DUELING ALLIANCES - For reasons known only to its two-person ‘steering committee,’ the Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils decided to bump heads with the LA Neighborhood Council Coalition on Saturday and likely everyone came up a loser.
If attendance is the scorecard on these kinds of puzzling decisions, the Citywide Alliance took a beating not unlike LA’s basketball Lakers … at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks … did on Sunday. Fewer than 30 attendants made the trek to the Alliance political rally that featured LA’s Controller Wendy Greuel and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky while close to 90 participants were on hand for the LANCC … and its companion DWP Advocacy Committee and NC Congress Planning Committee … discussions.
What prompts this kind of screwy scheduling is hard to fathom. Both forums had potentially much to offer. The LANCC has been meeting on the first Saturday of the month since its inception. The Citywide folks have been meeting on the third Saturday of the month … when they choose to convene … for years. Many of the same people have been regulars at both gatherings over the years. Since my emails to Alliance organizers Noah Mondisett and Bill Christopher asking for an explanation went unanswered, I’m left to conclude that they made their decision with their eyes wide open and the affect on the public and the Alliance reputation was not a concern. Naiveté? Arrogance? You be the judge.●●● Paul Hatfield found some discussion gold worth mining at the LANCC forum. You will find his report elsewhere on this page.
Stephen Box covered the Citywide Alliance session. These are his notes:
Controller … and Candidate for Mayor … Wendy Greuel …
● Made a strong case for her performance as City Controller in spite of limited audit staff, offered up her role as "financial reporting, paying bills, audits" and pointed out that her 15 auditors are far short of the "6 per billion"' standard.
● Addressed budget crisis by focusing on job creation and her record on business tax reform, advocating for the consolidation of revenue collections, and declared "No more gimmicks, no more short term solutions."
● Thanked neighborhood councils for supporting her by calling on City Council to act on the recommendations of her audits.
LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky …
● Called LA's budget crisis the simple result of "reckless spending during the biggest revenue increases that I have witnessed in my career" which he then detailed as being 19 ½ years in LA's City Council and 16 ½ as County Supervisor.
● Said about land use, "I live in this city, I pay taxes in this city, I own a home in this city and I'm appalled by what is happening in this city, by what has happened to City Planning and the investigation in Building and Safety."
● Referred to Measure R and the 30/10 Program as our stimulus package, called out the excesses of the CRA as evidence that is has become a honeypot for the developers, and positioned Cultural Tourism as economic stimulus exclaiming "The Arts Industry employs more people in LA now than the Defense Industry."
(Ken Draper is the editor of CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) -cw
CityWatch
Vol 9 Issue 37
Pub: May 10, 2011
