The Real Cost of LA Sidewalk Repairs – Needless Deaths!

VOICES-Recently the City of Los Angeles agreed to a $1.3 Billion settlement to repair its sidewalks over 30 years.  Next year, the City is supposed to spend $31 Million, and the annual amount will increase up to $63 million over years. 

What is the real cost of repairing sidewalks?  More needless deaths!  Of course, in the land of endless corruption, nothing is certain except more corruption. 

What’s the basis to claim that repairing sidewalks will result in needless deaths? 

Los Angeles has very little money.  In order to repair sidewalks, it has to take money from somewhere else.  One of its favorite places to raid for money is the LAFP and its paramedics and firefighters.  I suppose they could cut the police men also. 

If history is prologue, then we see our future.  In 2005, USA Today ran an exposé on how Los Angeles cheats in reporting its emergency response times, especially for paramedics.  The longer it takes for the paramedics to arrive, the more people who needlessly die.  As an authority on how Los Angeles falsely states its emergency response time, USA Today quoted Los Angeles City Fire Department’s own Medical Director, Marc Eckstein. 

The Price of Just a Few Seconds Lost: People Die, by Robert Davis, USA TODAY, May 20, 2005. 

Six years later in 2011, when the City was running short of funds and it wanted to give a few hundred million dollars to its favorite developers, the city council and mayor came upon a plan.  It would return its prior false reporting as described in the May 2005 USA article and do it again.  It concocted a ludicrous Deployment Report which said that if the City took $200 Million away from the LAFD and reduced the number of paramedics, it would improve its emergency response times.  In early 2012, our illustrious City Council President and current Mayor Eric Garcetti used the Deployment Report to reduce paramedics. 

In June 2013, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury found that reducing the paramedics did not improve response times, but instead it made paramedic response times worse leading to more needless deaths.  In fact, the Grand jury found that when the City Council took away the funds, it knew – not “suspected” – but it KNEW – people would needlessly die as a result. 

Now that Mayor Garcetti is under a court order to repair sidewalks, where is he to get the money?  The most likely place is the paramedics. Since Garcetti had been forced to restore some of their funding, they are ripe for another raid. 

Unlike Korean Airlines, the nation of China or mega-real estate developers such as CIM Group, paramedics are not a profit center for Garcetti’s buddies.  And, who are Garcetti’s best buds?  Well, we have Juri Ripinsky who was a Garcetti fund raiser and recipient of Garcetti’s support for the huge El Paseo Project in Hollywood.  Juri Ripinsky knows a lot about real estate since he spent four years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for real state and bank fraud.  

Yes, Garcetti’s LA is the place that says, “No,” to paramedics and, “Yes,” to federal felons. Has anyone seen the wonderful project which Mr. Ripinsky has actually constructed at the old Sears store on Santa Monica Boulevard at Wilton?  Of course not.  It doesn’t exist. 

Sidewalks, oh they’re so much better than paramedics.  Just think how much money is to be made by each councilmember’s drawing up his list of sidewalks to be repaired by his brother-in-law, er I mean, by a totally independent sidewalk contractor. 

That’s the trouble with paramedics, where’s the graft, where’s the corruption, where’s the diversion of funds?  All paramedics do is save lives, and the LA Grand Jury told us where that ranks in Garcetti’s LA. 

So good-bye paramedics, hello new curbs.

 

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. This email address is being protected from spambots. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch. )

-cw

  

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 29

Pub: Apr 7, 2015