LOS ANGELES

ALPERN TALKS TRANSIT--There is no reason to choose between more options for mobility and commuting. Improved roads, freeways, rail systems, bus routes, etc. need not be created at the expense of the others--it's like choosing food versus water.  Similarly, it's pointless and immature to choose between transportation infrastructure and planning infrastructure--without one, the other falls apart. 

Similarly, local versus regional versus federal help for our roads and freeways and rail systems need not be independent of the other.  Those who want more high-speed rail and yet give the cold shoulder (or even a more pejorative expression) to highway construction/upgrades are not part of the answer, they're part of the problem--and, of course, vice versa. 

On the Eastside of LA County, and in the Southeast Cities of LA County, that region benefits from both an I-5 widening and I-605 upgrade as well as with new Metro Rail lines planned to link into the current Gold and Green lines. 

And it sure wouldn't hurt to have a double-barreled approach to the South Bay Cities of L.A. County, in that a new Major Investment Study to extend and expedite the South Bay Green Line to Torrance, San Pedro and the Long Beach Blue Line is as timely as any potential freeway enhancements to the I-405 South Bay curve. 

And if some of us who foam at the mouth at any discussion of new freeways would just "take a chill pill", here's another reasonable question: would a freeway to connect LAX to the I-10 freeway via the La Cienega corridor, or an upgrade/expansion of the Downtown I-10, be any less desired by commuters than a direct LAX-Downtown train without the Crenshaw and Expo Line detour? 

So let's talk about regional rail efforts that might APPEAR local, but yet enjoy regional planning and consensus, and (no thanks to Sacramento) are getting regional and federal support. 

Regional Rail Example #1: The Wilshire Subway 

One of the best nominees of the outgoing presidential administration is one Anthony Foxx, the U.S. Transportation Secretary (photo above) who was unanimously nominated by the Senate and who is an advocate for both automobile and transit funding, and is a powerful advocate for both public and private funding for New Starts in transportation. 

Secretary Foxx was present for a ceremonial signing of $1.6 billion in federal funding to extend the Metro Purple Line (a.k.a. "the Wilshire Subway") to Century City.  This Wilshire Subway/Purple Line is used by commuters all over the county and Southern California region to access their jobs, and is already undergoing extension to La Cienega. 

The La Cienega extension is phase one of the Purple Line westward push to the 405 freeway, and the Century City extension is phase two. Measure R, the half-cent sales tax approved by LA County voters in 2008, is already dedicating $747 million for this second phase. 

The whopping $1.6 billion for the second phase allows all sorts of projects (including the third phase of the Wilshire Subway/Purple Line to the West LA Veterans Center) to be moved up the planning ladder at Metro as money becomes available for these other projects as a result of the federal grant. 

And although Sacramento has been dedicating by far too much money away from this locally-preferred project, the Purple Line continues to draw bipartisan support both from Washington and throughout LA County.  Let's hope that another grant is forthcoming for the third phase of the Purple Line. 

Regional Rail Example #2 

There are three main gaps of the Green Line--the first light rail line that didn't have a direct connection to Downtown, and which helps connect the peripheral regions of LA County to each other--to LAX, to the South Bay Cities, and to Norwalk. 

In that order, the attention, focus, and priority of both planners and budget directors at Metro exists to correct these "Green Gaps".  Of note is that--when the old Friends of the Green Line project did their outreach fifteen years ago--the local consensus was also in that same order. 

First, LAX.  Second, the South Bay Cities to Redondo Beach and Torrance.  And third, gone but not forgotten, is Norwalk.   

There is a major Metrolink train station at Norwalk that serves commuters from Orange and Riverside counties, and years ago an eastern Green Line extension was planned to connect this 2.8 mile gap between Metro Rail and Metrolink. 

It's no secret that when major connections and destinations are reached via train (or even bus) transit routes, ridership explodes incrementally.  That happened when the Red Line Subway connected to Universal City and North Hollywood, and when the Expo Line connected to the Westside. 

So it's long overdue that this "Green Gap" connecting LA, Orange and Riverside counties be revisited.  The locals in Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs did not show us a lot of love at all fifteen years, ago, but at least the interest has returned in a new generation of mobility-minded experts. 

And it's not just the locals who are interested.  Mayor Garcetti, Metro, and the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) are also taking note that this critical connection be ignored no longer. 

As predicted by Friends of the Green Line, the connection of the Green Line to LAX would suddenly turn NIMBY's into YIMBY's for Green Line expansion.  Both LAX workers and commuters would love to park or be dropped off a long way from LAX to access that destination, or even to access the entirety of the expanding Metro Rail network. 

Who would pay for this project, which could easily reach up to $600 million or more if it were placed underground or were elevated?   

Arguably, despite its entire location in LA County, the project was proposed for Orange and Riverside County funding in the past, and the same should hold true in the future.  L.A. County cannot reasonably fund and build all of its projects that benefit non-LA County residents and commuters.

But at least the overdue project is being re-explored...and this time, hopefully pursued by a multicounty agency that will be unstoppable in its attempts to plan, fund, and build it.  The next community open house (and the last for now) is at 12239 Sproul Street in Norwalk this Wednesday, January 11th from 6-8 pm. 

And for those of you who want our freeways and planning/zoning upgraded for the 21st Century as well as a rail upgrade...don't stop fighting and demanding for those as well. 

Because transportation of all modes and locations has never been a "mutually exclusive" sort of issue.  That's only for the short-sighted and petty, and we've no time nor patience for that in traffic-clogged Southern California.

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw

@THE GUSS REPORT-On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council will unanimously approve an extension of its contract with Best Friends Animal Society to continue occupying the animal shelter the city built, but could not afford to operate, in the northeast portion of the Valley, also known as the Mission Shelter. 

This deal was rigged literally from its 2011 inception, primarily benefitting the city’s politicians and the uber-wealthy Best Friends, at the expense of the taxpayers, animals and clarity on what – exactly – happened to scores of them who were passed through to Best Friends without the same accountability required of all other rescue groups. 

How wealthy is Best Friends? According to its most recent tax return, in the five-year period ending in 2015, it took in $313,676,006 in total support -- tens of millions of dollars more than when it came to LA in 2011. That is not Best Friends’ worth; it is just its income, while it grovels for money in advertisements. 

The taxpayers of Los Angeles do not collect rent from Best Friends for occupying the Mission shelter, or adoption fees, or dog licensing revenue, or fees that other, genuinely poor, rescue organizations pay to bail shelter animals. The taxpayers also provide Best Friends with free utilities, maintenance and security at the shelter. In 2011, and to this day, the city did its best to prevent a competitive bid from other well-established rescue groups for that tenancy. 

In a controversial, marathon-length City Council meeting on August 16, 2011, other LA-area rescue groups said they were blindsided when they learned that LA Animal Services GM Brenda Barnette said she sent out a (still unverified) RFP to more than 1,500 humane organizations to bid on occupying the Mission shelter, but that only Best Friends submitted a proposal. 

Teri Austin, who runs the well-respected animal charity Amanda Foundation, claimed (at the 05:15:38 mark of the video) that neither she nor any of the other leading, local humane groups ever received the RFP. Despite her plea, and those from other groups, the City gave the contract to Best Friends without investigating the claims of a rigged RFP process or Best Friends’ relationship with Barnette’s daughter, Mary Alice Davis. 

At the core of this rip-off is Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz, who embodies corrupt government bloat as the lawmaker who forever promises aid to suffering animals, but who always misses the mark like he did with LA’s porous, irrelevant spay/neuter law, licensing and cruelty laws, like his elephant bull hook ban that was so inept, the circus stopped exploiting elephants long before it ever kicked in. 

“I will call for an audit of LAAS and (Paul) Koretz will second it…to give him cover,” is what LA City Council president Herb Wesson said when he called me on July 3, 2014 after I collected thousands of signatures for an audit that would largely (but not solely) focus on the city’s dubious dealings with Best Friends. 

What Wesson meant by “giving Koretz cover” is very inside baseball. But it runs the gamut on fraudulent Garcetti claims like how LA Animal Services used Best Friends to falsify thousands of pet adoptions as I exposed in this CityWatch article from last October. 

The city’s relationship with Best Friends amounts to this: an unaccountable black hole where the city sends thousands of animals, counts them as “adoptions,” while all other groups taking in shelter animals are listed as “transfers.” The city does not require Best Friends to explain exactly where those animals went as all other rescues must. Note: Best Friends ships many of those animals to high-kill shelters in other states. By using this black hole as an illusion for helping homeless animals, LA politicians, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, falsely claim that “adoptions are up, kills are down,” when in fact they have no idea what became of the animals. And City Hall is about to, again, handsomely reward Best Friends for shielding the truth. 

The bogus “audit” that LA City Controller Ron Galperin eventually conducted was supposed to be based on a 72-page report requested by Wesson from me, following our lengthy January 3, 2014 meeting in his City Hall office. “Show me where the bodies are buried and we’ll audit it,” Wesson told me. But instead of using the report as a blueprint for exposing corruption, Galperin, Wesson, Koretz – and Mayor Garcetti – used it like a film negative; as a list of things they did not audit. 

And even with this rigged game, Best Friends has continued to cheat the city by using the Mission Shelter for activities that are strictly prohibited in its agreement with the city…..and with Koretz’ blessing. 

For example, the Mission shelter may only be used by Best Friends as an outlet for adoptions of animals that must first come from the city’s other shelters. Best Friends is explicitly prohibited from using it for animal intake, and the rule is there for a reason: to ensure that city property is used to help city animals. It is a secret known throughout the humane community that if you find an animal in another community, you can dump it with Best Friends, no questions asked. This is why the rule is there. 

In this 2013 email and accompanying impound record for a neonatal kitten improperly taken in by Best Friends, you can see the communication between a Best Friends employee and an LA Animal Services supervisor generating false impound numbers, a practice done thousands of times over. This activity was known to Koretz and the other city officials, including Galperin, who refused to audit it. The impound sheet shows the empty page in the city’s animal inventory system for one of those kittens. If the kitten had, as required, been processed through a city shelter, this page would have a photo, intake notes, a microchip number, inoculation and veterinary information, and the date when the kitten left the shelter. 

It is blank because the kitten never came in through the shelter….as required. 

It isn’t that Best Friends was ignoble in doing this. It is that they and City Hall were dishonest with the public, and it resulted in the deaths of scores of city animals whose turn it was to be taken by Best Friends, but weren’t because they were deemed “less desirable,” which means they require more love and veterinary care than a kitten to get adopted. And it costs money, even when Best Friends sits on a mountain of gold. 

At the final 2016 meeting of Koretz’ Personnel and Animal Welfare Committee, Koretz said that these two documents were “not credible” and that he “had not seen them before.” 

But which is it, Mr. Koretz? If you had not seen them before, how do you know they’re not credible? 

In fact, Koretz is lying in both instances because these two documents are on pages 21 and 22 in the 72-page report requested by Wesson from me in 2014 and provided to him, Galperin, Wesson and Garcetti at that time.

For two and a half years, Koretz actively ignored this and a wealth of other Best Friends-related corrupt practices and now recommends that Best Friends gets its contract renewed with the city on Wednesday. 

In the spring, Koretz will ask the voters of Council District 5 for another term in office. Before the primary, I will publish the 72-page report in its entirety in an interview with Jesse Creed, Koretz’ opponent, who is a public interest attorney, and an LAUSD product who graduated Princeton summa cum laude before graduating at the top of his Columbia Law School class. 

Creed has been endorsed in the CD 5 race by former City Controller Laura Chick. 

Koretz, Mayor Garcetti, Best Friends and LA Animal Services have refused to respond to direct questions regarding this matter.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.)Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-As those of you who regularly read CityWatch know, the LA City Council seems to engage in “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” vote-trading, as CityWatch’s Richard Lee Abrams wrote here back in July. “No councilmember will vote “no” on any project in his or her district. As a result, any project which a councilmember places on the City Council agenda unanimously passes. They’ve got a 99.9 percent unanimous passage rate,” which is statistically impossible. The passage rate isn’t just a majority vote but requires that every single councilmember present must vote “yes” every single time, no matter how many laws a project would break. 

Despite coverage by media outlets including the LA Times, the Council continues to do business as usual, citing that members are immune to Penal Code § 86 because the mental processes of councilmembers “confidential and privileged.” The result? Runaway projects, spending, and a Council that serves the needs of developers far more than it serves constituents. 

Caney Arnold has thrown his hat in the City Council race in District 15 to turn this around. Arnold, who has a background in Air Force acquisition and program management, is fed up with what he’s witnessed in the Council. Grassroots democracy, government transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of his campaign. I sat down with Arnold to discuss why he decided to run and the details of his platform. 

Arnold says, “The main thing that got me excited in politics again was Bernie, a progressive candidate to get behind. At the same time, I went to (Councilmember) Joe Buscaino’s town hall on homelessness. I was trying to advocate for a mom and her two kid but there was so much red tape. The paperwork was daunting.” He also noticed that Buscaino was moving homeless people out of encampments in San Pedro. (In September, CityWatch reported on the Council Homeless Strategy Committee’s authorization of $615,000 for the leasing and construction of storage facilities for the homeless in San Pedro, without prior notice being given to the Harbor Area’s neighborhood councils.) 

“The focus on moving people from place to place doesn’t help anybody, [it’s] just costing the city more money on police, sanitation, mental health workers. People are already in the system or on a waitlist for help. This is just a newspaper or photo op,” he added. “The system is inefficient. The method should be to secure housing first to help get people off the streets. Taking them out of the environment would take care of them and reduce nuisance on the street. It’s a win win for all and what is used in many other cities.” 

The frustration Arnold met as a volunteer addressing the homeless crisis in San Pedro and surrounding areas led him to run for Neighborhood Council. Once he was on the Neighborhood Council, he says he started to receive CityWatch and became aware of other issues that concerned him, such as campaign finance. 

“I started to look at campaign contributions on ethics websites and was amazed. A little after that, I had seen an article in the LA Times on an investigation involving the Sea Breeze apartments in Harbor Gateway,” he adds. (The LA Times reported over 100 donors directly or indirectly connected with a developer had contributed over $600,000 to politicians while the $72 million Sea Breeze apartment complex was up for approval.) 

“On one side, I was excited about this weakness but on the other side, I was discouraged. Every councilperson seemed to be in the same situation. It wasn’t like Joe was different from anyone else,” Arnold says of his decision to run. “We spent 84 hours, gathering 839 signatures, door to door, at shopping malls to get on the ballot. We don’t have $300,000 like Joe does but I have an appointment to talk to the city councilperson in West Hollywood. I’ve talked with loads of people in Watts.” 

“This is grassroots. Someone like me can decide to get off the couch. All it takes is someone with energy and motivation to get out there and do it. There are lots of excuses why things cannot get done. I thought someone needs to run. I looked in the mirror and saw that I was that somebody so I ran,” says Arnold.

In my next column, Caney Arnold and I discuss his ideas to solve specific problems and issues in the city.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GUEST WORDS-For over a month, I have been fighting to help more than 120 seniors, living in the Westwood Horizons (photo below) building in Westwood, from being evicted. I’ve met a number of them. Some are holocaust survivors. Some are veterans. They range in age from 70 years old to 100 years old. Many of them have lived in the building for decades. Serving eviction notices to our most vulnerable community members just before the holidays was outrageous. Since learning of the evictions on December 2, I have fought to do whatever I can to stop the process. 

Watermark took over the building in October 2016, and issued eviction notices a little over a month later. 

Under state law, the Ellis Act permits owners of apartment buildings to evict their tenants if they intend to take their building off the rental market. However, they must give proper notice and pay relocation fees pursuant to the City's rent control law of around $18,000 per resident. Furthermore, any senior facing an Ellis eviction can apply for a one-year extension, which the landlord must grant, if they’ve lived there for at least a year. After my involvement began, Watermark agreed to grant residents the one-year extension without having to apply, a positive step forward. 

In order to stop these evictions, I took a number of steps. First, I sent a letter to the General Manager of the Planning Department calling for a hearing regarding Watermark Retirement Communities’ proposal to renovate the facility and to change its use from residential to commercial. I also launched a pressure campaign on Facebook listing the names of each of the executives behind this unfortunate decision as well as phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses, calling on outraged community members to demand they halt the evictions. 

Also, I was able to convince the City Council to immediately vote and adopt a motion I introduced asking the City Attorney's Office to look at seeking an injunction to stop the evictions, or ways to make Watermark apply for new permits to remodel based on their plan do a considerable renovation which would lead to the mass evictions of the senior residents. 

I’ve subsequently met with the City Attorney’s office, which has responded energetically to my concerns. I’ve also had conversations with attorneys representing some of the residents who are convinced that they would have a reasonable chance of winning in court over the question of whether or not Watermark is illegitimately using the Ellis Act to evict their residents. 

I also heard from residents that the company was going to lay off their employees in a few months, leaving them without necessary and vital resources such as a functioning kitchen for prepared meals. It turned out that they had never actually given layoff notices to their employees as was rumored.

Before the New Year, I received a letter from Watermark President and CEO David Barnes indicating that our demands are slowly being met. They promised to retain every employee needed to continue providing services for as long as the residents continue to live at the facility, even offering a retention bonus to the employees. With this action, Watermark took another step in the right direction. 

They have also agreed that every senior resident who leaves the facility will be able to return when it is completed and for the same rent they currently pay. 

Although we are making forward progress, our work is not yet done. The huge issue remaining is that Watermark has argued that they must renovate the building for life-safety reasons, and that it can’t be done without removing all the tenants during that period. Watermark appears to have a point that this over 50-year-old building needs renovation for safety purposes. I have a meeting scheduled this week with Watermark’s management, architects and engineers, experts from the City’s Department of Building and Safety, and possibly additional specialists brought in by the residents’ attorneys, in order to determine whether renovating this building can be accomplished without having to remove the residents. Other owners of similarly situated buildings have done it, and I strongly believe Watermark can too. 

I hope to work out an agreement with them that will allow the tenants to stay while still accomplishing the necessary repairs to the building. That would be the only way to protect their safety while keeping their lives intact.This whole episode is emblematic of the challenge LA, and society in general, faces as our elderly population grows. The shortage of affordable housing is dire enough for people of working age, but to subject our seniors to threats of eviction is almost criminal. The Westwood Horizons crisis should be a lesson to all of us on that score.

(Paul Koretz is councilmember for Los Angeles’ 5^th Council District. He is running for reelection in the Los Angeles primary this March.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-Finally, someone is opposing Eric Garcetti in his bid for re-election as mayor of Los Angeles in March 2017. It is Mitchell Schwartz with his new side kick, The Developers’ Pig, Erika G.

Erika G first appeared with candidate Mitchell Schwartz on January 4, 2017 in front of the Department of Water and Power building in downtown Los Angeles. I found Ms. G, however, to be so fascinating that I decided to interview her for this CityWatch edition. 

First, I need to report that Ms. G clarifies that she is the former Developer’s Pig, but she is her own gal now. Her job was to help developers’ scarf up as many billions of tax dollars as possible. Ms. G explained, “Even a pig has to have some self-respect.” Adding that she thought her lipstick was just the proper shade of red, Ms. G complained that the Garcetti-DWP Bill of Rights was a lot of hog wash, and “I know hog wash when I see it.” She continued to explain that Los Angeles has become such a cesspool of corruptionism that she cannot stand it. “Development does not have to mean corruptionism,” she explained.

Ms. G continued that after wallowing in the developers’ muck all these years, she desired to take a bath so she trotted off to the DWP. “But at those prices, who can afford water?” she lamented. Ms. G related that the City Hall skims cash off the top of the DWP’s take from its customers. If the DWP hadn’t been paying tribute to the crooks at City Hall all these years, it could have afforded to fix the pipes beneath our streets without raising rates.” She added, “Every time you look at your DWP bill, you should realize that a considerable portion is being skimmed by City Hall. “Garcetti didn’t put that into his DWP Bill of Rights,” she snorted. 

Ms. G said that as the Developers’ Pig, she learned a lot of the inside dirt which she’ll be sharing with voters in the upcoming weeks. “Where’s the missing $424 million from the Hollywood-Highland Project? Hiding with Judge Crater?”   

Ms. G said the public wants answers to questions like, “Just what did Developer Leung buy with his $60,000 to Garcetti’s charity?” 

Why did Garcetti give $17 million to CIM Group for their illegal project at 5929 Sunset Boulevard? 

How do extortion and bribes interact with development projects in Los Angeles? 

Asked what she could do to fix corruptionism in Los Angeles, Ms. G pointed out that the new mayor has great power. “Yes, Virginia, there is a U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue,” Ms. G shared with us. “It’s called the FBI.” 

Without going into detail, Ms. G said that we can see for ourselves that a new mayor will have great power. The new mayor will have access to all the city’s files including all the communications with the developers and their agents. The FBI has criminal jurisdiction over such corruption and Mitchell Schwartz, as the new mayor, can share all the information with the Feds. “I’m very good at finding dirt,” said Ms. G.   

When queried about that the Schwartz Administration would be like, Ms. G cryptically replied with the Mel Brooks’ line, “May the Schwartz be with you.”

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Better to drive a stake through the heart of civic debate in Los Angeles than bleed it dry with more fundraising-obsessed election coverage.  

What’s so bad about a shoe-string candidacy? What’s so bad about an underdog facing impossible odds?    

War-chests of campaign funds are impressive, but it’s not clear how they benefit the public. After all, it’s not to give the public a clear, unbiased view of their options that campaign funds are deployed. 

If a member of the public is buying a car, he or she deserves an opportunity to inspect all the available models, have them lined up, so he or she can see them side by side, kick the tires, look under the hood.  

But the public is denied that opportunity in the context of elections when newspapers disqualify candidates who don’t make fundraising a priority.  

Even if those candidates are unlikely to get elected, maybe some of their ideas will inform the debate. Readers might find them interesting. It’s not easy to collect 500 signatures. 

As for viability, a single debate can change the dynamics of an election, throwing into disarray plans for a game-ending primary. A single article can start a wave of interest, rallying fund-raising sources and tactical support. 

Isn’t it more interesting--and more likely to build an audience--for the press to mix it up, foment the debate rather than smother it, make incumbents get in the ring and fight for a second-term?
The press should be merciless on incumbents who refuse to debate. Such refusal should be the unpardonable sin of politics. No elected officials are above the public. If we ask them to show up for a couple of hours for a debate, they better well do so—quickly and with a smile.   

If the press reports on a candidate’s fund-raising, it should be one factor among others. Media outlets that receive public funding—KCRW to cite just one example—should be required to give 2 minutes of airtime per candidate. The Elections division of the city should host debates, with candidates sitting in the seats used by Councilmembers during meetings. Cameras are pre-set in that chamber, so it shouldn’t be expensive. 

Besides, it's money well spent. 

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and a candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Joshua is a teacher.)

-cw

NEW GEOGRAPY--In 1949 the historian Carey McWilliams defined California as the “the Great Exception” -- a place so different from the rest of America as to seem almost a separate country. In the ensuing half-century, the Golden State became not so much exceptional but predictive of the rest of the nation: California’s approaches to public education, the environment, politics, community-building and lifestyle often became national standards, and even normative.

Today California is returning to its outlier roots, defying many of the political trends that define most of the country. Rather than adjust to changing conditions, the state seems determined to go it alone as a bastion of progressivism. Some Californians, going farther out on a limb, have proposed separating from the rest of the country entirely; a ballot measure on that proposition has been proposed for 2018. [[ http://www.presstelegram.com/government-and-politics/20161224/is-california-splitting-away-group-believes-california-should-form-its-own-nation ]]

This shift to outpost of modern-day progressivism has been developing for years but was markedly evident in November. As the rest of America trended to the right, electing Republicans at the congressional and local levels in impressive numbers, California has moved farther left, accounting for virtually all of the net popular vote margin for Hillary Clinton. Today the GOP is all but non-existent in the most populated parts of the state, and the legislature has a supermajority of Democrats in both houses. In many cases, including last year’s Senate race, no Republicans even got on the November ballot.

Homage to Ecotopia

The election of Donald Trump has expanded the widening gap. The two biggest points of contention going forward are likely to be climate change, which has come to dominate California’s policy agenda, and immigration, a critical issue to the rising Latino political class, Silicon Valley and the state’s entrenched progressive activists.

Most of the big cities -- Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento -- have proclaimed themselves “sanctuary cities,” and the state legislative leadership is now preparing a measure that would create “a wall of justice” against Trump’s agenda. If federal agents begin swooping down on any of the state’s estimated 2 million undocumented immigrants, incoming Attorney General (and former congressman) Xavier Becerra has made it among his first priorities to  “resist” any deportation orders, including paying legal fees.    

Equally contentious will be a concerted attempt to block Trump’s overturning of President Obama’s   climate change agenda.   In recent years Gov. Jerry Brown has gone full “Moonbeam,” imposing ever more stringent environmental policies on state businesses and residents. The most recent legislation signed by Brown would boost California’s carbon reductions far beyond those agreed to by the U.S. in the Paris accord (which Trump has said he will withdraw from). All of this is being done along with a virtual banning of nuclear power, which, as the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger notes, remains the largest and most proven source of clean energy.

California’s draconian climate policies have been oft-cited by Obama and environmentalists as a role model for not only America but the world. However, they will not be widely emulated in the rest of the country during the next four years. Instead, California may be opting for a kind of virtual secession, following the narrative portrayed in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel, “Ecotopia,” where Northern California secedes from the union to create a more ecologically perfect state.

Ironically, the state’s policies, which place strong controls on development, road construction, and energy production and usage, are somewhat symbolic; by dint largely of its mild climate, the state is already far more energy efficient than the rest of the country.  But to achieve its ambitious new goals,  most serious observers suggest, the state would lose at least 100,000 jobs and further boost energy prices -- which  disproportionately affect the poorer residents who predominate in the state’s beleaguered, and less temperate, interior.

The impact of these policies would be far-reaching. They have already reduced outside investment in manufacturing to minuscule levels and could cost California households an average of $3,000 annually. Such economic realities no longer influence many California policymakers but they could prove a boon  to other   states, notably Texas, Arizona and Nevada, which make a sport of hunting down California employers.   

A ‘Light Unto the Nations’?

Even with these problems, no other part of the country comes close to being as deeply progressive as California.  Illinois, President Obama’s home state, is a model for nothing so much as larceny and corruption. New York, the traditional bailiwick of the progressive over-class, is similarly too corrupt and also too tied to, and dependent upon, Wall Street. In addition, both of these states are losing population, while California, although slowing down and experiencing out-migration by residents to other states, continues to grow, the product of children born to those who arrived over the past three decades.

California’s recent economic success seemingly makes it a compelling “alt-America.” After a severe decline in the Great Recession, the economy  has roared back, and since 2010 has outpaced the national average.  But if you go back to 2000, metro areas such as Austin, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Salt Lake City and Phoenix -- all in lower-tax, regulation-light states -- have expanded their employment by twice or more than that in  Los Angeles.

Indeed, a closer examination shows that the California “boom” is really about one region, the tech-rich San Francisco Bay Area, with roughly half the state’s job growth recorded there since 2007 even though the region accounts for barely a fifth of the state’s population. Outside the Bay Area, the vast majority of employment gains have been in low-paying retail, hospitality and medical fields. And even in Silicon Valley itself, a large portion of the population, notably Latinos, are downwardly mobile given the loss of manufacturing jobs.

According to the most recent Social Science Research Council report, the state overall suffers the greatest levels of income inequality in the nation; the Public Policy Institute places the gap well over 10 percent higher than the national average. And though California may be home to some of the wealthiest communities in the nation, accounting for 15 of the 20 wealthiest, its poverty rate, adjusted for cost, is also the highest in the nation. Indeed, a recent United Way study found that half of all California Latinos, and some 40 percent of African-Americans, have incomes below the cost of necessities (the “Real Cost Measure”). Among non-citizens, 60 percent of households have incomes below the Real Cost Measure, a figure that stretches to 80 percent below among Latinos.

In sharp contrast to the 1960s California governed by Jerry Brown’s great father, Pat, upward mobility is not particularly promising for the state’s majority Latino [[ http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/non-white-youth-population-growing-in-california-and-nation-report-finds.html   ]]   next generation. Not only are housing prices out of reach for all but a few, but the state’s public education system [[ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/ ]]   ranks 40th in the nation, behind New York, Texas and South Carolina.  If California remains the technological leader, it is also becoming the harbinger of something else -- a kind of feudal society divided by a rich elite and a larger poverty class, while the middle class either struggles or leaves town.

Will America Turn to the California Model?

The new California model depends largely on one thing: the profits of the very rich. Nearly 70 percent of the state budget comes from income tax, half of which is paid by the 1 percent wealthiest residents (the top 10 percent of earners accounted for nearly 80 percent). This makes the state a model of fiscal instability. As long as the Silicon Valley oligarchs and the real estate speculators do well, California can tap their wealth to pay its massive pension debt, and expand the welfare state inexorably for its increasingly redundant working-class population.  

It’s highly dubious this model would work for the rest of the country. Due largely to its concentration of venture capital, roughly half the nation’s total, Silicon Valley may be able to continue to dominate whatever is the “next big thing,” at least in the early stages. Even parts of the tech community, such as Uber, Lyft and Apple, have announced major expansions outside of the state, in some cases directly due to regulatory restraints in California. Layoffs, meanwhile, are rising in the Valley as companies merge or move to other places. Google, Facebook and others, of course, will remain, keeping the big money in California, but the jobs could be drifting away.   

Under any circumstances, the rest of the country -- with the exception of a few markets such as Manhattan and downtown Chicago -- could not absorb the costs for housing or the taxes California imposes on its residents and businesses. Part of the reason stems from the fact that California is indeed different; its climate, topography, cultural life cannot be easily duplicated in Kansas City, Dallas or anywhere else. People will pay for the privilege of living in California, particularly along the coast. Would they do so to live in Minneapolis or Charlotte?

Nor, unlike during much of the postwar era, can it be said that California represents the demographic future.  The state -- even the Bay Area -- generally loses people to other states, particularly those in middle age, according to an analysis of IRS numbers.  Brown apologists suggest it’s only the poor and uneducated who are leaving, but it also turns out that California is losing affluent people just as rapidly, with the largest net loss occurring among those making between $100,000 and 200,000.  

Perhaps more revealing, the number of children is declining, particularly in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Children made up a third of California’s population in 1970, but USC demographer Dowell Myers projects that by 2030 they will compose just a fifth.

Nor is help on the way. Although boomtown San Francisco has maintained its share of millennials, most large California cities have not. And the number of people in their mid-thirties -- prime child-bearing years -- appears to be declining rapidly, notably in the Bay Area.   Coastal California is becoming the golden land for affluent baby boomers rather than young hipsters. Surfing dudes will increasingly be those with gray ponytails.

Instead of a role model for the future, the Golden State seems likely to become a cross between Hawaii and Tijuana, a land for the aging rich and their servants. It still remains a perfect social model for a progressive political regime, but perhaps not one the rest of the country would likely wish to, or afford, to adopt.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com… where this analysis was first posted. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He lives in Orange County, CA.)

-cw

EASTSIDER-I was reading an old special Issue of CityWatch (from July 2004, no less,) and guess what I found? The entire issue was devoted to affordable housing. Of course, back then, the issue was framed in the context of a proposed ordinance for Inclusionary Zoning. David Lowell described the matter of affordable housing as follows: 

“Leading the City’s solution list is a controversial concept called inclusionary zoning, which, to simplify, requires developers who are building new apartments, condos and homes to include some affordable housing units, generally in return for certain incentive benefits like a break on density requirements or expedited permit processing.” 

Sound familiar? Here’s the fascinating part: The City Council Motion for the Ordinance was made by none other than Ed Reyes (thank god, now termed out,) and our very own Mayor Eric Garcetti, then councilmember for the 13^th District. That’s right, our clever, smooth talkin’ Mayor has been riding this train since 2004. 

In fact, he and his buddy Jose Huizar (who replaced Ed Reyes on the PLUM Committee,) have both been milking this issue for bucks and power ever since -- even as they get a billion dollar bond measure through for their developer pals to build housing for the homeless. Because the truth of the matter is that for all of their work on the Inclusionary Zoning and other planning changes, there is less affordable housing than before, more people have lost their rent-controlled housing than before, and the housing that is billed as “affordable” is not in fact affordable. 

This is separate from a companion issue of the Council carefully looking the other way as many people in rent-controlled housing were inspected, rejected, ejected and just plain dumped on the street, so that politicians’ developer buddies could build, build, build. 

I have painful, personal memories of all of these shenanigans. Reyes and Garcetti decided to lock up land in Northeast LA through a series of “Interim Control Ordinances,” “Community Design Overlays,” and other indecipherable bureaucratic gobbledygook which really meant that no one was going to build anything unless and until they had the personal blessing of Reyes and Garcetti. And of course those blessings came with height variances, setback variances, glossing over density requirements, last minute plan changes, and even quick build expedites – all, generally, in the name of providing a few affordable housing units. Sometimes, even the PLUM Committee and the Planning Commission looked vaguely embarrassed as they toed the party line over any and all protests. 

In late July of 2016, CityWatch contributor Dick Platkin wrote a very telling article, “Getting Developers to Build Affordable Housing...Like Getting Blood From a Stone.” 

There were two important points in his piece. First, regarding any increase in affordable housing, he noted that “...as hinted at in the value capture report, LA’s amalgam of existing housing programs barely produces any net gain in affordable housing. This is because many market housing projects have extensively eliminated existing affordable housing through relentless demolitions and evictions.” 

The actual Value Capture Report can be found here. 

As Mr. Platkin notes in a “you can’t get there from here” moment: “...the Council and its value capture ordinance cannot avoid the essence of their conundrum: the need of developers to maximize profits from their real estate investments. The greater the City’s affordable housing requirement, the lower the resulting private investment and number of affordable units.” 

There you have it. The math of the reality that there isn’t much affordable housing in the City of Los Angeles. There wasn’t in 2004, there wasn’t in 2006, and there sure isn’t in 2017. As I noted in an earlier CW article, the City Council and the Mayor have been avoiding this truth as far back as 2006 when they tried to pass a big bucks affordable housing (Measure H.) 

The Takeaway 

It seems pretty clear to everyone from the LA Times to the Neighborhood Councils that developers own our Mayor and the City Council -- the PLUM Committee, the Planning Commission, and the Planning Department are all no more than an afterthought to the relentless destruction of our neighborhoods and our City itself. Where the communities have been able to generate the funds to challenge these developments in court, the City has lost most of the cases. But who has the resources to sue our own government all of the time? 

With virtually no opposition to re-electing the Mayor and the City Attorney, not to mention most of the City Council incumbants on the ballot in March, it is highly unlikely that anything will change, absent some outside force. 

Fortunately, such a force will be on the ballot in March -- Measure S, the Coalition to Preserve LA backed initiative, headed by Jill Stewart. 

I urge everyone to go to their website, read the summary of the initiative, the FAQs, and think for yourselves. If you live in or near a community which has had any of these outrageous projects foisted on you or your friends, if you read CityWatch, if you are in a Neighborhood Council, if you can’t afford rent -- in short, everyone outside of City Hall -- please take the time. You can bet that literally millions of developer and lobbyist dollars will be flooding in to stop this measure. 

For me two key provisions of Measure S tell it all. First, there is a two year moratorium on “spot zoning,” the favorite method of the City Council to throw out all of the planning rules for well-heeled developers. It would actually impact something like 5% of development projects. Second, and just as important, it would require the City Council to create a real General Plan and updated Community Plans, to reflect our City of 2017, not the LA of the 80s -- the last time the City paid any attention to the law. 

Hold Neighborhood Council meetings to discuss the measure. Get people involved. Remember, this is not a herculean task. Something like 10% or less of registered voters actually vote in these municipal elections. It therefore doesn’t take a huge shift in numbers to actually make a difference. 

If there is any lesson to be garnered from our recent Presidential election, it is that a relatively small difference in voter turnout, at the margins, can produce a huge change. 

So I say, go for it!

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY-- Across the country, white voters placed Donald Trump in office by a margin of 21 points over Clinton. Their backing helped the GOP gain control of a vast swath of local offices nationwide. But in California, racial politics are pushing our general politics the other direction, way to the left.

Some of this reflects California’s fast track toward a “minority-majority” state. Along with a few other states — Hawaii, Texas and New Mexico — California is there now, with minorities accounting for 62 percent of the population, compared to 43 percent in 1990. The shift in the electorate has been slower but still powerful. In 1994, registered Democrats held a 12 percentage-point margin over Republicans. By 2016, the margin had widened to 19 points.

The racial shift does much to explain why Trump lost some largely affluent suburban areas like Orange County, where 53 percent the population is Latino or Asian, up from 45 percent in 2000. Perhaps most emblematic of potential GOP problems was Trump’s — and the GOP’s — loss in Irvine, a prosperous Orange County municipality that is roughly 40 percent Asian.

California’s unique racial politics

Ideology plays a critical role in California’s emerging politics of race. Hispanic and Asian voters outside California — for example, in Texas — have tended to vote less heavily for Democrats. In 2014, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Texas Latinos. Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott garnered 38 percent of the Latino vote in his successful re-election campaign. In contrast, that same year, Neel Kashkari, Jerry Brown’s Republican opponent, won only 27 percent of the Latino vote in California. Only 17 percent of California Asians voted for Trump, nearly 40 percent lower than the national rate (27 percent).

These differences, ironically, have become more evident as California has become relatively less attractive to immigrants. Since the 1980s and 1990s, as California’s economy has become increasingly deindustrialized, the immigration “flood” has slowed, particularly among Hispanics. By the 2010s, other cities — notably Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston — were emerging as bigger magnets for newcomers.

These areas, with lower costs, generally work better for less-skilled immigrants. Latinos in Texas, particularly, do better than their counterparts in California — as measured by homeownership, marriage rates and incomes — and also tend to vote more conservatively.

Part of this reflects different political attitudes among minority leaders in the two states. “We’re not going to do it with welfare, we’re not going to do it with income maintenance, we’re not going to do it remaining contentious and divided,” notes Democrat Henry Cisneros, San Antonio’s first Hispanic mayor and later U.S. secretary of housing and urban development. “We’re going to do it if we come around a single theme: jobs.”

In contrast, California’s racial politics focuses more on serving an increasingly “stranded population” of poor people with limited opportunities for advancement. Indeed, a stunning United Way study found that half of all Latinos, and some 40 percent of African Americans, have incomes below the cost of necessities (the “Real Cost Measure”). Among non-citizens, 60 percent of households have incomes below the Real Cost Measure, a figure that deteriorates to 80 percent among Latinos.

Building a sanctuary for poverty

Zealous boosters of “diversity,” California progressives also embrace policies — in fields like energy, housing and workplace regulation — that place strong barriers to upward mobility. They have undermined what’s left of the industrial economy, and also opposed the production of new single-family houses. Jason Furman, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has shown that the single-family house, on average, contributes 2.5 times as much to the gross domestic product as a multi-family unit.

Instead, today’s new-style progressives — who are primarily concerned with wealth redistribution, racial redress and climate change — have done little to address the ramifications of an increasingly deindustrialized economy that has cut into blue-collar opportunities. Rather than pushing growth, they have placed their emphasis on ever-increasing subsidies for the poor, including those working in expanding low-wage service industries.

To break this pattern, we need a different set of policies, whether they come from moderate, pro-business Democrats or what is left of the California Republican Party. The primary need is to replace welfarism with a strong, pro-growth agenda. This, critically, would include the expansion of single-family housing, something the American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead suggests could spark a new economic expansion. Since 2000, more than 95 percent of the minority growth in the 52 largest metropolitan areas has been in suburban and exurban areas.

If President-elect Trump succeeds in promoting policies that unlock growth, in part, by sweeping away the worst anti-economic growth regulations, it could create a new wave of opportunity for minority Americans. It would be a tragedy of historic proportions if California, long the object of so many immigrants’ dreams, ends up choosing dependency over opportunity.

(Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org). Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis-based public policy firm, and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. This article was posted most recently at New Geography.) 

-cw

RANTZ AND RAVEZ--The year 2017 has begun and we are all searching for ways to begin this year with a positive attitude and hopefully an improved quality of life for ourselves and our families as we sit down and read the logic and common cense by that veteran of the Los Angeles streets and political insider that can illustrate and bring to your attention the issues that impact you, your families and your overall quality of life. That is me ladies and gentlemen. The man-of-the-streets and of the Los Angeles political world. Waste in government spending, excessive taxation, massive traffic congestion, out of control homeless population, broken political promises and so many other issues currently face us from Sacramento to Los Angeles City Hall and all parts between. 

Let me begin with some of the new taxes that will be taking more dollars from your pockets and thrown into that deep hole known as the Federal, State, County and Local Governments. When you hear that government is there to help you, remember that while you are paying dearly into their elusive accounts, the money seldom appears to improve your quality of life. Take for example the traffic on the 101, 10 and 405 Freeways. From the San Fernando Valley to Downtown Los Angeles and to the Westside approaching the Los Angeles International Airport. It is a gridlock traffic situation 7 days a week. The frustration and billions of dollars spent on the local freeways has done little to move traffic faster than the pace of a Mollusk. I will save you the time to check and see what a Mollusk is. It is kind of like government. Very slow and hides when it perceives danger. It is a Snail. 

Where are those new sidewalks City Hall promised for your neighborhood a few of years ago? The same place many other City Hall promises have ended up. Lost in the committees and departments and various other hiding places where your tax dollars are stashed away and used for various programs and pet projects. Take for example the million dollars the city is providing to defend Undocumented Criminal Aliens facing deportation. While we all know that not all people in this country or city are criminals committing crimes, it is not the city’s responsibility to defend those committing crimes that happen to be in this country illegally. Those are your tax dollars that our elected officials want to use to fight the Federal Immigration Service. Your tax dollars are for city services and not for pet project ideas of a very liberal city government.  

As of January 1 we all get to pay a little more for everything we buy in Los Angeles. The sales tax has increased ½ cent for the Los Angeles County Traffic Improvement Plan. I am sure most of us will be dead by the time anything is done to the 405 gridlock to LAX. Then there is the 1.2 BILLION dollar Homeless tax that will appear on your future property tax bill. The city wants to use the funds to provide supportive housing for the homeless in Los Angeles. Locations will be situated throughout Los Angeles communities. Some in the valley and others spread throughout the city. 

There is the 3.5 billion dollar Community College bond measure that was passed in November. This fund will be used in the Community College District for educational purposes. There is the County of L.A. 1.5 cents levied annually per square foot of improved property in Los Angeles County to fund Safe, Clean Neighborhood Parks, Open Space, Beaches, River Protection, and Water Conservation Measures. All of the increased taxes and fees were all by the voters during the November Election.  

It would be good for the City Controller to look into where the projects are and where the money is located. Preparing Controller Reports on senseless projects is simply wasting money and doing nothing to improve local government or truly addressing those issues that would or could improve services in the City of Los Angeles. The only time the LA City Controller got any publicity was when he went after the DWP Union Leader on a Training Fund that was set up for city employees. The expensive and lengthy investigation did not reveal anything that resulted in any enforcement action against the DWP Union or their leaders. In the end, the Controller put his head back into the sand and has continued to do little to shake up any City of LA Departments or managers.      

+++++++

The LAPD and the MTA are working on a possible contract for police services … pushing the LA County Sheriff out the door! 

While millions of dollars are appealing to LA’s City leaders, the lack of current LAPD personnel to enforce the laws and patrol the streets of Los Angeles to reduce the growing crime trends remains a major problem for the LAPD. With only 9897 sworn officers short of the 10,000 in the police department budget, it will be hard pressed to take on the responsibility of patrolling the various transit lines throughout the City of LA. 

The LAPD has eliminated certain services it delivered to citizens in the past due to lack of personnel. In examining the preliminary year - end LAPD Crime Stats, we find the following information: Violent crime in LA has increased for the third year in a row. A 10% increase in violent crime over 2015 and a 38% increase since 2014. That means more murder victims, robbery victims and the other major crimes in the city. While there are many reasons for the crime increase the situation is not expected to improve in 2017. 

With this in mind, how can the LAPD handle the public transit lines along with the streets and neighborhoods of Los Angeles without additional personnel? Police recruitment is down in L.A. and throughout the country and not improving. The Anti-Police LAPD Police Commission has done nothing to demonstrate any type of support or encouragement for the LAPD Personnel that are not motivated or encouraged to do what they do best “Protect and Serve” the people of Los Angeles.  

Policing the bus and rail system is a daunting task at best. Being an infrequent rider on the public transit system Orange Line and Red/ Blue Lines in and around Los Angeles, I can tell you that there are many violations that are not being enforced by the Los Angele County Sheriff’s Department due to the lack of Sheriff Personnel riding the transit lines. While I will on occasion see a Deputy checking the riders for payment to ride the Metro Lines, I can count on one finger how many times I have seen a Deputy on a city bus or train in the past two years. 

With most of the LAPD field personnel are working 12 hour shifts 3 days a week, I am sure some officers will work overtime for extra pay to support their families. How much can an officer do without rest considering court and other police activities? Without additional personnel, it will be hard pressed to protect the passengers riding the Metro lines in this region.

+++++++

I Thank Mr. O’Henry for his kind comments about my articles. I happened to see Mr. O’Henry while dining at Uncle Bernie’s restaurant on Ventura Blvd. Uncle Bernie’s, not my Uncle, is a great place to dine for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Try it and I am sure you will enjoy the experience. 

If you have a situation you would like me to review, drop me an email at [email protected]. 

-cw

COMMERCIALIZING OUR PARKS-A controversial set of new rules quietly given final approval over the recent holiday -- allowing national parks in the United States to expand corporate sponsorships and commercial contracts with private companies -- is being called a "disgrace" by those who say the move is a betrayal of what the nation's parks should be. 

Despite outcry from citizens, documented in public testimony and hundreds of thousands petition signatures, the director of the National Park Service Jonathan B. Jarvis announced on December 28 that he had signed an order-- officially titled Order #21 on Donations and Philanthropic Partnerships -- which, among other changes, ends an outright ban on commercial advertising and lifts restrictions on naming rights in parks. 

"It is disgraceful that the parks service plans to sell our national parks to the highest bidder despite overwhelming public opposition to increased commercialism in our national parks," said Kristen Strader, campaign coordinator for Public Citizen, which organized against the proposed reforms. She cited more than 215,000 petition signers and hundreds of individuals who submitted official objections to the NPS. 

In his statement last week, Jarvis argued that public concerns over the changes were overblown. "Whether or not people and organizations fully understood the proposed changes," Jarvis said, "it was clear that people place great value on national parks and are insistent that they be protected as they belong to all of us." 

While he acknowledged the changes would allow "opportunities for limited donor recognition in parks," he pushed back against criticism by saying, "no one is going to commercialize national parks and park superintendents still won’t be allowed to solicit donations. We have federal law to back us up on that." 

While Strader gave the NPS some credit for removing a particularly noxious provision from the draft policy that would have allowed corporate logos to be placed on exhibits and waysides, she disagreed the new rules would not seriously change the look and feel of the parks. 

"Now that this policy has been finalized," Strader warned, "park visitors soon could be greeted with various forms of advertisements, like a sign reading 'brought to you by McDonald’s' within a new visitor’s center at Yosemite, or 'Budweiser' in script on a park bench at Acadia." 

Such a reality, she said, should worry anyone who cherishes the national park system. 

"In a society where we are constantly inundated with advertisements everywhere we go, national parks offered a unique and beautiful escape," Strader said. "Even in schools, students endure a constant barrage of billboards, social media advertising and marketing. Until now, national parks have remained relatively commercial-free, which is why they were such a valuable respite."

This order, she concluded, is "a dangerous shift toward opening our parks up to an unprecedented amount of commercial influence."

(Jon Queally is staff writer at CommonDreams.org where this report was first posted.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-According to the “Osmosis Theory of LA’s Decline,” populations tend to move from areas of high costs and low opportunity (HC-LO) to areas of low costs and high opportunity (LC-HO.) Darwin’s survival of the fittest has a say here too. The smarter the person, the more likely he or she will move away from Los Angeles. In other words, the more talented middle class is “osmosisizing” itself away from “high cost-low opportunity” Los Angeles to “low cost-high opportunity” areas like Texas, the South, Nashville and Arizona. (Photo above: uncollected trash in Koreatown, Los Angles.) 

There are other factors in LA’s plight. Because babies cannot move out on their own, newborns are not renting apartments and buying houses. The elderly often own their own homes and have their costs covered. Thus, the new births and the “not-dying” of the Boomers do not mean LA is seeing an increased demand for housing. 

The crucial element of population mathematics is that Los Angeles is driving out the most vital segment of its population, that is, the family age middle class. As they leave the City, we lose our future. (We have previously discussed in CityWatch on December 29, 2016, why LA has a lower demand for housing while housing prices rise.) 

Two Productive Segments of LA’s Middle Class 

Los Angeles’ middle class of child rearing age spans two “generations.” There are Family Millennials, born between 1981 and 1998. Their peak birth year was twenty-five years ago. Thus, there are fewer younger Millennials each year and an increasing number of the older Millennials are becoming Family Millennials, age 25 and above. 

Los Angeles’ other middle class “generation” is its Generation Xers, who are between the ages of 35 to 49 years old. Los Angeles already is deficient in its number of Gen Xers. While Garcetti and others were raving about the young Millennials living on groups of two and three in lofts in DTLA, they covered up the fact that the Gen Xers were leaving the City. 

Many in this group, who were between 27 and 41 years old when the Crash of 2008 hit, have mostly decided to leave dense urban areas. Although this generation is smaller than the Baby Boomers above them and the Millennials below them, Gen Xers are vital for any urban area for the next two decades. They are wealthier and more entrepreneurial than Family Millennials and their prior departure is one of the reasons Los Angeles has lost more employers than any other urban area over the prior decade. 

People with the entrepreneurial spirt are precisely the type that leaves the high cost-low opportunity of Los Angeles for the low cost-high opportunity areas in Texas. In fact, Austin (the capital of Texas,) was the grand winner in attracting Gen X entrepreneurials. Since 2000, Austin’s Gen Xers have increase by 44.9% despite the fact that the size of this population segment has declined 6.6% nationally and Los Angeles is doing even worse than the national average. 

As Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox wrote in NewGeography.com in December 2016, “This makes sense as this is the age when home ownership is most critical and people are looking for the maximum income relative to costs. Being in your late 30s to 50 does not mean you have lost the ability to dream, but it does make addressing reality far more imperative than when in your 20s.” 

Thus, a significant number of Gen Xers have left Los Angeles and the age group just below them, Family Millennials, is doing likewise. Both generations leave for basically the same reason -- LA is high cost with low opportunity. People want their children to do better than they are doing. Thus, families move to the low cost-high opportunity areas. 

Losing both GenXers and Family Millennials is Financially Devastating to Los Angeles 

According to Val Srinivas and Urval Goradia, writing in “The Future of Wealth in the United States Mapping Trends in Generational Wealth,” for the Deloitte University Press in November 2015, “…Generation X will experience the highest increase in share of national wealth through the forecast period, growing from under 14 percent of total net wealth in 2015 to nearly 31 percent by 2030. In contrast, “The Millennial generation will experience the fastest growth rate of net wealth. However, the generation’s share of national household wealth will remain below 20 percent.” 

By 2030, the Gen Xers and Family Millennials will control about 50% of the nation’s wealth. Any urban area that loses the middle class from both these generations will lack the financial wherewithal to sustain itself. The middle class has proven it will not raise its families in cramped high rises in Hollywood or DTLA or at Gehry’s Folly at 8160 Sunset. The on-going destruction of Valley Village’s residential areas is particularly ominous for the viability of the entire Valley. 

Los Angeles’ Absurd Solution is to Spend Billions on Construction 

Politicos have fallen in love with the disastrous notion that Los Angeles should make construction of extremely dense Transit Oriented Districts [TODs] and Infill projects its main business. This idea is a perversion of the Keynesian principle that during a recession, spending money helps a society to recover. If the government cannot find something worthwhile to construct, then, Keynes said, it can pay people to dig holes and fill them up again. The money paid to the workers will be spent in the stores, that will then make it possible to hire more employees and buy more products from suppliers. 

This principle is sound, but Keynes never encouraged spending money on harmful projects. (If there were a bona fide housing shortage, residential construction would satisfy Keynes’s requirements, but our Crash of 2008 was caused by spending billions of dollars to build into a glut – which is exactly what Los Angeles is doing.) 

As mentioned in a prior article, destroying rent-controlled housing in order to build luxury housing is atrocious macro-economic policy and harms society. Furthermore, the subsidy of unwanted luxury housing harms the Price System by misleading people into thinking that financing more high rises is a wise use of investment capital. Again, this dynamic plus massive fraud resulted in the Crash of 2008. 

It seems that both California’s Governor and LA City leaders think that deficit spending on construction should be Los Angeles’ prime business. While the spending of billions of dollars will have a short term stimulus, the long term impact will be devastating. 

The Crucial Exodus Time is Nigh 

When people expect prices to rise, people buy before the increase. The Family Millennials and Generation Xers are beginning to realize that home prices in Austin, Texas, outside Nashville and Atlanta, etc. are rising. Now is the time for them to jettison LA and buy where costs are still low and opportunity is high. As Gen Xers and Family Millennials see that home prices in other areas of the nation are beginning to increase, their departure rate from LA will accelerate. The few Gen Zers who are still here will soon realize that they need to unload their properties in LA before the next crash as well as buy elsewhere before those housing prices significantly increase. 

The temporary inflation in R-1 prices will benefit the Gen Xers who did not move away prior to the Crash of 2008. As they move to higher management levels, they can afford better homes. They realize that selling their R-1 homes in Valley Village is their last chance to get their money out of their Valley homes. The financial pressure to escape from LA is irresistible. 

A Gen Xer can sell an LA home for $1 million and buy a larger home in Texas for only $450,000. The housing cost differential between Los Angeles and Texas and Nashville and Atlanta, etc. is go great, that the equity in an LA home may allow a Gen X family to buy a better home for all cash. At the very least, the family will have a whopping down payment with a very small mortgage. For Gen Xers, opportunity is knocking twice. 

The Impact of Measure S 

The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is officially on the March 2017 ballot as Measure S. If it passes, it will halt the most dramatic threat to LA’s future, i.e., the mega projects, which are at the root of the extortion and bribery running LA City Hall. 

Even if Measure S passes, however, Infill developers will continue to bid up the prices of residences way beyond their value as mere living space. If all single homes were re-zoned R-1, no matter what higher zoning surrounded them, families could afford to look for a home in LA. Such a down zoning would prevent the Infill developers from bidding up home prices and a family could feel secure that its residential neighborhood would be safe from developers for decades. The opposite will continue to be the situation for LA. Residential prices will temporarily escalate as Infill developers bid up the purchase prices.   

Science Will Prevail 

Despite misinformation from City Hall and its apologists like Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics and Joel Singer of California Association of Realtors on Channel 4's Conan Nolan’s show, the osmosis-like movement of talented middle class from Los Angeles to the suburbs in Arizona, Texas and the rest of the Sun Belt will prevail. Has there ever been a time in history when people voluntarily moved away from low cost-high opportunity areas to high cost-low opportunity areas?

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GELFAND’S WORLD--Over the past few days, several of my friends have asked me to support them in their attempt to create a reform movement in the California Democratic Party. This isn't the first such attempt by any means, but the current confluence of bad news on the national level and grass roots rebellion on the local level makes this attempt a bit more likely to succeed. My comment is that their reform platform should go even farther. 

The Blue Revolution, as it calls itself, proposes structural changes in the way the Democratic Party rules itself. Most of what it suggests is valid, but of little interest to the rest of us. But they do get to one topic that is important -- restructuring the way that members of the Democratic National Committee are selected. I would like to suggest a reason why this is important. The DNC plays a critical role in the way presidential primary elections are scheduled. The current DNC has been an utter failure in dealing with the chronic problem of giving great power to Iowa and New Hampshire, two states which fail to represent the United States as a whole or, for that matter, speak for liberal values. 

Our local rebels want to change the way that California's DNC representatives are chosen. More power to them. But let's take it farther. A real reform proposal would be to demand that the DNC change the order of primaries to give the rest of the country a chance. As long as we're at it, how about making California the first or second state in the 2020 primaries? 

We will know that a newly restructured DNC is for real when New Hampshire is kicked out of its first place position in the presidential primaries, and not until then. If our California DNC delegation can't make some noise about this long-overdue change, then what good are they? 

Moving primaries around is a start, but it's still just a small piece of what ails us. I would like to offer a proposal that is both thoroughly radical and yet profoundly conservative. You might say it is self-sacrificial yet ambitious. 

The background: 

Back in the old days, Democrats got money and support from unions and from a few individual donors. The big business interests didn't feel a lot of kinship with Democrats, and gave their money mostly to Republicans. Democrats found themselves outspent, but managed to hold control of the congress for most of a half century. Unfortunately, the Democrats who controlled the U.S. Congress got a little greedy. They figured that business interests had to deal with them anyway because they held the power, so they might as well take money from business. 

It was the perfect example of a short term success that becomes a long term problem. Let's consider one example of how this worked out. We'll do so by asking the following question -- does anyone trust the U.S. congress to represent the interests of the American public when it comes to prescription drug pricing? The answer is pretty obvious isn't it? We're not going to find a lot of people who would say, "I believe that the congress will do what's right for us when it comes to that issue." Notice that Republicans and Democrats are equally damaged (in the moral sense) by their acceptance of pharmaceutical money. 

The Democrats have a real problem when they are not in the majority, because they don't have a simply stated ideology to fall back on. Republicans have it easy. All they have to do is recite, "Less government, lower taxes, a stronger military." Simplistic thinking combined with simplistic rhetoric does have its audience. In a nation that has been watching itself decline as an economic power since the oil embargo of the 1970s, the Democrats don't have a real strong slogan of their own to counter with. 

So how about if the Blue Revolution and those of us who think of ourselves as Reform Democrats create our own litmus test. We will support candidates who refuse to take money from the drug companies, from the casinos, from oil companies and computer chip manufacturers, from Facebook and Google, Walmart and Microsoft. We will support a party that represents workers. We're not necessarily hostile to business -- we'll work with business in terms of legitimate needs -- but we need to understand who we are first. 

We can start here in California. Since this is a CityWatch column, let's also apply the rule to Los Angeles City Council elections. Anybody who takes money from the developers doesn't get my vote. 

I understand that it's easy to poo-poo these suggestions as being impossible to achieve. Allow me to suggest that the internet age has changed things quite a bit. I suspect that plenty of people would donate a few dollars to candidates who pledge to follow the new rule by refusing corporate money. It will require candidates who are willing to join in a new political culture. The opportunity exists for a newly reformed Democratic Party to flourish. But it has to be a party that understands that modern voters will see through insincerity. 

Addendum 

In my previous column, I argued that those of us who are so appalled by the Trump election should not forget our anger. One commenter argued, not unreasonably, that we shouldn't match the hatred we saw applied against Obama with hatred of our own. Fair enough, but let's clarify. I would argue that it is legitimate to be angry about the victory of racism, misogyny, and bullying. This isn't hatred so much as it is justifiable outrage. This does not mean that we should lose our self-control, but that we should stay motivated. 

Someone named Phil Shailer said it much better than me. This reaction to Trump voters has been making the rounds and is likely to go viral because it speaks for so many of us.

Finally, let me thank Bill Roberson, Shannon Ross, and Carrie Scoville for making me aware of the Blue Revolution.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Several weeks ago in “Can the Cheap Perfume of "Approve with Conditions" Mask the Stink of Bad Planning?”  I explained how the real purpose of lengthy “conditions of approval” for large, controversial real estate projects like 333 S. LaCienega is to neutralize community opposition. These endless promises are intended to defuse challenges to mega-projects, like the one pictured above in a shorter form than proposed. These promises, transformed into “conditions of approval,” are nearly worthless, but often succeed in persuading neighborhood critics to drop their opposition to bad projects. (Photo above: La Cienega and Third Street intersection.) 

This sordid process thrives in Los Angeles because decision makers routinely approve controversial projects once they receive campaign contributions and once community opposition has been sidelined by developer promises. In these situations, the decision makers never bother to ask such obvious planning-related questions as: 

• Does the project conform to the very plans and zones that the City Planning Commission and the City Council legally enacted after an extensive preparation and adoption process? 

• Does the design of the proposed project match the character and scale of surrounding residential areas, as required by the City Council-adopted Community Plans, as well as the design guidelines now included in the General Plan Framework Element? 

• Do public infrastructure and public services have sufficient capacity – per Framework Policy 3.3  -- to meet future user demand stemming from the approved project? 

• Will the project’s Environmental Impact Report conclusions be monitored and updated once the City Council adopts approval ordinances? 

• Will project approvals be phased, ensuring that later phases are contingent on certified compliance with the original Conditions of Approval? 

• Will a developer’s multiple promises to community groups and elected officials, such as job generation and transit ridership, be accurately and regularly monitored? 

• Will there be real-world consequences, such as revocation of certificates of occupancy or partial demolition of structures, if promises are not kept? 

Because these obvious questions are never asked, the legislative actions, such as spot-zoning, blocked by Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, predictably lead to truly bad city planning. For example, the proposed luxury high rise at the former Loehman’s site – 333 S. LaCienega -- perfectly illustrates how these bad planning practices proliferate in Los Angeles, with cascading adverse consequences. Consider the following: 

• Clash with character and scale of nearby areas: As should be obvious the rendering above, this project does not comply with the legally required General Plan findings that the structure be consistent with the scale and character of the neighborhood’s residential area. More specifically, the project will be 240 feet high and have a Floor Area Ratio/FAR (i.e., building mass) of 6.0 on a lot where height is restricted to 45 feet and building mass is limited to an FAR of 1.5. As for compatible character, the proposed tower has a nautical design, reminiscent of a cruise ship, while the surrounding residential buildings have Spanish Revival architecture. Admittedly, a cruise boat might come in handy when massive earthquakes and climate-change induced sea-level rises permanently flood the greater Fairfax area, but for now this nautical design is totally at odds with the area’s character. 

• Traffic congestion: The project is located at one of the most congested intersections in Los Angeles. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the site is the convergence point of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, LaCienega Boulevard, Burton Way, and LeDoux. No combination of street signs, signal lights, and traffic officers has managed to keep this intersection clear during rush hours, and the construction of an auto-centric luxury tower at this location can only make a bad traffic situation worse. 

• Unconvincing public necessity: Los Angeles City Charter, Section 558, clearly states that to qualify for General Plan Amendments and zone changes, a project must conform to public necessity, convenience, general welfare, and good zoning practice. In this case, the tenants will be extremely rich, paying an average rent of $12,000 per month for lavish apartments in a building with five star amenities, including on-call luxury cars and drivers. These are certainly wonderful features for the 1 percent who can afford them, but the Wilshire Community Plan area has no demonstrated shortage of parcels that can accommodate such luxury apartments. The use of spot-zoning and spot-planning to jack up a 45 foot height limit to 240 feet may meet a private need to maximize profit, but it does not meet any public need. There is no public necessity for a spot-General Plan Amendment and spot-Zone Change to build a luxury apartment tower where it is strictly illegal and unwarranted. 

• Poor Zoning Practices eliminate certainty: The related City Charter finding of good zoning practice is also sharply at odds with this project. The City Council must take three separate actions to legalize this project: a spot-zone change, a spot-height district change, and a spot-General Plan Amendment. Not only is City Charter Section 555 clear that these legislative actions must apply to socially and geographically significant areas (i.e., not single parcels), but these poor planning practices totally eliminate certainty from the planning process. When individuals, families, or companies move into an area, they have clear expectations of what can be legally built near their homes and businesses. But, spot-zoning completely removes this certainty. Cities like Los Angeles then become the Wild West. Spot-zoning through a City Council vote to permit a 240 foot high rise tower where 45 feet is the law eliminates all predictability from the planning process. The zones and plan designations that people assumed about their neighborhood when they moved in can vanish at the snap of a deep-pocketed developer’s fingers. 

• Affordable housing hype: The project claims that it needs a major economic incentive, much greater building mass, to accommodate large luxury apartments, through LA’s Density Bonus Ordinance. More specifically, the developer intends to replace 13 of 145 luxury apartments with low-income units to build a much larger building. Yet the developer has owned this building site for many years and has virtually no land acquisition costs. In this case, LA’s genuine need for more affordable housing has become a thin cover story for the construction of 130 luxury rental apartments where less than half of that figure is legally permitted. 

• Misuse of on and off-site improvements: The project’s conditions of approval, as voted by the City Planning Commission and the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, include adjacent street trees, bicycle infrastructure, and a quasi-public fountain. Yet in nearby Los Angeles and Beverly Hills neighborhoods, there are many existing pedestrian-oriented projects and corridors. Some have been built and operated as basic municipal services, not as extensions of mega-projects. Others are linked to by-right buildings that conform to plans and zones, and that do not need City Council spot-zoning rescue ordinances to usher in public improvements. 

• Bad Precedents: To justify height and mass far above legal limits, the project invokes other nearby buildings that exceed 45 feet. Yet, most of these over-height buildings also required spot-zoning approval from elected officials to be built. For example, one of these projects, across the street, at 8500 Burton Way, is a prototype for this project and owned by the same developer. Yet, when it was permitted, its neighbors were told it would not become a precedent for more ad hoc zone changes and general plan amendments. Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle. If the City Council eventually approves 333 S. LaCienega, it is only a question of time until nearby property owners make parallel requests. They will quickly realize that similar zone changes and General Plan amendments can green light more lavish and lucrative high-rise apartment towers on their properties. 

The take away from this case study is that a few poor planning practices eventually open up the flood gates for more bad decisions. Their cumulative impact is municipal demise, but good planning practices can move a city in the opposite direction. Los Angeles can still become the progressive, highly livable city that most of residents and visitors truly desire. It might even eventually become the global city that its City Hall boosters magically believe can be achieved through real estate speculation.

(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles City Planner and also a Board Member of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association. He welcomes comments and corrections at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

SUSTAINING THE CITY-Try to ignore the federal election results for a moment, if you can. There is a lot of fear, dread and loathing about City overdevelopment, worsening traffic (as a result of overdevelopment), and worsening environmental issues (also a result of overdevelopment). In short, we have the foxes guarding the henhouse and a Planning Politburo that appears hell-bent towards shredding all law and livability in the City of the Angels. 

Corrupt City Councilmembers and Mayors? Nothing new. Oversized influence of mega-developers at City Hall? Nothing new. But what appears to be a growing trend is that, even when a City Councilmember is doing the right thing, LA City Planning ignores the will of the citizenry and their elected leader, transforming a neighborhood into an environmental and quality-of-life-nightmare. 

ENTER MEASURE S:  This spring's elections (March 7, 2017-- closer than you might think) will feature a measure that -- no matter what the agenda-driven professional liars and self-serving creepies say -- does the following: 

• Developers will have to have to pay for their traffic and environmental impact reports to be done by independent experts, and not by their own hired guns. EIR's have to mean something, and they have to be credible.

• Backroom deals between billionaire developers and City Councilmembers will be made illegal, and City Council rules and laws will be adhered to and enforced. 

• Developers will have to prove to impacted communities that their new megaprojects can absorb the new development with respect to traffic and other environmental impacts. 

• Despite claims by mega-developers that they want to create affordable housing, the opposite has been the result of these at-market and oversized, over-tall projects (which often have over 50% vacancy) that ultimately leave fewer, and not more, truly affordable housing for Angelenos. 

• The City Council will have to (finally) update the City’s legally-required Community and General Plans that balance growth and environmental impacts. 

You know...follow and obey the laws!

After years of being told that we were decades (not years, but decades) behind in our Planning for the regions and totality of our City, it's time we had the ability to catch up in our Planning infrastructure the way we just did with our Transportation infrastructure. 

The City spends gobs of time and resources on lots of priorities, but the basics of planning for a big city that makes scientific and environmental sense? Nope! 

But no longer. 

If the Planning Department can tell the Mar Vista Community Council, its residents and its Councilmember (Mike Bonin of CD11) to go pound sand when a developer (Pamela Day and her Crimson Holdings cronies) consistently lie, obfuscate, and disempower the neighborhoods of Mar Vista...what can we do? 

If the Planning Department ignores the pleas of the Mar Vista Community Council, the CD11 office and planners, and the local residents (who have always been for affordable housing) when they plead for a 3-5 story project but get an 80+-foot tall, 7-8 story project that is the tallest development for miles, and with entirely insufficient parking and infrastructure so that the developer can win the lotto...what can we do? 

And what can you do when this keeps going on in your neighborhood -- black, white, Latino, Asian, mixed, poor, wealthy, etc.? What can you do when the Planning Department gives us the cold shoulder and ignores our legal rights, recommendations and pleas? 

Vote Measure S into law -- we have to STOP the LA City Planning Politburo. We have to STOP the unsustainable, environmentally-destructive madness. We must have a civilized, sustainable city that has rules that are followed. 

STOP the tone-deaf, agenda-driven, wild-eyed, build-build-build group-thinkers at LA City Planning. 

Vote YES on Measure S!

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION VUE-In a sign that California is quickly emerging as the nation’s progressive conscience-in-exile, a new Los Angeles education-reform group has launched an ambitious initiative that it claims could close historic student achievement gaps in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). 

Members of Reclaim Our Schools LA (ROS-LA), a coalition of educators, labor unions and social justice organizations, told a December media event attended by about one hundred parents, students and supporters (photo above) in the library of South LA’s Dorsey High School, that the key to substantive school reform is to transform LAUSD into a “community school district.”

Community schools, which have roots in the progressive movement of the early 20th century but have been undergoing a recent revival, look beyond academics to the entrenched, poverty-related social, emotional and health barriers that keep kids in high-needs districts from succeeding in school. The approach redresses those needs by partnering with families, local government and community-based organizations to provide “wraparound services” — health clinics, mental health counselors, after-school programs or parent support services — on school grounds. 

“We believe schools should be safe havens for students and families,” said coalition member Angelica Salas. “Our coalition is committed to making sure that every student can benefit from an education, independent of what school or what ZIP code they live in.” Her group also used the event to unveil a detailed argument for community schooling in a paper called “A Vision to Support Every Student.”  

In addition to Salas, who is the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, nine coalition speakers were present, including union president Alex Caputo-Pearl of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), and Max Arias, executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 99. 

The coalition was short on the details of what an actual community school might look like, saying each would be tailored to specific community needs. But the group noted that LAUSD, whose student population is 80 percent low-income, already boasts a number of successful pilot community schools, including San Fernando High School Community School in the economically depressed North San Fernando Valley, and James A. Garfield Senior High School in East LA, whose on-campus “Wellness Center” offers physical exams, family planning and mental health services. 

Though the movement has been mostly overlooked by the media in their coverage of the 25-year education wars that have pitted the “school choice” privatization movement against traditional neighborhood public schools, it has produced impressive gains in math and reading proficiency, along with increases in graduation and college-admission rates, with the kind of disruptive, high-needs students that the corporate charter school model tends to exclude. Those successes gained community schooling a toehold in the Obama administration’s 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which included language supportive of the approach. 

“Unlike other models of reform that we see today,” said coalition member John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, “[community schooling] is a model of reform that is inclusive; that doesn’t exclude English learners; that doesn’t exclude foster [care students]; that doesn’t exclude students with special needs. It says everybody is part of our community.” 

According to ROS-LA’s Patricia Castellanos, who is also deputy director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Oakland Unified and Cincinnati Public Schools have already declared themselves community school districts, with Austin, Texas possibly to follow. 

But as the nation’s second-largest school district, LAUSD would considerably raise the profile of community schooling with what Castellanos termed a “new path” to reform, with the potential to impact national education policy. 

That prospect, coalition members repeatedly emphasized, has taken on new urgency in the months since last spring, when ROS-LA began organizing. Donald Trump has alarmed public education advocates with both his campaign proposal for a $20 billion school voucher program and his nomination of anti-public schools radical Betsy DeVos to head the Department of Education. 

“If there were ever a time to invest more in our public schools, it is now,” declared coalition member Tina Trujillo, associate professor at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. 

However, ROS-LA’s ambitions may not only collide with the incoming administration, but also run up against Republican vows to cut federal funding for health services, food assistance and cash assistance for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. 

California currently receives about $69.3 billion in federal support for health and human services, with $7.7 billion going to the state Department of Social Services for child welfare services, foster care and the CalWORKs welfare-to-work program — the kind of assistance to low-income and vulnerable Californians that is at the heart of community schooling’s wraparound services model. 

“We are very well aware that there are financial issues that need to be dealt with,” admitted UTLA’s Alex Caputo-Pearl. “California hovers between 40th and 50th among the states in per-pupil funding. It’s not acceptable. We’ve got to take that battle to the state level, and we will.” 

The exact price tag to transform LAUSD to community schooling remains unknown. Castellanos said that specific budget numbers will be part of ROS-LA’s planning and research for 2017, adding that national community school experts claim the model is less expensive to implement than it might seem, since it is based on leveraging existing community services and grants. 

In the meantime, the coalition will be laying the groundwork for political and economic support by lobbying LAUSD leaders and scheduling parent-student forums in early 2017 to ensure that ROS-LA’s priorities are reflected in the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan. 

“Our goal is to have LAUSD designate itself as a community schools district and to allocate funds to roll out this model.” Castellanos said. “That will require conversations with the LAUSD board so that community schools are part of the school board’s budgeting process in the next year.”

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted at Capital & Main.)  Photo by Bill Raden: Dorsey H.S. student Christabel Ukomado addresses Reclaim Our Schools gathering. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITCS--On September 28, LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin held a community meeting in the Westminster Avenue Elementary School auditorium to present his accomplishments and propose solutions to the problem of Homelessness in Venice. There was a slide show, fliers, city officers and non-profit organization organizers. There were a lot of attendees in the auditorium. A lot of cops were there too.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--Grab a glass of champagne. Then bend your mind around this New Year’s resolution for Californians: In 2017, let’s become more tolerant of political corruption.

Yes, bigotry against political skullduggery is just about the last socially acceptable prejudice in our state. And while the idea of tolerating dirty deal-making may sound perverse or strange, so are the ways we make decisions in California. We rarely consider how all of our rules curtailing the power and discretion of elected officials—rules approved in the name of preventing corruption—have made it so difficult to respond to large scale problems in our state that we no longer try.

Our state’s governance system has long been premised on the notion that our chosen representatives must be extremely naughty people. And so we’ve designed a highly complex government over the last century with the primary goal of preventing corruption, by limiting the power and discretion of elected and appointed officials to make dirty deals—or just about any other deals. That is the channel connecting our state’s rivers of regulations, oceans of laws, and tsunamis of formulas for budgets and taxes that defy human navigation.

All these obstacles have worked to a point: We’re a pretty clean state by American standards, with a relatively low rate of public corruption convictions. And the corruption cases you see here typically involve very small stakes for a big state—minor embezzlements, small-time cover-ups, and politicians who violate tricky campaign finance laws or (heaven forbid) live outside their districts.

The perverse result of our clean but hampered government is that we’ve opted to embrace large-scale, incapacitating societal wrongs, instead of accepting even the smallest rule-bending in the legislature or city hall (what other jurisdictions might still consider part of the cost of getting stuff done).

In California, among the richest places on earth, thousands of homeless people are on the streets, and we tolerate the highest poverty rate in the United States. We have done little to respond to a huge and expanding shortage of housing for working and middle-class people. Our roads, bridges and waterworks are in dangerous disrepair. Our health system makes it hard to get health care, our schools offer too little education, and our tax system, by bipartisan acknowledgment, doesn’t tax us efficiently or fairly.

In hamstringing our politicians, we’ve frustrated ourselves.

And yet, attacking such big problems is considered wildly unrealistic. There are too many rules and regulations standing in the way of large-scale action. And if we got rid of those rules, we fear we would be abetting corruption.

Which is why we so desperately need to adopt a new attitude toward corruption.

A famous observation of Samuel Huntington, one of the 20th century’s greatest political scientists, applies now in California.

“In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over centralized, honest bureaucracy.”

“In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over centralized, honest bureaucracy,” Huntington wrote. ““A society which is relatively uncorrupt … may find a certain amount of corruption a welcome lubricant easing the path to modernization.”

California needs lubrication—and a little more corruption that allows us to advance larger public goals.

California must expedite the building of affordable housing, homeless housing, housing near transit, and housing on lots already zoned for housing—even if it means paying off certain interests to prevent their opposition and handing out exemptions to planning requirements and zoning and environmental laws like party favors. The alternative is to let the scandalous housing shortage grow, while we cross all the regulatory t’s and let NIMBYs tie us in knots.

LA voters, for example, just approved money for homeless housing we need now—but it likely will take at least five years to have the housing in place if we follow the usual procedures. And it could be even worse if anti-growth activists, posing as warriors against corruption, succeed in passing a moratorium on certain developments on LA’s March ballot.

The poor state of California’s roads also cries out for some big corrupt deals, damn the environmental reviews. For years, the state has failed to address a $130-billion-plus backlog in state and local road repairs. A legislative report found that more than two-thirds of roads are in poor or mediocre condition, one of the worst records of any state in the country.

But California’s mix of limitations on infrastructure and taxes mean we’ll keep falling behind—as long as we play by the rules. Raising taxes to cover repairs requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the state legislature and getting to two-thirds in cases like this requires buying votes with spending. But our abstemious governor hasn’t been willing to do the buying. He should resolve to be less righteous and more road-friendly in 2017. (And how fast can we get some contracts out the door and get construction crews on the highways?)

Roads and housing aren’t the only contexts where we prioritize following all the rules over meeting the needs of Californians. In education, state leaders make a fetish of meeting the very low requirement of the constitutional funding formula for schools—instead of finding ways, kosher or not, to lengthen our short school year (just 180 days) and offer students the math, science, arts and foreign language they need, but aren’t getting.

Our aqueducts and water mains so badly need updates and repairs that politicians should be raiding other government accounts to secure the necessary funds. But moving money around brings lawsuits and scrutiny. So no one dares resolve the problem, not even in a time of drought. Now is the moment to break rules and accelerate water infrastructure. Find ways to bully or buy off anyone who objects.

The stakes of our anti-corruption fixation may get higher in 2017. California finds itself in a confrontation with President-elect Donald Trump. Politicians are talking about how they are ready to fight Trump if he attacks California policies or threatens vulnerable people, like immigrants and Muslims.

Fighting may be necessary, but California and its governments are at a decided disadvantage in a battle with the richer and more powerful federal government. Dealmaking might be the better strategy, at least at first. On recent trips to Sacramento, lobbyists and other behind-the-scenes players argued to me that California should find some way to buy off Trump—either personally or in his presidential role—given the president-elect’s love of negotiations and his lack of interest in ethics or legal niceties. Of course, such creative dealmaking runs up against Californian rules and sensibilities.

That’s why the change we need is not legal—it’s cultural. We need to be more politically mature and realize that big progress in governance almost always involves actions that are not entirely forthright. Indeed, some of our country’s most effective officials—like the Daleys in Chicago, or even a California character like Willie Brown, the former Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor—were effective precisely because they didn’t always color inside the lines.

So as we greet 2017, let’s raise a toast to dealmaking that brings real progress, even when it’s dirty.

(Joe Mathews is Connecting California Columnist and Editor at Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Mathews is a Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).)

-cw

@TheGussReport – Predicting LA’s fortunes requires a decent read on our city and county officials. Dialogue with them and listen closely because what they say matters; their evasion matters more; and their evasion while speaking matters most. (Photo art above: LA’s new skyline?)

“The winds of change blow from the west” is the trite refrain they often invoke when justifying many an ill-conceived idea. Bullet-train, anyone? But in a year with Trumpian-force winds, LA (and San Francisco and Sacramento for that matter) is going to be tested big-time, especially when its desperate need for federal dollars is weighed against its pledge to remain a sanctuary city. And since LA is unaccustomed to being tested by outside forces, there are plenty of balls for it to drop.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-2016 is nearly over, and that means that 2017 offers immense opportunities for CityWatch writers and readers, including yours truly, to answer important questions. These are some of the stories that I am following and hope to examine in more detail. I look forward to similar research and articles from other CityWatch writers. 

CITY HALL QUESTIONS 

How extensive is corruption at Los Angeles’s City Hall? 

The LA Times Sea Breeze story of $600,000 in campaign donations to get land use decisions reversed is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg. And David Zahnizer’s front-page story on Rick Caruso’s luxury tower at the former Loehman’s site is just as important. While the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative/Measure S staff has broken smaller stories of corruption, there are undoubtedly many bigger stories waiting for careful investigation and publication. The more the better because even if Measure S does not pass in March 2017, this type of investigative reporting will play a major role in ensuring that Los Angeles is well planned. The alternative, an unplanned city, in which real estate speculators determine long-term land use patterns, is a road to municipal ruin. 

What is the residential build-out potential of Los Angeles, based on existing zoning? 

The corporate funded density hawks repeatedly argue that LA has virtually no land left for housing construction, yet the most recent City Planning reports on this exact question – from the early 1990s – concluded the exact opposite. Furthermore, we also need to know how much future housing construction and population growth can be supported by available public infrastructure and public services. 

What is really behind the “no money” excuse for the many projects and public services that elected officials and some of their advocates ignore? 

There is no shortage of low-priority budget categories that qualify for this sorry alibi: urban street trees, careful plan check and code enforcement, updated General Plan elements, sidewalk and street repairs, ADA curb cuts, street cleaning, street lights, recreation program, library hours, climate change mitigation and adaptation, bicycle infrastructure, mass transit station amenities, and much more. For these and many more projects, local government’s constant refrain is, “There is just no money,” yet big-ticket items, like the 55 percent of the City budget that funds the LAPD, go unchallenged. 

What role does local government play in increasing wealth and income inequality? 

Most fingers point to the Federal government because it largely controls tax rates, tax loopholes, minimum wage, and the safety net, such as Social Security and Medicaid. But, City Hall also plays a significant, but overlooked role. For example, every time the zone and/or General Plan designation for a piece or property densifies through spot-zoning, the site becomes considerably more valuable. Yet, this windfall is not taxed in California because most commercial property is never totally sold. Instead portions of the ownership change, allowing the property title to remain fixed and unassessed because of Proposition 13. 

Is METRO advancing mass transit for mobility or to bolster real estate speculation? 

Some scholars, like Allen Whitt, long ago argued that the fundamental purpose of urban mass transit, include MetroRail in Los Angeles, is to resuscitate real estate in older parts of town, such as Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood. Now, several decades later we are witnessing the expansion of mass transit, but with little consideration for mobility. 

In Los Angeles, the MetroRail interface with other transportation modes is missing: buses, cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. METRO has dropped the ball on this aspect of transit, while City Planning has largely limited its role to up-zoning the private parcels near existing and proposed transit stations. As a result, transit-adjacent public areas have unfunded guidelines, while individual parcels are stoked for an influx of private investment. 

ENVIROMENTAL QUESTIONS 

How is climate change related to economic activity? 

The popular press presents the climate change “debate” as climate scientists on one side and climate change deniers on the other side. This supposed debate is then reduced to one bid question: do humans cause climate change or is it a natural fluctuation? But this this simplistic approach sees the forest and misses the trees. This is because it doesn’t examine the diverse carbon footprints of our planet’s eight billion humans. It equates the carbon footprint of those living in squalor on $2 or less per day with executives of fossil fuel companies, living in energy-intensive estates, driving big cars, and flying on highly polluting planes. 

Will driverless electric cars reduce our carbon footprint? 

Companies such as Tesla and Google tout their driverless and electric cars as a miracle cure for congestion and Green House Gases. But this is a dubious claim for several reasons. First, better cars perpetuate the entire built environment based on cars: the entire car manufacturing process, roads, parking lots, and car-oriented buildings, especially big box retail and shopping centers. 

Second, better cars mean each car uses less energy, but the automobile companies still expand overall production. For example, Toyota does not use the profits from the Prius to make a better bicycle, but to branch out to the Prius C and Prius V. Instead of one Prius model there are now three, as well as other Toyota models with hybrid engines, such as the Camry. As a result overall energy consumption is still expanding. 

A FINAL WORD FOR THE NEW YEAR 

CityWatch readers, in 2017 please share your information about these and other important and overlooked stories. We may have meager resources, but crowd-sourcing our knowledge can and will be the antidote to the neglect of the mainstream, corporate media.

(Dick Platkin reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch. Please send any questions, comments, or corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LA GOVERNMENT WATCH-Over this past year, our contributions to CityWatch have focused on a disturbing pattern that has shown how elements of our Los Angeles City government have been working against the public interest for years. Here’s a re-cap of what needs to change as we move into 2017: 

1. No sole source contracts or private sales of surplus property under any condition. No exceptions. No contracts let without Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Apart from being required by law, they are the life blood of good government, because they secure the best value for the public, while also ensuring that every member of that public gets a clean shot at winning contracts. The same is true of public auctions of surplus property. 

2. No closed sessions of the City Council -- for any reason -- not even those permitted by the Brown Act (i.e. litigation, real estate negotiations and so on.) 

3. No attorney-client privilege for Officers of the City (except in their capacities as private citizens.) Again, all litigation -- regardless of the dollar amount -- should be conducted in open session. This would help prevent the kind of prolonged litigation that has recently cost the City over $250 million. 

4. No contracting with secretive LLCs. If you want to do business with Los Angeles, you have to take your mask off. It is preposterous how many entities there are with whom the City currently does business without knowing the most basic of facts about them, including the precise identity of the owner. 

5. No enforcement role for the Ethics Commission. Campaign finance laws etc. should be enforced by the DA. The Enforcement Division of the Ethics Commission routinely violates the Constitutional rights of members of the public. The part of the Ethics Commission that maintains the database of donations etc. should be kept intact. 

6. No absolute power for the City Council President in making committee assignments. Such power gives the President too much leverage over the rest of the Council and results in a stifling of debate (because everyone has to tow the line or suffer retaliation.) 

7. No use of parking fines in the General Fund. Such fines, not to exceed $35, should go to a fund used exclusively for infrastructure projects. 

8. No back-room lawsuit settlements. These are used as a way to kick-back money to the plaintiff. Settlements need to be dealt with in open session. 

9. No further violations of Rule 93 -- violations which have resulted in the public’s cameras in City Hall that are being operated by public employees -- at the direction of Herb Wesson – so that the members of the public are videotaped from a face-obscuring distance. 

10. No commencing of City Council meetings with the settling of liens against members of the public who suffer humiliation and unspeakably huge monetary penalties.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer. Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.