaling you through the flames." They continue to rise. May he, too.

Pity the Nation

“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”

― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(Abby Zimet has edited CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, thinning the carrots, hauling too much water, experiencing true if ragged community, and writing. This perspective was posted originally at Common Dreams.) 

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-A recent 60 Minutes program reported on how the H1B visa is being used to get rid of an older, more expensive professional American work force in favor of imported workers whose best "skill" is that they will work for a fraction of the salary and benefits. 

The link between this phenomenon and higher profits at any cost should not be missed merely because it is not reported by the mainstream corporate-owned media that is not so coincidentally behind this phenomenon designed to increase corporate profit at any cost. Even foundation-dependent NPR is loathe to go against the interests of its equally compromised corporate owned and controlled foundation supporters, who believe that NPR will never "bite the hand that feeds them." 

This financial reality within the media is emblematic of how much worse things will be in the American workplace and economy for older, more expensive high seniority employees now that we have a Trump administration that is hell-bent on reinstituting a 19th century government-free laissez faire work environment that supports corporate profit and the elimination of hard earned seniority and vested salary rights above all other legal rights and considerations. 

The rights of expensive high seniority employees were already under assault under the Obama administration when regulatory agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) were defunded to the point of being unable to stop blatant age, gender, and racial discrimination in the marketplace. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Even more sinister is what amounts to the complete elimination of the hard-earned ability of unions to stand against this well-planned assault on American workers across the employment spectrum. As I have already pointed out in many articles about the privatization of public education, unions like American Federation of Teachers (AFT) under Randi Weingarten or United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) under Alex Caputo-Pearl and company were put into office by the very players in management that are so intent on eliminating any vested rights teachers might have. 

Just one example of how this is accomplished can be seen at UTLA in its position when called upon to defend expensive high-seniority teachers that are disproportionately targeted and removed from their careers using completely fabricated "evidence." Once the school district has fired the teacher, they are no longer considered to be a member of the union so the union has no obligation to legally defend that person -- even though the LAUSD/UTLA Collective Bargaining Agreement clearly gives the union this right. 

Doesn't allowing management in any unionized industry the ability and power to determine union membership completely undermine the fundamental power and purpose of a union? According to UTLA and other ersatz unions like it around the country, you can be a good dues paying member of the union for years, but once the employer removes you, there go your union rights. 

What exacerbates this irrational phenomenon is that employees are being targeted and removed by management with no respect for their basic rights to presumptions of innocence and due process of law. 

To put it bluntly, unions like UTLA and others around the country now represent management and their own administrative interests -- not the interests and hard fought legal rights of their rank and file. 

Putting aside the blatant illegality and inequity of this collusion between union leadership and corporate management, one might also ask what avoidable economic catastrophes might occur if the institutional memory offered by older workers continues to be eradicated. 

If the laissez-faire policies of the Trump administration make 2017 the functional equivalent of 1928 (on the eve of the Great Depression of 1929) by eliminating a seasoned older work force, who will be left to keep this country from going over a cliff? 

While racial and ethnic discrimination are often in the news, do you think the majority of people in this country are aware that in the aggregate, age discrimination could be the most dominant and pernicious form of discrimination in our society?

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Kudos to Las Vegas, with a population of about 600,000. It is the little city that could, and did, land what the City of Los Angeles could not: an NFL franchise – in fact, one with a phenomenal brand – and what is going to be the baddest domed stadium in the world when it opens in a few years.

Then there are the tens of thousands of jobs and a bazillion tax dollars from the concerts, conventions and Super Bowls it will host. Wonders, it shall also do, for the occupancy rate of its hotels, its infrastructure, home property values and the needs of its neediest. 

Vegas, baby ... Vegas. 

Why can’t we get government leadership like that? 

Vegas landed the Raiders because it was ready to deal. It wasn’t a fluke. The NFL thrives on money and television, yet Vegas is just the 42^nd largest TV market in the U.S., while Los Angeles is second only to New York. They won because of leadership. The City of Los Angeles lost its NFL chances because of a lack of it. 

That theory holds true because a far smaller and poorer LA County city, Inglewood, with an estimated population of just 120,000, landed not one, but two, NFL franchises and what is going to be an insanely cool multi-billion dollar stadium and shopping and hotel complex that will host Super Bowl LV in 2021 and countless events in the decades to come. 

Oh, the tax revenue that will bring…to Inglewood. 

The Rams, Chargers and now the Raiders have something else in common: they all at one time or other played in the City of Los Angeles, left it, and are coming back to cities nearby but which are not named the City of Los Angeles. 

For years, the past and present 18 elected officials of the City of Los Angeles gassed-on about landing an NFL team and a world-class stadium in which it would play. It could be a refurbished Coliseum, Dodger Stadium or the never-to-be-built Farmer’s Field in downtown.

They, the political set, thought they would be our conquering heroes and land a pile of tax revenue that would save us from their profligate spending, bloated pension burdens and launch them all to higher office. 

But as we found out after the Rams, Chargers and Raiders chose other nearby cities in which to land, the City of LA only has great weather, and not the leadership to make a great deal. 

Another reason why Las Vegas landed the Raiders, as well as recently getting a National Hockey League team, is because it and Atlantic City no longer have pariah status with professional sports leagues as the exclusive homes of gambling in the United States. As the New York Times recently pointed out, “according to the American Gaming Association, 19 N.F.L. stadiums are less than 20 miles from a casino, and daily fantasy companies allow fans to bet on a lineup of players of their design using a computer or smartphone.” 

In other words, as times changed and circumstances evolved, the leaders in Las Vegas and in Inglewood were ready to deal. They did, and won. 

Meanwhile, City of Los Angeles officials continue their pursuit of sparkly things that LA does not need, like million dollar condo developments, luxury hotels and the 2024 Olympics, with few buying Mayor Eric Garcetti’s line that since Peter Ueberroth made the 1984 LA Olympics profitable, it is inevitable that he, Garcetti, who can’t house the homeless, ease the traffic or honor a budget (presently $250,000,000 under water) can do the same. 

Garcetti has held the reins of power in City Hall as either City Council president or Mayor since 2006 but is still seeking his first big “get.” 

In 2024, the LA Coliseum will be 101 years old, the Rose Bowl will be 102 and the Staples Center will be one of the older of the “newer” American arenas at 25. They, and lesser known venues in the area, will never suffice for an Olympics. 

The recently re-elected Garcetti should stop reaching for the glittery things in his field of vision, be they sporting events or higher office, and start governing to the benefit of the hoi polloi who live and work here now and in the coming years. When there are new and exciting things to go for, he and his successors should study the winning formulas of the little cities that could … and did.

(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. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Tags: Daniel Guss, The Guss Report, NFL teams, Raiders, Las Vegas, Ingelwood, Eric Garcetti

VIEW FROM INSIDE--A recent Los Angeles Times story explored the recent drop in arrest rates, both in Los Angeles and across the state, stating it was "unclear" why arrest rates have dropped as crime has risen. While we can't speak for other agencies, we can inform the public about some reasons for the arrest rate decline in jurisdictions patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. 

One key factor is the lack of unobligated patrol time due to short staffing in our patrol functions. As detailed in a National Institute of Justice report, "Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising" proactive policing, where deputies interact with the public and investigate suspicious activity and persons, produces arrests and deters crime.  However, instead of engaging in those functions, deputies now spend time racing from call to call, leaving little time for proactive patrol.  

In addition, short staffing of the Department leads to patrol deputies being forced to work multiple overtime shifts in a week, which often lengthens a shift to 16 hours.  Additionally, deputies are being ordered to work on regularly scheduled days off. The fatigue factor of long shifts and the realization that an arrest towards the end of a shift will lead to multiple hours in paperwork and additional hours in processing if a booking takes place, combined with compression of work weeks, is certainly a discouragement to making an arrest. In addition, making an arrest often requires backup, the availability of which many times is in question due to short staffing. 

It is not, however, just a lack of resources which have led to a drop in arrest rates. While the article implies a decrease in conjunction with a rising crime rate means crimes are not being solved and suspects identified, that is overstated. Since arrests are most often discretionary acts, a deputy may simply write a report documenting the crime, leaving it to prosecutors to file charges and send a notification letter to the defendant with an appearance date for arraignment. An arrest simply jump starts this process. This then raises the question: Why would a deputy forego an arrest and instead only write a report?  Simple.  Making an arrest presents an opportunity for second guessing by the Department, politicians, and the public. 

The Department has instituted a culture that emphasizes discipline not praise for hard working patrol deputies, with a singular focus on looking for the "bad" in every arrest or public contact. The default response of line supervisors and higher-ups is to second guess deputies and look for "bad tactics" or outcomes, instead of supporting proactive deputies, or praising them as examples to be followed. Since discretion allows a deputy to solve a crime and document it with a report, the understandable human behavior is to avoid making an arrest if that will simply invite second guessing and undue scrutiny. 

Then, of course, there is the politics of law enforcement; that is, politicians. The lack of support for deputies doesn't just exist within the Department but is amplified by politicians eager to grab the limelight and slam rank-and-file law enforcement whenever an incident does not end in textbook fashion. Former NYPD Commissioner and LAPD Police Chief Bill Bratton once observed, "Police work is not always pretty. In my years in law enforcement, I've learned not to make a judgment until I have all the facts."  Sadly, that is not the case with many politicians. Far beyond just a lack of support, the willingness of elected and self-appointed experts to rush to the cameras and pass judgment on rank-and-file law enforcement officers for incidents where they scarcely know the details--and what "details" they often know later prove to be false--certainly causes pause in engaging in arrests or proactive law enforcement.  

Further, whether it is simply a vocal minority receiving outsized attention on their views of law enforcement, or in fact a larger segment of society, it is unquestionable that as a whole there is less civility towards law enforcement by the general public. Society has become impatient, rude, judgmental and sanctimonious towards law enforcement, and it should be no wonder why deputies are hesitant to engage in actions such as arrest which leads to second guessing. 

A recent survey in a leading law enforcement publication found the major decrease in proactive policing across the nation was in large part because of  "significant correlations between leadership, media, community relations, and training to their individual effects upon decreased proactivity." As mentioned above, the decrease in arrests and a rising crime rate does not mean that crimes are not being solved and suspects identified.  However, if one wants to start searching for the reasons for a decrease in arrests while there has been an increase in crime, the responses of nearly 500 officers and deputies in this survey and the issues detailed in this blog provide a solid starting point.

(The Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS) is the collective bargaining agent representing more than 7,900 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County.)

-cw