LOS ANGELES

GELFAND’S WORLD--Saturday was full of irony. The Los Angeles Times published an editorial that raised red flags about the way the city's elected officials are trying to sneak through a large pay raise for employees of the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The Times had previously published a story by David Zahniser and Dakota Smith revealing the sordid details. 

NEW GEOGRAPHY--Amazon’s stunning acquisition last week of Whole Foods signaled an inflection point in the development of retail, notably the $800 billion supermarket sector. The massive shift of retail to the web is beginning to claw into the last remaining bastions of physical space. In the last year alone, 50,000 positions were lost in the retail sector, and as many as 6 million jobs could be vulnerable nationwide in the long term. Store closings are running at a rate higher than during the Great Recession.

CALBUZZ SPECIAL REPORT--Imagine losing days, weeks, or months of your life rotting in a jail cell even though, in the United States, you’re supposed to be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

DEEGAN ON LA-The parallels are uncannily similar: two different parts of LA, each beginning with an important, historical movie footprint and evolving into a land use bonanza. Century City, once the very busy 20th Century Fox backlot (and before that a ranch belonging to western silent movie icon Tom Mix), became a real estate behemoth studded with skyscrapers, traffic congestion, and high prices. Central Hollywood, once a folksy, low slung neighborhood, is about to be transformed into its own real estate behemoth with the massive proposed Crossroads of the World project. It, too, will be studded with skyscrapers, traffic congestion, and high prices. 

@THE GUSS REPORT-If you live in the Valley, Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Attorney Mike Feuer and the LA City Council have taken this approach to fighting property crime: Do It Yourself. 

THE CITY--On June 19, the Neighborhood Council Alliance of River Communities (ARC) welcomed Nicholas Maricich, City Director of Planning Policy and Development, and Michelle Garakian, from the Mayor’s Office of Legislative and External Affairs, to discuss details of the proposed Affordable Housing Linkage Fee Ordinance. 

WHAT WAS HE THINKING?--Advocates of the single-payer healthcare proposal which has been steadily advancing through the California legislature were voicing outrage and disappointment on Saturday after Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, announced he was pulling the bill from further consideration this year.

CORRUPTION WATCH-The Hollywood Community Plan has no Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the June 2017 Update. This means that all these super-mega projects being proposed in Hollywood are based on data from the 1960s and the mid-1980s. 

EDUCATION POLITICS--Four days before the end of the school year, Venice High School students, organized by the Black Student Union and the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, walked out of class to protest their principal allegedly firing an African American college counselor. 

JUSTICE--The biggest lie about Proposition (“Prop”) 66, California’s poorly drafted new death penalty law – only missing another “6” in numbering to be properly identified as the devil’s spawn – is speed. 

NEW GEOGRAPHY--“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis Brandeis

LEANING RIGHT--From all the attention focused on "special elections" in Georgia, South Carolina, Montana, and elsewhere, one would think that we've got nothing better to do than focus on politics in other states, particularly "Red States".  One would also think that our finances and policies are going swimmingly well in California, a "Blue State" which is bleeding its middle class out of existence. 

CREATIVE MINDS MEET GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS--Following news that legislation aiming to power California solely with renewable energy by 2045 passed the state Senate, bestselling author Naomi Klein joined Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz and community leaders on Wednesday in calling for a "World War II-scale mobilization" to combat climate change and lead the way in developing environmentally safe technology. (Photo above: LA Councilman Paul Koretz.)

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP--LA City Planning this week released a backward-looking, slow-moving and poorly reasoned plan — more than a year in the making — that fails to reduce greed-driven evictions of residents, or to preserve thousands of low-rent units being eyed by land-flippers and speculators.

MCDONALD REPORT--After years of alarming studies and in-depth news coverage, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti have yet to address the devastating health impacts to residents who live in freeway-adjacent housing, which LA politicians continue to approve. On Tuesday, at the Planning and Land Use Management Committee meeting, the Coalition to Preserve LA and other community groups urged council members to finally take substantive action. 

MUSING WITH MIRISCH-It is sometimes both sad and shocking how City Halls throughout the state, along with some of our elected officials, can be in such denial of reality, data and math.  

BELL VIEW-When it comes to elections, I obsess over one number: turnout. We have been told, for example, that turnout was through-the-roof for the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, where Democrat Jon Ossoff narrowly lost to Republican Karen Handel. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gushed: “In a district with about 526,000 registered voters in all, nearly half of them came out: unofficial turnout stood at about 49 percent in the race.” 

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Before memory fades completely, this is the time to take stock of the Occupy mass movement of 2011. A few years into the Great Recession, it began with Occupy Wall Street, and then quickly spread to over 1000 encampments, including other countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel. 

RANTZ & RAVEZ-The Westfield “Village” at Victory and Topanga Canyon in the West San Fernando Valley has turned into a place to walk your dog and pay for parking (some validate) to do business with local vendors that remain open for business despite the poor foot traffic and slow sales in the area. More and more of the businesses in the “Village” are experiencing financial difficulties; sales have not been what was expected. 

GELFAND’S WORLD--In the Hollywood Fringe festival as in other parts of life, we wander along, ignoring the mediocre, enjoying the pretty good, and hoping to find that diamond in the rough that is effective and affecting. I think we've got one here. 

CORRUPTION WATCH-What if Angelenos had a City Council that maximized our quality of life instead of aggrandizing the profits of a handful of real estate developers?