By Marc B. Haefele

This is, locally speaking at least, not as bad a year’s change as some. We have a  competent, fairly diligent mayor for maybe the first time since the best months of Dick Riordan’s first term. We have a competent police  chief too,  the first  since well before  I came to LA 25 years ago. We may soon, or already, have a competent fire chief. At least we are rid of poor Bill  Bammatre, who finally had to confess that he wasn’t up to the reformer’s  task that  Mayor Riordan settled on his shoulders over a decade ago.

On the other hand, coming up in the City Council, we’ve got the Return  of the Undead Member with the virtually unchallenged reaccession of nearly recent State Sen. Richard Alarcon to his old 7th District seat. I’m already anticipating that the long-serving, long-retired and unsurpassably controversial Arthur K. Snyder will file to run again in the Eastside 14th District against incumbent Jose Huizar.

Meanwhile, will the mayor of Los Angeles really be able to take over the LAUSD next year like everyone, including me, has been  predicting? The legislative  will is there but the idea’s legal  passage seems no longer certain.  Antonio Villaraigosa’s lawyer team seems to be taking the line in court that there is nothing in the City Charter that forbids the takeover. But the charter verbiage against the takeover is very specific. I shouldn’t be playing lawyer, but I’d earlier heard the city argument was going to involve supremacy of state over local law. Considering the assembled army of legal talent on the mayor’s side, I’d like to think they know what they’re doing by taking the no-conflict road instead. But the quick movement of the case from its primary jurisdiction doesn’t suggest this is so.  We could be in for a long fight here--or maybe even a surprise upset.

What with our new acting fire chief, mightn’t we expect some completely new ideas for running the city fire department? Certainly, the department’s 12-year lag in fighting discrimination suggests a need for them. My  fire buff friend Jim  has a suggestion to dilute the frat-house culture that seems so long to have pervaded Los Angeles fire stations: Put the fire fighters on 12-hour-day, 3-day work weeks like the LAPD recently under Jim Hahn and abolish the sleep over fire house altogether.  This new concept would  undo the accepted “submarine crew” closeness of the individual fire locations and void a century-old tradition. But it might also undo the perception, caused by the notorious Tennie Pierce discrimination case and others not so fiscally outrageous,  that between their brave exploits and their training to “do what they are prepared to do,” our fire fighters might sometimes be spending a little too much time  together between calls.

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils are going to have to decide someday, and I hope it is sometime next year, whether they are going to stay halfway inside the tent as an unruly subordinate of LA city government, or go outside as a completely independent entity.   My guess is that the longer  the bureaucratic interim acting head of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, Lisa Sarno,  stays on, the more likely it is that  the more progressive NC folk are going to take their chances outside the Big Tent.  In the short run, this will probably prove  disempowering. But in the long run  this could make for a more independent, useful voice for the citizens of Los Angeles. Who can say we don’t need that?

And not just in the year soon to come. (Marc Haefele has been covering LA politics for 25 years for the LA Weekly, KPCC Radio and other media. Haefele is a regular contributor to CityWatch.) _