LOS ANGELES

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-2016 is nearly over, and that means that 2017 offers immense opportunities for CityWatch writers and readers, including yours truly, to answer important questions. These are some of the stories that I am following and hope to examine in more detail. I look forward to similar research and articles from other CityWatch writers. 

CITY HALL QUESTIONS 

How extensive is corruption at Los Angeles’s City Hall? 

The LA Times Sea Breeze story of $600,000 in campaign donations to get land use decisions reversed is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg. And David Zahnizer’s front-page story on Rick Caruso’s luxury tower at the former Loehman’s site is just as important. While the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative/Measure S staff has broken smaller stories of corruption, there are undoubtedly many bigger stories waiting for careful investigation and publication. The more the better because even if Measure S does not pass in March 2017, this type of investigative reporting will play a major role in ensuring that Los Angeles is well planned. The alternative, an unplanned city, in which real estate speculators determine long-term land use patterns, is a road to municipal ruin. 

What is the residential build-out potential of Los Angeles, based on existing zoning? 

The corporate funded density hawks repeatedly argue that LA has virtually no land left for housing construction, yet the most recent City Planning reports on this exact question – from the early 1990s – concluded the exact opposite. Furthermore, we also need to know how much future housing construction and population growth can be supported by available public infrastructure and public services. 

What is really behind the “no money” excuse for the many projects and public services that elected officials and some of their advocates ignore? 

There is no shortage of low-priority budget categories that qualify for this sorry alibi: urban street trees, careful plan check and code enforcement, updated General Plan elements, sidewalk and street repairs, ADA curb cuts, street cleaning, street lights, recreation program, library hours, climate change mitigation and adaptation, bicycle infrastructure, mass transit station amenities, and much more. For these and many more projects, local government’s constant refrain is, “There is just no money,” yet big-ticket items, like the 55 percent of the City budget that funds the LAPD, go unchallenged. 

What role does local government play in increasing wealth and income inequality? 

Most fingers point to the Federal government because it largely controls tax rates, tax loopholes, minimum wage, and the safety net, such as Social Security and Medicaid. But, City Hall also plays a significant, but overlooked role. For example, every time the zone and/or General Plan designation for a piece or property densifies through spot-zoning, the site becomes considerably more valuable. Yet, this windfall is not taxed in California because most commercial property is never totally sold. Instead portions of the ownership change, allowing the property title to remain fixed and unassessed because of Proposition 13. 

Is METRO advancing mass transit for mobility or to bolster real estate speculation? 

Some scholars, like Allen Whitt, long ago argued that the fundamental purpose of urban mass transit, include MetroRail in Los Angeles, is to resuscitate real estate in older parts of town, such as Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood. Now, several decades later we are witnessing the expansion of mass transit, but with little consideration for mobility. 

In Los Angeles, the MetroRail interface with other transportation modes is missing: buses, cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. METRO has dropped the ball on this aspect of transit, while City Planning has largely limited its role to up-zoning the private parcels near existing and proposed transit stations. As a result, transit-adjacent public areas have unfunded guidelines, while individual parcels are stoked for an influx of private investment. 

ENVIROMENTAL QUESTIONS 

How is climate change related to economic activity? 

The popular press presents the climate change “debate” as climate scientists on one side and climate change deniers on the other side. This supposed debate is then reduced to one bid question: do humans cause climate change or is it a natural fluctuation? But this this simplistic approach sees the forest and misses the trees. This is because it doesn’t examine the diverse carbon footprints of our planet’s eight billion humans. It equates the carbon footprint of those living in squalor on $2 or less per day with executives of fossil fuel companies, living in energy-intensive estates, driving big cars, and flying on highly polluting planes. 

Will driverless electric cars reduce our carbon footprint? 

Companies such as Tesla and Google tout their driverless and electric cars as a miracle cure for congestion and Green House Gases. But this is a dubious claim for several reasons. First, better cars perpetuate the entire built environment based on cars: the entire car manufacturing process, roads, parking lots, and car-oriented buildings, especially big box retail and shopping centers. 

Second, better cars mean each car uses less energy, but the automobile companies still expand overall production. For example, Toyota does not use the profits from the Prius to make a better bicycle, but to branch out to the Prius C and Prius V. Instead of one Prius model there are now three, as well as other Toyota models with hybrid engines, such as the Camry. As a result overall energy consumption is still expanding. 

A FINAL WORD FOR THE NEW YEAR 

CityWatch readers, in 2017 please share your information about these and other important and overlooked stories. We may have meager resources, but crowd-sourcing our knowledge can and will be the antidote to the neglect of the mainstream, corporate media.

(Dick Platkin reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch. Please send any questions, comments, or corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LA GOVERNMENT WATCH-Over this past year, our contributions to CityWatch have focused on a disturbing pattern that has shown how elements of our Los Angeles City government have been working against the public interest for years. Here’s a re-cap of what needs to change as we move into 2017: 

1. No sole source contracts or private sales of surplus property under any condition. No exceptions. No contracts let without Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Apart from being required by law, they are the life blood of good government, because they secure the best value for the public, while also ensuring that every member of that public gets a clean shot at winning contracts. The same is true of public auctions of surplus property. 

2. No closed sessions of the City Council -- for any reason -- not even those permitted by the Brown Act (i.e. litigation, real estate negotiations and so on.) 

3. No attorney-client privilege for Officers of the City (except in their capacities as private citizens.) Again, all litigation -- regardless of the dollar amount -- should be conducted in open session. This would help prevent the kind of prolonged litigation that has recently cost the City over $250 million. 

4. No contracting with secretive LLCs. If you want to do business with Los Angeles, you have to take your mask off. It is preposterous how many entities there are with whom the City currently does business without knowing the most basic of facts about them, including the precise identity of the owner. 

5. No enforcement role for the Ethics Commission. Campaign finance laws etc. should be enforced by the DA. The Enforcement Division of the Ethics Commission routinely violates the Constitutional rights of members of the public. The part of the Ethics Commission that maintains the database of donations etc. should be kept intact. 

6. No absolute power for the City Council President in making committee assignments. Such power gives the President too much leverage over the rest of the Council and results in a stifling of debate (because everyone has to tow the line or suffer retaliation.) 

7. No use of parking fines in the General Fund. Such fines, not to exceed $35, should go to a fund used exclusively for infrastructure projects. 

8. No back-room lawsuit settlements. These are used as a way to kick-back money to the plaintiff. Settlements need to be dealt with in open session. 

9. No further violations of Rule 93 -- violations which have resulted in the public’s cameras in City Hall that are being operated by public employees -- at the direction of Herb Wesson – so that the members of the public are videotaped from a face-obscuring distance. 

10. No commencing of City Council meetings with the settling of liens against members of the public who suffer humiliation and unspeakably huge monetary penalties.

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

THE WEALTH FORMULA, PART TWO- In a recent CityWatch article, I explained why the City of Los Angeles has escalating housing costs and, at the same time, is experiencing a net exodus of people leaving rather than moving to LA. It took years of corruption and malfeasance, but the City has managed to make Los Angeles the nation’s least desirable urban area. 

The Destruction of Wealth is Not Wise 

Just as the government has laws against people stealing other people’s property, the government has a duty not to encourage the destruction of businesses which are generating wealth. Rent-controlled properties are long-term wealth creators. Los Angeles’ Rent Stabilization Ordinance was relatively effective in allowing landlords to make a profit and provide housing the poor could afford. (I shall not discuss the criminal REAP program. I hope someone does a CityWatch article from the landlord’s perspective.) 

From the macro-economic standpoint, when an honest business is generating wealth, it should not be destroyed. Tearing down rent-controlled units destroys wealth. Not only is the landlord harmed, but the tenant is harmed, and those who end up homeless become a financial burden on everyone. Macro-Economics does not care if the developer believes he can make more money from his new fancy units. Society does not look at only how much “gelt” he pockets, but it must subtract all the wealth lost by the destruction of the rent-controlled units and all the extra costs which society will incur. 

From a macro-economic standpoint, the destruction of over 22,000 rent-controlled units has caused irreparable harm from which the City will not recover. 

In a city operating on the economic philosophy of corruptionism, the city government is unable to institute wise macro-economic safeguards. As a result, we have an economic system that destroys affordable housing, while only 37% of the need is being built and while replacing it with luxury apartments that represent a 12% glut. (11-17-2015 HCIDLA report) The City then gives our tax dollars to the developer because he says his profit is too small. ($17.4 Million to CIM Group for 5929 Sunset Blvd.) Thus, we have a corrupt city government that destroys the homes of poor people, stealing “wealth generators” from small landlords; and then the City gives tax money to the developers who happen to be funding the Mayor’s and councilmembers’ campaigns. 

Where Los Angeles Does Have Housing Shortage 

There is an actual shortage of detached single family homes. One factor is that prior to the 2008 Crash, banks unloaded foreclosed homes as fast as possible onto the market. But after the Crash of 2008, many banks decided to rent homes. This decision reduced the number of homes for sale without reducing the number of available homes in which to live. Withholding homes from the sales market drove up prices without any increase in demand. 

How the City Increases the Price of R-1 Homes

The City’s housing policies, especially in-fills, allow developers to buy and tear down the single family home to construct multiple rental units on the property. As a result, a family who wants to purchase a home for living space often faces a developer who will pay far more than the living space value. 

Because developers can get councilmembers to change the zoning to satisfy their whims, they are confident that wherever they buy, they can build multiple units. In order for many families to purchase a home in Los Angeles, they have to out-bid developers. 

As a result, detached home prices have been “bid up,” thereby reducing the supply of homes for families. A proper government would protect the Price System of detached homes by not allowing any spot zoning or granny flats. A competent city would not permit Small Lot Subdivisions. 

A City Which Decimates its Middle Class is a Failed City 

As a result of making it hard to construct and allowing the destruction of detached homes, the City has driven out Family Millennials, i.e., the new Middle Class. It did not take a genius to foresee that when the younger Millennials wanted to settle down, they would abandon the Dorm Room style of life and do what Americans have done for generations: find a detached home with a yard and decent schools. Intentionally depriving Millennials of the homes they would come to desire has left them no realistic alternative but to move away from Los Angeles. When the most productive sector of the population abandons a city, it becomes an economic basket case. 

The City’s Subsidizing Mega Projects Drives out the Middle Class 

Because Wall Street does not want to be left holding the bag when the next crash comes, it is balking at financing a lot of mega projects. Wall Street has seen that fraud does not deceive the laws of economics. For example, for years the City fooled Wall Street into lending for improvident mixed-use projects by giving the developers an extra revenue stream to repay the Wall Street loans. The City would let the developer keep the sales taxes from the retail stores in the mixed-use projects. CIM Group’s Midtown Project in City Council President Wesson’s district, for example, allegedly gets 100% of sale taxes and business license fees. 

When she was City Controller (July 2001 to April 2009), Laura Chick warned of this folly, pointing out that 50% of the CRA mixed-use projects’ retail space was vacant, but the City ignored her. Without tenants, there was no extra revenue stream for the builders to repay the Wall Street loans. Perhaps, the most colossal disaster was the Hollywood-Highland Project which cost $625 million to construct but was sold a few years later for only $201 million. Projects do not sell for 1/3 their construction costs because they are making money for the developer. Remember, the wealth formula: you have to sell or rent for more than the cost to produce. 

Since then, the City has been giving its developer buddies billions of dollars in financial aid. The private Grand Avenue Project is getting about $197 million. All the projects in Hollywood will end up being subsidized. The City has subsidized Korean Airlines and China. Yes, freakin’ China – the world leader in over-development. When the government subsidizes developers who build crap that no one wants, the government destroys the Price System. 

The Anticipatory Destruction of Wealth 

While some people look at Gehry’s Folly at 8160 Sunset Boulevard and say “ooh and aah,” others see the Anticipatory Destruction of Wealth. The role of the government is to understand this aspect of macro-economics. When hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in bad projects based on falsified data, all those hundreds of millions of dollars are diverted away from productive investments. That means we lose wealth by diverting money from where it should go. All the wealth that wise investments would have created never comes into existence. 

While some recognize this anticipatory destruction of wealth, no one person knows where the funds should have been invested. That is why the nation needs to restrict investment firms to doing one thing – raising capital for productive investments. Investment firms, which can stay in business only by making wise investments in enterprise, are absolutely essential for the nation to prosper.

Prior to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, investment houses were limited to doing the research necessary to know where to invest the capital they raised. Of course, the people who provided the funds for the investments held each investment firm liable for mistakes. After the investment firms no longer had to make a profit by raising capital and investing it for other people, they found that financial manipulation was more profitable for the executives -- even if it crashed the world economy. The vital function of Wall Street’s raising capital for wise investments cannot resume until a beefed up Glass-Steagall is re-instituted and credit default are outlawed and Wall Street’s role in the commodities market is seriously restricted. 

The City’s War on the Middle Class is not Wise 

Garcetti has made no secret of his war on the single family home and against the automobile in his mania to turn Hollywood and now the rest of Los Angeles into a west coast Manhattan. The City would have been far wiser to pass an emergency re-zoning measure 10 to 15 year ago, in which all single-family homes, no matter where they were located, would have a presumptive R-1 status. 

Simultaneously, there should have been a moratorium on any increase in office density in The Basin. That would have stabilized residential housing in the Basin, while allowing offices on the periphery. Traffic patterns would have been reversed, somewhat, thereby allowing for more population without more traffic. Without anyone at City Hall who understood or cared about macro-economics, we have suffered through at least 15 years of economic falderal and corruptionism. 

Que sera sera 

At this point, one is supposed to provide the prescription for recovery. But there is none for Los Angeles. Alea jacta est, the Rubicon was crossed years ago, and we have gone far beyond the point of no return. Here is Los Angeles’ most likely future: there will be a massive dump of billions of dollars of construction dollars into Los Angeles for mega-projects and fixed-rail transit. These improvident expenditures will further erode the quality of life and leave Los Angeles bankrupt, at which time the City will seek a federal bailout.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. 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.

BUTCHER ON LA-Within two weeks of moving into our new apartment in La Crescenta, I learned of two substantive, meaningful opportunities to participate locally: a community meeting explaining the new districts for elections of local school board members and notice of a meeting of the Crescenta Valley Town Council where the main topic discussion was construction on the 210 freeway. 

Got a doggie park recommendation for what turns out to be the best dog groomer in the San Fernando Valley (at the corner of Wheatland and Sunland), pulled into the parking lot and found myself parking in front of the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council storefront. 

Then we received this notice announcing the City of Los Angeles’ gifting of delicious, free mulch and soil amendment. 

And just as I was feeling most darkened by the shortness of the days after the Election, I read this from esteemed labor activist attorney, our friend Emma Leheny, who now with the National Education Association, America’s largest labor union, sharing a comprehensive organizing resource for local action: 

Anti-immigrant statements by Trump and his supporters have caused anxiety among school children throughout the country. Bullying and harassment in schools have been fueled by Trump’s slurs. Educators have been supporting our schools and students – with guidance, inclusive curricula, and anti-bullying resources.  But given Trump’s stated plan to rescind all Obama executive actions, school sites may soon see ICE agents attempting to enter campus. ICE issued a memorandum in 2011 stating schools were off-limits for immigration enforcement, except in exigent circumstances. We can expect that memo to be repudiated, or at a minimum, ignored in the next administration. So our students and educators are looking for answers: what can keep our schools safe for all of our students? 

NEA has developed this template resolution and policy for use by any school board. It recognizes the constitutional rights of undocumented students to access a free, public K-12 education, as set forth by the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe. It puts in place steps for district administration to follow if approached by ICE. It re-iterates the support and respect a school community holds for all of its students and families. Several large school districts have already taken steps in this direction – Los Angeles, for example, enacted and re-affirmed a resolution opposing immigration enforcement at school. 

The Tenth Amendment also creates a bulwark against feared efforts by the new administration to overreach by attempting to coerce local and state compliance with an anti-immigrant agenda. This proposed NEA language educates local administrators about what protection they can offer students, even in the face of ICE intimidation. 

They go low, we go local. 

From Noah Zatz’s spot-on piece, The Principle and Politics of Sanctuary:  

What to do? It is easy to feel paralyzed and powerless in the face of President-elect Trump’s announced intention to rain terror on immigrants and people of color with mass deportations, Muslim registration, racial profiling, and so much more. Start somewhere. For me, that has meant staring where I live, by attending my first local school board meeting. I’ve joined with other parents to make my small city’s schools into sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement and other intrusions. It’s also meant starting where I work, joining with faculty, staff, and students to push similar policies at the university level. 

Sanctuary offers a simple moral idea that draws on rich and righteous histories. It connects us to the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves, the protection offered to Anne Frank and Schindler’s List, and the 1980s religious movement to welcome Central American refugees from Cold War conflicts. 

They go low, we go local. Whenever the social justice arms of our religious communities show up – be it the Catholic Worker or the human rights committee of a reform synagogue -- in South Gate or Selma, the light of God and the goodness of people ultimately bend the arc of justice towards peace -- but we’ve gotta work it. 

There’s an amazing group of organizers gathering on Facebook at “Our Future. The Organizers’ Roundtable.” Sign up now to join the greatest organizers in the country. Find your local page! 

Find a local organization working to protect the environment. For instance, I’ve been inspired by the successful local organizing in my new neck of the woods by Glendale’s VOICE (Volunteers Organized in Conserving the Environment).  

As 48 US mayors say in their November 22 letter to the President-elect: 

On November 8, American voters approved more than $200 billion in local measures, funded by their own local tax dollars, to improve quality of life and reduce carbon pollution. Seventy percent of voters in Los Angeles County, the car capital of the world, approved a $120 billion, multi-decade commitment to public transit. Seattle voters approved transit investments totaling $54 billion; Austin voters approved a record-setting $720 million mobility bond; Boston voters approved investment in affordable housing, parks, historic preservation and more. 

As President, you will have the power to expand and accelerate these local initiatives which the people resoundingly supported. We call upon you and the federal government you will lead to help cities leverage funds for the hundreds of billions of dollars in transit, energy, infrastructure and real estate development necessary to upgrade our infrastructure for the 21st century. We ask that you lead us in expanding the renewable energy sources we need to achieve energy security, address climate change and spark a new manufacturing, energy and construction boom in America. 

We ask that you help provide American businesses the certainty to invest through continued tax credits for electric vehicles, solar power, renewables and other clean technologies. And we ask that you shift to embrace the Paris Climate Agreement and make U.S. cities your partner in doing so. 

While we are prepared to forge ahead even in the absence of federal support, we know that if we stand united on this issue, we can make change that will resonate for generations. We have no choice and no room to doubt our resolve. The time for bold leadership and action is now. 

Sign up for the simple local app Nextdoor and connect with happenings in your community. 

Find your local Patch for local news! 

Order your local newspaper for home delivery -- or BUY an electronic subscription if you don’t need the feel of newsprint on your fingers. 

It’s all local and it’s all personal – I’ll sign up for a Muslim registry. I’ll tell the woman at the DIY store that she’s being rude when she says too loudly that she doesn’t understand a word the cashier is saying because she speaks with a different accent. I’ve got an entire clip of safety pins to wear! 

I ordered home delivery of the LA Times now that we’re back in town! 

A worthwhile read from the Nieman Reports, All Journalism is Local:  

A possible future for journalism is more in the mold of grassroots organizing, where the newsroom becomes a sort of 21^st century VFW hall, the hub of local activity. The current buzz is around audience acquisition through social media. What about audience acquisition through local physical presence, opening up potential trickles of revenue from events and other local activities? 

The danger of social media “audience acquisition” is that it repeats the mistakes of cable television, rendering us captive to celebrity, national news stories, and clickbait. Newsrooms as “civic reactors,” the beating heart of our communities, offers greater promise -- not to mention the skills of grassroots organizing are cousins to traditional news-gathering skills, rather than the alien skills of marketing and public relations. 

“Res publica” means, literally, the “real” people. It is up to us to make sure it is not the kind of “real” in reality television, but the kind of “real” you find at PTA meetings and traffic hearings.

I’m inspired to help organize a bit locally. I accepted a little freelance reporting job with the Crescenta Valley Weekly News, a vibrant, privately-owned local weekly newspaper. Enjoy my first byline: Holiday Happiness Found on Oak Circle Drive. 

They go low … we go local!

(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch, is a retired union leader and is 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.

CAL WATCHDOG-The campaign to place California secession on the ballot next election year entered uncertain waters as news broke that its mastermind lives and works in a city in the center of Russia.  

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Louis Marinelli told The California Report from his Yekaterinburg apartment, KQED reported. “I wanted to handle some personal issues in my family, regarding immigration. My wife is from Russia. I’m here handling various personal issues. But at the same time, we have some political goals we can achieve while I’m here.” 

From founding to funding. 

Marinelli’s deep Russian ties, past and present, attracted attention as he took his current stay in the country as an opportunity to start work on a so-called “embassy of California” in Moscow. That undertaking, as Bloomberg noted, has the aid of “a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin” — the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia — which Marinelli said supports California’s right to self-determination. “Talking to the Russian tabloid Life, Alexander Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, said that the embassy would serve as a hub to boost tourism and foster cultural and economic exchanges between the Golden State and Russia,” Heat Street reported.  

“We may disagree on several issues, but if we have common ground on one issue, why shouldn’t we have a dialogue?” Marinelli asked Bloomberg. But he has already begun to hit against the limits of that rhetoric.  

“Marinelli’s Russian connection has created a schism, if not quite the Great Schism, in the breakaway movement with members of the California National Party, a group that is formally affiliated with Yes California but has publicly disavowed Marinelli as a Russian marionette. Silicon Valley investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar briefly became another standard-bearer of ‘Calexit,’ as it come to be known, threatening Marinelli’s virtual monopoly on the cause, but backed off, saying he didn’t really support secession.” 

The Trump factor. 

But crisis management was not the only reason Yes California accelerated its timetable to land their initiative on the California ballot in 2018. (According to the prospective measure’s language, voting yes “would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if ‘California should become a free, sovereign and independent country,'” as the San Jose Mercury News observed.) Donald Trump’s election provoked a degree of dismay among some California Democrats intense enough to suggest a secessionist movement could take advantage while passions remained relatively hot. 

“It wasn’t until Trump’s victory last month that mainstream U.S. outlets -- including the Sacramento Bee, the LA Times and NPR -- covered the group more seriously,” KQED noted. “The story got new legs because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to voice their desire for California to leave the union after Trump’s election. Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology.” 

Although no elected officials have promoted the breakaway effort, tempers have flared around the idea that a Trump presidency would try to stymie state Democrats, seen by many party members nationwide as a progressive vanguard on social and environmental issues. 

In a recent San Francisco speech before the American Geophysical Union, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to press ahead with the state’s current climate policy regardless of what happens in Washington. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” he said, according to the IBTimes. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.” 

Rough going. 

Despite the flurry of attention from Russia, Marinelli’s personal political reach in California was likely to remain limited. To date, his track record has been spotty. He “filed a handful of statewide ballot measures related to secession in 2015 and none qualified for the November ballot,” the Sacramento Bee recalled.  “He also waged an unsuccessful campaign to represent state Assembly District 80, but didn’t advance beyond the June primary.”

(James Poulos blogs for CalWatchdog.com where this perspective was originally posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EXPOSES NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL INFLUENCE—(Editor’s note: We decided to re-post this possible pay-for-play eye-opener for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a CityWatch kind of story and we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss it. We think that the flow of big dollars from developers to elected officials voting on their projects is a serious ethics violation and should be a violation of the law. And finally, we think the attention paid by Mr. Caruso to the Mid City Community Council was at the least interesting if not extraordinary. Neighborhood councils celebrate the 15^th anniversary of certification of LA’s council this month. NCs have come a long way.)

Real estate developer Rick Caruso has been a reliable benefactor at Los Angeles City Hall, giving donations big and small to the city’s politicians and their pet causes.

Caruso, known for the Grove and other shopping destinations, has donated to all but one of the city’s 17 elected officials. His charitable foundation provided $125,000 to a nonprofit set up by Mayor Eric Garcetti. And his companies recently gave $200,000 to the campaign for Measure M, the sales tax hike Garcetti championed in last month’s election.

Add in money from his employees and his family members, and Caruso-affiliated donors have provided more than $476,000 to the city’s elected officials and their initiatives over the past five years, according to contribution reports.

Now, Caruso wants Garcetti and the council to approve a 20-story residential tower on La Cienega Boulevard, on a site where new buildings are currently limited to a height of 45 feet. Opponents of the project view Caruso’s donations with alarm, saying the steady stream of contributions has undermined their confidence in the city’s planning process.

“I'm sorry, but that’s a lot of money,” said Keith Nakata, a foe of the project who lives roughly five blocks from the site. “That is obviously something that the community cannot compete against.” (Read the rest.)   

-cw

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-In previous CityWatch articles I have spelled out the many long-term and harmful consequences of bad planning. Yet, in Los Angeles truly bad city planning just keeps rolling along, in particular, repeated cases of City Hall decision-makers overriding legally adopted Community Plans and local zoning through speculator-friendly spot-zoning and spot-planning enabled by campaign contributions. 

While we wait for evidence that this bothers the decision makers, it clearly bothers the engaged public. In fact, this is why Los Angeles has had so many planning-related voter initiatives, lawsuits, and Sacramento legislative directives over the past half century. Furthermore, this push back against bad planning and the Big Real Estate interests behind it will continue as long as “legal corruption” is rooted out. 

To cite but one example, Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition U in 1986 to limit the size of commercial buildings. Now, 30 years later, in March 2017, they can bring Proposition U into the 21^st Century through Proposition S, also called the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. As frequently discussed at CityWatch, Proposition S will stop most spot-zoning and spot-planning, while also jumpstarting the update of LA’s General Plan, including the 35 Community Plans. 

An excellent example of spot-zoning and spot-planning in the cross hairs of Proposition S is close to where I live. It is the Caruso Affiliated project at 333 S. LaCienega, the site of former Loehman’s discount clothing store. Located at the “Bermuda Triangle” intersection of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, Burton Way, and LaCienega, it is one block south of the Beverly Center and one block west of the Cedar-Sinai Hospital. Now under appeal to the City Council, the City Planning Commission has already awarded this project six separate zoning and planning approvals.  If sustained, these bennies would permit the construction of a 240 foot high rise luxury apartment tower on a parcel whose current height limit is 45 feet. While height is certainly a problem with this project, it also has other serious problems that I highlight later in this article. 

But, first let’s examine how this malodorous project bulldozed its way through a City Council office, a neighborhood council, the Department of City Planning, and the City Planning Commission. Part of the answer is heavy lobbying, as described in another CityWatch article, “How Big Real Estate Manufactures Consent.”  But, a second part of their formula is masking the bad planning that pervades this and similar projects with the cheap perfume of “conditions of approval.” In this case, there are nearly 40 pages of approval conditions all neatly folded into this project’s two determinations.  

This is standard practice since nearly every case that the Department of City Planning handles, including those that the City Council later approves through lot specific ordinances, is weighted down by pages of conditions. Having written some of these determinations and read far more, I now believe that their real purpose of these many promises is to gain the support of community groups who do not like specific projects.   

Flaws in Conditions of Approval: There are, however, eight serious flaws in this Big Real Estate tactic, even though it often succeeds in convincing local planning light weights to begrudgingly support a project. 

1)  The conditions cost the developers very little. They are a tiny fraction of the budget for a major project, and I suspect some conditions also qualify as tax credits or deductions, including those that were added as promises to community groups. 

2)  Most of the conditions mitigate a project’s construction and operational impacts. They are, therefore, not true community benefits. Instead their ostensible role is to buy off opponents to controversial projects. 

3)  A project’s developer and his/her tenants also benefit from conditions to offer on and off-site improvements, such as tree planting.  The improvements spruce up projects, and therefore make them more appealing to potential tenants. 

4)  Some conditioned improvements, such as quasi-public fountains, can be used to offset L.A.’s one percent Public Arts fee.  

5)  Off-site improvements promised through conditions are minimal. They do not address the real infrastructure deficits in most of Los Angeles, including but hardly limited to sub-standard street trees, crumbling sidewalks, missing ADA curb cuts, dangerous pot-holes, thirsty grass in yards and parks, decrepit alleys, dangerous overhead wires, unsightly supergraphics and billboards, lax code enforcement, old and failing water mains, missing bicycle infrastructure, slow internet, and unreliable electric power. 

6) The only conditions that City Planning actually monitors are contained in alcohol permits (CUB’s). As for more powerful discretionary actions adopted through City Council ordinances -- such as Zone Changes and General Plan Amendments -- City Planning has no monitoring staff or procedures. 

7)  The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) also does not have any proactive procedures for enforcing these hundreds of conditions for hundreds of cases.  Like all code violations, it is up to local communities to submit complaints that approval conditions have not been complied with. But, as many Angelinos have slowly learned, these complaints are frequently ignored. In fact, this is why experienced residents resort to City Council interventions in order to get LADBS to finally move on code violations. 

8) Once a building is permitted and completed, there are no consequences for unmet conditions, such on and off-site improvements. In Los Angeles, buildings are not partially or wholly demolished when they fail to meet the building code, zoning code, or compliance with the conditions imposed on all discretionary zoning and planning actions. 

Considering these eight gaping loopholes, my conclusion is that the real purpose of conditions of approval is to assuage community opponents by offering mitigation to their complaints about major projects. It is to get them to approve an otherwise bad project when measured against legally adopted General Plan elements, Height Districts, and zones. 

In my next City Watch column, I will address explain why projects like 333 S. LaCienega are truly awful city planning. For now suffice it to say the following: 

• It sets an ominous precedent for future General Plan Amendments, Zone Changes, and Height District Changes.  If this project is successful, similar requests to build other new high-rise luxury projects in this area will methodically appear. 

• It does not comply with the legally required findings that the project be consistent with the scale and character of the neighborhood. As for scale, the projects will be 240 feet high and have a Floor Area Ratio (i.e., mass) of 6.0 on a lot where the height is restricted to 45 feet and the mass of a building is limited to an FAR of 1.5. As for compatible character, the proposed tower has a nautical architectural style, similar to a cruise ship, while most of the surrounding residential buildings have Spanish Revival design features. 

• It does not comply with the City Charter Section 555, which is clear that the City Council can adopt legislative actions, such as General Plan Amendments, “… provided that the part or area involved has significant social, economic or physical identity.” A parcel that is bequeathed spot-zoning because it allows a more lucrative project hardly has a distinctive and significant identify. 

• It has not demonstrated that there is such a shortage of lots zone for luxury apartments in the Wilshire Community Plan area that the City Council should require adopted zone changes to meet this need. 

• It purports to be a transit oriented project, but the nearest mass transit station – at Wilshire and LaCienega-- will be more than a half-mile from the tower, and the transit station will not open up until 2023. Furthermore, the proposed project has 24/7 on-call, chauffer driven luxury car service for all tenants, making it high unlikely that these high flyers will walk a half-mile to hop on the Purple Line subway to travel 

• It is located at one of the most congested intersections in Los Angeles. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the site is the convergence point of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, LaCienega Boulevard, and Burton Way. No combination of street signs, signal lights, and traffic officers have ever managed to keep this intersection clear. 

• It claims it needs large amounts of additional height and mass economic incentives to add new pedestrian oriented features, even though this part of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills has many pedestrian-oriented projects and corridors, with buildings that conform to plans and zones. 

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner. He reports on local planning issues for CityWatch, and he welcomes comments and questions at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NOW AND FUTURE DRUG POLICY-As 2016 comes to a tumultuous end, we look back on the year in drugs and drug policy. It’s definitely a mixed bag, with some major victories for drug reform, especially marijuana legalization, but also some major challenges, especially around heroin and prescription opioids, and the threat of things taking a turn for the worse next year.

Here are the six biggest stories from the year on drugs: 

1. Marijuana legalization wins big. 

Pot legalization initiatives won in California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, losing only in Arizona. These weren’t the first states to do so -- Colorado and Washington led the way in 2012, with Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C., following in 2014 -- but in one fell swoop, states with a combined population of nearly 50 million people just freed the weed. Add in the earlier states, and we’re now talking about around 67 million people, or more than one-fifth of the national population. 

The question is, where does marijuana win next? We won’t see state legalization initiatives until 2018 (and the conventional wisdom is to wait for the higher-turnout 2020 presidential election year), and most of the low-hanging fruit in terms of initiative states has been harvested, but activists in Michigan came this close to qualifying for the ballot this year and are raring to go again. In the meantime, there are the state legislatures. When AlterNet looked into the crystal ball a few weeks ago, the best bets looked like Connecticut, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont. 

2. Medical marijuana wins big. 

Medical marijuana is even more popular than legal weed, and it went four-for-four at the ballot box in November, adding Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota to the list of full-blown medical marijuana states. That makes 28 states -- more than half the country -- that allow medical marijuana, along with another dozen or so red states that have passed limited CBD-only medical marijuana laws as a sop to public opinion. 

It’s worth noting that Montana is a special case. Voters there approved medical marijuana in 2004, only to see a Republican-dominated state legislature gut the program in 2011. The initiative approved by voters this year reinstates that program, and shuttered dispensaries are now set to reopen. 

The increasing acceptance of medical marijuana is going to make it that much harder for the DEA or the Trump administration to balk at reclassifying marijuana away from Schedule I, which is supposedly reserved for dangerous substances with no medical uses. It may also, along with the growing number of legal pot states, provide the necessary impetus to changing federal banking laws to allow pot businesses to behave like normal businesses. 

3. Republicans take control in Washington. 

The Trump victory last month and looming Republican control of both houses of Congress has profound drug policy implications, for everything from legal marijuana to funding for needle exchange programs to sentencing policy to the border and foreign policy and beyond. Early Trump cabinet picks, such as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) to lead the Justice Department, are ominous for progressive drug reform, but as with many other policy spheres, what Trump will actually do is a big unknown. It’s probably safe to say that any harm reduction programs requiring federal funding or approval are in danger, that any further sentencing reforms are unlikely and that any federal spending for mental health and substance abuse treatment will face an uphill battle. But the cops will probably get more money. 

The really big question mark is around pot policy. Trump has signaled he’s okay with letting the states experiment, but Sessions is one of the most retrograde drug warriors in Washington. Time will tell, but in the meantime, the marijuana industry is on tenterhooks and respect for the will of voters in pot legal states and even medical marijuana states is an open question. 

4. The opioid epidemic continues. 

Just as the year comes to an end, the CDC announced that opioid overdose deaths last year had topped 33,000, and with 12,000 heroin overdoses, junk had overtaken gunplay as a leading cause of death. 

The crisis has provoked numerous responses, at both the state and the federal levels, some good, and some not. Just this month, Congress approved a billion dollars in opioid treatment and prevention programs. The overdose epidemic has also prompted the loosening of access to the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone and prodded ongoing efforts to embrace more harm reduction approaches, such as supervised injection sites. 

On the other hand, prosecutors in states across the country have taken to charging those who sell opioids (prescription or otherwise) to people who die of overdose with murder, more intrusive and privacy-invading prescription monitoring programs have been established, and the tightening of the screws on opioid prescriptions is leaving some chronic pain sufferers in the lurch and leading others to seek out opioids on the black market. 

5. Obama commutes more than 1,000 drug war sentences. 

In a bid to undo some of the most egregious excesses of the drug war, President Obama has now cut the sentences of and freed more than 1,000 people sentenced under the harsh laws of the 1980s, particularly the racially biased crack cocaine laws, who have already served more time than they would have if sentenced under current laws passed during the Obama administration. He has commuted more sentences in a single year than any president in history and more sentences than the last 11 presidents combined. 

The commutations come under a program announced by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who encouraged drug war prisoners to apply for them. The bad news is that the clock is going to run out before Obama has a chance to deal with thousands of pending applications backlogged in the Office of the Pardons Attorney. The good news is that he still has six weeks to issue more commutations and free more drug war prisoners. 

6. DEA gets a wakeup call when it tries to ban kratom. 

Derived from a Southeast Asian tree, kratom has become popular as an unregulated alternative to opioids for relaxation and pain relief, as well as withdrawal from opioids. It has very low overdose potential compared to other opioids and has become a go-to drug for hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. 

Perturbed by its rising popularity, the DEA moved in late summer to use its emergency scheduling powers to ban kratom, but was hit with an unprecedented buzzsaw of opposition from kratom users, scientists, researchers, and even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who authored and encouraged his colleagues to sign a letter to the DEA asking the agency to postpone its planned scheduling. 

The DEA backed off -- but didn’t back down -- in October, announcing it was shelving its ban plan for now and instead opening a period of public comment. That period ended December 1, but before it did, the agency was inundated with submissions from people opposing the ban. Now, the DEA will factor in that input, as well as formal input from the Food and Drug Administration before making its decision. 

The battle around kratom isn’t over, and the DEA could still ban it in the end, but the whole episode demonstrates how much the ground has shifted under the agency. DEA doesn’t just get its way anymore.

(Phillip Smith writes for AlterNet. This piece was posted most recently at TruthDig.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE REAL COST OF AMERICAN ED--"We could have hundreds of thousands of American seniors living in poverty due to garnished Social Security benefits if this trend continues," said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Montana. The federal government is garnishing Social Security checks to recoup unpaid student debt, leaving thousands of retired or disabled Americans below the poverty line and setting the stage for an even bigger problem, according to a new report. 

The data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), compiled at the behest of Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), showed that people over the age of 50 are the fastest-growing group with student debt, outpacing younger generations -- and compared to younger borrowers, older Americans have "considerably higher rates of default on federal student loans." This leaves them open to having up to 15 percent of their benefit payment withheld, in what's called an "offset."  

In 2015, the GAO reported (pdf), the Department of Education collected about $171 million in defaulted student loan debt through Social Security offsets from 114,000 people, the majority of that from borrowers aged 50 or older and receiving disability benefits. About 38,000 were above age 64, and more than three-quarters of older borrowers took out the loans to cover their own education, rather than to pay for their children's schooling. The typical monthly offset was slightly more than $140. And more than 70 percent of the money collected through offsets went toward interest and fees, as opposed to the loan balance. 

"This report demonstrates just how draconian these Social Security offsets are and how there seems to be a failure at all sorts of levels of this policy," Persis Yu, the director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center, told MarketWatch. 

Meanwhile, the report states: "Older borrowers who remain in offset may increasingly experience financial hardship. Such is the case for a growing number of older borrowers whose Social Security benefits have fallen below the poverty guideline because the offset threshold is not adjusted for increases in costs of living." 

Indeed, the program -- which itself may be under threat from a Trump administration -- already hands out insufficient benefits, with the GAO noting that "a growing number of these older borrowers already received Social Security benefits below the poverty guideline before offsets further reduced their income." 

As shown in the chart below, this impacts tens of thousands of borrowers: 

In its report on the "disturbing" trend, the Washington Post noted: 

Some people have been granted financial hardship exemptions, while others have successfully applied for permanent disability discharge of their loans through the Education Department. But researchers at the GAO are critical of the agency's byzantine application process that puts borrowers at risk of falling back into garnishment. If people do not submit annual documentation to verify their income, their loans can be reinstated and the cuts can resume. 

In turn, Warren decried the tactics described in the report as "predatory and counterproductive."

"The hard-earned Social Security checks that are the sole source of income for millions of seniors should not be siphoned off to pay interest and fees on student loan debt," she said in a statement. "It's no wonder many Americans don't think Washington works for them: our government is shoving tens of thousands of seniors and people with disabilities into poverty through garnishment every year -- and charging them $15 every month for the privilege -- just so that the Department of Education can collect a little bit more interest and keep boosting the government's student loan profits." 

What's more, with Americans 65 and older seeing their total student loan debt grow by 385 percent since 2005, McCaskill warned that these numbers are merely "the tip of the iceberg of what may be to come." 

"We could have hundreds of thousands of American seniors living in poverty due to garnished Social Security benefits if this trend continues," she said, "and we shouldn't allow that to happen." 

Social Security Works and Student Debt Crisis, two non-profits working on different aspects of the burgeoning crisis laid out in the GAO's report, last year pledged to "always fight in solidarity with each other."

(Deidre Fulton writes for Common Dreams  … where this piece was first posted.) (Photo credit: Kate Gardiner/flickr/cc). Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--California is trapped—caught in the dangerous space between two menacingly authoritarian regimes that want to fight each other.

One regime is headquartered in Beijing, and the other is about to take power in Washington D.C. But when viewed from the Golden State, it’s striking how much they have in common.

Both are fervently nationalist, full of military men, and so bellicose they are spooking neighbors and allies. Both, while nodding to public opinion, express open contempt for human rights and undermine faith in elections and the free press. Both promote hatred of minorities (anti-Tibetan and anti-Uighur stances in China; anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim stances in the U.S.).

And both regimes are captained by swaggering men (President Xi Jinping in China; President-elect Donald Trump in U.S.) who tend to their own cults of personality and pose as corruption fighters while using their power to enrich their own families.

Most frighteningly for Californians, both regimes seem to see advantage in escalating conflict with the other. Both leaders have encouraged hatred of the other’s citizens (Xi has embraced ultranationalists who compare American treatment of the Chinese to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, while Trump has called China a “deceitful culture”). The incoming American administration is threatening to raise tariffs and label China a currency manipulator, actions that would likely start a trade war. The Chinese administration is provoking confrontations in the South China Sea while the new American strongman embraces Taiwan—actions that could start a real war.

All this leaves California with the enormous challenge of navigating U.S.-China tensions in a way that protects our people, our economy, and our values. And that will require tricky diplomacy that doesn’t take sides, for we need to maintain relations with both regimes. After all, we live under the laws of the United States, but are irretrievably linked to China, a vital partner in the trade, culture, technology and education sectors that distinguish California in the world.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California. Our public universities rely both on federal funds from D.C. and top-dollar, out-of-state tuition fees from Chinese students to subsidize the education of Californians. So any Trump restrictions on foreign visitors—or retaliatory Chinese limits on overseas study and travel—could blow up the University of California’s business model. It also would damage the University of Southern California, the city of L.A.’s largest private sector employer, which heavily recruits Chinese students.

Our state’s signature industries—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—depend on consumers who live under both regimes. And our most promising ventures—from virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies to major developments (like the San Francisco Shipyards in Hunter’s Point, to just name one)—rely on our ability to bring together manufacturers, investors and technologists from China and the U.S. In a trade war, both regimes could decimate innovation and development with restrictions on foreign investments.

And with both regimes so quick to escalate nationalist rhetoric, it’s quite possible that both Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in California could become targets of bigotry and hate crimes. Our housing market relies on Chinese buyers, who spend an estimated $9 billion a year on homes here. A backlash against Chinese investors buying homes (and using them only part of the year) could produce discrimination and hurt our housing market, which in turn would damage the already underfunded public schools our taxes support.

How then can California handle such a conflict?

First, by protecting our people (especially Californians of Chinese ancestry) and our institutional connections to China with the same fervor the California government is rallying to protect our undocumented immigrants against Trump’s threats of mass deportations. This California diplomacy will be especially hard given the hyper-sensitivity of the autocrats in Beijing and D.C. to the slightest of slights; just as Trump lashes out at Saturday Night Live parodies, Xi and his loyalists see the Kung Fu Panda films as American warfare against them.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California.

And, second, by reminding both regimes—in friendly but firm ways—that we are opposed to conflict because the U.S. and China need each other more than they appear willing to acknowledge.

Californians who doubt this would do well to consult John Pomfret’s masterful new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Pomfret, an American journalist long posted in China, employs telling details (the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was from Xiamen; an 1860s California attorney general campaigned against Chinese prostitutes while importing his own) to show how profoundly the two countries have shaped one other’s development, and just how vital their relationship has become to the world.

“The two nations have feuded fiercely and frequently, yet, irresistibly and inevitably, they are drawn back to one another,” he writes. “The result is two powers locked in an entangling embrace that neither can quit.”

California’s role in this difficult period should be to tell the story of its own deep ties to China, while serving as a model for a productive relationship, argues Matt Sheehan, author of the forthcoming book Chinafornia: Working with Chinese Investors, Immigrants and Ideas on U.S. Soil.

Sheehan, who also publishes the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter and provides communications consulting for Chinese and U.S. companies, says now is an important time for California officials and businesses to seek out areas of productive cooperation with Chinese counterparts, especially in areas like manufacturing and fighting climate change.

“I think of California as a living laboratory for a more practical, productive version of U.S.-China relations,” he says.

But not all collaborations with China would be helpful. Our technologies companies shouldn’t be aiding the U.S. surveillance state or assisting the Chinese government in suppressing human rights, as Facebook is reportedly doing by developing a newsfeed that would empower censors.

We also shouldn’t play to anti-Chinese prejudice, like some California unions have done in opposing trade agreements and advancing union organizing. One noxious—if ridiculous—example is a current push by the hotel workers’ union to block the sale of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach (where the union has an organizing campaign) to Chinese interests on grounds that it’s so close to that city’s port that Chinese ownership would threaten national security.

One possible model for California’s strategy going forward might be Anson Burlingame, whom President Lincoln dispatched to Beijing to represent the U.S. during the Civil War. Burlingame’s approach, as described by Pomfret, was to commiserate with the Chinese (we have our terrible rebellion with the South, you with the Taipings) as a basis for collaboration. His work ultimately produced the Burlingame Treaty, which banned discrimination against Chinese workers in America, welcomed Chinese students to U.S. educational institutions, and opened the way for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens.

Today, Burlingame’s accomplishments are mostly forgotten, but his name belongs to a highly desirable suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region boasting one of America’s most prosperous populations of Chinese Americans.

(Connecting California Columnist and Editor, Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).)

-cw

WEALTH FORUMLA, PART ONE-The City of Los Angeles has intentionally destroyed the housing market and the result is devastating the entire city. Here we have a prime example of a City government that has so screwed up the Price System for housing that builders are constructing for a market segment in which there is a glut while ignoring the segment that has a shortage.

Developers have been misled into constructing high-end luxury apartments when the demand for that type of housing is falling. Since the City has a net exodus of Middle Class people over people who come here, more housing is available even if no one builds anything. The slight rise in LA’s population is due to the birth rate being higher than the number of people who move away or die. But newborns do not demand more houses and elderly Baby Boomers already have homes. Since people are not “taking their houses with them,” our housing supply is increasing. 

Housing costs, however, continue to escalate causing more people to move away, especially Family Millennials who should be the Number One segment of the population to stay here and demand more housing. 

Frauds in the Los Angeles Housing Market. 

With Family Millennials leaving in droves, why aren’t housing prices falling instead of constantly rising? What are the frauds that falsely deceive Angelenos into thinking there is a huge demand for housing, when in fact the demand is falling? 

For a short while, it was the securitization of residential rental income, but it appears that this scam was too much like the fraud that caused the Crash of 2008; financial institutions backed out of this folly. 

Although we know the City has been destroying rent-controlled units -- and this fact alone would cause an increase in homelessness, placing upward pressure on rents -- it does not explain the huge increase in the market segment that is over built: higher end apartments. 

While younger Millennials still in the Dorm Room Phase of life have been doubling and tripling up in order to rent over-priced apartments, there has still been a 12% glut of these units, per the City’s own data. Yet, rents have continued to increase between 2013 and 2016. The false reporting of alleged vacancy rates has misled people into believing that there is a housing shortage when there has been none. (In order to accurately report rents, they should have been adjusted “per person.” When three single people chip in to pay for a $2,000 apartment, the rent per person is actually lower than when one person pays $800 per apartment. Thus, on a per person basis, rents can be falling while the “per apartment” rents are increasing.) 

Belief is Stronger than Fact. 

Belief in a housing shortage is another reason for prices to increase year after year while demand decreases. People pay what they believe is the market rate. As in the 2000s, developers have continued to build under the misconception that there has been a housing shortage. 

Rental prices are generally provided by real estate companies motivated to keep rents high. Thus, their rental reports are usually based on what they advertise and not on the actual rents collected. Those who saw “The Big Short” will remember how no one was taking the time to go and actually look at all these new homes. When one guy did, he discovered that they were vacant and some people were buying three, four or five homes in the belief they could be flipped in an eternal up-market. Just as Wall Street made people believe there was a huge demand for homes, landlords have issued statistics that make people believe there is a shortage of apartments due to huge demand. 

The City of Los Angeles is heavy into this fraud. It keeps lying about the fantastic increases in Hollywood’s population. In April 2016, LA issued a report that the Hollywood population had jumped to 206,000 people and cited the Southern Association of Governments (SCAG) as its source. SCAG had no data about Hollywood population. 

Then, in October 2016, the City released an even more mythical figure: Hollywood’s population was 210,511 people at the end of 2015. Wow, that’s a lot of people, but people who had any memory knew that in April 2016 the City had said the population was only 206,000 people. Did the City lose 5,511 people in the first few months of 2016? Of course, since the City’s data is composed of Lies and Myths, no one should expect any of it to make any sense. 

There is nothing new Under the Sun. 

We have seen this phenomenon previously, prior to the Crash of 2008, when housing prices were rapidly increasing faster than the population was growing. Under the classic laws of Supply and Demand, a downturn in Demand generates reduced Supply as builders realize that the prices for which they can sell new homes will soon be substantially less than the cost to produce them. Yet, the housing market boomed in the face of falling demand – just as we see today. 

The boom-bust phases of the business cycle were an immutable fact until John Bernard Keynes wrote his General Theory in 1936. But after fools like Bill Clinton, the U.S. Congress and lastly Obama’s little Timmy Geithner exiled Keynes, we have reverted to the boom-bust phases. 

When the government fails to protect the Price System from fraud, no one knows what anything is worth. After Congress’ and Bill Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall and the legalization of Credit Default Swaps, massive fraud destroyed the Price System for homes. It turned out that demand for houses had been exhausted until we raised the productivity of more Americans. Rather than shift investment so that the middle and lower classes could become wealthier, Wall Street rigged the system so that people falsely believed there was this huge demand for residential housing. 

The residential housing market was similar to a Ponzi scheme in that the fraud required more and more putative home buyers in order to keep the scam afloat. In time, Ponzi-type schemes always end up demanding more buyers than there are people in the universe. 

The Formulas for Wealth. 

One need not know that PV = Rn / (1 + r)n and Ck = Rn / (1 + MEC)n are what I call the Wealth Formulas, (but most economists say “marginal efficiency of capital.”) Despite their formidable look, they simply mean that in order for a business to produce wealth, a business must sell its products for more than it costs to produce them. 

There is one vital addition -- time. Investments generate wealth over time. Thus, an important principle is not to destroy your business while it is still generating wealth. 

Since money is the abstraction by which we figure out what different things are worth, money is the great common denominator of everything a business uses to generate wealth. In other words, if a business person wants to provide for his family, he has to make certain that whatever he makes and sells costs the buyer more than it cost him or her to produce it. This is obvious, and I hope readers are saying, “Duh!” 

The Government’s Duty, LA’s Failure. 

While businessmen use these concepts daily, most people do not realize the government’s fundamental duty to make certain the formulas actually work. While defending the nation from aggression may be the government’s most important foreign function, protecting the economy is its most vital domestic duty. 

The government must make certain that the Price System accurately translates the value of different services and things into dollars. Without a way for a business person to know the value of an employee’s labor, the value of the building he or she rents for his or her business, or the value of the equipment he or she purchases so that his or her employees have the tools to manufacture the product, there is no way for the business person to calculate how much “wealth” his product will generate.  

When no one knows the value of goods and services, then no one wants to loan a business person any money, and he or she does not want to borrow any money lest he or she be unable to repay it. 

A failure of the Price System means poverty. A correctly functioning Price system means wealth. Thus, the role of all governments is to protect the Price System so that people make sound business decisions. 

The City of Los Angeles, however, is guilty of gross dereliction of duty in this regard. 

Conclusion of the ‘Wealth Formulas’ Part I. 

No one can faithfully serve two masters. The government’s proper role is to provide for the common welfare, not to be beholden to one segment of society. For too long, the City of Los Angeles has been owned by real estate developers. Thus, the City has no process to provide for the quality of life of Angelenos. 

The Planning Department has no section on macro-economics. No one knows Adam Smith from Adam West or John Maynard Keynes for a Keys Drug Store. As a result, housing prices are chaotic and we have thousands of units which no one wants, all while suffering a shortage of the type of housing people actually need. The lack of rent-control has swollen the homeless population, while the war against the single-family home has raised prices so high that we have driven away the emerging Middle Class. The situation is beyond critical and there is no reason to forecast any improvement.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. 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.

AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PALM TREE--I'm a typical American Jew--my tribe came up with most of the Christmas carols we love so much (we also came up with Superman and Batman ... so there!), and I just LOVE Christmas.  I love the lights, I love the spirit of giving and family togetherness, and I love the slowing down to just breathe a little.  I also appreciate the Christian spirituality, which really isn't so far removed from the rest of us. 

But as a father and husband, a transportation/planning advocate, and a pro-family advocate (and that includes kids!), I've got my own "wish list" for the twelve days of Christmas.  I could have gone for a Hannukah/Chanukah/Hanukkah (choose your favorite spelling) wish list, but that would only be eight days ... and what fun would that be when I could have twelve wishes instead: 

TWELVE parks for the City of Los Angeles--and I don't mean pocket parks, but rather BIG open spaces that is the size of about 1-2 blocks.  I'm spoiled by Mar Vista and Palms Parks, and I want a new one for each sector of the City, with a mega-big Downtown Central Park for the two districts serving most of the Downtown area (we could make this 13 for each district, right?) 

ELEVEN days of a rescheduled LAUSD school year that allows for a school year starting closer to Labor Day (NOT mid-August, you knuckleheads!), and/or allowing for a balanced school year with a two week (or perhaps 10-day) break in the spring combined with a smaller winter break.  The LAUSD Board promised a fix to all this, and then they lied to us by reneging on that promise. 

TEN Community Plans a year updated as is consistent with the Bylaws of the City of Los Angeles, to preserve single-family neighborhoods, place height limitations and direct moderate densification along our major commercial corridors to properly allow for an increased population.  No excuses! 

NINE redeveloped industrial zones to create jobs for Angelenos and other Southern Californians. Industrial isn't always ugly, and even if some folks believe it is, then the jobs those zones create will mitigate for that "ugliness". Not everyone is a lawyer who will work at home--people need middle-class, sustainable, and stable careers involved with manufacturing. 

EIGHT new transit lines to serve the Westside, the Eastside, the South Bay, the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the Southeast Cities, the Harbor/San Pedro region, and Downtown regions. 

SEVEN more required years of work before any City, County, or State public worker can retire with full benefits--unless these workers have either saved more, given up vacation time, are physically unable to work or be retrained for other jobs demanding less physical labor.  Maybe we all "deserve" to retire in our mid-50's, but we can't afford to pay for pensions as we're doing now. 

SIX percent as the assumed earnings that public sector pension funds should presume before demanding that the taxpaying base be charged for the extra costs of pensions.  We're going broke, folks, and this isn't a game--unless city/county bankruptcies, and insufficient state funds to meet our budgetary requirements is something we all want to see more of. 

FIVE percent switching from our K-12 budget to our state college budget, in that our bloated, horrifically and tyrannically self-serving public education unions would have to live within their means while allowing taxpayers contributing to our UC and Cal State colleges a chance to affordably pay for their children to get a college education. 

FOUR new smart bus stations (not just benches or stops) each month for our most frequently-used bus connections to establish a roof/shelter, appropriate seating (or not) that doesn't encourage homeless encampments, advertisements for local neighborhood councils, LED announcements for when the next bus is coming, and with plug-in features for cellphones.  Bus riders deserve respect. 

THREE stories as the goal for our City (with the exception of Downtown and a few major commercial corridors) to focus on as the limit for housing projects to achieve affordable and desirable housing for our growing population.  Unless we're talking luxury high-rises, anything over three stories isn't a home...it's a crud-hole.  STOP it, overdevelopers and enabling politicians! 

TWO new county supervisors, and with a redistricting that allows for more appropriate representation for the geographies of our very large L.A. County...and knock it off, you racist cretins, if redistricting is something desired by ethnicity and not geography.  Our county and city is race-obsessed (a New Racism, if ever there was one) enough as it is. 

ONE new wonderful Neighborhood Integrity Initiative to pass in the spring to put the brakes on overdevelopment and require a legal and sustainable and environmentally-friendly development process in the City of the Angels. 

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays and New Year to All!

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw

IMMIGRATION POLITICS-Two weekends ago, in the working class city of Lynwood in southern Los Angeles County, hundreds of anxious immigrant rights activists packed into the banquet hall of a Mexican restaurant to discuss the next four to eight years under President Trump. Nanette Barragán, the district’s newly elected Congresswoman, proclaimed her intention to fight Trump tooth and nail on the harshest elements of his famously hardline immigration agenda, including his proposed border wall. However, Barragán continued, should President Trump and Republicans in Congress propose a bill that would “afford the protections we need,” she would consider it. In particular, she referenced a recently proposed bipartisan bill that would extend by another three years a temporary reprieve from deportation that the Obama administration granted in 2012 to immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. 

“I know the danger,” she told the crowd, describing relatives in Texas who had enrolled in the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “It’s very personal to me.” 

This subpopulation of immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” occupies a special status in the moral outlook of many politicians and of much of the public when it comes to immigration enforcement and reform. Even among Republican politicians who see unauthorized immigration as a criminal act, there are those who regard the Dreamers, unlike their parents, as essentially blameless. The Dreamers have long offered one of the only slivers of potential compromise and agreement in Congress in what is arguably the most polarizing political issue in the country. 

Obama and congressional Democrats have reached for this bipartisan brass ring repeatedly, introducing the Dreamers’ namesake bill, the Development, Relief, and Education for Minors (DREAM) Act, which would legalize the Dreamers’ status, four times over Obama’s two terms. In characteristic fashion, however, the president always counterbalanced his embrace of the Dreamers with an enormous concession to his hardliner adversaries: the erection and implementation of the most aggressive deportation regime the country has ever seen. 

The impact of this bargain on undocumented immigrants has been almost exclusively negative. The DREAM Act has yet to pass Congress; Obama’s support for it, and for immigration reform generally, remains theoretical. The millions of deportations his administration has overseen, on the other hand, are anything but that. 

If the privileging of certain classes of immigrants over others has served the undocumented population poorly under Obama, it’s likely to get much worse under President Trump. With the president-elect just a few weeks away from assuming office, California’s Democratic lawmakers have been pushing a slate of bills at the state, county and city levels to insert a layer of protection between federal law enforcement and the state’s undocumented immigrants. One of those bills is designed to move the debate over immigrant rights away from what its proponents characterize as a false dichotomy between those who deserve protections and those who do not, by extending guaranteed legal counsel -- non-citizens are not currently entitled to an attorney by right -- to every person in a deportation proceeding, regardless of their background. 

“If we create a system where we’re providing representation for some categories of people because we consider them ‘deserving,'” Emi MacLean, (photo left) an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network told me, “we’re just reinforcing this really hateful, fear-mongering rhetoric of the incoming Trump administration.” MacLean’s group is pushing the measure at the city and county level in Los Angeles. In the face of the full frontal attack that immigrants expect will follow Trump’s inauguration, MacLean believes that the proper strategy is to lock arms and allow no one to be thrown under the bus. 

Obama’s line on deportations, outlined in a 2014 speech, is that his administration targets “felons, not families.” Rhetorically, it’s a distinction with obvious appeal: Who in the world likes felons and doesn’t like families? But procedurally, immigrant advocates say, it has been used as an excuse to deny due process to a broad cross-section of people who do not conform to what Democrats have long held up as the types of immigrants that deserve priority protection, such as college-bound Dreamers, undocumented parents of U.S. citizens who have lived here for decades, or undocumented immigrants who have served in the military. 

In practice, the “felons” label is boundlessly elastic. It can mean summary deportation for an immigrant with a drug charge from more than two decades ago for which he has already served time. It can cover a grandmother accused of being a gang member by a single police officer on the basis of essentially no evidence whatsoever. It can include an old DUI or marijuana charge, or a citation for street vending without a license. Or based on no criminal history at all, or on a criminal record whose only offense is illegal entry or re-entry, which as a basis for priority deportation creates a circular argument. According to a recent study by the Marshall Project, those last two categories made up 60 percent of the 300,000 deportations that have been carried out since Obama first made his “felons, not families” speech. 

Obama’s good immigrant vs. bad immigrant language, MacLean believes, helped usher in Trump’s vilification of all undocumented immigrants. During the presidential debates, she pointed out, Trump noted that his proposed policies merely followed practices put in place by Obama. “Obama’s rhetoric of ‘we’re going to deport felons, not families’ created the mentality and the reality that we’re living today,” she told me, “where our president-elect, in his initial speech announcing his candidacy, talked about Mexicans coming into the United States as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals.’” 

Trump has already proclaimed that there are between two and three million immigrants with criminal records who he will instruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport immediately upon taking office. By comparison, Obama has deported about that number of immigrants -- 2.5 million -- over the course of eight years. That was more deportations than any other president in history, and more than all of the presidents of the 20th century combined.  

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa believes that Trump’s figure is a red herring that indicates just how broad a net he plans to cast over the undocumented population. After addressing the Lynwood meeting, while walking from storefront to storefront, chatting in Spanish with their patrons about his gubernatorial campaign, Villaraigosa told me there is “no evidence” that there are two to three million undocumented immigrants in the United States with criminal records. The real number, he claimed, is closer to 800,000. Trump’s invocation of the larger number, he told me, indicates to him that the president-elect plans to go “far, far beyond” merely focusing on immigrants who pose a legitimate public safety threat. 

One immigration attorney told me that two to three million seemed to her to be a reasonable estimate of the number of immigrants already “in the system” -- through arrests and convictions, but also through DACA enrollments and asylum requests and old removal orders that were ignored or never made it to their recipients in the first place -- who the government can track down and deport without much trouble. If you’re an undocumented immigrant or an asylee and you’ve ever been fingerprinted for any reason, she explained, the federal government has your biometric data and probably a paper trail to your residence. There’s no “hiding in the shadows” under such circumstances. Trump’s two to three million priority deportation cases, then, may have nothing to do with criminal status; they’re just ICE’s low-hanging fruit. As under Obama, the “criminal” label is just an excuse to expedite deportations with a minimum of judicial oversight. 

The distinction between “felons” and “families” has already been stretched to the point of legal farce under the Obama administration. If undocumented immigrants are to have any protection from deportation under Trump, many immigrant rights advocates are convinced, it is incumbent upon Democratic-controlled states like California to undermine what has become a tool for summary deportation by purging contrasts between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants from their own laws and policies. 

Yesterday morning, in the administration building named after her father, Janice Hahn settled into her seat, alongside her colleagues on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, to hear more than 100 members of the public speak in favor of, or in opposition to, a measure Hahn helped write. The measure, co-written with Supervisor Hilda Solis, Obama’s former Labor Secretary, would pitch county money into a $10 million legal defense fund, jointly financed by the county, the city and private donors, to provide attorneys to immigrants in deportation proceedings. 

Similar funds are being considered in San Francisco and New York City, and a smaller fund has already been put into place in Chicago. In Sacramento, a bill is moving through the California legislature that would create a legal fund at the state level. 

Stripped of power in Washington D.C., Democrats have embraced these rear-guard actions in an effort to defend their communities, proactively or desperately, depending on your point of view, against the expected deportation onslaught from the Trump administration. In California, the bill before the state, which is entitled “Due Process for All,” makes no distinction between immigrants’ criminal histories in determining who is eligible to make use of the fund -- a victory for immigrant rights advocates who aspire to let the divisive “felons, not families” rhetoric fade into oblivion. 

At the Board of Supervisors meeting, the city attorney, a Los Angeles school district board member and a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Garcetti voiced their enthusiastic support for Hahn and Solis’ measure. It passed by a 4 to 1 vote. 

The language determining the allocation of the funds, however, has yet to be written. If it mimics the state version, California will be on its way to codifying into its laws a unanimous commitment to extending a universal right to due process to all undocumented immigrants, regardless of past arrests, convictions or allegations by the police. It would send a strong message of solidarity at a moment when division could prove catastrophic to millions of the state’s residents. 

If it instead adopts the language of the Obama administration, allocating the right to legal counsel only to certain groups of immigrants deemed more worthy of protection than others, that solidarity could unravel. Immigrants have seen what the results of that division have been under a Democratic administration. Under President Trump, they can only imagine.

(Leighton Woodhouse is a Los Angeles journalist, filmmaker and graphic designer whose work has appeared in the New Republic, the Intercept, Gawker, VICE News, the Nation, Salon and the Awl. His latest feature documentary is Trumpland. This piece was originally posted at Capital& Main.)  Photos by Leighton Woodhouse.

Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PRESERVATION POLITICS-Well, now that you’ve read about the Lytton Savings building at Crescent Heights and Sunset -- and its placement on the City’s “historical register” -- maybe you’d be surprised to find that there’s another “1960s Lytton Savings” worthy of saving. It’s an orphan of a building in Van Nuys at 6569 Van Nuys Blvd. and it has an equal but different story to tell. 

A tale of two buildings, a tale of two different cities: a trendy Los Angeles versus its distant relative, the San Fernando Valley. It’s a tale of community disinterest, proof that even the professionals will “sell out” buildings in the suburbs over a building on Sunset Blvd. It’s a tale revealing that “preservation is a dirty word north of Mulholland Drive.” 

Photos of both the Crescent Heights “Lytton Savings” and the Van Nuys “Lytton Savings” show a great similarity, a love of modern architecture by Bart Lytton, one of those l960s savings and loan tycoons who pyramided the building of the suburbs into a chain of S&Ls. He had a stylebook but he wasn’t building those Home Savings structures that look like mausoleums (I’m surprised no one ever put their ashes into a safe deposit box at Home.) Lytton, a benefactor of the County Museum of Art, used clean modern lines and had a “stylebook” for his banks, but over past 50 years, they’ve disappeared. Maybe you can find one more but, to my knowledge, only the “honored” Crescent Heights and the “soon to be trashed” Van Nuys buildings remain. 

As a member of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, I grew up in Van Nuys admiring the Lytton Savings building. There were only two well designed buildings in Van Nuys: the Paul Revere Williams Bank of America, and next door, the Lytton Savings building with its 40 foot high atrium, skylights, a floating staircase and the loan department suspended on a balcony under the atrium. Yes, like the friends of the Crescent Heights bank, I had my $12 there 50 years ago; I’ve also had a love affair with the building ever since. 

But as a Van Nuys Neighborhood Council member, I’ve never seen the Crescent Heights Lytton Savings and that’s where a bureaucratic story begins. 

When I tried to discuss nominating the Van Nuys Lytton building for “landmark status,” I found that, like the Crescent Heights building, it is subject to demolition -- immediately. 

PROPOSITION M seems to be bringing a land rush to tired Van Nuys Blvd. where most storefronts date from the l920s. Talk about a light rail on Van Nuys Blvd means that everything is in play. And because the Lytton building had parking, four stories with 200 units can be built there. There’s such a land rush now with 400 units at the corner of Kittridge and Van Nuys -- that very same corner. 

As a member of the Van Nuys NC Plum Committee, I tried to talk up the building, but was “blackballed” from the committee. “Thank you for your interest in preservation. (You’re now off the committee.”) 

The fine art of the building isn’t worthy of discussion, but there is talk about the struggling Salvadoran market, La Tapatulcheca (photo above), now occupying it, and that the illegal vendors the market encourages bring the “wrong look” to Van Nuys. Instead, there are wild hopes of gentrification and a “SPROUTS” that will never sprout here. If you think that’s funny, you should feel what I felt when I pursued the matter. The “Lytton Savings” in Van Nuys is on the City of Los Angeles’ “SURVEY LA” list -- an architectural study project of all the City’s buildings of architectural value, including “orphans” like this one that are worthy of “saving.” 

So, ask the City Attorney, “Doesn’t the Neighborhood Council have to at least get a presentation about why the building is on the Survey LA list?” No answer. 

Ask Ken Bernstein, City Historical Preservation Officer, “Won’t you defend your SURVEY LA list of buildings of interest or concern?” No answer.   

Ask LA Conservancy for their help and you hardly get encouragement because the Crescent Heights “fight” seems more interesting. Perhaps “saving two of a kind” is just so difficult to explain that they won’t even “come over the hill” to defend my advocacy -- or SURVEY LA -- or even tell me about their Crescent Heights battle. 

I wish the Crescent Heights people well. I think their building is worthy of preservation, as I do the Van Nuys building. It’s the rare situation where “preserving two of a kind” over one of a kind makes sense. I’d welcome synergy between the groups. 

But the success (such as it is) in Crescent Heights troubles me. I’ve been given a view of City politics suggesting that there is a different threshold for honest discussion of preservation in the City. One cynically sees some sense that the Crescent Heights battle is as much about those Hollywood-Beverly Hills types riding down Sunset Blvd. in a top down convertible, either celebrating the Gehry building to come or the Lytton Savings to be “saved.” 

But if you try, as I did, to get the City’s million dollar “SURVEY LA” discussion of the building inserted into the Van Nuys NC record, you’ll find that you can’t. The City acts as if their own “SURVEY LA” guidance is a “secret” -- a bureaucratic secret for their own convenience. It’s their secret and they’ll decide when and if they want to use it. 

And as for discussion in the Valley on preservation issues -- those who built out the Valley with single family homes in the l950s will build out the Valley now with four story apartments. (Even my single family home sanctuary is being surrounded by those 4 story apartments.) When you can’t get your neighborhood council to respect you enough to make the preservation presentation, you’re not in a good place.

(John Hendry is a neighborhood council activist who lives in the San Fernando Valley.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOX POP--LA City Hall’s shady, underhanded ways have become a serious hot-button issue in the city’s March 2017 elections — and now City Council District 5 candidate Jesse Creed has jumped into the fray.

“As reported by the LA Times, ” Creed wrote in an email to supporters, “special interest lobbyists were at the center of a corrupt and illegal campaign finance scheme, collecting over $600,000 in illegal contributions for City Hall politicians. Do you think the politicians care about the people when the lobbyists are the financiers of their campaigns? Please. The people get hosed.”

Since early 2016, the Coalition to Preserve LA, the grassroots movement sponsoring the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, now known as Measure S, has been leading the charge against City Hall’s unfair, dishonest methods, which favor greedy developers over ordinary Angelenos.

With the City Council and mayoral elections coming up in March, numerous candidates running against City Hall incumbents are now sounding alarm that it’s time for much-needed change. Jesse Creed (photo left) is one of them. 

Creed is running against Council District 5 member Paul Koretz, who serves Hollywood, Bel Air, Fairfax, Century City and Westwood, among other neighborhoods. In a recent email to supporters, the challenger wrote:

Lobbyists are responsible for a culture of special interest dependency and corruption in City Hall, resulting in politicians who ignore the needs of the people. Meanwhile, problems like our broken streets and sidewalks, illegal dumping, and flagrant violations of building codes go unfixed.

We owe it to the people of LA to break this culture of special interest dependency. The people of LA help fund our city elections with a matching funds system that gives candidates up to $100,000 in taxpayer funds. We owe it to the taxpayers of LA to run an ethical campaign.

Coalition to Preserve LA has noted for months that developers spend millions on politically connected lobbyists, who then woo City Hall politicians and bureaucrats for special spot-zoning favors that negatively impact the rest of us through ruined neighborhoods, gridlock traffic and displacement of longtime residents.

It’s why community leaders across LA are asking Angelenos to vote “Yes on S” in March. 

For his own campaign in Council District 5, Creed vowed to not take developer or lobbyist money.

Join the Coalition to Preserve L.A. by clicking here right now to donate any amount you wish, and follow and cheer our efforts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For more information, you can also send us an email at [email protected].

DEEGAN ON LA-Frank Gehry has two options -- some may say a Hobson’s choice – now that the LA City Council has unanimously approved Historic-Cultural Monument status for Kurt Meyer’s Lytton Savings Bank building located on the property Gehry wants to transform into a complex of skyscrapers at the western gateway to the Sunset Strip. 

He can drop his objections and work his 8150 Sunset project around the Lytton Savings Bank building, or he can help developers Townscape Partners move it offsite to a new location. It’s not as if he doesn’t already have enough problems at 8150 Sunset: this project is faced with three, possibly four, pending lawsuits. He’s also contending with a vocal community that doesn’t really want the project there in the first place. 

Anything can happen. We are suddenly experiencing a through-the-looking glass political environment coupled with lots of aggressive political activism when it comes to the lava-hot issue of land use and development. Many Los Angeles communities, HOA’s, Neighborhood Councils, and NIMBYs are pushing back hard against development and these local uprisings have been one of the big political stories of 2016. Next March, in the Mayoral and City Council elections, candidates will have to face many voters who are sick and tired of unregulated over-development. They may just be inclined to support a show-stopper like the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative that would recast how zoning variances are handled -- if it is voted into reality on the March ballot. 

Getting Historic-Cultural Monument status for Lytton has been a risky but so far successful process showcasing which politicos have been brave and which have not. A couple of guys (Steven Luftman and Keith Nakata, both neighborhood council board members and land use committee members) identified the Lytton Savings Bank as something worth saving and launched a campaign for Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) status for it. The road ruptured when City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management committee (PLUM) placed approval of Gehry’s 8150 Sunset project on their agenda for consideration and then approved it, before knowing the HCM status for Lytton – the consideration for which was scheduled several weeks later. Not only was it feckless of PLUM to avoid first making a decision about Lytton, but it was also a backwards procedure. What to do about Lytton should have appropriately and logically been decided before deliberating about the 8150 Sunset project. 

Not satisfied with being chickens just once, the same PLUM committee -- Chair Jose Huizar, Curren Price, Gil Cedillo, Mitch Englander and Marqueece Harris-Dawson -- when they eventually heard the case for HCM status decided to forward it to the full City Council without any recommendation. Twice, they abandoned their responsibility to weigh in on a significant land use issue that eventually benefitted a developer. 

Bravely, Councilmember David Ryu (CD4), who brokered an agreement over the 8150 project, stepped in and publicly voiced his support of Lytton’s HCM status. This helped push it through. Whatever it was that happened behind the scenes, led to the result, a few days ago, of the council unanimously approving Historic-Cultural Monument status for the Lytton Savings Bank building. 

All councilmembers, including the five PLUM members that twice dodged the issue, voted for it in the go-along-get-along City Council culture. In this case, they appear to have gone along with Ryu. 

What the supporters of Lytton have gained may be a Pyrrhic victory: the HCM vote may slightly delay demolition, but it does not guarantee that the building will survive. At least, not at its present site. 

In an October 27 letter to the City Council, Frank Gehry addressed the Lytton Savings Bank building issue, telling the politicos that he had tried different massing options without finding one that would preserve the Lytton bank. He concluded, “I really do not believe that I can design a successful project while keeping the bank on the site.” More prosaically, he admitted to the PLUM committee that his construction crane needs to sit on the existing footprint of the Lytton building so, he says, the Lytton building cannot coexist with his project. 

If he sticks to the claim that the Lytton Bank building is in his way -- although there are two alternative findings in the Environmental Impact Report concerning Lytton that challenge that assertion -- the only other option for saving it is to move the building to a new location. But finding a sponsor and a piece of land may be very difficult. Two valuable resources, cash and location, would need to materialize and, so far, there is no one, including Gehry, who publicly advocates and is willing to pay for moving Lytton to another site. 

The effort to save Lytton has produced many wins, including the willingness to challenge a world famous architect, pushing the politicos, exposing the double-cowardice of PLUM members Jose Huizar, Curren Price, Gil Cedillo, Mitch Englander and Maurice Harris-Dawson, and creating a cohesive community around this critical neighborhood issue. 

The only possible loser is the zig-zag-roofed Lytton Savings Bank –and maybe -- a couple of city councilmembers on the decaying PLUM committee (Gil Cedillo-CD1 and Curren Price-CD9) who are up for re-election in March 2017. They could be ripe for replacement by anti-out-of-control-development voters in the City of LA.

(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].) Photo credit: Los Angeles Magazine. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-When it comes to government corruption, extortion and bribery are two sides of the same coin. It is often hard to distinguish between the two. A military contractor may approach a Congressman and offer to get his kid into a prestigious private school and arrange for the tuition to be “handled.” In Los Angeles, for example, it costs between $11,000 and $32,000 a year to send one child to private school. When the person who pays the money initiates the deal, we call it bribery. 

On the other hand, the Congressman may tell the military supplier, “You know that X-71B which you manufacture? My committee doesn’t think that it is essential and we will be holding hearings in a few months to cut it from the appropriations package.” The Congressman’s kid is then admitted, with tuition pre-paid to the RichieLoo School for Privileged Brats, and miraculously, the cutting of X-71B never appears on the Committee’s agenda. We call this extortion or “grow up, this is how things operate.” 

Extortion Comes to Los Angeles 

City government also has oodles of opportunity for extortion, but until recently Los Angeles’ comprehensive Mutual Bribery operation kept the system relatively clear of extortion. It was a beautiful system in its efficiency and the way it allotted “developer corruption” throughout the City. 

Each councilmember could make any deal he wanted with a developer without any regard for the law, guaranteeing unanimous approval of the project. LA City Council’s Mutual Bribery system is so well known now that it is no longer news. 

How Extortion was Held to a Minimum 

What no one had noticed was the degree to which it limited extortion. With a City Council of fifteen, it would be financially ruinous if a developer had to enter into deals with a majority of the city councilmembers. Thus, each developer has only had to deal with the councilmember representing the district in which he wanted to build his project. We will leave aside the fact that this system has resulted in massive over-development that has turned Los Angeles into the least desirable urban area in the nation. 

Why Los Angeles Is Facing Run-Away Extortion 

Recently, the City of Los Angeles has embarked on an era of massive extortion. A number of factors have contributed to this and it will infect LA in the coming years. 

1. As noted above, extortion and bribery are two sides of the same coin. Thus, adding extortion to Los Angeles’ modus operandi is an extension of its general criminal nature. 

2. Part of the Mutual Bribery pact was: “You stay out of my district and I will stay out of your district.” There are many places during the administrative process where other councilmembers could throw up road blocks to a project outside their district, but they refrained from such interference. For example, if a councilmember became angry, he could use his influence to have a home declared historic, which would throw a monkey wrench into a project. When Councilmember Krekorian and Ken Bernstein at the city planning department decided that Marilyn Monroe’s home was not historic, it would be troublesome if another councilmember agitated to have the home declared historic. 

3. The Sea Breeze Project showed that Mayor Garcetti was dealing himself into the Mutual Bribery scam even though he was no longer a member of City Council. Garcetti wanted and got $60,000 so that the Sea Breeze Project could proceed. 

What was worse, councilmembers far outside Council District 15 where the project was located were getting significant pay offs. 

As the LA Times article noted, “In several cases, elected officials received the money as they were poised to make key decisions about the development, known as Sea Breeze.” 

In addition to the $203,500 to then CD 15 Councilmember Janice Hahn and $94,600 to subsequent CD 15 Councilmember Joe Buscaino (you gotta love the flexible morality ex-cops like Dennis Zine and Buscaino,) hundreds of thousands of dollars went to councilmembers far flung from South Bay’s CD 15. 

Councilmember Englander got $65,800 and his district CD 12 is located in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley and newcomer Councilmember Nury Martinez got $7,700. She too represents the Valley. 

Interestingly, Councilmember Huizar who represents DTLA got $30,400. Gee, I wonder why? The LA Times noted, “More than $30,000 went to Councilman Jose Huizar, who heads the powerful council committee that reversed the Planning Commission’s decision and approved Leung’s project.

At least $65,800 went to Councilman Mitch Englander, who sits on that committee with Huizar.” 

Remember, one famous ploy of extortion is a threat which then disappears. The Planning Commission had thrown up a road block to the Sea Breeze Project, but then Huizar’s PLUM Committee removed that road block. I am certain it was all in the interest of justice and the $30,400 had nothing to do with the obstacle’s disappearance. 

4. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard Fruin says that city corruptionism is okay. This decision is no surprise as Judge Fruin announced a long time ago that the City is above the law and he would do nothing to interfere with the system of Mutual Bribery. Echoing Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the “world safe for democracy,” on December 13, 2016, Judge Fruin made Los Angeles safe for corruptionism. The unintended consequences are already evident. 

When the courts sanction massive eternal bribery, the courts have to turn a blind eye to extortion. There is no way the court can dissent to the massive extortion which the LA Times laid bare in its October 30, 2016 article without infringing on the City Council’s right to operate on the basis of Mutual Bribery. 

How would the court word its opinion? “It is okay to accept bribes, but it is not acceptable to solicit bribes (extortion).” Of course, developers would point out that extortion is essential. How else will they know whom to bribe and when to bribe them? 

5. Thanks to Judge Fruin all councilmembers may now create obstacles which will be expensive for the developers to overcome As the December 13, 2016 issue of WeHoVille wrote, “In a unanimous decision this morning, the Los Angeles City Council approved designating the 56-year-old Lytton Savings building at 8150 Sunset Blvd. as a historic cultural monument (HCM).  The designation bestows certain protections against demolition on the mid-century modern building, but does not guarantee its survival.”  

OMG – classic extortion! A huge problem, which may be made to disappear. On the other hand, is Councilmember Ryu’s striking back at Garcetti’s interference in his district similar to his interference in CD 15 with the Sea Breeze Project? Councilmember Ryu was elected on his claim that he would listen to his constituents about development. This hideous project is the one massive Hollywood project which falls outside Mayor Garcetti’s CD 13. (We know Garcetti still runs CD 13 and Mitchie is his stooge.) 

We won’t belabor the behind the scenes machinations and pressures on Councilmember Ryu, but the most powerful community group, Fix The City, Inc., has sued over 8160 Sunset. It is clear that Councilmember Ryu’s constituents hated this nightmare, yet he could not stop it. 

So which do we have? Are all the councilmembers dealing themselves into the extortion game at the same time Judge Fruin has given his judicial stamp of approval to corruptionism, or is the City Council retaliating against Garcetti for messing with their rights to be lord and masters of their own council districts? After all, that is the promise holding the Mutual Bribery pact together: “I get to be absolute ruler of my council district.” Maybe it is a little of both. 

Judge Fruin would have been wise to heed Lord Acton who said in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” By placing the City Council above the reach of the law, anything goes. The knowledge that the courts will never interfere with the City Council’s corrupt ways imbues the councilmembers with massive power to do whatever they want – including de-generating into vicious internecine warfare over the billions of dollars to be divvied up under Measures JJJ, HHH and M.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. 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.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--Barbara Boxer was never a particularly effective senator. Just name a signature legislative achievement or a victory for California in her 24 years representing the state.

So her exit was fitting.

She went out protesting the passage of what had been our own bill of water projects. And she went out blasting her own colleague, Dianne Feinstein, for crafting a practical compromise on water that was attached as a rider to that bill.

Feinstein effectively made a deal with Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Republican who is #2 in the House. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement. It states protections for species while allowing for more water deliveries South and more flexibility in managing water, with the goal of capturing water from storms.

Boxer, who was clearly not part of negotiations, opposed the bill and vowed to block it.

“This is a devastating maneuver,” Boxer said, as quoted by the Sacramento Bee. “This last-minute backroom deal is so wrong. It is shocking, and it will have devastating consequences if it makes it into law, which I can tell you I will do everything in my power to make sure that it never, ever makes it into law.”

As it turned out, there wasn’t much in her power. The bill went through and appears likely to be signed by the White House as of this writing. Feinstein patiently explained that “This bill isn’t perfect but I do believe it will help California,” Feinstein said, and noted that it was a better deal that she might have gotten once Trump takes office.

Feinstein took criticism from skeptical editorial pages. But she got the deal done. Boxer made a point, but not much else.

California desperately needs Kamala Harris to be more Feinstein than Boxer.

(Connecting California Columnist and Editor, Zócalo Public Square, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

LESSONS FOR CHARTERS--In 2014, when teachers at Los Angeles’ Jefferson High School opened their own charter school, the Student Empowerment Academy, they hoped to bring the larger world into their classrooms. They wanted to show kids opportunities outside of their neighborhood, where academics often took a back seat to economic survival. Kids would learn science, math and social studies by solving real-world problems in teams, just as they would in the work-force, while teachers would have autonomy and genuine decision-making authority. 

But faculty members soon found themselves facing one real-world problem they hadn’t bargained on -- a tug of war for power with administrators and board members. Conflicts reached a boiling point in 2015, with staff leaving en masse – either fired, pushed out or stressed beyond their limits. 

The school also ran afoul of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which oversees the city’s charter schools, for financial mismanagement and other shortcomings. With enrollment dwindling, Jefferson announced that SEA would have to move to another facility for the 2017-18 academic year. If these obstacles weren’t enough, in its last year the fledgling charter school was led by a former professional football player with no teaching background and little administrative experience, and who, along with the academy’s board of directors, would throw the academy and students under the school bus once the going got tough. 

SEA’s story highlights the precarious nature of small independent charter schools, and brings to light the fact that charter boards of directors are largely independent and don’t always have to account to parents, teachers and communities for decisions that affect students. In the end, the academy’s board of directors concluded that SEA faced problems that were so intractable that the only solution was to shut it down, and last June, two weeks after classes ended for summer break, the directors voted for permanent closure. 

Teachers and parents were left reeling. Parents demanded to know what happened to the public funds that created the school, and where their kids would attend classes the next year. Teachers argued that more could have been done to save the school. 

Jefferson High sits in a South LA neighborhood where corner stores, modest homes and ramshackle apartments huddle cheek by jowl with small factories, all in the shadow of downtown’s skyline. Alumni include diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American Nobel laureate, choreographer Alvin Ailey, jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon and singer Etta James. About a decade ago Jefferson became notorious for massive brawls that erupted on campus. Television news reports blamed racial tensions, but more-in-depth accounts noted that nearly 4,000 kids were crammed into a school built for a third that many. 

Six years ago in response, the school created small learning communities to break down the anonymity of the giant high school. One of those initiatives was the New Tech High School for Student Empowerment Academy, a sort of school within a school. When, in 2013, administrators announced staff cuts and larger class sizes, faculty member Linda Rahardjo was one of several teachers who designed the 300-student independent charter version of SEA to carry on the work they had begun. 

Rahardjo told Capital & Main the decision to go charter was an ultimately futile attempt to preserve what the faculty had originally built. The teachers who formed SEA were a closely-knit group who came to school early and stayed late to create a safe place where students could learn to study and think. “Being able to pass their classes became the in-thing,” she noted, adding that the students had begun to put brains above brawn, especially where disputes were involved. “They’d step back [from a fight] and say, ‘That’s not what we do here.’” It was a cultural shift at Jefferson. 

SEA’s troubles began in earnest with a perfect storm of problems that included its coming expulsion from the Jefferson High campus, declining enrollment and financial instability — all of which exacerbated tensions between the academy’s faculty and its board members. Matters weren’t helped by a financial scandal. 

Earlier this year LAUSD demanded an explanation after SEA paid an outside contractor more than $130,000 for services that should have been provided for free by the school district, and for supplies that district staff said would have been much cheaper if purchased from LAUSD. 

For instance, the contractor charged nearly $5,000 for toilet paper that district officials said LAUSD would have sold for less than $1,000. He allegedly inflated shipping and handling fees and billed $2,000 for taking notes at four board meetings. 

One of the SEA board’s most consequential choices, however, was to hire of one of its own to run the school as it was floundering at the end of the 2015 school year. The last principal had been let go amid student walk-outs and teacher dissatisfaction. Had there been other eyes on the process, and greater scrutiny of the next principal’s track record, the new man might not have landed the job. 

Marvin Smith is a former National Football League linebacker who played for the LA Rams in 1983 until, he said, he was sidelined by an injury. He has since resurfaced as an ordained minister, a radio talk-show host and an advocate for low-cholesterol diets.  Smith doesn’t appear to have a teaching or administrative credential. In his resume, he claims a master’s degree in business from Azusa Pacific University; however, a university spokeswoman said Smith enrolled in a program in organizational management and attended classes, but she could find no record of his graduation. 

More notably, Smith is a charter school devotee who said he intends to remain in the field his entire life. But so far, his educational ventures have been short-lived. 

He founded and directed the Doris Topsy-Elvord Academy, a small charter middle school in North Long Beach. But he closed the school three years ago because of some of the same financial and enrollment problems that would plague SEA. 

The SEA board has been remarkably charitable about Smith’s CV. 

“Sometimes you learn more by failing than succeeding,” said SEA board chair Tommy Newman, when asked about the closure of Smith’s Long Beach charter venture. He told Capital & Main that the board stood by the decision to hire Smith. 

Ref Rodriguez, an LAUSD school board member whose district includes Jefferson High School, called Smith a “wonderful person,” while admitting that he lacked understanding of teaching and learning. 

Others have not been so sanguine. 

“Not only did this guy not know instruction but he didn’t know how to manage a school,” Betty Forrester, a United Teachers Los Angeles vice-president told Capital & Main. “Top it off with a lack of transparency, communication and democracy. Those things make people wonder.” 

Smith explained to Capital & Main that he took the SEA post to bring unity and calm to the school, insinuating that, operating behind the scenes, disgruntled teachers had sparked the student protests that led to the ouster of his predecessor. It’s an opinion both Rahardjo and student leader Karen Espinoza reject. 

“The reason I stepped in is, I don’t like kids being manipulated by adults for adult agendas,” Smith said, without identifying those agendas. “We have to push for the kids.” After assuming control of SEA, Smith said he embarked on what he called a “team effort” to overhaul the school. 

On the contrary, Forrester said, Smith did not truly welcome teacher collaboration, which she argued would have given the school a better chance to succeed. 

“People didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “There were no clear answers. It was like, ‘Shut up, go into your classroom and do what we tell you.’” 

While the school struggled during its last months, Smith was already exploring new charter opportunities for himself in Ohio, with an apparent assist from one of SEA’s board members. Bryan Bentrott, a Newport Beach developer, who is a personal friend of Smith’s, wrote him a letter of support for the venture just six months before SEA closed. Bentrott, who also served as a board member for Smith’s failed Long Beach charter school, portrayed Smith as a charter superhero who had saved the academy from closure. 

“Last year Marvin singlehandedly rescued a charter school in Los Angeles,” Bentrott wrote. “Despite tremendous odds, Marvin stepped in and saved a school, which was on the verge of shutting down.”

In reality, SEA was in its death spiral. 

As teachers rallied to solve SEA’s problems, Smith may have already given up, perhaps having gotten wind of the coming closure. The school’s budget documents show that in May, he cashed out his paid time off, collecting over $11,000 a month before the shutdown vote. 

Smith may still be pursuing the chance to open a new charter school in Ohio. He wouldn’t answer questions about it. Such applications are difficult to track because many private and public agencies are authorized to approve charters in Ohio. 

While the teachers’ efforts to help save the academy didn’t bear fruit, José Cole-Gutiérrez, a director at LAUSD’s charter school division, said they weren’t necessarily wrong to try. Unless it had a fatal flaw, such as a serious threat to student safety, he said his office would have considered renewal if SEA showed improvement. 

It also turns out that the school’s financial picture might not have been as bleak as Tommy Newman and his board colleagues painted. A draft audit shows the school ending 2016 $175,000 in the black, although he contends that late legal bills might not have been factored into the bottom line.

Newman, an attorney who currently works as communications and public affairs director for a nonprofit housing developer, also cited an unpaid loan, high personnel costs and legal expenses associated with negotiations for a union contract as reasons the school could not continue. He also said the school faced risk because of the contractor affair, although Cole-Gutiérrez said no specific action on the overpayment is currently contemplated, adding that LAUSD has the authority to ask its inspector general to investigate or refer the matter to the district attorney. 

SEA’s closure meant kids would lose the close teacher-student relationships the school had cultivated, and either have to navigate a large high school or scramble for a spot elsewhere long after enrollment decisions had been made for the next year. 

“To me, the shame is that this was a teacher-led and teacher-initiated school,” said LAUSD board member Ref Rodriguez. “That we were not able to make it work pains me.” 

A couple of months before the closure vote, social studies teacher Kari Mans and art teacher Bill Neal had both joined with co-workers in a last-ditch effort to solve some of the school’s most vital issues, like finding space for the school to operate out of, or recruiting students. In an interview, Neal said he was still hopeful, even though he said his and the other teachers’ efforts had largely been ignored or rebuffed by Smith. 

“We were starting to get this sinking feeling,” he said. “All of this had already been decided. It was like a foreboding. This is going to be bad.” 

“It was heart-breaking,” Newman acknowledged. “It felt like failure. I’d invested a year and a half of my life in it.” 

However, he argued, the school couldn’t survive financially because of low enrollment and lack of funds. He contended that even if SEA made it through another year, the Los Angeles Unified School District would be unlikely to renew its charter because of poor oversight reports. Still, the latest report also highlighted strengths, such as the school’s $250,000 Walton Foundation grant and its substantial implementation of the innovative aspects of its charter. 

Teachers pointed to other assets: Graduation rates were relatively high, and many in the class of 2016 were bound for college. Mans, who had recently joined the faculty, told Capital & Main that the school’s project-based learning approach produced students who could think critically and solve problems. 

For all the dedication he described, Tommy Newman didn’t have to answer to anyone for his vote.

He and his four fellow board members were essentially in charge of a very tiny school district, with final responsibility for everything from finances to personnel to purchasing, albeit with oversight from the LAUSD. 

But unlike the LAUSD’s board members, SEA’s weren’t elected to their posts and when they decided to throw in the towel, they faced no consequences. They were not required to show they’d done everything possible to keep the school open. With the exception of the sole parent representative on the board, they didn’t live in the community and could return to their jobs or businesses after the closure without looking back. 

The LAUSD’s Cole-Gutiérrez said he takes closures seriously, but that a school’s board of directors holds ultimate decision-making power. 

“It’s contemplated in the Charter Schools Act that there is an exchange of autonomy for accountability,” Cole-Gutiérrez said, adding that shuttering schools is sometimes a necessary part of that. 

In addition to Newman and the lone parent, the board included a retired middle school principal, Bentrott and another attorney. The board might have been savvier than some, but Newman said he had no idea of the problems he’d face when he agreed to join. 

That’s not uncommon, said UTLA’s Betty Forrester, who got involved at SEA after teachers voted to join the union. Charter school board members are sometimes recruited simply because they raise their hands to volunteer, or so that a school can meet the basic requirement of having a board in place, she said. And even though they don’t have to answer to voters, their decisions carry huge weight for the children they serve. 

“Students only get one chance to be in ninth grade,” Forrester noted. 

For what it’s worth, parents and teachers could get some answers about the school’s financial viability when the school’s final audit is submitted later this week. 

They will be lucky if they do. The state Department of Education reports that many charters can’t afford to provide a final audit, or simply ignore the requirement after they close. Smith’s former charter, Doris Topsy-Elvord Academy, was one that did not bother submitting a final audit as required by law. 

Additionally, more than 100 shuttered schools have failed to return public funds they’ve been granted; collectively they owe the state upwards of $49 million.  

The question of whether the school itself could have made it, had the board not opted for closure, will likely remain unanswered, because board members have no further obligations to the community the school served. 

What is known, said Forrester, is that the students Marvin Smith vowed to fight for were the losers at the Student Empowerment Academy. 

“There were issues with academics, with supplies, and massive teacher turnover,” she said. “Stability is huge in education. They weren’t able to stabilize the school. They didn’t do right by the students.”

(Robin Urevich is a journalist and radio reporter whose work has appeared on NPR, Marketplace, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Las Vegas Sun. This piece first appeared in Capital & Main.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Back in October, I wrote my CityWatch column about the presidential election as a referendum on feminism. For the first time in U.S. history, a woman was on the top of the ticket for a major party. Her rival was a man known over the years as much for his pronouncements about the female form during his appearances on Howard Stern as for his experience as a mogul and as a reality TV celebrity on The Apprentice. When a conversation between former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush and Trump went viral mid-election season, we knew the GOP candidate believed his fame entitled him to “grab” and kiss women without their consent. 

The following month, Donald J. Trump had pushed past the magic number of 270 electoral votes to become President-Elect. As results indicated a Trump victory (and the following day as I listened to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech), I reflected on my October column. Did the election results indicate that Americans no longer support feminism? 

As we follow news, whether via the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN or via Twitter, Politico or other online sites, Election 2016 appears to be more complicated, given our intelligence citing Russian hacks and possible interference even at the polls. Regardless of whether or not the absence of interference might have changed the election results, women remain a formidable force. 

Kamala Harris is headed to the Capitol to replace Barbara Boxer and closer to home, Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger will join Sheila Kuehl, Hilda Solis and Mark Ridley-Thomas on the LA County Board of Supervisors. Women will form the majority in the country’s largest local government agency. The 15-member LA City Council, however will only have one woman. 

Next month on January 21, on the day following the Inauguration, tens of thousands will join the Women’s March on Washington with similar events across the U.S., including a Women’s March LA to be held downtown. 

According to the Women’s March on Washington site, the organization and participants “stand together in solidarity with our partners and children for the protection of our rights, our safety, our health and our families – recognizing that our vibrant and diverse communities are the strength of our country. 

“We support the advocacy and resistance movements that reflect our multiple and intersecting identities. We call on all defenders of human rights to join us. This march is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up. We will not rest until women have parity and equity at all levels of leadership in society. We work peacefully while recognizing there is no true peace without justice and equity for all.” 

The election has turned out to be a referendum but not in the sense I once suspected. The rallying of women throughout the country, as well as the men who support us, has shown that we remain a powerful force for change. 

For more information or to register: 

Women’s March on Washington  

Women’s March on LA  

Register for Women’s March on Washington – Los Angeles (by 12/24.)

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

@THE GUSS REPORT-There are grudging, trudging phases that politicians go through when dealing with guerilla journalists. Often, they provide a window into which direction the story will lead. 

The first phase is to ignore us. The second is when they realize we are onto a story and we have an outlet and an audience. That’s when they call us their friend or employ the pregnant pause and the faint praise, “I really admire your…..passion.” Third, when we nail a story that is picked up by the mainstream media, and we are credited for breaking the story, they go silent and cold as a nuclear winter. And fourth is the thaw when they realize that people beyond their reach are reaching out to us to share their stories. 

Before we launch into 2017, let’s take a quick look back at the 2016 you and I shared. 

In 2016, I contributed 39 articles to CityWatch, amplified by the occasional invitation to talk on KFI AM 640 where the Sunday Morning News humorously bestowed upon me the title, “Eric Garcetti’s Worst Nightmare.” In developing these stories, there were more than a few humorous encounters like when I prepared to exit an LA City Hall elevator and a certain chief of staff was on the other side of the opening doors; someone’s jaw dropped, and it wasn’t mine. Others included awkward overtures and a hearty, guffawing handshake from an elected official who never previously said as much as “hello” to me. 

In February, my article LA’s Hypocrisy on World Spay Day: ‘Backyard Breeders’ Get a Pass showed how city officials are all talk and no action when it comes to controlling the pet population that results in overcrowded pounds that kill thousands of healthy, happy and adoptable animals. In March, I wrote of billionaire hedge fund guru Bill Ackman costing many of his clients their life savings by investing against (i.e. “shorting”) the stock value of LA’s Herbalife while overdosing on investments in Valeant, a dubious Canadian pharmaceutical firm. Since then, Herbalife kept winning in court and in its stock price while Valeant lost half of its remaining value, reaching an all-time low last week. 

As spring approached, I wrote how Time Warner Cable would have little to offer us after the 2016 season in which iconic Dodgers announcer Vin Scully retired, having deprived subscribers of other services of enjoying his last few seasons. Now rebranded as Spectrum, it is the same tired service, at higher prices and virtually no portability while DirecTV launches its lower priced, bundling-not-necessary and completely portable DirecTV Now service. 

In April, I wrote in (Dis)-honorable Mentions at LA City Council how our lawmakers honored a local school whose alumni included what amounted to a rogue’s gallery of former LA Sheriff Lee Baca, former LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, former LAPD Chief Darryl Gates and former tennis champ Bobby Riggs. Later, in LA City Council Soapbox Evades its Own Sexual Misconduct Failures I told you the story of how city officials talked about helping sexual assault victims while standing alongside, and completely ignoring the costly sexual harassment settlements of, their colleague Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar. 

In May, I showed in ‘No Kill’: LA’s Big Lie how Mayor Eric Garcetti falsely claimed the city’s animal impounds are no longer killing animals because he simply redefined the meaning of death and adoption. A week later, I showed in Duped Councilman Rationalizes Mayor’s Animal Bamboozle how Councilmember Paul Koretz, LA’s biggest phony on humane issues, rationalizes the fraud to please his wife’s employer….Mayor Garcetti.

Also in May, my Ill-Prepared LA Grovels for a Super Bowl it Won’t Get told how the City of LA, which doesn’t have an NFL team or stadium, groveled for a Super Bowl that it would not, and ultimately did not, get.

In June, I wrote Garcetti Reappoints ‘Arrogant’, Delinquent Commissioner to show the mayor’s disconnect in reappointing Roger Wolfson, the “No-Show Commissioner” of LA Animal Services. He, along with fellow panelist Larry Gross, contributed articles to CityWatch this year, but ironically, none of them were about humane issues. And that’s just the way the Mayor wants it -- experts in areas other than the Commissions to which he appoints people. 

When we got to July, I wrote about a Deputy LA City Attorney named Hugo Rossitter who failed to disclose his outside legal businesses, let alone pay business taxes to the cities of LA and Beverly Hills, in LA Prosecutor, Fake Businesses … and, Why It Matters. 

In August, I launched a series of articles with Herb Wesson: King of the Foreclosure Dance on how the Los Angeles City Council president was continuously on the verge of losing his homes due to decades-long foreclosure troubles, while he sold the public on failed affordable housing and homelessness issues. Wesson later misled LA Times’ City Hall reporter David Zahniser on the origins of his problems, and what he was doing about them. (Photo above: Herb Wesson.)

As late summer turned to fall, I tracked down in Sherman Oaks Gives Tourists … and LA’s Curious … the Bird a wayward peacock named Percival, who was as colorful and overt in his Valley activities as Congresswoman-turned-County-Supervisor Janice Hahn’s campaign flunky John Shallman was in his anonymous online pursuits in Exposed: Hahn Operative Trolls CityWatch.

In the September through November corridor, I showed, starting with Garcetti Playing Dirty Pool? how the mayor removed a heroic LAFD whistleblower named John Vidovich from his post just a few months prior to his retirement for exposing fraudulent fire inspectors, and what role the overtime-gobbling firefighters’ union had to do with it. My big “get” of the year was when the LA Weekly and KCBS picked up on the story after I exposed the LA Times’ original story on Vidovich to be bogus and – perhaps – vindictive. 

As Trump v. Clinton came on the horizon, I took one more jab at the Mayor’s phony humane claims with How Eric Garcetti Falsified 8,807 Pet Adoptions and Worse. 

A day before the November 8 presidential election, I cautioned in Wall Street. Wednesday. Watch Out! that the stock market, were Trump to win, would experience dizzying turbulence. When it appeared Trump would in fact win, the Dow Jones pre-market price dropped almost 800 points, but has boomeranged to unprecedented heights ever since. So I was right about the turbulence, but so very wrong about its duration. 

After a foray into the hurt feelings of the election in Obama: ‘Go Out There and Win an Election’ and Vote Recount: The 3rd Stage of Grieving I attempted to bring some reasoning to Thanksgiving with Thanksgiving: Both Sides Now. 

And finally in December, I delved into dangers of tourists pursuing access to our world famous landmark in Runaround Ryu and Hollywood Sign Danger and how Garcetti, City Council, City Attorney Mike Feuer and City Controller Ron Galperin are in denial about much bigger problems that LA faces in 2017 in City Hall’s Latest Delusions on Terror, Fraud, Fire … and Everything Else. 

In 2017, the LA City Hall and LA County Supervisors’ bubbles may finally burst, and the leaders’ spines will be tested. My predictions and previews are coming next week.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640 and Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.