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GELFAND’S WORLD - The L.A. City Council can't seem to avoid the taint of scandal. This time it involves the appointment of an ethically challenged councilman as chair of the powerful Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee. This committee is the place that developers have traditionally gone to get favors. The fact that such favors involved greasing the skids did not go unnoticed at the FBI. The prime example: Jose Huisar served as PLUM chair and was indicted on multiple counts for what he did there. He was convicted and has just now turned himself in at federal prison to begin serving his 13-year sentence.
There have been 4 members of the City Council who have been indicted for serious crimes in the past few years. Councilman Englander got indicted for favors he received on a trip to Las Vegas. What's of immediate relevance is that John Lee, his staffer, was referred to in the indictment as also receiving illegal perks on that same trip. Lee has been accused of ethical violations by the city's Ethics Commission. Now Lee is the new chair of the PLUM committee!
You may have noticed that I don't use exclamation marks very often, but this case is worthy of one.
David Zahniser at the L.A. Times provides a summary of the latest City Council shenanigans, which you can read here. Zahniser, together with reporter Dakota Smith, turns out this series which they call L.A. On the Record. It's a good read.
But somehow these scandals were considered off limits to neighborhood council members.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the upcoming neighborhood council congress, which took place at the L.A. City Hall on September 28. I recommended that council participants attend, not because the lectures and discussion sessions were all that interesting, but because it is useful to network with your co-participants from other parts of the city. All of the above turned out to be the case. The sessions were, for the most part, fairly dull, and attendance was way off from previous years. To be precise, we had just under 600 at last year's event, and a mere 319 this time. Only 73 neighborhood councils were represented (by even one attendee) out of the 99 in existence.
The organizers of the congress have been meeting over Zoom and trying to figure out what went wrong. There were at least a couple of things which were of note.
The first is that the details on what sessions were to be presented were not available until right before the congress, and even then, there wasn't much that was really enticing. There really wasn't a lot that would have caused people to write the congress date on their calendars. One session on the city's response to potential heat emergencies was useful, but didn't draw all that many people. A session featuring officials from the City Clerk's office and from the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment was just short of being actually embarrassing in terms of its superficiality.
What was missing from this congress was any discussion of corruption in city government. All that stuff about John Lee and Jose Huisar? They didn't want us to hear about it. And by "they," I'm referring to the organizers of the congress and in particular, the self-appointed subcommittee on programming. I must give disclosure here by pointing out that I was a member of that committee and tried, for a while, to convince my colleagues to allow the presentation of some meatier topics. It was not to be. Instead, we got a session on how to get along with each other which featured training in how to warm up your voice and avoid stage fright. This may be of some use to some people, but it should not be allowed to push out real content.
A free for all in the 35th State Senate election
The two finalists are Laura Richardson, who formerly served in the House of Representatives but lost that seat due to redistricting. She has also served in the state legislature and on the Long Beach City Council. Her opponent is Michelle Chambers, who has served on the Compton City Council.
My mailbox (the real one, not the computer one) has been filled with competing glossy election mailers for weeks now. Richardson is accused of having been the most corrupt member of congress back when she served. Chambers is merely accused of having stabbed another woman back when she was living in Harrisburg, PA.
You might ask why the voters of my district didn't have an alternative to these two back in the primary. It turns out that there were lots of alternatives. They just didn't finish in the money. Perhaps it's because these two had the support of well-funded groups including realtors and large unions.
So, what are these charges all about, and how legitimate are they really? Let's start with Richardson. She was accused of using her staff to work on her election campaign. Technically this is forbidden. There are even old laws which make it illegal for government employees to work in politics. Yes, the Hatch Act was ostensibly designed to protect government employees from being arm twisted into doing campaign work by elected officials. In my experience and observation, legislative employees have been known to take a leave of absence prior to the election -- they have a strong interest in having a job to come back to, and that would not be the case if the boss loses the election. Richardson seems to have pushed the envelope, to the extent that she was officially reprimanded. That's unusual. There was even some complaining by former employees about her treatment of staff, but that is a little harder to evaluate. I mean, Diane Feinstein used to say, "I don't get ulcers, I give them."
So in Richardson, we have somebody who obviously pushed the envelope in terms of trying to get reelected. It's not uncommon and doesn't necessarily speak to her suitability to serve in the State Senate, but probably would have disqualified her as a candidate in many voters' minds in a previous era.
Then there is Michelle Chambers. She seems to have had a tiff with a city employee when she first started at the Compton City Council. The story doesn't make perfect sense and is not explained completely, but it is clear that something she did was annoying back when she was first learning the ropes. That's not enough to disqualify her from being considered for election to the state legislature. But the website 2 Urban Girls claims to have unearthed evidence that she stabbed another woman back in Harrisburg some 31 years ago. You can see that story here. On the other hand, the supposed victim of the alleged attack has responded by saying that No, she wasn't stabbed by Chambers, and they are now friends, and she supports Chambers for election. You can read that story here.
This is what passes for political discourse in the Senate-35 election race. It is a pretty good indication of how campaign consultants view the voters. To borrow that line from Blazing Saddles . . . "You know, morons."
These competing campaigns demonstrate my oft-repeated claim that you may hear the truth and nothing-but-the-truth from competing campaigns, but you will never hear the whole truth. Whatever Chambers did back in Harrisburg, she is surely a different person after a third of a century, and Richardson didn't do anything back in the House that came anywhere near what a hundred-plus Republicans did in supporting the 2021 insurrection attempt. But I've got to admit that both competing stories are scandalous and would have ruined the electoral chances of many a candidate in the old days.
And those are the two names that will be on my ballot.
Addendum: Sports
Couldn't resist. College football is now an officially professional sport, in the sense that it is fully legal for college players to receive payments that professional athletes would not have had in a previous era. To compound the scandal which isn't a scandal anymore, college football players can now market their talents to additional teams even as they are already playing for some other team.
The problem locally is that neither of the two contenders has been able to buy enough first line players to break into the top tier. USC gave it a try but lost to Michigan and Penn State (both top 5 contenders at the time) by a combined total of 6 points. If USC had purchased one additional defender, they might be rated number 3 right now.
Still, the college game is fun to watch. It can be more exciting than the professional version, because there is still room for uncertainty. Vandy beat Bama, and Oregon beat Ohio State. So, ignore your moral qualms about professionalism if you can, and enjoy the show.
And that brings up baseball.
There is no concern over false amateurism. These guys are pros, and the best of the best. And now, one of the best of the best is an import from Japan who is compared to Babe Ruth. That is, Shohei Ohtani is/was a superior pitcher (like Ruth) who is also a superior hitter. In a year in which Ohtani is recovering from surgery to get his pitching arm back in order, he has turned in Ruth-like batting numbers while also stealing bases at an approximately equal level. Question: Will the Dodgers and Ohtani figure out that maybe they should just keep him as a hitter, and leave the pitching to the other guys? They are obviously thinking about it.
So even in a decade where the Los Angeles leadership are flogging the Olympics and the World Cup, the people who actually live here are once again obsessing on the Dodgers and the hopes for another World Series. It's fun when reality intrudes on the dreams of the publicists and politicians.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
