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ERIC PREVEN'S NOTEBOOK - Public comment on LA’s proposed budget? Sure—if you didn’t already burn your one-minute ration Friday in Van Nuys with 124 others.
Next shot: Monday, April 28 at 4:00 p.m., Downtown. City Hall.
Of eight budget hearings, five start after lunch—perfect for slipping big decisions past a worn-out public. Only three start fresh at 9:00 a.m.
Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting captures County governance in the buff: $4 billion in childhood sexual abuse settlements. A $60 hike for Junior Lifeguard fees. Fifty-five thousand SEIU workers walking off the job. Bring sunscreen—and a lawyer.
Supervisors call it "budget stress" while saving $205 million for new executive suites downtown. Inflate the ceremonies. Deflate the public. That’s the model.
Mark Ridley-Thomas, meanwhile, remains free on appeal, his brief surprisingly coherent. You can almost hear him, somewhere downtown: "Raise the roof!" Some careers bend. MRT specializes in slipping through.
Over at Metro—the Board's favorite sitcom—the cast keeps rolling. America's favorite Supervisor and her favorite public commenter are still standing, even as we creep toward five months of enforced silence under Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
Listen for yourself.
They can shrink the public. They can raise the fees. They can bury $4 billion in disgrace.
But they can’t mute the truth.
Quiet Please: On Thursday, May 1, the Council debates gutting the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office—their idea of “climate response.”
Meanwhile, LA spends $50 million a year on helicopters—$3,000 an hour circling low-priority calls, fueling car chase broadcasts, and dumping CO₂ into the sky.
CEMO delivered heat relief, resilience planning, and protection for vulnerable Angelenos. After fires leveled 16,000 structures and caused up to $150 billion in damages, you might expect City Hall to connect the dots.
Instead, they’re cutting climate defense—and keeping the helicopters flying.
Priorities, Los Angeles: Up in the air. Going nowhere fast.
Marqueece Harris-Dawson has garrotted public comment."Please take our calls, Sir."
Papal Wishlist:
Pope Francis asked for humility.
We gave him fighter jets, rooftop snipers, 8,000 security agents, and a world summit disguised as a funeral. We meant well. We always do.
The simple farewell—a plain coffin, a simple Mass—was delivered under NATO jets, 200 world leaders, and a quarter-million mourners packed tighter than Times Square. Watching CBS’s rooftop special, it felt less like a funeral and more like an Olympics opening ceremony, minus fireworks (but better hats).
Funerals, inaugurations, fancy toilets for Roki Sasaki at Dodger Stadium, the Olympics—these are humanity’s one-night stands: thrilling, exhausting, and always followed by regret and a slight headache
Francis’s true legacy showed up elsewhere: candles in Buenos Aires, flowers in Manila, quiet Masses in India. Inside Vatican City, it was barricades, photo ops, and Trump v. Zelenskyy disguised as mourning.
You can ask for simplicity.
You can be the Pope.
And still, nobody really listens.
Friday Budget:
Last week, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky promised a “transparent, community-driven” hearing for LA’s $13.9 billion budget. Then came the catch: a “special meeting” that mutes the public. One item, one minute to speak—$13.9 billion in sixty seconds!—Same meeting from Van Nuys to Monday’s downtown session. If you spoke on Friday, you’re done! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. It’s not a hearing; it’s a stopwatch. LA County, no transparency champ, thanks to Measure G, makes department heads face questions, while City Hall crams every dollar into one rushed minute. A budget should show LA’s values; this one hides them. Yet Angelenos showed up—animal welfare advocates (15 speakers), senior service supporters (14), immigrant rights groups (13), city planners (12) led the charge. Solo voices, like a senior and a homelessness advocate, stood tall, but regular residents? Sidelined by design. Linked are eight speakers, from pets to public banks, who spoke well. Yaroslavsky, open the mic—let the city people speak.
The City of LA's self-fulfilling prophecy.
Categories and Speaker Counts
After analyzing the 124 speakers’ remarks, I identified 15 primary subjects. Below is the table listing the subjects, ordered from most speakers to least, with the number of speakers, percentage of the total (124), and a description of each subject.
Total Speakers: 124
Total Subjects: 15
Bob Blumenfield's nose.
Here is a link to a bootleg transcript of eight great comments from Friday.
The Bruv Industrial Complex:
A family of four rolls up to Dodger Stadium for a classic ballgame. Four cheap seats, parking, two beers, two sodas, four hot dogs: $399.68. Twice the MLB average. Cheaper to fly to Cincinnati, catch a game, and stay overnight than to cheer in LA. When did the American pastime become a luxury gated community?
Meet the Bros: slick hustlers of LA’s Bro Industrial Complex—prep school grads, real estate moguls, and branding gurus who turn sacred sports into billion-dollar schemes. They’re not just hosting the LA28 Olympics; they’re sticking you with the bill. LA28 promised “no-build” Games, leaning on existing venues. No build doesn’t mean no-bill. The real cost, an estimated $50 billion, hides in Metro’s delayed 28-by-28 transit plan, “smart city” tech flops, and “necessary” infrastructure that somehow doesn’t count toward the budget. The Bros throw the party. You pay for the cleanup. Meanwhile, LA’s “world-class” vision means tourists sipping spiked lemonade on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade amid Forever 21 liquidation sales. No plan? Liquor up the sidewalks and call it progress.
I’m no outsider. I captained the Mamaroneck Tigers swim team and logged laps at Michigan’s IM building, where Jim Harbaugh played pickup hoops and Michael Phelps later trained. Back then, sports meant grit—one swim, one shot, one breath. Not branding deals or luxury boxes. That spirit we’ve let slip away isn’t the athletes’ betrayal—it’s ours, when we let their dreams sell for $400 a seat. The Pac-12, the West Coast’s student-athlete proving ground, wasn’t just folded; it was liquidated, its traditions sold like estate sale furniture to feed the greed behind LA28’s bloated tab.
The winners? An elite network, often tied to places like Harvard-Westlake and USC and UCLA, churning out media operatives and LA28 insiders. From Coldwater Canyon to Crypto.com Arena, the connected always cash in. Trump Jr.’s “Executive Branch” club nails it: a private playground for insiders. No resume needed—just a paddle to swim with the current, steering LA28’s profits to the Bros.
Somewhere in the valley tonight, a kid swims laps after everyone’s gone home. Somewhere, a team plays for pride alone. Not everything’s for sale. But in Bromerica, the scoreboard’s grim. A family shouldn’t need a second mortgage for a ballgame. A city shouldn’t need a GoFundMe for the Olympics. You shouldn’t cheer your own fleecing. Enough. Don’t buy the $400 hot dogs. Don’t applaud the $50 billion hangover. Demand a game where the score isn’t rigged—and the bill doesn’t bankrupt us all.
Van Nuys City Hall. Not necessarily a looker.
Bromatics: Benchmarking Primer
For those diving deeper into the rhythms, rituals, and occasional absurdities of Los Angeles budget season, here’s a curated set of past dispatches from the Notebook. Each offers a snapshot of how the city and county spin, shield, and sometimes surrender to the realities of public finance.
Start with "Budget Washing", a look at how fiscal maneuvers are dressed up in public interest language while the real action happens elsewhere. Move to "Budget This! More Time...", chronicling how “more time” often means less transparency, and how delay serves those already inside the room.
Then there’s "Friday the 13th at LA’s Budget Hearing", a grim field report from a hearing where chaos, confusion, and cursory oversight reigned supreme.
Finally, "LA County Rolls Out the Mutha of All Budgets" examines how scale, spectacle, and selective transparency define the County’s annual fiscal pageant.
Reflection: Board of Supervisors Meeting - November 12, 2014
Smart Speaker: Yes, it's Eric Preven, the county resident from District 3. And I think it's very important to keep in context today what Supervisor Yaroslavsky was discussing, which has to do with the $2 billion jail proposal that is exceedingly high and outrageous. And the purpose of today's love fest needs to be carefully monitored.
We are trying to divert mentally ill patients from the jail system and therefore reducing the size and scope of the new jail project that Mr. Kreimann, Mr. Fujioka, AECOM and many of the supervisors have been diligently trying to erect while the public protests.
What we want to do is take care of our mentally ill people. We want to pursue crime appropriately, but Supervisor Antonovich is scheduling the victims' meeting today is very, very perplexing and confusing for the public because today was the day we wanted to hear concrete steps about how we're moving forward with the mental health program.
You got to give me 10 seconds back; that's interrupting.
Supervisor Don Knabe, Chairman: I don't have to give you anything.
Smart Speaker: I'm trying very hard to make a comment, and you're interrupting me. How is that appropriate? It's not appropriate, okay. Now the District Attorney, hang on.
[Applause.]
Smart Speaker: No applause, folks. No applause here in the boardroom. [Applause.]
In conclusion, I would like to thank Jackie Lacey for taking a serious look at this. But we have to do more. It was October 2011 that some of these reports came out. We have a consent decree being negotiated. We have our former lawyer sitting on the—
Supervisor Don Knabe, Chairman: Thank you. Next?
Supervisor Michael Antonovich (addressing Eric Preven): Placing the victims of crime at the back of the bus is very insensitive. And I'm very appalled that you would consider victims of crime having no place at this forum on important issues of the day. I'm really appalled at your comment about victims of crime. Perhaps had you been a victim of a crime, you would understand there is a need for attention.
When you consider 45,000 victims of crime, only 20,000 have been having any type of assistance, which needs correction now.
[Approximately two hours later.]
Smart Speaker: Yes, it's Eric Preven, a county resident from District 3. It's a long day, so I'm sure you want to get out of here, as do I.
Mr. Antonovich, I wanted you to know that nobody has a monopoly on compassion for victims of crime, myself included. Two days before my son was born, my good friend Roland Kuster was murdered in Hollywood. And thankfully, the guy was brought to justice by law enforcement. His family, of course, will never recover from that loss.
And I want to thank you for all you've done for victims in general. But I think it's a cheap political trick to try to characterize my comments as anything but what they were. I stand with you in support of victims. However, what we were talking about was diversion. And by putting the two items together, I do think it was confusing, certainly for me, and I think possibly for other members of the public. And I would ask you to evaluate that as ideas, not as politics.
I personally feel badly that I offended you.
Moving on to Mr. Saladino, who is checking his email. We did communicate quite clearly that the board of supervisors ought to address Supervisor Molina's allegations about pension spiking and issues of closed session meetings that were looked at by the D.A.
The D.A. made a finding. And it is very important that the public understand, under the Brown Act, that the board of supervisors understands the finding, concurs with it, or doesn't concur with it so that we can proceed accordingly.
So you have not addressed that. I was very upset, I will say, that the Los Angeles Times quoted you as saying, "We goofed." And they quoted Mr. Dodd, who is a D.A., saying totally inappropriately, "it wasn't a big one."
I don't know what a big one looks like if talking about pension spiking inappropriately behind closed doors is not a big one.
So I would ask you to respond appropriately. I'd ask the board each to address it and we can move forward.
LA Rolls Out the Mutha Of All Budgets.
(Eric Preven is a Studio City-based TV writer-producer, award-winning journalist, and longtime community activist who won two landmark open government cases in California.)
