LOS ANGELES

ANIMAL WATCH-On May 3, the Los Angeles City Council reaffirmed its intention to make Los Angeles a “no kill” city, meaning 90% of all adoptable animals would leave the shelter alive. Where they go after that is not of particular concern, as evidenced by the lack of monitoring of rescues nationwide and the inability to follow the destination of animals that are transported freely across the country and to Canada, and often relocated numerous times. 

While responsible rescues are vital to Los Angeles, we wonder if local politicians watched the revealing investigative report, Some So-Called Nonprofit Pet Rescues May Not Really Be Charities, by David Goldstein of CBS News. Goldstein attempted to interview the owner of Saving Spot Rescue, an alleged 501(c)3 dog rescue in Los Angeles, which claims to be non-profit but was found to not be in good standing either with the IRS or the CA Attorney General. 

CITY COUNCIL CLUELESS ABOUT LA'S 'ALMOST' SUCCESS 

Los Angeles Councilman Paul Koretz’ representative discussed the City's "no kill" achievement with KABC, stating, “We enacted several policies that will get us there. It’s not going to happen overnight but we increased funding to spay and neuter, that was a big part of it.” 

What he didn’t say, or may not have known, was that as of March 31, 2016, LA Animal Services GM Brenda Barnette had an unspent balance of $5,004,395.66 in the Animal Services Pet Sterilization Trust Fund and had to be instructed by the Commission to increase her spay/neuter efforts. Barnette admitted that an additional 2016-2017 annual contribution by the Council was canceled because of her high reserve. 

“We try to make it as reasonable as possible for people to adopt,” Councilman Paul Koretz (who claims he had 19 cats as a child) told KPCC. He did not admit that an ASPCA grant funded "free" cat adoptions, and discounted LA Animal Services' dog and cat adoption fees to $20.17 from December 27 through December 31, 2016. And he ignored that Best Friends is adopting out kittens, cats and dogs for the Cinco de Mayo weekend for $5 each. 

While “cheap” or “free” adoptions may empty shelters and lower euthanasia stats, what happens if that animal needs expensive veterinary care, special food, or training and the adopter merely wanted a freebie or bargain-basement special? Isn't it also the duty of a shelter to assure the adoption of a helpless animal is considered a serious investment and long-term responsibility--not just a trial run? 

The issue of owner responsibility, along with their failure to insure law enforcement as one of the obvious causes of stray and homeless animal problems, seems to allude Los Angeles officials.

WHAT IS THE OFFICIAL ‘NO-KILL’ RATE? 

For more than five years we have heard that LA Animal Services was quickly climbing to the coveted 90% live-save rate called, "no kill." However, under the Best Friends' Policy and Statements, it seems it is not quite that simple. 

After stating that a benchmark is important, Best Friends affirms, "Generally, the no-kill threshold for a community is considered to be 90 percent." 

But, the next paragraph states: "It is important to note that a 90 percent save rate is not necessarily defined as no-kill. This is because a community with a 90 percent save rate could still be killing animals who are not cases of true euthanasia. It is also possible that…a given community may achieve no-kill even if the save rate isn’t 90 percent." 

So, perhaps the formula explained in a March 13, 2017 Best Friends' media release will help us better understand the method of computation:

LA Animal Services reported an 86.6 percent live release rate from July through December 2016 (the fiscal year to date.) This is a formula that calculates the percentage of animals that leave shelter facilities alive through adoption, return to owner, or transfer and is calculated on total animals entering the shelter system. As a national organization, Best Friends uses the save rate benchmark, which reflects intake minus euthanasia outcomes divided by intake, for all its program cities. Save rate reflects only the percentage of animals not euthanized and does not account for the number of animals still held in the shelter or in foster care. 

DO RESCUES AND TRANSPORTS ASSURE A ‘FOREVER’ HOME? 

There are no audits of Best Friends' by the City Controller; however, at the September 8, 2015, LA Animal Commission meeting, Marc Peralta,  Director for Best Friends at the Mission Hills shelter stated that, under its No Kill Los Angeles program, Best Friends pays each NKLA rescue $150 for each animal it “pulls” for adoption over the number taken the year before, and that it has more than 110 participating organizations in the NKLA coalition.  

On November 1, 2013, Best Friends posted, Pup My Ride transports 10,000th pup, which describes that an LA city shelter dog, named Bart "...rolled away on the Pup My Ride van to Greenhill Humane Society in Eugene, Oregon, making him the 10,000th pet transported by Best Friends Animal Society-Los Angeles to an adoption rescue partner across the country. 

Once an animal is transported, there is no guarantee of its fate. PETA provides an ongoing list of "rescues" that have gone awry at ‘No-Kill’ Label Slowly Killing Animals. Here are a few of these media reports for the past two months: 

NJ Pet Rescue Owner Charged in Second Animal Cruelty Case, April 26, 2017 -- FLEMINGTON, NJ -- For the second time in less than 18 months, the owner and operator of the Catnip Friends Rescue has been charged with animal cruelty by the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Frank Rizzo, chief of the Law Enforcement Division of the NJSPCA, said in a statement. In February 2016, Wilferth plead guilty to one $500 civil count of animal cruelty based on charges filed against in December 2015 regarding the death of a dog. 

Woman Charged With Animal Neglect…50 Cats Found in Cages at Store, April 20, 2017 - RIVERSIDE, Mo. -- An animal neglect charge was recently handed down against the owner of Street Cats Rescue in Riverside after police discovered awful odors and 50 cats inside cages, some of which suffered from poor health, KSHB reports. The court documents describe strong odors of feces and urine coming from the business, and cats being found in such poor health that they had to be euthanized. 

24 dogs, 10 cats seized from Phoenix rescue group in "devastating" condition, March 15, 2017 -- PHOENIX, AZ -- ABC15.com reported that authorities had seized 24 dogs and 10 cats from a self-professed animal “rescue” doing business as Wiggle Butts Dog Rescue…animals were found covered with ticks, suffering from hair loss and untreated injuries, and “extremely malnourished.” Many animals were covered with feces, and their paws were stained, evidently from standing in their own waste. 

Washington County Woman Charged with Animal Neglect, March 11, 2017 – WASHINGTON COUNTY, OR -- KATU reported that a woman who had allegedly been operating a “cat shelter” at her home had been charged with first-degree animal neglect after a dead cat was found near the residence. Authorities investigated after receiving complaints alleging that the woman had moved out of state and left cats without care, including some inside the house…at least one of the cats found in the abandoned residence had a serious bacterial infection and another had ringworm. Some also had severe upper respiratory infections and could be heard wheezing loudly before they were even seen hiding throughout the house. 

Fayetteville Woman Facing Animal Cruelty Charges After Nearly 30 Dogs, 3 Dead, Found In Her Home,  March 8, 2017 -- FAYETVILLE, AR -- 5NewsOnline.com reported that authorities had seized 26 live animals and three dead dogs from a woman who told them that she worked with self-professed animal “rescue” groups. The animals were found inside small cages with accumulated feces inches deep, their coats were saturated with urine and feces, and several were “abnormally thin or weak.” In some areas of the home, accumulations of feces were 3 feet deep. A veterinarian who examined the three dead dogs determined that one of them had been dead for months. The woman had reportedly adopted 10 dogs since 2015 from a self-professed “no-kill” group in Texas doing business as San Antonio Pets Alive and had adopted another dog from a shelter in Fort Smith, Arkansas. 

Dozens of Animals Seized from Florence Animal Shelter, March 22, 2017 -- FLORENCE, TX -- Authorities had seized 89 cats and a dog from a self-professed “no-kill” shelter [[[ http://5newsonline.com/2017/03/08/fayetteville-woman-facing-animal-cruelty-charges-after-nearly-30-dogs-3-dead-found-in-her-home/ ]]] doing business as R.U.G. Activity Center Animal Shelter after a state health inspector found cats housed in cages “with not enough room to move about,” overflowing litterboxes that contained days’ worth of feces and urine, and sick cats housed with healthy ones, FOX7 reported. 

Greyhound Adoption Shelter Accused of Mistreating Animals, March 2, 2017 -- Hopkinton, MA -- FOX25 Boston reported that a self-professed “no-kill” “rescue” doing business as Greyhound Friends, Inc., had been issued a cease and desist order by state authorities. A former board member said that state officials had told the “rescue” that cages were too small for the size of the dogs being held there. Two former board members who were interviewed said that they were alarmed to learn that many dogs had been kept in cages at the “rescue” for years. 

WHAT HAS BEST FRIENDS GAINED FROM LOS ANGELES? 

When a new Los Angeles city animal shelter and clinic broke ground in 2008, it promised to provide the Northeast Valley with badly needed animal control services. In fact, the plea to pass Prop. F bond funds in the amount of $154,000,000 was based upon studies which showed it was essential for animal welfare and public safety to provide an additional shelter in that area. 

However, upon completion of the Mission Hills (NE Valley shelter) in 2011, the City decided it couldn’t afford to staff it. It was the perfect opportunity for Best Friends, which leases the $19 million facility for $1 per year, plus the City pays $200,000/year for maintenance. 

A December 7, 2016 report by the City Administrative Officer states, "Since January 2012, BFAS has invested over $3.5 million annually in the operation of the NEV facility." 

In the five-year period ending in 2015, Best Friends "took in $313,676,006 in total support -- tens of millions of dollars more than when it came to LA in 2011," according to the Guss Report on January 9, 2017. 

OTHER LARGE CITIES CLAIM ‘NO-KILL’ 

AUSTIN, TX -- "This coming February, Austin will celebrate its five-year anniversary of being America’s largest no kill city, saving more than 90 percent of its homeless animals since 2011," writes Kristen Auerbach for the Huffington Post.  

But, there's another side of the story: As City Reaches No-kill, Free-roaming Dogs Still Trouble Neighborhoods  April 27, 2016 -- At about the same time as one of the most brutal dog attacks in recent San Antonio history — a South Side man had his scalp and ear ripped off by a pack of dogs in December, before a police officer arrived and shot three of the animals — the city's Animal Care Services department announced it had reached a long-elusive goal. As 2015 closed, more than 9 out of every 10 dogs were being released from ACS care alive. 

NEW YORK CITY, NY 

ANIMAL CARE CENTERS OF NYC (ACC) RELEASES Q1 2017 DATA -- 94.3% Placement Rate Highest in Nation -- April 18, 2017 -- Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC), the only open-admissions animal shelter serving all five boroughs, announced today…the overall placement rate for cats and dogs reached 94.3% with 95.5% of cats and 92.6% of dogs finding placement, either through direct adoptions or through its New Hope adoption partner program. Risa Weinstock, ACC’s Executive Director, attributes this accomplishment to the ASPCA, 200 active New Hope Partners; however, she also notes that “intake has decreased by 35% over last year..." 

LA BREEDERS' LICENSES INCREASE WHILE IMPOUNDS GO DOWN 

Efforts to ban easy retail access to purebred dogs can merely make them more desirable and/or drive purchasers to a nearby city or to the Internet, which is rife with easy access to every breed. This can be a desire to replicate a childhood pet, preference for certain genetic characteristics, or a loss of confidence in the transparency of shelter information and fear of potential temperament liability caused by the desperation to "save" every animal. 

This could provide an insight into why the number of breeders' licenses sold by LA Animal Services increased by 44% -- from 466 to 669, according to Brenda Barnette's Woofstat report for February 2017, and was up 71% from the same period last year. 

Also, LAAS statistics have shown a decrease in impounds. If this were due to intense low-income community spay/neuter efforts, then it is admirable. However, it is clouded by the fact that City residents claim they can't reach LA shelters by phone to get stray and aggressive animals picked up in their communities; and Los Angeles has the highest number of bites to postal carriers in the U.S. in 2016. 

DECLARING A SHELTER ‘NO KILL’ DOES NOT DESCRIBE THE ENTIRE CITY 

In discussing the laudable efforts to increase the live-save rate in Austin, John Bachman, co-executive director of Voice for Animals, makes a point that should also be heeded by Los Angeles: "By being obsessed with...no-kill and then say 'Oh we've reached it,' they give a false impression to the whole city that 'Oh we don't have to worry anymore, we're no-kill.’" 

In Los Angeles, we must share the concerns that announcements of a city reaching "no kill" can cause politicians and communities where stray animals are not a constant threat to safety to tune out other serious animal-related issues. We already see it in the failure to hire badly needed Animal Control Officers and replace dangerous vehicles in service for over 15 years. 

NOT ALL PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED BY ‘SAVING’ ANIMALS 

The emotionally charged, enigmatic buzzwords “No Kill” is right at the top of on-going controversies over semantics and statistics and can be strategically interjected into any discussion regarding animal shelters in order to elicit passionate response by the public -- i.e., donors -- where tugging on heartstrings usually opens pocketbooks.  

But are we really getting the truth about the plight of unwanted animals and a clear concept of what is meant by reaching “no kill?” Or are statistics and reports regarding euthanasia manipulated to show progress or failure depending on who stands to benefit philosophically and/or financially? 

Factors that are missing in the mandate to just "save" animals at all costs is the need to create and enforce owner responsibility and to solve the "birth problem" to avoid overpopulation, strays, and the need for euthanasia. John Bachman said it is pure mathematics: "Adoption is like treatment. You're treating the problem, but you're not solving the epidemic."

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

-cw

CORRUPTION WATCH-Should California judges put personal self-interest and loyalty to other judges ahead of their duty to support the Constitution? 

In ancient days, loyalty to one’s own family or tribe predated concepts of justice. Early societies realized social cohesion could not exist without people knowing that power was not the controlling factor in all matters. From the start of civilization, all societies have had some institution to apply the laws. 

Hammurabi’s famous code found perjury highly offensive (3,745 to 3,703 years ago.) We all know about the commandment “not to bear false witness against one’s neighbor.” Because one’s own may be guilty, there is an inherent conflict between loyalty to one’s own and telling the truth. 

After the Fall it was pretty much downhill as far as truth-telling is concerned. However, as mankind settled into an agricultural mode, populations expanded, and people became more interdependent, mankind at least had the sense to recognize that falsehood was a serious problem. As Sissela Bok puts it in her study of lying, "trust in some degree of veracity functions as a foundation of relations among human beings; when this trust shatters or wears away, institutions collapse." An ethic of loyalty to kith and kin may be enough for an extremely primitive sort of existence. [“False Witness,” 1993, by Richard H. Underwood, Univ. of Kentucky)

The civilized world’s legal codes have realized that society’s survival depends upon trust in institutions and that trust requires honesty. The point which most people miss about the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah is that, according to the rabbis, the extreme offenders were the judges themselves, who were named Liar, Habitual Liar, Deceiver, and Perverter of the Law. While everyone can grasp the troubles that came for regular people who lied in individual cases, it was when the judges themselves are the culprits that the existence of society itself became imperiled.

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

@THE GUSS REPORT-Did a rogue Los Angeles deputy city attorney criminally misuse his authority to dupe a Los Angeles Times reporter into publishing an untrue article about a criminal charge he said he filed, but did not – one that he never intended to prosecute? 

That prosecutor, Eugene Hall, Jr, appears to have done this to intimidate and coerce with negative publicity a prospective defendant so that he would drop his civil rights lawsuits against Hall’s employer, the City of Los Angeles, and several of its officials. That practice is strictly prohibited by the California Bar Association, which tightened such rules on May 1; it may be criminal as well. 

Here’s how it went down…. 

Wednesday March 29 – 4:35 p.m.: Los Angeles Times reporter Emily Alpert Reyes sent notorious City Hall gadfly/Encino immigration attorney Wayne Spindler, the following text message: 

“Hi Wayne, this is Emily Alpert Reyes with the LA Times. The City Attorney’s office informed me they are filing criminal charges against you for illegally possessing an assault weapon. I’d like to get any comment you can provide. I’m available at this number. Thanks!” 

(Note: Spindler turned in the gun for destruction back on May 20, 2016 as part of a court order that he is appealing. What transpired between then and the allegation leveled against him this spring is that he has since filed civil rights lawsuits against the city and several of its officials. His purchase receipt for the gun is dated January 25, 1989, predating the 1991 ban which at most calls for a $500 citation, though a recent state program with a faulty website allowed gun owners to register without ramification.)

Before Spindler reached Reyes, her article was published on the Times’ website at 6:10 p.m., and read, “Spindler was charged with a misdemeanor and is scheduled to be arraigned in April,” citing Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for City Attorney Mike Feuer. 

But Reyes failed to confirm whether that was truthful, because no such charge, or any other charge, was listed against Spindler on the court’s website (which is the official record) on March 29 or any of the subsequent six days. 

An email from CityWatch contributor Eric Preven to Spindler, which is now part of the court record, alleges that reporter Reyes told Preven that she did not get her information from Wilcox, whose press release was not distributed until later the next day: 

“How did Emily hear about it? She says she didn't get the City Attorney press release... and referred me to the company spokeswoman when I asked her.” 

Spindler says that later in the evening of March 29, after Reyes’ article was published online, he told her he was unaware of the charge, but she would not tell him how she heard about it.

The only person other than Wilcox who would likely have had access to the case information was Deputy City Attorney Eugene Hall, Jr. who, along with Reyes, Wilcox, and Feuer, has refused to answer questions for this article. 

Thursday March 30 – 2:11 p.m.: With Reyes’ article about Spindler now in the print edition of the Times without any corrections, I contacted her to determine whether she had any unconventional or inappropriate contact with prosecutor Hall. Both Reyes and the LA Times spokesperson to whom she referred me, Hillary Manning, refused to answer, citing: 

“We do not have a comment on this, as it relates to the details of our newsgathering. If you have a question about the information as reported in the published story, please let me know.” 

That is precisely what I did, but Reyes and Manning offered only circular replies.

Monday April 3rd – 9pm: With still no charge against Spindler in the court system, CityWatch published my article about the false information in Reyes’ LA Times piece.

Tuesday April 4 – 8:04 a.m.: Reyes sent Spindler the following text: 

“Hi Wayne, this is Emily with the LA Times. Did you ever get a notice to appear for the weapons charge? I’m driving in to work right now but will be available in about an hour.” 

Having had no contact with Spindler since March 29, Reyes would only have asked that question as a result of reading the accusations in my article.

Instead of replying to Reyes, Spindler says he watched the next several hours unfold as follows. He believes that Reyes may have been confronted with my article by LA Times brass and/or she made a panicked call to prosecutor Hall to find out why there was still no case on the court’s website a full six days after she wrote that the case was filed and is scheduled for arraignment. Spindler plausibly explains that Hall – fearing possible disbarment, criminal charges and civil liability as a result of my article – then had to file the charge, which is precisely what Hall did on the 4th. 

The likely reason why Hall didn’t actually file the charge prior to April 4 is because he knew that if it was filed, it would permanently remain on Spindler’s record even if he didn’t prosecute the case; he would have no bargaining chip in such a scenario. But by just appearing to have filed the case, but not actually doing so, Hall could assure Spindler that the charge would never appear on his record, and use it as a bargaining chip to coerce Spindler to drop his civil suits. 

It was Hall’s sloppy paper trail that unraveled his ruse. 

The court’s website shows that Hall did not file the case until April 4, but the case file contains a paper copy of the complaint, stamped and dated by the court clerk as “Filed March 30, 2017.” 

If Hall’s March 30 paper complaint had been filed as its stamp indicates, which it was not, it would have immediately shown up on the court’s website. Even to this date, it has not. He somehow got a deputy court clerk named Elawna Brown to stamp his Spindler complaint as “filed,” perhaps during a window visit in which clerks often stamp dozens of documents for attorneys, and pulled back that particular one without having it actually processed into the court system. In other words, Hall got his complaint stamped as filed, without the actual filing of the complaint that the stamp reflects was done. 

Hall appears to have used his fraudulently stamped document to get Reyes to write her article, before Wilcox’s press release (which she allegedly said she never received) was distributed. There is seemingly no other way Reyes could have learned about the case other than through Hall’s fraudulently stamped complaint. 

And Hall, who is based in the City Attorney’s office in Van Nuys, signed the fraudulently stamped Spindler complaint not in Van Nuys on March 29, but in Los Angeles, meaning downtown LA, which is where reporter Emily Alpert Reyes is based and published her article on March 29 with no other logical source for the false information. 

As Barry Scheck, a defense attorney in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, legendarily barked, “there…..there, how about that Mr. Fung?” 

Public records support that Hall had no intention to file the charge, but was forced to cover his tracks by filing it on April 4, immediately after my April 3 article was published.

But things are much worse than that for prosecutor Eugene Hall Jr. 

On March 29, when Hall signed his complaint against Spindler (the one later fraudulently stamped as “filed” on March 30) it triggered three letters from his boss, Supervising Deputy City Attorney Richard A. Schmidt, that were sent to each of Spindler’s residences, which falsely stated: 

“Please be advised that a criminal complaint has been filed charging you with a violation of Section P30605a, commonly known as possession of assault weapon.” 

Since there was no such complaint at that time, and for the subsequent six days, each mailed letter might constitute a misuse of prosecutorial power and mail fraud. 

Reyes, as late as last Friday, continues to refuse to state where she got her faulty story information. When Spindler texted her again to ask, she replied: 

“Because Dan has been making an issue of this, I don’t want to say anything beyond what we’ve put in the newspaper. But I think the story is clear about who provided the information.” 

So much for the Times’ policy about not explaining its newsgathering practices…. 

The judge in the case, the amiable, semi-retired Bernard J. Kamins, who earned the nickname “Judge Bear” for giving teddy bears to children involved in his cases, and for his successful drug rehabilitation programs, may be particularly receptive to claims of prosecutorial misconduct; he is a former public defender. 

If proven, that spells immense and costly trouble ahead for Hall, Schmidt, Feuer, Brown, Reyes and their respective employers.

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

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--In a 10-0 vote Friday, the city council passed a resolution authored by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield  appealing to Congress to investigate whether Trump has violated the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. The resolution also calls for investigations into high crimes and misdemeanors that could lead to impeachment against the president. Blumenfield represents Council District 3, the northwest San Fernando Valley, including Canoga Park, Reseda, Tarzana, Winnetka and Woodland Hills. Absent from Friday’s vote were Councilman Mitch Englander, the sole Republican on the Council, as well as Council Members Jose Huizar, Paul Koretz and Joe Buscaino.

Since the election, many are familiar with the Emoluments Clause, also known as the Title of Nobility Clause, which is a provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution.

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

Trump’s extensive business and real estate dealings have brought concerns, particularly with respect to foreign government agencies that may fall within the clause’s scope. For example, back in March, China granted 38 provisional “Trump” trademarks scheduled to become permanent within 90 days.

Blumenfield worked on the resolution with We st Valley Resistance, which supports investigating Trump for possible impeachable offenses; similar resolutions have passed in other cities and towns across the country, including Richmond, Alameda and Berkeley, as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While Trump has issued statements that the Trump Organization would be donating any profits derived from foreign government guests at his DC hotel to the Treasury and that his organization would not enter into any deals with foreign governments during his term, the Trump Organization is opening a 57-story Trump Tower in Manila and a spokesman for Blumenfield says the president’s relationship with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte should be investigated. Duterte has been criticized for alleged human rights violations against suspected drug dealers in his country.

While the council resolution is only symbolic, the Trump presidency is certainly a game changer. We’ve yet to see a president and an administration with so many questionable actions and conflicts. Whatever messages we can send to Washington, whether involving Emoluments Clause violations or high crimes and misdemeanors seem to be fair game.

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

-cw

PERSPECTIVE--Illegal sources of income are subject to federal and state income tax; so, why would I object to the City of Los Angeles collecting Transitory Occupancy Tax (TOT) revenue from illegal short-term rentals, such as Air BnB?

In the former case, taxation does not exempt scofflaws from prosecution.  If anything, tax compliance requirements are useful tools to bring criminals to justice or enhance their sentences . If Al Capone were alive, he would agree.

The latter is different – it creates an impediment to enforcing zoning laws.  A cash-strapped city like Los Angeles will not want to bite the hands that feed it.  It is the equivalent of bribery.  Pay to play, and the city will not pursue enforcement of residential zoning codes. The City Council and mayor will drag their feet, if not completely overlook, the protection of honest residents’ right to enjoy their neighborhoods without the adverse effects associated with revolving door occupancy.

In his annual budget letter to the mayor and City Council, City Controller Ron Galperin weighed in.  He said the city must be “vigilant to consider the potential TOT revenue impacts to the general fund.”

As I read between the lines of his statement, that’s not really an endorsement of the policy. If anything, it is a carefully nuanced assessment.  Ron is the controller and he is required to advise the city on any financial matter – good or bad.

But zoning violations should not be ignored just because the cash generated by the TOT partially mitigates the effects of the city’s reckless approach in managing its budget. Please note that Galperin also emphasized the importance of a prudent and well-balanced budget. Ignoring laws does not meet the definition of prudent.

It’s a good thing that a city-sanctioned, short-term rental scheme did not exist when Scarface Al was around. No telling how much more power he would have wielded in Chicago.

We now face an army of non violent mini-Als, no baseball bats or Chicago pianos, but armed with industry lawyers and plenty of money. 

(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

MEDIA POLITICS--Hollywood's primary writer’s union has come to the defense of member Stephen Colbert after Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai said he was investigating an anti-President Donald Trump monologue the comedian delivered on his Late Show last week. 

In a radio interview last Friday, Pai said that his agency was looking into a Late Show monologue delivered on May 1st that criticized Trump for abruptly aborting an interview with CBS News' John Dickerson. Pai said the agency had received complaints—some online critics have labeled Colbert's monologue homophobic—and promised it would "apply the law" set out by the courts.

In a joint statement this morning, Writers Guild of America East and West presidents Michael Winship and Howard Rodman wrote that they were "appalled" by Pai's remarks. "Pai's remarks are just the latest in a series of statements by the current administration indicating a willful disregard of the First Amendment," they wrote. "What is obscene is not what Colbert said but any attempt by the government to stifle dissent and creativity."

The FCC reviews complaints of broadcast content and typically issues fines when it concludes flagged content is obscene or indecent. A fine on Colbert seems unlikely, however, owing in part to the higher tolerance for explicit content in late-night time programming. 

(Katie Kilkenny is an associate editor at Pacific Standard  … where this piece was first posted. She covers culture both online and in print.)

-cw

GUEST WORDS--(Editor’s note: As is often the case in development arguments, things are seldom black and white. This is the Hollywood Chamber’s perspective where jobs and community convenience have priority. Richard Lee Abrams, has other thoughts not the least of which is that the General Plan … the voice of the community … deserves to be upheld. Check them both out. Let us know what you think.) 

By now, most people have heard the disappointing news that Superior Court Judge Richard L. Fruin, Jr. has once again sided with a very small group of plaintiffs to prevent Hollywood's new Target from being completed. I thought it might be appropriate to offer of few of my own observations on this sad state of affairs. 

Let me first offer a little background. It has now been nine years since Target first filed to build a store in Hollywood. When it was initially approved by the City and threatened with a lawsuit, Target decided to do a complete Environmental Impact Report (EIR) to strengthen its case against lawsuits. However, that later proved to be of little value. 

At issue was a quirk in the Station Neighborhood Area Plan (SNAP) that governs development in that area. The SNAP ordinance allows projects that are strictly retail to only be 35 feet in height, but allows mixed-use projects to be up to 75 feet. The City Council and Planning Commission felt that the Target would be a benefit to the neighborhood and granted a variance to allow the project to be built at the 75-foot height. 

The La Mirada Neighborhood Association, which is reputed to have only two or three members, sued. Judge Fruin ruled that the EIR was fine, but that the city erred in granting a variance and should have changed the zoning. 

The City, in order to comply with the judge's order, created a new Subarea F zoning category for big box retail centers. Once again, the La Mirada Neighborhood Association sued, saying that the City should have performed a new EIR to justify the new zoning designation. And once again, the judge agreed with the plaintiffs. It serves no purpose to rebut the judge's rationale for his decision, but I would like to share my thoughts on what a loss this means for Hollywood. 

Between 250 and 300 permanent jobs have been lost to the community now for several years because of these lawsuits. These are jobs that could have been filled by many of the low-income residents in the neighborhood close to the Target site. In addition, the Target would have provided expanded shopping opportunities for our entire Hollywood community, and would have been within walking distance for many low-income neighborhoods. It is only two blocks from the Hollywood/Western subway station and so is easily reachable from all areas of Hollywood. We haven't had a department store since Sears closed its Hollywood store in 2008, so this would have been a wonderful addition to the community. 

I get more questions about the status of the Target from both residents and businesses than any other subject. There is overwhelming support in Hollywood for this store. So the question is "What are the specific reasons why these few people are opposing the Target so vehemently?" 

Robert Silverstein, the plaintiff's attorney, usually responds that the plaintiffs aren't against a Target -- they just want them to follow the city's rules. My objection to that answer is that rules set by a city are not cast in stone. 

Historically, cities have always had broad discretionary powers to determine land use within their bounds. The SNAP ordinance is not the U.S. Constitution. The City should have the right to make changes as circumstances warrant. 

We live in an urban area. What value is achieved by limiting a retail center to one story? When we have attended past hearings on the Target, the main justification of the opponents for their position is that they want housing built in the neighborhood, not just retail centers. If developers want added height, they have to provide housing as well, they say. They also have voiced concerns over views being blocked or a building built out-of-scale with the neighborhood. 

I could understand these arguments eight years ago, but circumstances have changed dramatically since that time and the rationale for those positions no longer applies. In the interim, three projects have been announced and are in the entitlement phase across the street from the Target that will provide 1,293 housing units. These projects will all be as high, or higher, than the Target. So what purpose is to be achieved by forcing the Target to be torn down and rebuilt at one story? My answer would be, "absolutely none." 

The opponents can bask in their latest court victory, but in my view, they should be asking themselves if they are really serving the greater good for Hollywood? If Target pulls out because they are tired of fighting this small group of naysayers, have the interests of Hollywood really been served? Does the loss of these needed jobs and shopping opportunities mean anything to the opponents? 

Being with the Chamber of Commerce, I am an eternal optimist. We have been through some difficult times in Hollywood, and despite setbacks, the community's revitalization continues to move forward. I remain hopeful that a solution can be found so that the Target can be completed. Meanwhile, I would urge everyone who is supportive of having the Target finished to not be silent. Let the La Mirada Neighborhood Association know how you feel.

(Leron Gubler has been serving as the President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for the past 24 years. His tenure since 1992 continues to oversee the great comeback story of Hollywood.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH--(Editor’s note: As is often the case in development arguments, things are seldom black and white. See the Hollywood Chamber’s perspective where jobs and community convenience have priority. This is Richard Lee Abrams perspective. He has other thoughts not the least of which is that the General Plan … the voice of the community … deserves to be upheld. Check them both out. Let us know what you think.) 

In the April 27, 2017 issue of CityWatch, Dave Bell wrote an article, “Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?”   Judge Richard Fruin has answered that question in his seventeen page explanation again rejecting the Hollywood Target Store. The reason that partially-finished monster is still looming over Sunset-Western can be summed up in one word -- Garcetti. Since Judge Fruin must use “legalese,” he cannot come out and act like a Biblical prophet pointing at King David proclaiming, “Thou art the man!” 

By the way, Petitioners did not sue after the store was partially built. Target started building after the case was already in court, knowing that a 74-foot store was illegal. It was a cynical ploy to tell Judge Fruin that it would be an economic waste not to allow the Target Store to continue constructing the illegal store. And Judge Fruin was not favorably impressed. 

Judge Fruin’s legal reasoning in again rejecting the Target Store made it clear that the problem rests with the City and not with the Petitioners. And when the judge refers to the City, he clearly means Garcetti. Garcetti was then the councilman who insisted that Target violate the law back in 2008-2009. After the court rejected the first Target Store, Garcetti insisted on appealing. The case has been all the way to the California Supreme Court and back down, but the City, i.e. Garcetti, does not listen. 

The City Persists in Violating the Law 

In 2016 the City tried to do another end-run around Judge Fruin and the law, the same way Garcetti and his love-child project at 5929 Sunset had tried to do by demolishing the facade of the Spaghetti Factory. As a result of those Garcetti machinations, that huge residential project sits vacant. Nonetheless Garcetti had the City give his buddies at CIM Group $17.4 Million. 

Then in 2015, the courts rejected The Millennium (Earthquake) Towers in Hollywood as a violation of the law. These last two cases were before Judge James Chalfant. 

Garcetti also subverted the law with his 2012 Update to the Hollywood Community Plan. In January 2014, Judge Allan Goodman rejected the Hollywood Community Plan Update as based on “fatally flawed data and wishful thinking that subverted the law (CEQA).” 

These legal loses are not the fault of the City Attorney’s Office which has to follow the directions of its client, the City. That means when the City Attorney tells Eric Garcetti that a project is illegal and he should follow the law, the City Attorney still has to show up in court and put on the best face possible. If Garcetti would heed the wise advice of the City Attorney’s Office, the City could operate more smoothly and would not be spending millions on attorney fees to lose cases. There was also the $1.3 billion sidewalk case that came with $15 million in attorney fees. 

The Issue in Target II 

The fundamental issue in this recent Target case is whether the City could make a major change in the zoning law, i.e. the Specific Plan “SNAP,” without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement (EIR). Think of an EIR as like a final exam: if you skip the final, you fail the course. Duh! Maybe, trust fund babies who went to Harvard-Westlake are allowed to buy their way out of final exams. Who knows? 

Thus, Garcetti decided that there was no need to have the final exam for the recent change in SNAP. Garcetti has yet to learn that just because he says something, does not make it so. He may be able to fool the voters, but he cannot fool the professionals. If he had listened to the City Attorney back in 2009, Hollywood would have probably had a Target by 2010. If he had listened to the legal professionals in early 2016, he would not have insisted on adding a Subarea F to SNAP without conducting an EIR. 

A Brief History of SNAP 

The citizens and professionals who drafted SNAP took years to classify every single parcel of property within its area as belonging to one of five Subareas A through E. SNAP rejected the idea of a Subarea F as it did not want mega-stores. SNAP is a new zoning law that became effective in March 2001. When Garcetti decided to ignore it in 2008, SNAP was less than a decade old – not some ancient zoning code which had become out dated. 

Adding a New Subarea F Was a Huge Change in SNAP 

Adding a Subarea F which would allow mega big box stores in Hollywood was a significant change to SNAP. It required the City to conduct a new EIR to assess the impacts on Hollywood if the streets were filled with these warehouse type mega-stores. 

Starting back in 2008, Garcetti could have cooperated and allowed Target to build a legal store with its parking underground. If then-Councilmember Garcetti had permitted Target to construct the type of facility the law allowed, the store could have been operating by 2010. Instead, there has been close to a decade of lawsuits; we may very well face another decade of them. 

The decision is up to Garcetti. Does he want to guarantee that Hollywood has no Target Store while he spends millions on attorneys to take the same matter to the appellate court, then on to the Supreme Court, only to be told, “You cannot graduate from high school without taking the final exam?” 

In the end, what are Hollywoodians going to get? Endless Garcetti litigation? Or will Mayor Garcetti allow Target to construct a legal store? Don’t expect a resolution to this fight or construction on the Target store … any time soon.

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

PERSPECTIVE--Mayor Eric Garcetti caught some flak in a recent LA Times article for failing to mention the $1.1B the city must pay to fund employee pensions. 

But let’s be fair: the Chair of the Budget and Finance Committee deserves an equal share of the criticism:

“Despite recent funding shortfalls, over long periods the performance of the pension system’s investments has met or surpassed expectations.” Council Member Paul Krekorian (photo above), as quoted in the LA Times, November 18, 2016.

This is an example of the naiveté of our elected officials. Mr. Krekorian forgets, or chooses to ignore, that past performance is no indication of future returns; the further back in time, the less relevant are the results. The 15-year return for LACERS is 6.5%; the 10-year is 5.9%. The world economy has undergone major structural changes over the 30 year period, for which the average return was 8.4%.  Projecting investment performance based on data from over 20 years ago is as useful as comparing Barry Bonds’ stats to Hank Aaron’s.

Or maybe it’s an acknowledgement that city officials do not represent the public as a whole, only the city employees and retirees, many of whom reside outside of the city. According to the results of a 2014 study reported by the Times, about two-thirds of city employees live elsewhere. So much for a multiplier effect. While those employees cannot vote in city elections, the unions representing them are powerful political forces. 

The mayor and City Council hope to make a dent in the problem by taxing short-term, Airbnb style rentals, effectively trashing zoning in residential neighborhoods.  Certainly, a share of the new gas tax will flow to the city, along with some “legalized” pot-related revenue (it remains to be seen how the Justice Department deals with the conflict between federal and state laws).  However, the city could lose some, or all, of the surplus transfer from the DWP.

The fact remains, 20% of the general fund goes to cover the city’s pension contribution, a rate that has increased from 5% in 2002. It’s been fairly flat at around 20% for a couple of years. In 2012 it was 15%, the same for 2008, during the height of the subprime mortgage meltdown. Overall, city revenue has increased by $1.2B since Garcetti took office. With that much of an increase, one would expect the city’s contribution rate to drop.  It’s an inconsistency any CEO would have to explain to a board in the form of a simple variance analysis.

It is the result of the deteriorating pension position.  While explaining what an unfunded liability means would put any general audience to sleep, it is far easier – and more understandable – to present an analysis of the contribution rate over a period of several years.  It would make the growing unsustainability of pension promises apparent in terms the public could appreciate.

I will propose to the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) to make such information a required disclosure in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).

Who knows – maybe Paul Krekorian would be enlightened.

(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

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Earlier this year, I covered Caney Arnold’s Council District 15 run. The progressive grassroots candidate had hoped to parlay his background in Air Force acquisition and program management, as well as a graduate degree in Public Policy and Administration, to create change at the council level but his campaign was truncated by the March primary. 

Arnold is still on course to create change. “Now that the City Council races are over, I’ve moved on to other projects,” he shares. I sat down with Arnold to discuss his role as Our Voice LA Leader and the national Our Voice Initiative.  

Started by Sam Ronan, the young Air Force Reserve who ran for DNC Chair, Our Voice Initiative is a national nonpartisan grassroots organization to bring “movements and groups together...and provide a common toolbox of strategy, policy, and organizing/funding resources to new candidates who want to take on the establishment.” -- Our Voice Initiative.  The group will focus on providing information on propositions, laws, and regulations proposed at all levels of government; vetting candidates; and organizing protests, rallies, town hall meetings, marches, inquiries, and hearings. 

Arnold says he was inspired by Ronen’s drive to help create a political and campaign system that belongs to the people. “Our Voice Initiative will act as a political consultant to help those interested in participating more in the process -- to help them understand how to do that.” The former candidate’s own campaign experience led him to appreciate the need for an information conduit. “A lot is getting info to the people in a way they can digest without having to spend their entire lives trying to access that information. People just don’t have the time to collect information. CityWatch is doing a great service, similar to what Our Voices is trying to do,” he says. “We want to bring information to the people about what is going on with the government behind closed doors and to encourage them to participate in the process themselves, whether it’s as simple as participating in campaign finance and advocacy or running for office.” 

While Our Voice is a national organization with state chapters, Arnold says he approached the group about organizing at the city level in Los Angeles. “I think ours is the first at the city level -- not an official chapter -- but they’re supporting us and are thrilled that we’re working in LA,” he adds. 

“What we’re trying to do is to create a more nonpartisan umbrella group and to extend to the local level while other groups are stuck at the state congressional or federal level,” Arnold says. “In order to develop grassroots candidates, we have to start with city council and school board races -- and build from there. That’s what I am interested in going in LA and it’s the purpose of Our Voice, as well.” 

Arnold says he “learned a lot from his run for City Council. “There’s an unfairness built into the campaign system and the election process. We face voter apathy and those are things I want to get more involved in -- to just help make people more aware. During the council race, a couple of motions were offered up by city councilmember on campaign finance, involving a lower hurdle for matching funds, for example. I think they brought up some motions that never went anywhere. They just died in committee. It seems like a disingenuous photo opp to try to convince voters that they’re interested. I’d be interested in resurrecting this or improving upon it to help create a fair campaign process in Los Angeles.” 

Arnold sees the Resist Movement as a catapult to change. “The main thing is there’s lots of commonality as far as grassroots concerns go on the left and the right. Everyone agrees that there’s too much corruption in government. Plenty of people will march, which is great to raise awareness but they don’t want to go the distance, to do voter registration or Get Out the Vote, to donate $25, phone bank, or canvas. It isn’t as sexy. But we’re all in this together. We can do both. We need to raise awareness and to move forward. That’s what Our Voice will do -- to pull people together.” 

For more information on Our Voice Initiative, visit the site. 

Donate to Our Voice Initiative through Indiegogo. 

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

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-This is the third post in a series. We’ve been deep diving into a Unified Enrollment scheme, a top priority of the charter lobby, that’s being pushed on LAUSD officials without a discussion of policy implications and almost no public input. 

In the first post, we laid out some of the scholarly research that finds Unified Enrollment systems exacerbate inequitable access to schools. They’ve been funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and Denver. 

In the second post, we revealed a process that looks a lot like the iPad scandal, complete with secret meetings to lobby board members and slick, pseudo-public presentations. Policy implications are not on the agenda. 

In this post, as promised, we’ll introduce the privatizers who have infiltrated the school district to advance the interests of the charter lobby. 

Conspiracy theory? Hardly. This just looks like the new business model. Since the iPad scandal, privatizers have had to find new ways to move their agenda. The scandal made direct corporate lobbying behind the scenes too risky. But there’s no need, if you have managed to plant your sales force inside the school system itself.  

The District personnel pitching the Unified Enrollment scheme are not just any LAUSD employees. They are Broad and Walton acolytes, trained and placed in the school system to move the corporate reform agenda forward from the inside. 

Ani Bagdasarian Packard started working at LAUSD while corporate reform poster boy John Deasy was Superintendent. For two years, she worked in LAUSD as a Broad fellow, just as Broad’s education empire shifted its focus. Previously a training academy for Superintendents, it would now focus on lower level staff “to make it easier for superintendents to define policy agendas, influence public opinion, coalesce political forces, and advance bold reforms on the ground,” according to a Washington Post article from that time. 

Bagdasarian Packard is now “advancing bold reforms on the ground” as Program Policy Development Advisor for LAUSD. 

In her presentation to LAUSD’s Early Education and Parent Engagement Committee on February 28, 2017, Bagdasarian Packard explained that after the technology scandals that led to John Deasy’s ouster from LAUSD, “…my colleague and I decided to move forward with this, and we worked with IT to go with solution B, Plan B.” 

Her colleague? 

Maybe she was talking about Jodie Newbery, who presented with her at that meeting as well as at last week’s Bond Oversight Committee (BOC) to try to get the secret project funded with $24 million in school construction bonds. 

Newbery was also hired when Deasy was Superintendent, in October 2011. 

Where did she come from? Her three previous positions were in charter school promotion, according to her LinkedIn profile. First for the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence and then for the California Charter Schools Association. Her most recent job was as "Senior Manager, Walton Family Foundation Grant and Los Angeles School Development." Then she made the jump to LAUSD as Program and Policy Advisor, Portfolio Management. That doesn't require a conspiracy theory. How much more explicit could you get? 

So a couple of low level co-workers inside LAUSD are behind a major policy shift for the District? 

That is bold. And could be great, if it meant that LAUSD was truly becoming receptive to bottom-up innovation. But the dynamic seems to be about something other than welcoming diverse input. 

At the BOC, District administrative staff balked when BOC member Rachel Greene asked what Board policy the project was advancing before approving its funding. The answers were vague at best. District staffer Diane Pappas said the policy was Board approved in the Superintendent’s Strategic Plan. She neglected to mention that the Board has refused to vote on the Strategic Plan. Anyway, she said, they'd been meeting privately with individual board members to get buy-in. 

I have found no evidence that a policy decision about Unified Enrollment has even occurred. 

The BOC agenda materials claim that the Unified Enrollment System falls under the catch-all “School Upgrade Program” which is for “upgrading, building and repairing school facilities to improve student health, safety and educational quality.” Seems like a stretch in this case, as it did when Deasy used the same rationale to use bond funds to pay for the iPad Common Core Technology Project. 

Just as with the iPad scandal, District staff is pushing hard. When BOC member Stuart Magruder, largely credited with first putting the brakes on the iPad boondoggle, asked if they were sure the District could meet the short timeline for Common Enrollment, Pappas answered, “We’re ready.”

Bagdasarian seemed more than ready. “These are just some snapshots of what it will look like” – she stopped herself -- “What it ‘may’ look like,” she said in the February presentation. 

And what multi-million dollar “reform” would be complete without a PR campaign? 

Reports of a new coalition to advocate for the inclusion of charters.  

Cue PEAPS-LA, a coalition of nonprofit education reformers to champion Unified Enrollment. The Partnership for Equitable Access to Public Schools Los Angeles includes Parent Revolution (of Steve Barr and Ben Austin acclaim) and Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (of Antonio Villaraigosa and Marshall Tuck acclaim), among others. 

So once again, all the pieces are in place, and the public only gets a seat to watch the result. With the iPads, the scandal surrounded alleged private lobbying efforts by corporate execs at Pearson. This time, the lobbying is hidden in plain sight, by LAUSD staff themselves. All they need now is the School Board's green light. No discussion necessary.

(Karen Wolfe is a public school parent, the Executive Director of PS Connect and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-In the April 27, 2017 issue of CityWatch, Dave Bell wrote an article, “Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?”  Judge Richard Fruin has answered that question in his seventeen page explanation again rejecting the Hollywood Target Store. The reason that partially-finished monster is still looming over Sunset-Western can be summed up in one word -- Garcetti. Since Judge Fruin must use “legalese,” he cannot come out and act like a Biblical prophet pointing at King David proclaiming, “Thou art the man!” 

By the way, Petitioners did not sue after the store was partially built. Target started building after the case was already in court, knowing that a 74-foot store was illegal. It was a cynical ploy to tell Judge Fruin that it would be an economic waste not to allow the Target Store to continue constructing the illegal store. And Judge Fruin was not favorably impressed. 

Judge Fruin’s legal reasoning in again rejecting the Target Store made it clear that the problem rests with the City and not with the Petitioners. And when the judge refers to the City, he clearly means Garcetti. Garcetti was then the councilman who insisted that Target violate the law back in 2008-2009. After the court rejected the first Target Store, Garcetti insisted on appealing. The case has been all the way to the California Supreme Court and back down, but the City, i.e. Garcetti, does not listen. 

The City Persists in Violating the Law 

In 2016 the City tried to do another end-run around Judge Fruin and the law, the same way Garcetti and his love-child project at 5929 Sunset had tried to do by demolishing the facade of the Spaghetti Factory. As a result of those Garcetti machinations, that huge residential project sits vacant. Nonetheless Garcetti had the City give his buddies at CIM Group $17.4 Million. 

Then in 2015, the courts rejected The Millennium (Earthquake) Towers in Hollywood as a violation of the law. These last two cases were before Judge James Chalfant. 

Garcetti also subverted the law with his 2012 Update to the Hollywood Community Plan. In January 2014, Judge Allan Goodman rejected the Hollywood Community Plan Update as based on “fatally flawed data and wishful thinking that subverted the law (CEQA).” 

These legal loses are not the fault of the City Attorney’s Office which has to follow the directions of its client, the City. That means when the City Attorney tells Eric Garcetti that a project is illegal and he should follow the law, the City Attorney still has to show up in court and put on the best face possible. If Garcetti would heed the wise advice of the City Attorney’s Office, the City could operate more smoothly and would not be spending millions on attorney fees to lose cases. There was also the $1.3 billion sidewalk case that came with $15 million in attorney fees. 

The Issue in Target II 

The fundamental issue in this recent Target case is whether the City could make a major change in the zoning law, i.e. the Specific Plan “SNAP,” without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement (EIR). Think of an EIR as like a final exam: if you skip the final, you fail the course. Duh! Maybe, trust fund babies who went to Harvard-Westlake are allowed to buy their way out of final exams. Who knows? 

Thus, Garcetti decided that there was no need to have the final exam for the recent change in SNAP. Garcetti has yet to learn that just because he says something, does not make it so. He may be able to fool the voters, but he cannot fool the professionals. If he had listened to the City Attorney back in 2009, Hollywood would have probably had a Target by 2010. If he had listened to the legal professionals in early 2016, he would not have insisted on adding a Subarea F to SNAP without conducting an EIR. 

A Brief History of SNAP 

The citizens and professionals who drafted SNAP took years to classify every single parcel of property within its area as belonging to one of five Subareas A through E. SNAP rejected the idea of a Subarea F as it did not want mega-stores. SNAP is a new zoning law that became effective in March 2001. When Garcetti decided to ignore it in 2008, SNAP was less than a decade old – not some ancient zoning code which had become out dated. 

Adding a New Subarea F Was a Huge Change in SNAP 

Adding a Subarea F which would allow mega big box stores in Hollywood was a significant change to SNAP. It required the City to conduct a new EIR to assess the impacts on Hollywood if the streets were filled with these warehouse type mega-stores. 

Starting back in 2008, Garcetti could have cooperated and allowed Target to build a legal store with its parking underground. If then-Councilmember Garcetti had permitted Target to construct the type of facility the law allowed, the store could have been operating by 2010. Instead, there has been close to a decade of lawsuits; we may very well face another decade of them. 

The decision is up to Garcetti. Does he want to guarantee that Hollywood has no Target Store while he spends millions on attorneys to take the same matter to the appellate court, then on to the Supreme Court, only to be told, “You cannot graduate from high school without taking the final exam?” 

In the end, what are Hollywoodians going to get? Endless Garcetti litigation? Or will Mayor Garcetti allow Target to construct a legal store? Don’t expect a resolution to this fight or construction on the Target store … any time soon.

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

THE BUTCHER SHOP-Measure C? Charter reform of the police disciplinary system? On the May 16 runoff ballot? Seriously? Wonder why people are so cynical?

Right now, the improvements made by the LAPD in the 25 years since those scary nights of the LA riots are hailed as the way forward for big city police departments. Communities across America look to Los Angeles for a way out of Ferguson and Cleveland and Florida – and the bad old days of the LAPD. 

Instead, Measure C represents a step backwards for police reform and accountability at a time the LAPD and the LAPPL should shine and lead. 

As the recommendations of the Christopher Commission were implemented in and after 1992, the composition of Police Review Boards (BOR) changed from all sworn to three-member panels that include one civilian along with two LAPD officers at the level of Captain or above. At the time, the police union opposed the change. 

During the charter reform years, both panels debated changes to police discipline, seeking to be fair to the workers and to the community they serve.

There’s not a lot that’s as reliable in the City of Los Angeles as a report from the City Legislative Analyst (CLA). Here are their numbers: 

ANALYSIS OF OUTCOMES

According to the LAPD, the Department concluded 287 BOR hearings from 2011 to November 2016. In 229 cases, the Chief directed an officer to a BOR hearing with the recommendation that the officer he terminated. The remaining hearings were cases in which an officer opted to have a hearing on a demotion or suspension.

According to LAPD, BORs returned a guilty verdict in 190 cases, but only recommended removal of the officer in 112 cases. Less than half of the officers directed to a BOR by the Chief with a recommendation that they be removed from employment were actually terminated after the hearings. Similarly, in the 58 Opted Boards for demotion or suspension cases over the last six years, BORs have acquitted 15 officers and have concurred with the Chiefs recommended disciplinary measures in only 12 cases. 

Civilian Voting Patterns

When evaluating the merits of an all-civilian or majority-civilian BOR panel over a panel made up of sworn officers and a civilian, the Council may wish to consider the voting history of civilian Hearing Examiners. During the period from 2011 to November 2016, civilian Hearing Examiners were consistently more lenient than their sworn officer counterparts. In the 39 Directed BOR cases where the Chief recommended termination but a BOR acquitted accused officers, the civilian member voted for acquittal in every case. During this period, 16 of the remaining 190 termination cases heard by BORs were decided by 2-1 margins. In each case, the Hearing Examiner voted for the more lenient option. 

Civilian BOR members have also voted for reduced penalties in every case where a BOR found an officer guilty of misconduct, and have also consistently voted for lesser punishments or acquittals in Opted Boards dealing with demotions or suspensions. As in Directed Boards, civilian BOR members did not vote in the minority in demotion or suspension cases, and have been reliable votes for either lesser penalties for misconduct or for acquittal. During this period, there were 4 demotion or suspension cases decided by a 2 to 1 margin. In all cases, the civilian voted for the more lenient outcome. 

On the other side of the building, a May 2 report from the Inspector General to the Police Commission delineates 25 specific recommendations for action. From the LA Times’ Police panel calls for more LAPD reforms to address racial bias, discipline and community policing: “Los Angeles police commissioners approved a wide-ranging set of recommendations on Tuesday that called on the LAPD to improve how it guards against possible racial bias by officers, strengthen community policing and evaluate the department’s discipline system.” 

The 54-page report, Review of National Best Practices, pulls extensively from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015 “Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing”: One of the Task Force’s overarching recommendations is that law enforcement culture embrace a “guardian mindset” to build public trust and legitimacy, and that agencies adopt the concept of procedural justice as the guiding principle for their policies and practices, both external and internal. As part of this process, the Task Force recommended that agencies “acknowledge the role of policing in past and present injustice and discrimination” and the difficulty this poses in building community trust. 

“We need to keep looking for ways to continue to make this department the best it can be,” said Matt Johnson, the panel’s president, in response to the report. “We need to continue engaging meaningfully with questions about community trust, race and use of force. I believe that these reports and recommendations provide a path forward to doing just that.” 

Council President Herb Wesson told the LA Times on January 24 City Council approves ballot measure that could put more civilians on LAPD discipline panels that, as far as he is concerned, this is just a start: “I believe that once we open this door, it will be easier for us to open it again and again if we want to make additional changes,” he said. “Is this perfect? No. Is it flawed? Yes. But I do believe that it’s a step in the right direction.” 

In its strong endorsement against the measure, the LA Times’ Measure C pretends to be about police reform. Instead, it's a noxious sleight of hand. Vote no begins: “Seldom has an effort to alter Los Angeles’ governing blueprint been as clever and underhanded as Charter Amendment C, a little-noticed measure on the little-noticed May 16 city ballot that would change how police officers are disciplined for misconduct. Seldom have city officials been so sly in their effort to slip something so noxious past L.A. voters.” 

Here's what the League of Women Voters Los Angeles say Measure C would do:

Measure C would amend the City Charter to give the City Council the authority to allow a police officer accused of misconduct to choose to have the case heard by a Police Department Board of Rights panel composed either of: a) two police officers with the rank of captain or above, and one civilian chosen from a list of carefully screened professional mediators, as is currently the case, or b) three civilians. Measure C does not define the criteria for who would serve on this 3-member civilian panel. Police officers could choose whether to have their case heard by the traditional Board of Rights or the civilian Board of Rights. 

On Larry Mantle’s Air Talk, April 27, We debate Measure C: Should all-civilian boards review police disciplinary matters? PPL President Craig Lally argued that it’s a matter of fairness, that there’s an inherent conflict because everyone reports to the same Chief and that they’re always worried about the impact “bucking a decision” might have on future promotions or assignments. “There are four captains suing right now,” he noted, after rendering not guilty determinations. “They’ve experienced reduction in rank, didn’t get promotions they should’ve received.” 

Peter Bibring responded on behalf of the Southern California ACLU and a growing coalition opposing the measure: “Given that civilian examiners are more lenient than sworn examiners in every instance of dispute and more than half of the cases referred from BOR’s are overturned, this would make it dramatically harder to hold the police accountable; this is not a measure to increase transparency or accountability.” 

WHO’S ORGANIZING AGAINST MEASURE C? 

From Bike the Vote:

Measure C – the lone item on the May 16 general election ballot for most voters in the City of Los Angeles. The Measure, which is backed by the L.A. Police Protective League, purports to increase civilian oversight of the L.A. Police Department, but is in actuality a deceptive ploy to reduce accountability. Bike The Vote L.A. joins organizations concerned with civil rights, social justice, and police reform – including ACLU of Southern California, Black Lives Matter L.A., Community Coalition, L.A. Community Action Network, and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, among others – in opposing this harmful measure. 

Organizing opposition is starting to show up to call out this cynical, hypocritical move by LA’s pols:

Share this powerful video message from LA-CAN: Los Angeles: Vote NO on Charter Amendment C on May 16!  

Rabbi Jonathan Klein of CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice) says of his organization’s opposition to the measure: “A transparency measure suddenly appearing on an off-cycle ballot, that sneaked up on us and which lacks a published communal rebuttal argument?  If the appearance of this ballot measure feels so unexpected, is supported by the very agencies that community groups believe need more oversight, why should anyone trust that this is what it says it is?  Sure enough, the ACLU and others have the data that lead us to believe that this might actually DIMINISH true civilian oversight. Both CLUE and our Black-Jewish Justice Alliance (in partnership with the SCLC) oppose Measure C.” 

Get the facts! Share the facts! Time for voting! Sign the pledge to vote no on C here and share this information with all your LA-voting friends! Yes on Los Angeles moving forward – No on C! No on cynicism! 

(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch and is a retired union leader now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MCDONALD REPORT-From neighborhood activists to city planners, everyone knows that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council love transit-oriented development. What many people don’t know, and what LA politicians would rather not discuss, is that it’s fueling gentrification in the nation’s second largest city.

UCLA researchers dropped that fact bomb about transit-oriented development in LA last August. 

Teaming up with the Urban Displacement Project at UC-Berkeley, they released a study with several alarming findings. In their own words, they wrote: 

1. Areas around transit stations are changing and many of the changes are in the direction of neighborhood upscaling and gentrification; 

2. Examining changes relative to areas not near light-rail or subway projects from 2000 to 2013, neighborhoods near those forms of transit are more associated with increases in white, college-educated, higher-income households and greater increases in the cost of rents. Conversely, neighborhoods near rail development are associated with greater losses in disadvantaged populations, including individuals with less than a high school diploma and lower-income households (read that again… it’s the very definition of gentrification); 

3. The impacts vary across locations, but the biggest impacts seem to be around the downtown areas where transit-oriented developments interact with other interventions aiming to physically revitalize those neighborhoods. 

UCLA provides a map and data to back up those hard facts. If Garcetti and the City Council haven’t done so already, they should take a long, hard look. 

In fact, Paul Ong, director of UCLA Luskin’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, says California politicians should use the report to ensure that “progress” through development is “fair and just.”  

Unfortunately, LA elected officials hate public dialogues about the Big Picture definitions of “progress,” and they spend little time considering what’s “fair and just” development for the masses. 

Instead, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council talk about creating a more “environmentally sustainable” city by cutting down on car usage. Hence, the need for more apartment complexes and mixed-use buildings near bus or rail stops — known as transit-oriented development. 

Developers and politicians, though, regularly greenwash controversial developments for political cover. What’s worse, serious plans for a more “economically sustainable” city for the working- and middle-class — teachers, garment workers, senior citizens, struggling artists, among others — are nearly non-existent at LA City Hall. 

Unsurprisingly, UCLA and UC-Berkeley researchers also found that “Bay Area municipalities have in their books many more anti-displacement policies than municipalities in LA County.” In the city of Los Angeles, Garcetti and the City Council have implemented few substantive and specific anti-displacement policies. 

It’s one big reason why, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, more than 22,000 rent-controlled apartments have been taken off the market since 2001. An LA Times graph shows that disturbing trend dramatically up-ticked during Garcetti’s time as mayor. 

All in all, as stewards of the nation’s second largest city, LA politicians have shown that they are not interested in addressing the impacts of gentrification-inducing transit-oriented development. So what are they interested in? 

Maintaining power. Or, put another way, keeping their jobs and possibly landing better ones. Politicians do that by raising lots of money, which helps them fend off challengers on Election Day. Enter the deep-pocketed developer. 

For years, developers have been key benefactors for LA politicians. They contribute enormous sums of campaign cash and other political money — such as giving to a politician’s favorite cause or “officeholder” account, a kind of slush fund that elected officials use for dining and travel expenses.

Garcetti, in fact, established a non-profit called the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles. It has attracted big bucks from developers and various companies  — in its first year, Garcetti collected a whopping $14.6 million.  

The Coalition to Preserve LA, which sponsored the development reform initiative known as Measure S, found that developers and other bigwigs in the real estate industry (also known as LA’s “real estate industrial complex”) forked over at least $6 million in campaign contributions to city politicians since 2000.  

That’s a conservative number. It’s probably much higher. 

In the past year, for example, the LA Times reported that billionaire developer Rick Caruso shelled out hundreds of thousands to L.A. politicians and their causes while seeking City Hall approvals for a luxury housing tower for the super wealthy. One beneficiary was Garcetti’s non-profit, which accepted $125,000 from Caruso. 

The billionaire developer, by the way, greenwashed the controversial mega-project, a gigantic high-rise plopped down at a gridlocked intersection. To the aggravation of neighborhood activists, Caruso promoted it as a transit-oriented development. 

The LA Times also uncovered the shocking “Sea Breeze Scandal.” Perhaps illegally, developer Samuel Leung, who also needed City Hall to green light a luxury housing mega-project, funneled more than $600,000 to Mayor Eric Garcetti and other LA politicians. 

In the end, Caruso and Leung got what they wanted. 

As one can see, political money is also part of the gentrification equation. Developers shell out beaucoup bucks to L.A. politicians, and Garcetti and the City Council return the favor by approving transit-oriented and luxury developments. Developers then make tens of millions in profits, politicians have fatter campaign chests, and residents get hit by a wave of gentrification.  

Adding insult to injury, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council are selling out the working- and middle-class for what amounts to chump change. One’s life, home, and family are worth much more than $125,000.

(Patrick Range McDonald, an award-winning journalist, was senior researcher and website editor for the Coalition to Preserve LA.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BELL’S VIEW--The other day a video posted on Facebook drew my attention. In it, a motorcycle moves in slow motion toward the middle of an intersection and a certain crash with a left-turning car. I could see where this was heading, but I couldn’t look away. I have no real desire to watch a motorcyclist pinwheel through the air and crash to the pavement (he survived, thanks to his helmet), but I watched anyway.

So many events I have seen I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never get the video of the Tamir Rice shooting out of my head. And I don’t suppose I should. Maybe this destruction of our illusions – the illusion that we can prolong our innocence through looking away – is the price we have to pay to bring any real change to the world. We live in in-between times, where one person’s truth is another’s lie. How can that be possible? I’ve never completely bought the old chestnut that there are two sides to every story. Tamir Rice was a thirteen-year-old boy playing in the park. I don’t care what the grand jury said. 

Another slow-motion wreck sucking my attention these days is the continuing saga of the Joe Bray-Ali (photo above) campaign to unseat incumbent City Councilman Gil Cedillo – the 70’s B-movie villain currently ignoring his constituents in Council District 1. As anyone following the story knows, Bray-Ali either had his character assassinated or his true identity revealed last week when LAist broke the story of Bray-Ali’s former career as an Internet troll. The story prompted Bray-Ali to publicly attempt to recreate John Hurt’s chestbuster scene from the first Alien movie. He apologized, but he didn’t do it. He’s only human, but he’s not that guy. He made mistakes, but he was only trying to do the right thing. 

Flailing, he revealed a few other juicy indiscretions (tax evasion, marital infidelity, and tagging, in that order) and promised to explain it all later as he blithely reassumed his campaign persona. Meanwhile, the old Joe came out swinging on a few Facebook threads, where he just couldn’t seem to help himself. In one, he trotted out a list of some of the crazy misdeeds (bigamy anyone?) of our current City Councilmembers, including Mike Bonin’s long-past meth habit. How, one commenter asked, is Bonin’s triumph over addiction comparable to your Mr. Hyde impression on Voat? 

How indeed? One truth has emerged: Bray-Ali’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington shtick is not exactly the real thing. He’s brash, he’s bold, he’s – either – racist, sexist, and transphobic, or some kind of satirical anthropologist employing the awesome power of the n-word to move us all toward positive social change. 

The question remains whether Bray-Ali’s move-along, nothing-to-see-here approach can sweep him into the Council chambers on May 16th. A few prominent Bray-Ali supporters have jumped ship, while others have either drunk the kool-aide or just admitted they don’t care. I sympathize fully with the impulse to support the lesser of two evils. City Hall needs a shakeup. The question District1 voters have to ask themselves is: how much is too much?

Bray-Ali’s explanations have been satisfying only to the rubberneckers and the kool-aide drinkers. The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword, but, at this point, Bray-Ali needs to get hold of something sharp and cut out the rotten bits. Words just aren’t going to do it this time. As a proponent of the power of language, I’ve never felt so adrift. Debate has evolved away from a means of challenging ideas and into a method of silencing our opponents. Shame, humiliation, degradation, and name-calling – all dressed up as free speech – work only to drive speech into hiding, oblivion, or meaninglessness. Joe Bray-Ali has seen this process from both sides – from give and take – and now he’s in the fight of his life with the beast we’ve all been feeding since the turn of the millennium.

On May 16th, the voters in District 1 have a choice – but the choice is all Joe’s at this point. He needs to find a way to the other side of the wall he’s built for himself. And he needs to do it fast.

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

-cw

EASTSIDER-Mendacity is generally defined as “an act of not telling the truth.” It also has a bunch of helpful synonyms, like deceit, deception, falsification, fraud and lying. I think it is a great word, and according to the Cambridge Dictionary, “Politicians are often accused of mendacity.” 

After a great deal of searching, I believe that I have found the poster child for mendacity in the form of California Senator Steven Bardford, who recently introduced SB 163, which makes it easy for political candidates to live outside the district they want to represent. 

Obviously a great mind at work. The reason that we have residency requirements is that we have a new political class, the lifer elected officials who go wherever there are safe races after being termed out in their current gigs. The idea is that, at a minimum, an elected official should live and work in the district that elected him or her. You know, like the pre-term-limits days, when politicians actually had roots in the communities they represented. 

Well, no mas, and if Senator Bradford has his way, no penalty for living far away from the community you seek to represent. 

I am obliged to mention a few examples of elected officials who got in trouble over this. Yvonne Burke, of course, but she got a pass by declining to run again for office. Our very own Richard Alarcon (and his wife) who got convicted of perjury and voter fraud, but later got it tossed out by an appeals court on the grounds that the judge gave “improper jury instructions.” 

On the state level, Senator Roderick Wright got popped for the same thing, lying about where he actually lived. In this case, I guess the jury instructions were ok, because the appeals court upheld the conviction last year. 

While Alarcon and Wright are the poster children for this kind of behavior, they are far from the only ones. As the Sacramento Bee reported back in 2014, there’s a whole list of them.  

Most go unprosecuted, partly because of the fact these are not slam dunk cases, and I suspect most also get a pass because the District Attorneys who should prosecute these cases are elected officials themselves. Take a look at some of these unindicted conspirators in the Bee article. 

What’s even scarier is that the Federal Government, a fountain of legerdemain, simply finesses the whole idea that you should live with the folks you represent. Under their rules, you only have to live in the state where you are running for office. Logical for senators, but for gerrymandered congressional districts? C’mon. 

Under that rubric, Darrell lssa could run to replace Xavier Becerra in the 34^th Congressional District special election. Or maybe McClintock. 

Actually, at the federal level running for office where you don’t live has become a favorite sport. Recently, Roger Hernandez ran from outside against Grace Napolitano, who won her own seat by running from outside the district. It’s enough to give a person a headache. 

My personal favorite is Tom McClintock, a seriously conservative republican from Ventura, who makes Rand Paul look like a lefty. Back in the 80s, he ran for office and became an Assemblyman and State Senator, until he termed out. I remember him as a forerunner of Howard Jarvis with his “no new taxes” stance, and in fact, they are joined at the hip to this day. 

Tom ran for almost everything in California outside of the legislature; Controller (1994 and 2002), the recall election over Grey Davis in 2003, and Lieutenant Governor in 2006 -- all unsuccessfully. Thereafter, he abandoned Sacramento. In a masterpiece of irony, Mr. McClintock, a self-stated arbiter of morality and ethics, went all the way up to Sacramento (actually the Gold Rush country east of there) to represent the 4^th Congressional District. Long way from Ventura, and a great graphic example of what I’m talking about in residency requirements. 

The Takeaway 

The first question is whether or not this residency stuff is cheating. You bet it is, and it is an insidious craven kind of cheating, further insulating our elected officials from us, the troops. It also encourages the lifetime permanent politician class, since they can move from place to place depending on their best shot to have the lobbyists, special interests, and political consulting firms get them their next gig in the ladder of the lifer politician. 

In other words, this system blows a hole in the term limits laws akin to “the mother of all bombs.” 

People who we elect from geographically created districts are supposed to live in those districts -- hopefully to even work, live and play there. That provides the essential connection between us and those who govern us. Otherwise, they might as well all simply live in Sacramento, or Washington, or LAX, or in homes bought for them by lobbyists. 

I believe that by “legalizing” a felony, the author is guilty of compounding a felony to help out the political class -- thus eliminating any sense of actual physical connection to the governed. As such, I award Senator Steven Bradford the first Bodacious Mendacity award! And yes, it is a really, really great award. 

(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.

RACE RIOT OR NOT?-The 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance is at hand, and the corporate media again routinely portray this historic event as a race riot resulting from the acquittal of four policemen who viciously beat up Rodney King, an African-American motorist. The media then systematically report that inter-ethnic and police-community relations in Los Angeles are much improved. Case closed since another “riot” is no longer in the cards. 

But was this event really a race riot – not a class riot based on extreme inequality -- and have its underlying causes been truly ameliorated by overhauling the Los Angeles Police Department and reporting improved inter-ethnic relations? 

The answers do not just depend on facts. They also depend on which theory of racism you subscribe to. While the facts are extraordinarily complex, we do know the following: 

The civil disturbance lasted for three days, from Thursday, April 29 to Saturday, May 1, 1992, although the City of Los Angeles maintained curfews and marshal law until the following Monday, for a full five days. When the city lifted the curfew, there was short-term intervention by public agencies to aid residents and businesses whose structures were damaged or destroyed during the event. This was soon followed by Re-Build LA (1992-97) a private sector initiative whose legacy is 259 boxes of non-digitized files at the Loyal-Marymount University library. There was also the official Christopher Commission report, whose focus was the conduct of the LAPD, including police reform proposals. 

But there were no prosecutions related to the 55 people slain between Thursday and Saturday. The media suggested they were victims of random bullets or other rioters shot them during looting. Since there is no evidence for these suspicions, it is just as likely that police officers or merchants protecting their buildings and stores murdered these 55 people. 

Based on the number of people arrested, (between 10,000 -13,000 of whom 52 percent were Latino, 10 percent white, and 38 percent Black), wounded (4,000), deported (several hundred), killed (55), looted or torched buildings (4,000), lost jobs (40,000), and damaged property ($1 billion in 1992 dollars), this was the second most destructive civil disturbance in U.S. history. Only New York City’s 1863 anti-draft riot was larger! While the two events are similar in their length and damage, they have a major difference. Historians have extensively researched the 1863 insurrection in New York City, while, at least until its 25^th anniversary, social scientists, public officials, filmmakers, artists, pundits, and journalists mostly ignored the 1992 Los Angeles event. 

It is the perfect example of a structured absence, an epochal historical event that has been methodically overlooked for a quarter century. In the language of George Orwell’s “1984,” it was flushed down the memory hole. 

Based on my reconstruction, LA’s 1992 civil disturbance moved through three stages: 

Stage 1 began in the late afternoon of Thursday, April 29, after the Simi Valley acquittals of the four police officers who attacked Rodney King. The response was largely spontaneous, beginning with several widely rebroadcast televised incidences of inter-racial violence in a largely African-American neighborhood. 

By the end of Thursday afternoon, looting and arson also began. It targeted particularly disliked stores and swap meets. Most ominously, an enormous cloud of dark smoke enveloped Los Angeles. In non-riot areas, such as West LA, pandemonium resulted. Nearly all employees left work early to join their families at home, picking up children at schools where teachers and staff refused to remain on-site. 

There were also more spontaneous events protesting the trial in different parts of the Los Angeles, mostly minority neighborhoods in south Los Angeles and Pico/Union, with pervasive political graffiti, typically “No Justice, No Peace." Demonstrators also targeted and torched overtly political targets. These included a military recruitment center, a City of Los Angeles multi-agency office that included an African-American LA City Council member’s field office, as well as many black-owned businesses. 

One of the most interesting political targets was a commercial center, WLCAC, funded through anti-poverty programs. Local residents physically chased its founder, Ted Watkins, through WLCAC’s grounds, but he managed to escape. 

By Thursday evening, on the streets of south Los Angeles, one of the locations where the rebellion began, a party atmosphere developed without any evidence of racial or ethnic friction, partially explaining why whites comprised 10 percent of those arrested. People were just people, partying on the streets, often sharing “free” consumer items grabbed from the stores. 

As for the notoriously brutal Los Angeles Police Department, they were stunned by events. They withdrew from the epicenter and only watched events. Likewise the Los Angeles Fire Department was overwhelmed, and it could not save many buildings. 

As a result, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley declared Marshal Law and imposed a curfew, eventually on the entire city. He also requested intervention from the State of California and Federal Government. They responded on Friday, sending in the National Guard from northern California, as well as the California Highway Patrol, Federal marshals, police and sheriff brigades from many other jurisdictions, and Marines from Camp Pendleton. 

These complex events, though anecdotal, belie the media spin that Los Angeles had a race riot, similar to many American cities at the end of World War I, or a 1960s-style ghetto rebellion. 

Stage 2 was the second day, when 4,000 federalized National Guard troops arrived in Los Angeles to augment the overwhelmed Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff. Nevertheless, this is when most of the arson and looting took place. Near my house, in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile area, I watched people ram a station wagon through an appliance store plate glass window and then fill up their car with TVs. 

I also remember hearing radio news reports about looting at a drug store on Western Avenue, north of the I-10, in what we now call Koreatown. The reporter described a completely multi-racial crowd consisting of Asians, Latinos, Blacks, and Anglos, all grabbing consumer goods off the shelves. It was during this second day that the civil disturbance spread over the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area, and also leapfrogged to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Tampa, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and even several European cities. 

Stage 3 appeared on Saturday, after most of the political protests and high intensity “discount shopping” subsided. At this point, organized crime joined the fray, targeting specific stores, such as Samy’s Camera, which was then located on Beverly Boulevard near LaBrea. At the camera store men armed with automatic weapons held neighbors at bay while they shot the locks off of the door. 

They then went into the store and selectively grabbed the most expensive camera equipment. By this time the entire city was under Marshal Law and police forces and federal troops patrolled the entire city until May 24, including areas that had or little or no demonstrations, looting, or fires. The press reported that the National Guardsmen’s rifles were loaded and aimed at pedestrians, with the safeties turned off, as they patrolled LA’s streets in military trucks. 

Saturday, by the way, was also May Day. Despite the enormous police and military presence, there were May Day rallies in Watts and in downtown Los Angeles, along with many smaller demonstrations focused on police misconduct and poverty issues. These events were highly political and were met with an enormous inter-agency police response, but no one was attacked or arrested for demonstrating. 

How do we interpret this story? 

Clearly, most press coverage continues to portray these events as a race riot. The total militarization of the civil disturbance was presented as efforts by elected officials to protect the public, not commercial property or institutions, even though much of the subsequent Federal and Rebuild LA aid efforts focused on rebuilding stores that had been looted or burnt down. 

Nevertheless, a look at immediate press coverage, such as the next issue of Newsweek, presented the uprising as a class riot, a conflict between have-nots and haves. It was only later that government and media spin machines repackaged this civil disturbance, with its major multi-racial class component, as a race riot, not an economic uprising suppressed by an integrated military and police response. 

Nevertheless, the overwhelming data and analysis confirms that the 1992 civil disturbance was primarily an urban rebellion focused on property, with strong political and economic components, not a race riot. The misperception that it was a race riot largely results from the several televised racial attacks at the very beginning of the events. Furthermore, by focusing on the ethnicity of burned-out merchants, rather than their economic role, many television viewers were also misled to believe that the attacks on their stores were racially based. 

Which Theory of Racism? The classic theory of race relations, developed by W.E.B. DuBois and Oliver Cox, dominated social science until the 1940's. It considered racism to be institutional. It originated with slavery and colonialism and evolved into laws maintaining apartheid and segregation, supporting ideologies and social-psychological attitudes (prejudice), and discriminatory acts, usually called bias and bigotry. According to this theory, the purpose of these laws and beliefs is to sustain economic exploitation in which some ethnic or racial groups are super-exploited. Because racism generates so much inequality and because this inequality then produces acts of individual and collective resistance, geographical segregation usually allows this resistance to be quarantined. 

According to this theory, prejudiced attitudes and prejudiced behavior, including racist mobs and pogroms, result from racism. They are not its cause. This theory, interprets LA’s 1992 civil disturbance as primarily a multi-racial urban rebellion directed against business and government institutions that the participants held responsible for economic exploitation and political repression. Scattered incidences of interracial violence were not the main event. 

The competing contact theory of racism presents the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance as a race riot in which the Simi Valley trial acquittal of white police officers provoked anti-white violence by African-Americans. This theory is based on ideas of supposedly innate ethnocentrism and xenophobia refined in the 1940s through such famous scholars as Gunnar Myrdal, author of “An American Dilemma.” The contact theory has been the dominant theory in the field of race and ethnic relations ever since. It argues that racial and ethnic categories are obvious and self-evident to people. Individuals automatically know which ethnic or racial group they are in and what groups other people are in. They largely and “naturally” see the world divided into these various national and sub-national groups. 

Humans are essentially genetically hardwired to see their own group positively (ethnocentrism) and other groups negatively (xenophobia). When different groups have contact, these natural processes kick in. At the more benign end of the contact spectrum, prejudice spontaneously appears. At the extreme end, inter-racial or inter-ethnic contact results in violent race riots, sometimes even in genocide. According to this theory, contact produces “organic” prejudice resulting from people reacting negatively to obviously perceptible group differences. These prejudiced attitudes, in turn, result in prejudiced behavior, which aggregates into racist practices and patterns. 

In terms of Los Angeles, there are scattered facts that support the contact theory, such as the televised beating of a white, Latino, and Asian motorist. Others point to the burning of Korean-owned stores in many neighborhoods. 

As for the arson and looting, the same acts occurred in the 1965 Watts Rebellion, but then the target was another middleman minority, Jews. In both cases, scattered merchants were burnt out, with little evidence that their ethnicity, rather than their economic niche, was the cause of arson. 

Furthermore, in the case of 1992, many of the merchants who got burnt out operated in Latino neighborhoods, like Koreatown, which had nothing to do with Black grievances against the police. In fact, the 1992 statistics indicate that the LAPD arrested more Latinos than Blacks, yet the press never reported widespread friction between Latinos and Koreans. 

My conclusion is that the overwhelming data confirms that the 1992 civil disturbance was primarily an urban rebellion based on economic inequality, not a race riot. Newsweek was correct when they called it a class riot. Furthermore, the role of the police, reinforced by the corporate media for over two decades, was to stop the rebellion, protect property, and squelch its political dimension, not separate warring racial and ethnic groups. 

This leads to the next question, then. Could it happen again? According to the most recent public opinion poll, conducted by Loyola Marymount University, an increasing number of Angelinos – over a majority -- think another civil disturbance is likely to happen. According to the lead investigator, Prof. Fernando Guerra, “Economic disparity continues to increase, and at the end of the day, that is what causes disruption. . . People are trying to get along and want to get along, but they understand economic tension boils over to political and social tension.” 

Considering City Hall’s role in promoting economic inequality through real estate speculation, General Plan Amendments and Zone Changes benefiting property owners, wide scale demolitions and dislocation, and the resulting gentrification, the public is not apparently bamboozled by reports of LAPD reforms and feel good stories about ethnic fusion restaurants.

(Dick Platkin reports on local planning issues for City Watch. Progressive Planning published an earlier version of this article. Please send any questions, comments, or corrections to: [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-One of the most disturbing and regrettable trends in today's news reporting is the systematic and often premeditated failure to even mention highly relevant facts that, if addressed, would cause the reader to come up with a completely different interpretation or conclusion. 

A recent case in point can be found in KPCC 89.3 FM reporter Kyle Stokes' article: “What should LAUSD do about its ballooning benefits costs?”  Stokes approaches this issue through the respective positions of incumbent LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer and his challenger, charter schools-backed opponent Nick Melvoin. He asks each how he would deal with the looming $13.6 billion unfunded health and other benefits package obligations, but nowhere in the article does he mention that, for the last eight years, LAUSD has been "dealing" with this problem by systematically and illegally targeting and removing (with fabricated charges) teachers at the top of the salary scale and/or others about to vest in expensive lifetime health or other retirement benefits. 

Approximately 93% of the thousands of teachers who have and continue to be targeted for removal from their senior teaching positions at LAUSD find it difficult to get others to believe that they did nothing wrong or that this kind of heinous, illegal behavior is even going on. People just don't want to think the LAUSD administration would have any motive for acting this way. 

If nothing else, the magnitude of how far in the red LAUSD is with its health and other benefits programs offers an even greater motivation for LAUSD to target its more senior, expensive employees. To quote the late Vito Corleone, "It's just business." 

And why hasn't the State of California gone after LAUSD to defend these senior teachers and other targeted certificated and classified employees? If (and more likely when) LAUSD goes bankrupt, it’s the State of California that will be left holding the bag to bail them out. This clearly represents a conflict of interest for the state when it comes to defending wrongfully charged teachers whose greatest actual "crime" is being too expensive.

But if LAUSD can save $60,000 a year in salary and benefits a piece by getting rid of high seniority teachers -- in an attempt to balance the benefits budget that is billions in the red and could bankrupt the system in the next two years -- then perhaps LAUSD’s reprehensible actions against its targeted employees will offer a compelling reason for someone in a position of legal or journalistic authority to ask what the hell is going on. After all, it's not as if LAUSD has made any attempt to hide what they have been doing. 

KPCC's Kyle Stokes feels compelled to disclose in his article that Professor Fernando Guerra of Loyola-Marymount, who he cites, is on the KPCC Board. However, when it comes to disclosing the significantly more relevant information about how much money KPCC receives from corporate-controlled foundations that are moving to privatize public education with non-profit charters run by for-profit corporations, that somehow is not worthy of discussion.

(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.

CORRUPTION WATCH-Twenty-five years after the 1992 LA Insurrection, we are deluged by retrospectives and analyses. Many of them are excellent. All ignore one of the bedrock causes – a corrupt judicial system. 

As some of the documentaries mention in passing, many Blacks believed that finally with the trial of the four police officers, there would be some modicum of justice. After decades of being harassed, beaten and railroaded into prison by a predatory police department, many believed that the Rodney King case would hold the occupying army to an accounting.   

The judicial system played a far greater role in causing the uprising than by merely moving the trial to a bedroom community of police officers. For decades judges in the criminal courts had been lynchpins in the abuse, unjust jailing, and murders of Blacks by “the system.” After the disgraceful judicial elections in 1986 where the public had thrown three justices off the Supreme Court for not killing enough people, trial court judges knew their careers were tied to a high conviction rate. While one appellate decision had tried to stop these abusive judges by limiting the use of lying jailhouse informants to railroad people into prison, the bulk of those judges were of like mind: “if they’re not guilty of this, they’re guilty of something.” 

While the “white” community still lives in denial of the corrupt nature of the judicial system, the Black community was (and still is) not so naive. That knowledge was a major factor in the explosion after the Rodney King verdicts. Even with videotaped evidence, the courts made certain that the police officers were set free. The Black community knew that calling the courts “halls of justice” was a mockery and a fraud. 

Back then, as now, society lived in denial. While the LAPD was an occupying force, no one would admit that the ring leaders of the predatory system were the judges who knew their careers were buttered on the side of brutalizing minorities. Judges did far more than look the other way at police perjury or the concealing of exculpatory evidence. Some judges engaged in witness intimidation and active collusion with assistant DAs in order to convict people without regard as to whether or not they were guilty. 

Many judges like Judge Jacqueline Connor had served as Assistant District Attorneys and were not only aware of the perjury and falsification of evidence -- they expected it, they encouraged it, and they engaged in it. When Judge Connor was upset that a witness in a case pending before her had rebuffed the DA’s demand that he commit perjury in order to support a falsified police report, Judge Connor lodged a bogus complaint against the witness with the State Bar. The witness happened to be a lawyer. Her State Bar complaint was structured to sound as if it had been made by the defendant, but she insisted that the State bar keep her identity a keep secret. 

After her bogus complaint was revealed as judicial obstruction of justice, the Commission on Judicial Performance found that it was fine for a judge to intimidate a witness in a case pending in her courtroom. That was after the 1992 Insurrection, but before the Ramparts Scandal, where the criminal court judges, including Judge Connor, again played a key role. 

The Christopher Commission Report covered-up the role that judges played in the years of civil rights abuses; everyone blamed only the LAPD. While there is no doubt the officers did many horrible things (like attempting to murder Javier Ovando  and when he was only paralyzed, prosecuting him for attempting to kill the police officers) the judges also played a pivotal role in the misconduct. They had the power to stop these gross injustices against Blacks and Latinos and others who displeased the police. Not only could the judges have held police officers who committed perjury responsible, they could have held the prosecutors who used perjured testimony liable for their misconduct. Instead, some judges showed prosecutors how to intimidate witnesses.

Mentioning the existence of corrupt judges has always been taboo. As related in a prior CityWatch article, some federal judges have recently begun a crusade against prosecutorial misconduct, but they also tippy-toe around the role played by California state court judges. Judge Kozinski indirectly blames the state courts by saying that they suffer from an “epidemic of misconduct” because judges “turn a blind eye” to misconduct. 

On both the criminal and civil sides, judges and justices do far more than “turn a blind eye.” They actively encourage and engage in hideous misconduct, turning the state court system into a capricious scourge on the Constitution in which no one can predict when an abusive judge will alter evidence, lie outright in his or her opinions to railroad innocent people, or intimidate attorneys into abandoning their clients. 

Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, in writing his concurring opinion in Curiel v Miller, (2016) 830 F.3d 864, suggested that the California Supreme Court needs a new composition, beginning with a new Chief Justice. Leopards do not change their spots and criminally abusive judges and justices of the California judiciary are not going to reform themselves.   

Will the corrupt judiciary result in another insurrection in South Los Angeles? Probably not. Much of the Black community has dispersed to the Inland Empire and north to the Newhall area, if not completely out of state. The area is now heavily Latino. To the extent it has “illegals,” the community knows the necessity of keeping a very low profile. Garcetti’s gentrification should soon further decimate the community, but that does not mean that judicial abuse will stop. 

Just because certain demographic changes indicate that LA won’t have the same reaction in the same place where it occurred in 1967 and 1992 does not mean society itself is safe from a corrupt judiciary. Wherever they live, minorities and the poor will be disproportionately victimized by abusive judges. Others are foolishly naive if they think that a lighter shade of skin makes them safe from the same judicial injustices.

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

TRAFFIC WATCH--According to The New York Times, the car used to be “king” in the city (municipality) of Los Angeles. “'A Different Los Angeles', The City Moves to Alter its Sprawling Image,” was another story that seeks to portray the nation’s second largest municipality as having fundamentally changed.

Following this now popular meme, a Slate story in 2016 referred to Los Angeles becoming “America’s next great transit city.” Los Angeles has surely become America’s greatest transit tax city, with Los Angeles County voters in 2016 approving a fourth half-cent sales tax increase principally for transit since 1980. Yet transit's market share has fallen, not only in the nation's largest county but even in the city of Los Angeles.

The Ascent of Transit: A False Narrative

The Los Angeles political establishment and media is virtually unanimous in its praise for the now quarter century old rail system. Yet, despite more than $15 billion being spent on rail transit the already meager levels of transit commuting in the city have fallen further, while solo driving has risen to an all time high. Unless platitudes are more important than results, rail’s success is a false narrative. People are driving more and using transit less according to the American Community Survey for 2015.

The share of city of Los Angeles residents commuting by transit fell from 11.2 percent in 2010 to 9.5 percent in 2015 (Figure 1, note truncated axis). The 2010 figure was the highest decennial census year transit figure in the period starting in 1980. Just five years later, in 2015, however, the city of Los Angeles transit commuting share had fallen below 1980 levels.

In 1980, 10.8 percent of the city’s commuters used transit, a figure that fell to 10.5 percent just before the initial Long Beach “Blue Line” opened in 1990. While new light rail lines and the Metro (subway) line opened after 1990, transit’s market share fell further, to 10.1 percent by 2010. During the 2000s, transit commuting rose 1.1 percentage points to the 11.2 percent figure, propelled by unprecedented gasoline price increases. But progress was short-lived as the share dropped to 9.5 percent in 2015.

City of Los Angeles Surge in Driving Alone

At the same time, commuters were turning even more to driving alone. In 2015, 69.8 percent of work trip access was by solo drivers. This represents a substantial increase from the 66.8 percent drive alone share in 2010. From 1980 to 2010, driving alone edged up slightly, much less than the increase in the last five years. In 1980, 65.1 percent of commuters drove alone. In 1990, a nearly identical 65.2 percent drove alone. In the last five years, driving alone has risen more than the entire previous 30-year increase in the city of Los Angeles.

The news could get worse. According to new American Public Transportation (APTA) data, total ridership on all Los Angeles County MTA services dropped more than five percent from 2016. The APTA reported decline is astounding, since the highly touted extension of the Expo light rail line to downtown Santa Monica opened in 2016. Even more astounding is that the expensive, at least seven line (counted at radial line ends plus the transverse Green Line) system has added not a soul to transit ridership on the Los Angeles MTA bus and rail system since 1985. Not all MTA service is in the city of Los Angeles, however, the APTA data could presage a further transit market share decline in the city with the American Community Survey data due in the Autumn.

All of this is consistent with the larger trend in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (which includes Los Angeles and Orange Counties). Overall, the transit work trip market share in the metropolitan area fell from 6.1 percent in 2010 to 5.1 percent in 2015. The MTA 2016 decline is likely to push this figure lower.

The Illusion of a "Different Los Angeles"

Yet to read the press and media accounts in Los Angeles, one might be inclined to believe an alternate reality that LA transit is ascendant.

Christopher Hawthorne, who teaches urban and environment policy at Occidental College told The New York Times that the recent defeat of a development moratorium, along with approval of the transit tax and an affordable housing measure is “a very clear statement from the voters that they want a different Los Angeles.”

The voters may want a different Los Angeles, but apparently commuters are sufficiently happy with driving and have been for the more than a quarter century since rail transit was restored to Los Angeles. This is not surprising, since the average commuter can reach 60 times as many jobs by car in 30 minutes in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as by transit. (30 minutes is the average one-way commute time in the metropolitan area). Data is not available for the city of Los Angeles (see: “Access in the City”). 

However, it is a generally hopeless task for transit to be an alternative to the automobile, except for trips to and from the urban core (downtown and nearby). The reality is that it could take as much as the total income, every year, of a metropolitan area to provide transit that could effectively compete with the car throughout a metropolitan area for work and other trips.

Platitudes do not ride, people do. At least with respect to the implied transit ridership increases and forsaken cars, the “different” Los Angeles is an illusion, completely inconsistent with reality.

(Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University. This perspective was posted originally at New Geography.) 

-cw

DEEGAN ON LA-One of the city’s under-publicized scandals is the long-running shotgun marriage between city council members and developers using the Ellis Act to force tenant evictions throughout the city. 

Anyone that has been caught in this compact between developers and council members knows how devastating these evictions can be. They lead to despair, sometimes homelessness, and definitely serve to shut down affordable housing in neighborhoods since any replacement housing is priced at higher, market rate levels. 

Once today’s affordable housing is removed there will be no substitute -- just new housing at significantly higher prices. Once affordable rent-control housing is taken away, it is gone forever. 

A degree of unscrupulousness is evident and not surprising when you consider that, according to the Coalition For Economic Survival, “Ellis Act evictions are being done by developers who have owned the property less than a year…[and have] “been corrupted by large developers whose sole objective is to acquire rent-control housing, destroy it, evict tenants and replace the existing housing with high-priced luxury housing.” 

The Ellis Act is a three-decade old state law originally intended to help small landlords exit the rental business, but developers have figured out how to use it to drive their profit engines. Twenty-thousand rent-controlled units, home to low and moderate income tenants, seniors, disabled and working families, were destroyed between 2001 and 2016, according to CES. 

The long and abusive use of Ellis Act evictions throughout the city is reflected on this map that was created by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Coalition for Economic Survival. 

Could that be changing? 

Help may be on the way for tenants at risk of being evicted by landlords that use the Ellis Act, a state law with good intentions enacted in the 1980’s originally intended to help small landlords exit the rental business, but that has morphed into a device to vacate a building so it can be turned by developers into condos or market rate housing. 

Two motions passed by the LA City Council in the past couple of sessions may bring some order, as well as some relief for tenants. One, Motion CF14-0268-S5, “to modify the Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) in order to strengthen provisions relating to the enforcement of the Ellis Act and the preservation of RSO units,” was signed into law by the Mayor on April 19. 

The other is Motion CF17-0203, directing “the HCID (Housing + Community Investment Department) and the Planning Department to track the cumulative net gain/loss of affordable housing units [i.e. covenanted units and RSO units] in the City, and regularly post this information online as a public dashboard that includes cumulative data as well as annual and quarterly accounting.” 

There are currently 630,000 units stabilized with caps on rent increases and additional protections for tenants under the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance. That’s what will be tracked. 

Together, these motions and the apparent new understanding by council members of the crisis state of Ellis Act evictions should help ease anxieties by tenants that their housing will be swept away from under them. 

Both motions passed without dissent, although not all council members voted. The motion to modify RSO’s was introduced by Gil Cedillo (CD1) (in the heat of a very tight race to retain his council seat) and seconded by Mike Bonin (CD11). Council members Jose Huizar (CD14) and Joe Buscaino (CD15) were absent for the vote. 

Huizar may have missed one important vote, but was key in the second vote to track housing by introducing the motion that was seconded by Marqueece Harris-Dawson (CD8). All council members voted for that one except Paul Krekorian (CD2), who was absent for the vote. 

This more clearly brings into focus and lets the council members understand what tenants already know: that they are being squeezed out of affordable housing in neighborhoods they call “home.” To tell an evicted tenant there is “affordable housing” at another, more distant location, is not a viable solution. 

Time will tell how serious the politicos are about reining in the out-of-control developers. Council members Huizar and Cedillo serve on the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee (Huizar is chair) so they are in the catbird seats to be among the most vigilant observers and enforcers of land use and development in the city. Now, with these two motions, they have some added resources to protect renters.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.