NO ON MEASURE RRR--The Water and Power Associates opposes Measure RRR on the November 8 ballot. 

Here’s why: If passed, it will amend the City Charter to seriously change the governance of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. 

We concur that reducing political interference in LADWP’s business activities would be a positive step. However, the proposed Charter changes do no such thing. Instead, these amendments would transfer the City Council’s oversight over water and power rates to LADWP’s bureaucracy. This would quash the appropriate governmental oversight of the policies and performance of this vital asset of the City of Los Angeles, while conveniently deflecting voter outrage for increased rates. We also believe that the proposed amendments would encourage, not deter political interference. 

On July 1, 2000, the last major revisions to the City Charter dealing with the LADWP were implemented. They culminated from the activities of two separate commissions, one appointed and the other elected, working over a period of two years with extensive and open public input. In the previous Charter Amendment process, the public knew exactly what they were voting for. 

By contrast, these measures were prepared in the proverbial smoke-filled room, with little public involvement, and they allow changes to the Civil Service Procedures through future Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) between the labor unions and the LADWP, which the public is not privy to, subject to generic and non-specific requirements. 

The LADWP currently operates under a number of constraints that were approved through the same proposed MOU process, which the public would probably not have approved of, such as: required union approval of all contracts affecting union membership; a requirement that all employees affected by contracting out be offered a minimum of 10% overtime; and the Letter of Agreement granting generous Longevity Pay Bonuses originally intended to go only to linemen – a group traditionally difficult to attract and retain – which were extended to 86 different easy-to-retain civil service classes such as painters, roofers and plumbers. 

Allowing an open-ended MOU process, which the public is not invited to, to determine how the LADWP is run is not the appropriate process for making such major changes as substantially modifying the Civil Service System. 

The Associates agree that LADWP needs to be able to streamline but work within the Civil Service System; improve flexibility in hiring and promoting qualified candidates; and be able to fill positions in a timely manner. The proposed amendment, as written, could change many Department jobs from Civil Service status to “At Will” status and open the door to political appointments rather than merit-based appointments. The proposal also allows the Council to delegate the salary setting authority to the LADWP Board. 

In the 1930s, Los Angeles recalled Mayor Frank Shaw and convicted his brother and Aide Joe Shaw, for selling civil service jobs and promotions in order to fatten the campaign coffers of Mayor Shaw. While we are not accusing anyone of planning such activities, Measure RRR makes them possible. Allowing open-ended changes to this system, which has safeguarded the City from corruption for nearly a century, with neither thorough analysis nor full public participation is not the way to accomplish this. It benefits neither the LADWP nor other City Departments to curtail the interdepartmental transfers that would occur with the removal of the Civil Service System from the LADWP, as allowed in this Charter change. 

As stated in the Ralph M Brown Act, 1953 -- “The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.” 

The Department needs reforms, but they should not be left in the hands of the unions and politicians.   The Associates recommend that Measure RRR be rejected at the ballot box.

(Edward A. Schlotman is President of Water and Power Associates, Inc. Water and Power Associates, a non-profit corporation, was established in 1971 to inform and educate its members, public officials and the general public on critical water and energy issues affecting the citizens of Los Angeles, of Southern California and of the State of California. It also promotes preservation of the history of how the development of water and energy has affected the development of Los Angeles and California.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

 THE CITY--‘As I was going up the stair … I met a man who wasn’t there … He wasn’t there again today … Oh, how I wish he’d go away.’ 

This old rhyme states, in a nutshell, the way I think most people view the matter of homelessness in our country. Perhaps now, more than at any time since the Great Depression, significant numbers of Americans are living on the street. Certainly in Los Angeles, homelessness has grown to epidemic proportions. 

In all the years (nearly 40) I’ve been in southern California, the homeless have been present. I lived and worked for a long time in and near downtown Long Beach. My neighbors and I knew many of those who populated our streets. Some were considered to be colorful characters, harmless enough and not really much of a problem. The seriously-disturbed and aggressive panhandlers were rare and seemed not to be around for long. 

I moved across the bay to San Pedro and there, too, was a relatively small population of homeless. They congregated in a particular area of downtown and, for the most part, weren’t considered to be much more than a nuisance; a problem easily avoided. 

And then came the recession. Many lost their homes and never got another one. Social services and government felt the pinch, too. Even now, those with jobs are often hard pressed to afford the rent. As a consequence, we see the homeless hanging out in front of our organic food markets and sleeping on bus benches normally occupied by the people who clean our houses. Occasionally, suburban sensibilities are shocked when someone in a nice neighborhood looks out the window and sees a dilapidated vehicle inhabited by a scruffy individual who may not have seen a bar of soap in weeks or months. 

Spend some time online at Facebook and other social media sites and you will come to the conclusion that, for most commentators, the problem is not that people are homeless, it’s that they are visible. In my community, the response of the vocal majority of the ninety-nine-and-a-half percent who are not homeless is to dehumanize the homeless. These folks delight in posting pictures of the obviously mentally ill and calling them names. All homeless are lumped together as a class that is intellectually and morally bereft. According to the “commentariat,” the homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless. 

The good burghers’ solution for this situation: make the homeless disappear. Send them somewhere else. This is the ultimate NIMBY position -- not in my backyard, not in my neighbor’s backyard, not in my neighbor’s neighbor’s backyard. 

My city councilmember and his homelessness task force recently proposed opening a “navigation center” providing storage for the property of the homeless and offering them services. The suggested location on a commercial street was met with a barrage of criticism from the surrounding area. A public meeting to explain the plan was mobbed by a few hundred angry residents whose answer to everything was a resounding “no.” 

There are as many “solutions” as there are homeless individuals. I don’t know what the best ones are. But I do know what the worst one is: pretending it’s not your problem and wishing it away.

(Doug Epperhart is publisher, a longtime neighborhood council activist and former Board of Neighborhood Commissioners commissioner. He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected]) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

SOUTH OF THE TEN-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has hit the campaign trail. This past weekend he popped into Arizona to attend a campaign rally for a local candidate running for Sheriff. Normally this wouldn't interest me but a Twitter account I follow made a big deal of who the mayor was campaigning against, along with the t-shirt he was wearing that promoted an anti-police group. 

The Twitter account, @Near_Chaos, has a passion for reporting on the goings-on at the weekly sideshow called the LAPD Police Commission meetings. The meetings themselves appear not to have any merit -- loved ones of the deceased cannot get answers, nor can the Commission really reform the beleaguered department. 

At the core of the weekly ruckus are members of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Members publicly protest what they and many others view as the continued disproportionate rate of excessive force used on people of the South LA community.  

BLM Members have camped outside the mayor's house in Hancock Park and City Hall. News vans spotted a cleanup crew at Getty House after it was hit with dozens of eggs. Some have been arrested trying to get the mayor's attention to this issue, to which he responds by either slipping out the back door or publishing an empty column in an urban periodical. And he’s also appointed African-Americans to key positions within his office – all this while supporting Chief Charlie Beck, who has yet to publicly reprimand any of the officers named for shooting an unarmed citizen. 

Back to this past weekend. 

Mayor Garcetti was recorded on social media at a campaign event for Maricopa County Sheriff candidate Paul Penzone, who is running against the infamous “Sheriff Joe” Arpaio. See video here.  

Garcetti prefaced his speech by referring to his strong roots in Arizona and commented that his family still resides there. He further commented that “Sheriff Arpaio is wasting taxpayer money” with his policing policies. Sheriff Joe is well known for racially profiling the Latinos in the area. 

Arpaio styles himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff." He has been accused of abuse of power, misuse of funds, failure to investigate sex crimes, improper clearance of cases, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, and election law violations. He is currently facing criminal contempt proceedings. 

Maricopa county taxpayers are paying $4.5 million for Arpaio's legal defense fees, related to the racial profiling and open defiance of a federal judge who ordered he change his policies. Sheriff Joe did not comply and is now facing contempt charges. 

At some point during his visit, Mayor Eric donned a t-shirt that read, "Arrest Sheriff Joe," while standing next to a woman whose shirt read, "Arrest Arpaio Not the People.”  

The t-shirts fund a group called "Bazta Arpaio.” Citing 150 deaths in the jails and $140 million in related lawsuits, the group implores you to either donate money and/or buy a shirt to support their cause of ousting the Sheriff. Will Mayor Eric help BLM raise funds to oust him and Charlie Beck? 

Somehow the mayor has time to address the needs of the Latino community in another state, yet has no time to address the problems in his own backyard. The mayor is clearly sending mixed signals as it relates to his position on police abuse, both local and nationwide.  

LAPD recently came out from being under a federal decree, spearheaded by Connie Rice during the Riordan and Villaraigosa administrations. Through her nonprofit, the Advancement Project, she has joined other community activists in South LA by declaring a “state of emergency” in Los Angeles, related to the latest cases of police abuse.  

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s actions are line with an elected official who sympathizes with those who are victims of police brutality. Unfortunately, he is not brave enough to say it here at home and to use his political power in the way he flaunts it in other cities. On the other hand, perhaps his last two LAPD Police Commission appointments are saying it themselves via their actions during the PC meetings. 

Stay tuned.

(Melissa Hébert lives in Inglewood, CA, and blogs on community and political issues on 2urbangirls.com and is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. ) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BUTCHER ON STATE PROPS-My oldest son, Matthew Benjamin Butcher, was murdered in a Los Angeles medical marijuana dispensary on June 24, 2010. It is in his name and his memory that I offer a few political recommendations on California’s statewide initiatives – to fight gun violence (Yes on 63), repeal the death penalty (Yes on 62), and legalize marijuana (Yes on 64). 

The LA District Attorney could have prosecuted Matthew’s murderer as a death penalty case. The men who killed him had finished robbing the store, packed the marijuana and cash into their car, took the computer and the security feed it was tracking, and left. Cruelly and senselessly, they came back, put Matthew and the young security officer who was also working that day on their stomachs on top of each other, and shot them both in the back of the head.

The men who did this deserve to die. 

But not at my hands. 

The DA could’ve justified the death penalty.

I’m glad she decided not to. 

Inmate A53710 is serving his life sentences in Calipatria State Prison and Inmate # A54227 is in Salinas Valley. If the other murderers are ever caught, we’ll endure another trial. Otherwise, that’s it.

We’re done. 

I’ve heard too many wrenching stories about the families of murder victims suffering through trial after appeal after trial. The decision not to pursue ours as a death penalty case saved us from all that and for that I am thankful; between the combined compassion of our prosecutor, now Judge, Deborah Brazil, and the amazing workers of the LA County Victims-Witnesses program, I never had to look at pictures of Matthew dead. Don identified him for the police on the night he was killed and while it may seem like a small thing, I’d prefer not to have that image floating forever through my already too vivid imagination.

Way bigger for me is what I’ve learned about the death penalty, jurors, and humans.

I’ll never forget how I felt the day our jury reached their quick, unambiguous verdict: 

“I watched the jury every day. From the days they tried to get out of it through the tedious days of cell phone technology testimony (I object! This is boring!) Once they knew there was no getting out of it, these twelve men and women, plus four alternates, paid total attention to every bit of testimony and evidence. Finally after three weeks of trial, the jury decided quickly. Each of them called out loudly, proudly: “Guilty!” 

I met them at the elevator, stopping the jurors to thank them, to hug them. One held me and murmured: It was our pleasure. Several others simply hugged back and sincerely told me they are sorry for my loss. Beautiful Juror #7 with the golden hair said yes when I asked if she’s a mom. Juror #8 bent his big bulk down for my hug as I told him he looks like Steven, Matthew’s “little” brother! 

I want to buy the jurors drinks, thank them for doing the right thing. I promise to respond promptly to every jury duty notice I get from now on, in honor of the jury in Department 102!

Justice be served.” 

- Mother follows Echo Park pot shop murder trial to its conclusion, The Eastsider, November 21, 2013. 

It was in that same news article that I understood the upside of it not being a death penalty case:

“Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty in this case,” said District Attorney spokeswoman Jane Robison. “That means that when the defendants return on Jan. 10 for sentencing, they will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.’” 

And they were. On January 10, 2014, the men who murdered Matthew were held to account. 

It turns out the reason the DA opted not to pursue the death penalty is because Los Angeles juries – LA jurors, that is – are loathe to vote for it. Even jurors who know the accused is guilty without a doubt. LA juries, apparently, reportedly have a really hard time voting to kill another human being. 

I find that so life affirming.

And counter to the opinion of other Butchers, it leaves me determinedly opposing the death penalty, in Matthew’s name, because of what I learned in the process of getting him a tiny bit of justice. 

There are many good arguments against the death penalty, and I’d likely oppose it even if not for our experience watching up close. The cost, the cruelty, the lack of deterrent, the ridiculous mechanics of actually executing human beings, the Constitution.

Who am I to make that determination? (The beautiful LA jury phenomenon!)

What if I’m/we’re wrong?!? 

On May 1, 1989, Donald Trump ran this ad in the New York Daily News, calling for the death penalty for the “Central Park 5.”: "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY!"  

They were innocent! 

The cynical might argue that what I find optimistic and deeply moral about Los Angeles jurors might simply be distrust of the police, and they might be correct, in whole or part; we all need to work on that. For us, the LAPD and the County of Los Angeles did their jobs in service of justice. 

The world only spins forward. I’m voting Yes on 62 to repeal the death penalty in California. I’m also gonna vote against the initiative which would speed up executions (No on 66). 

Also, in Matthew’s memory, it’s time to legalize pot. I’m voting Yes on 64! 

And finally, anything we can do to limit guns and gun violence is a yes for me! Proposition 63 is a novel, good idea and I’m voting Yes! 

I’d love to participate in intelligent discussion on these and the other statewide initiatives. I made a chart (below) using the Haiku descriptions of the measures written so very cleverly by our friend Damian Carroll.

Damian also did the local props (he is so smart and funny!) 

Everyone knows how wrong I think Los Angeles City Charter Amendment Measure RRR: DWP ‘Reform’ Charter Amendment RRR: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!  

I love that Hillel Aron has named it the “Pirate Initiative” in his recent LA Weekly treatment: Pirate DWP Reform Ballot Measure RRR Has Some Going, "WTF?!"  (For the sake of accuracy, I was the GM of legacy local SEIU 347 and a Regional Director for SEIU 721.) 

The spending info here is from Ballotpedia, financials that were updated as of October 2, 2016.

+ Spending for Propositions 65 & 67 are reported as combined campaigns. 

** Measures 58 and 59 were put on the ballot by the legislature so there’s no ballot access cost data. 

 (Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch, is a retired union leader and is now enjoying Riverside and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUE TRANSIT SUPPORTERS-I’ve been taking a bit more transit than usual these days, as a bit of a change of pace from pedaling the Brompton absolutely everywhere. 

My changes of pace, by the way, never involve a private motor car, which I drive four or five times a year under marital duress; I’ve put in enough miles behind the windshield -- that is to say, over a quarter-million or so -- to know exactly what I’m missing by avoiding the driver’s seat, and it is absolutely nothing. Physical and emotional stultification just don’t tickle my innards. 

So there I was on the Wilshire Rapid, making good time to my dentist’s office in SaMo, when we crossed Westwood Boulevard. And of course the intersection hosted a lineup of people on bikes, waiting to proceed to UCLA. A cyclist had just gotten off the bus, presumably for the same purpose; bikes were rolling up and down Wilshire; and the bike racks around the intersection were full to overflowing. 

It naturally brought to mind the lack of bike lanes connecting UCLA with the new Expo Line station at Westwood. This vacuity comes to us, of course, courtesy of chair-warmer District 5 council member Paul Koretz, who has been kowtowing so vigorously to a cabal of Cheviot Hills homeowners that he probably needs a live-in chiropractor. The Chevioteers failed in their attempt to block the entire Expo Line -- yes, they tried to hold the entire western half of LA County hostage to their fear of “those people” crowding onto the train to steal their porch decks -- but cyclists are an easier target than ethnic groups, especially since “cyclist” is often (in white pseudo-suburbia) a code word for “dark.” 

Saving car lanes and parking was the ostensible excuse, but that excuse flew out the window when Ryan Snyder presented a bike lane plan that removed no car lanes or parking, cleverly entitled the “Remove Nothing Plan.”  

“Remove Nothing went nowhere. Koretz and his puppeteers ignored it, and Koretz went further, saying he would permit no study to be made of any plan including bikeways of any sort on the southern portion of Westwood. 

People will be riding bicycles on Westwood anyway, and probably slowing traffic in a way they wouldn’t with a bikeway in place. Angelenos old and young, of every shade, will want to get from the Expo Line to UCLA, and, of course, the many delectable restaurants along the way. Fewer will choose to do so lacking a bikeway; a number of those will opt to use cars, further clogging traffic. Stoopid, ain’t it? Opportunity misplaced. 

I won’t call it a lost opportunity, though, because I think we can find it again, and soon; it hasn’t been lost, but simply hidden from view for a while. After all, Jesse Creed is running against Koretz for the council seat in CD5, and he is a strong supporter of transportation choices, including bikeways. He himself endeavors to pedal anywhere within a two-mile radius of home. 

Remember that, come March and the election. If you live in CD5, Creed’s the real deal. (Photo above, left.) 

Naturally, if you live in CD1, the home district of this blog, its Joe Bray-Ali, running to retire “Roadkill Gil” Cedillo. (Photo above, right.) 

If you live anywhere else, send a little cash to these two gentlemen. Two more progressive voices added to Huizar’s on the city council might be enough to transform LA. No more rubber stamp votes against the future! Bray-Ali and Creed for City Council! 

Grass roots vs. trickle down: which side are you on?

(Richard Risemberg is a writer. His current professional activities are focused on sustainable development and lifestyle. This column was posted first at Flying Pigeon.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOICES-At a time when Los Angeles City is asking the taxpayers to approve a $1.2 billion bond measure for supportive homeless housing, our Governor continues to refuse to declare homelessness a "State of Emergency" in California – an action that would release $500 million immediately from the rainy day fund. 

How can this Governor close his eyes to the tens of thousands of his citizens, allowing them to sleep in alleys, streets and behind dumpsters…eating from garbage cans and defecating on themselves and on the streets? 

It is time for everyone to light up the switchboards at the Governor’s office and the offices of all our state elected officials, demanding they declare a "State of Emergency" and release the funds. 

And while we are at it.... 

Why is Los Angeles City asking for $1.2 billion when Prop 30 has $2.1 billion already segregated for the same cause, in addition to the availability of half a billion dollars in rainy day funds? 

All this tells me is there is no serious plan and no real political will to end homelessness. 

Remember, if you are not angry about homelessness, then you have just not been paying attention.

(Jay Handal served at the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment for ten months as Election Manager for the 2016 Neighborhood Council elections. He is Treasurer of the West Los Angeles Sawtelle Neighborhood Council, Co-Chair of the Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates Committee for the upcoming 2016-2017 fiscal year, and a hearing examiner for the Los Angeles Police Commission.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS--Public education supporters in Los Angeles are shocked and gratified to learn that the staff of the Los Angeles school district has recommended rejection of several charter school petitions to be considered at next week’s school board meeting. For years, it seemed there was no reason to ever expect LAUSD to reject charters and recent reports show senior district staff coordinating with Eli Broad's nonprofit to expand charter choices even as it grapples with decreasing enrollment.

The board will decide whether the staff recommendations will stand at the Tuesday, October 18 meeting. Presumably, that meeting will include heated discussion among the school board and district staff, as well as comments from charter advocates and the public. It’s common for charter schools to organize large showings of supporters at their hearings, usually with matching t-shirts.

The recommendations were posted on the district’s website on Wed. The district’s Charter Schools Division made the recommendations after facing heavy criticism for its perceived mishandling of oversight responsibilities in the wake of financial scandals at El Camino Real Charter High School.

The recommendation which has drawn the most speculation is the one to approve the issuance of a Notice of Intent to Revoke the charter of El Camino Real.

Staff has also recommended the denial of the renewal of three Magnolia Science Academy Schools, part of the Gulen chain of charters which are associated with the Turkish Imam suspected of organizing a coup against the government of Turkey. That California chain has been under fire since a legal complaint was filed last February, calling on the California Department of Education to investigate. The complaint was first reported on the PSconnect blog.  It cited more than accusations, and included findings made in a state audit such as 69% of Magnolia's financial transactions being unaccounted for; that Magnolia routinely awarded large contracts to vendors with overlapping connections to their own employees and board of directors; and that Magnolia had illegally used hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to pay for visas for Turkish nationals. A report in today’s Los Angeles Times shows that number is closer to $1 million. 

Other charter proposals facing the new wrath of the LAUSD: WISH Charter is hoping to add more grades to its school. Citizens of the World wants an additional school and to grow an existing school. Celerity Dyad and Celerity Troika schools are petitioning to renew their charters. Staff is recommending that the board reject all those petitions.

It is unprecedented in recent memory for the LAUSD staff to recommend rejection of so many charters since the district began instituting market based reforms years ago. A top priority of so-called reformers is charter school expansion, and the wind has been at their backs. One year, LAUSD voted for 67 out of 72 charters. California lifted its cap on charters when Netflix founder Reed Hastings forced the California legislature to accept a measure similar to the one currently on Massachusetts' November ballot. Senator Elizabeth Warren has taken a stand against that measure, called Question 2, and it's more and more common to see criticism of charter schools in major news outlets. The Washington Post recently published two pieces (here  and here) by the Network for Public Education's Executive Director, Carol Burris. Capital and Main, a leading Sacramento political blog, has been posting a series (here and here) featuring the billionaires funding California's charter industry, and the NAACP has recommended its board pass a moratorium on new charters. (Diane Ravitch posted phone numbers to call to express support for the moratorium.) 

Whether next week’s agenda represents the beginning of a reversal of fortune for the charter juggernaut in Los Angeles remains to be seen.

(Karen Wolfe is a public school parent, the Executive Director of PS Connect and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.)

-cw

PLAYTIME AT CalPERS (Part 1)--Grab a cup of coffee - this one’s a bit long. CalPERS and other public pension plans have had a rough go of it in recent months, Mostly, the Federal Reserve’s policy of 0% interest & buying back toxic financial assets on the taxpayers dime, has managed to wreck the investment assumptions of public pensions. 

As the long term assumptions of return on investment go significantly down, there is a necessary increase in the employer/employee contributions to the system, in order to keep their long term payoff ability intact. This puts Cities, Counties, & Special Districts on the hook for a higher percentage of their annual budget going to pay CalPERS, and the media has by and large responded with hit pieces about ‘greedy public employees’. 

Why’s Everybody Pickin’ On CalPERS?

As the 800 pound gorilla of the public pension world, CalPERS seems to have become the poster boy for hit pieces, even though the articles tend to ignore the basic math that all defined benefit plans are trying to deal with. Lower returns. So when the New York Times does a hit piece on CalPERS, I don’t pay too much attention. They are probably just tired of talking about their very own Donald Trump. 

But when the Los Angeles Times starts a multi part investigatory series on “the consequences of an historic expansion of retirement benefits for California public employees”, you know it’s a hit piece. And by the way, it is not really an LA Times series -- it is billed as a collaboration with something called CALmatters and an associated radio station, Capital Public Radio. 

As near as I can figure it out from their website, CALmatters is an attempt to provide California political news for sale much as the AP & Reuters do. It looks to me like the Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times owners are engaging in even more cost cutting of staff & using deals like this to provide the illusion of investigatve reporting. Sheesh. 

Anyhow, about this series of articles on CalPERS. Since it is clear that CalPERS itself incapable of explaining, much less defending, itself, I thought someone should at least explain what CalPERS is, who’s on their Board, who’s on their staff, how they function (or all too often don’t function), so that people can make up their own minds about the agency.

To provide context, a lot of the articles to date have implied that CalPERS should be ‘privitatized’ into 401(k) type plans. Oh yeah, that works. Just ask me and an entire generation what happened to their 401 plans (not to mention real estate values) when the financial collapse of 2007/08 took place. A lot of us watched instant decreases of around 40% of the value in our ‘retirement portfolio’. Many of my friends will never be able to retire, and will work until they die or get too sick to work. 

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems at CalPERS. There are. But to understand their dysfunction, it is necessary to take a look at how the giant $300 Billion plan that impacts over 1 million beneficiaries & their dependents actually operates. Both at a Board of Directors level and at a staff level.

The LA Times Article

You can read the first LA Times article here. Their central thesis is that then Governor Pete Wilson was desperate to find money since the State was broke, and wanted to gain control of the State’s retirement fund, CalPERS. Gee whiz. Every desperate politician that I can remember has wanted to do the same thing. Pete’s scheme involved taking over the actuarial function of the Plan so he could diddle the numbers, and to be able to directly appoint a majority of the CalPERS Board to validate the fix.  

The article then goes on to imply that the Unions response was to launch an preemptive ballot measure in 1992 (Proposition 162) which wound up meaning that “pension directors were no longer required to balance benefits with costs.”   They also characterized CalPERS doing it’s own actuarial projections was somehow suspect and found it “quite independent” as if that’s a bad thing.   

Honestly , the article is largely much ado about nothing. You could argue that by having sole and exclusive control over actuarial projections, the CalPERS Board has an extremely high fiduciary duty to be very conservative and prudent with their numbers. And the language which talked about the Board’s duties to beneficiaries taking “precedence” also says that they have to “minimize employer contributions thereto”, a balancing offset. 

Finally, Proposition 162 in no way changed the composition of the Board, nor did it change the appointment/election process of any of the seats. 

Ok, so I find the Times article misleading. What then, does the Board of CalPERS really look like? 

Composition of the CalPERS Board

In almost all public sector pension plans in California that I’m aware of, the Board of Directors structure is carefully set up to provide that the number of elected Public Employee Members are less than the number of appointed Board members, and the total of both is always an odd sum - like 13 in the case of CalPERS. This to avoid tie votes and to guarantee that the management “grown-ups” will ultimately be able to control the majority vote. 

At least that’s the theory. In the case of CalPERS, here’s how the appointment process works for the Board of Administration: 

6 members are elected - 1 elected by school members, 1 elected by retired members, 2 elected by active and retired members, 1 elected by public agency members, and 1 elected by state members. 

4 members are ‘ex officio’, a fancy way of saying that they automatically have a seat by virtue of their public office. Those officials are the State Treasurer, State Personnel Board designee, Director of Human Resources for the State, and the State Controller. In the case of these officials, the actual person sitting on the CalPERS Board is usually one of a number of designated staff members, and they can rotate. 

2 members are appointed by the Governor. One Represents the Insurance Industry, and the other represents local government. 

1 ‘public’ member is appointed jointly by the Assembly & Senate of the State. 

The Elected Members

Of the 6 elected members, two are pretty much straight up Union folks. 

Rob Feckner, current President of the Board, is elected by school members of CalPERS. He is out of CSEA (California School Employees Association), and is the longest serving Board member, going back to 1999. He’s been working for the Napa Valley USD for some 39 years as a ‘glazing specialist’, which should tell you how hot he is for power. Most of us would have retired a long time gone. 

Henry Jones is Vice-President, and holds the retired CalPERS members seat. He is a product of that exemplar of fiscal prudence, the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he was their Chief Financial Officer and retired in 1998. He has ‘only’ been on the CalPERS Board for some 8 years, but evidently the lust for power has overtaken him as well, since he recently and unsuccessfully challenged Rob Feckner for the post ion of President of CalPERS. 

Theresa Taylor was elected in 2015 to represent state members on the Board. She is Secretary-Treasurer of the very large SEIU Local 1000 (Service Employees International Union), as well as being on their State Council Executive Board. She works for the Franchise Tax Board & lives in Carmichael. 

There are also 3 other directly elected Board members. Pyria Mathur is the elected member from public agency members (read employers), and has been around since 2003. She has worked for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit District) since 1998, and prior to that worked as a consultant massaging Municipal Bonds. 

The last 2 elected members are elected by all CalPERS members at large. First is Michael Bilbrey, who works for the Bookstore at Citrus Community College in Glendora. He also is a past-president of CSEA, which makes him the second straight up Union type.

And finally we have JJ Jelincic, the second at-large elected member. JJ has been on the Board since 2010. Interestingly, he works directly for CalPERS, and once upon a time was President of the California State Employees Association, which was largely supplanted by SEIU after the State passed a collective bargaining law for state employees (SEERA). JJ is my favorite Board member, since he knows where some of the bodies are buried, and actually asks honest and direct questions of both the Board, and even scarier, the paid CalPERS staff. More on the paid staff in a follow up article. 

JJ’s actions have caused the Board and staff to try and marginalize him, thus exposing their true siege mentality & lack of intestinal fortitude. To demonstrate that I’m not making this up, check out this article at Calpensions.

The Ex-Officio Members

Of the 4 ex-officio members, clearly the grown-up in the group is John Chiang, currently the State Treasurer, and one of the few technically competent elected officials in the State of California. Prior to this position, he served as State Controller, and on the Board of Equalization. Unfortunately for us, he is currently busy in running for Governor when Jerry Brown terms out. His usual designee, Grant Boyken, has engaged in some seriously questionable acts regarding legislation sponsored by Chiang that directly impacts CalPERS private equity interests, while he (Boyken) sat on the Board as representative of the Treasurer. 

Richard Gillihan is a member because he’s the head of the State’s Department of Human Resources, where he acts as the State’s employer of record for all collective bargaining matters, including pension reform. He was appointed by Governor Brown in 2014, and has been of the CalPERS Board since then. He remains a mystery to me, in that as an HR Director, he clearly knows better as he passively allows the staff of CalPERS to violate many basic principles in their hiring and personnel practices.  

Betty Yee is the current State Controller, and as such sits on the Board. She’s sort of following in Chiang’s footsteps, having started out with the Board of Equalization before becoming Controller. For whatever reason, she rarely personally shows up at CalPERS Board meetings, sending a designee who tends to go along to get along. 

The final ex-officio member is Richard Costigan, who represents the California State Personnel Board. Mr. Costigan is a type we are all familiar with - professional pol. He comes from Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, one of the seriously big time political lobbyist law firms. After working in the assembly as Chief of Staff to a couple of minority leaders (read Republican), he jumped up as Deputy Chief of Staff and legislative affairs secretary for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was elected as the State Personnel Board’s representative in late 2010, and continues to hold that position as we speak. He, of all people, should know how this stuff works and be more vocal.  

The Appointees

There are three appointed members to fill out the 13. Two are directly appointed by the Governor, and one is appointed jointly by the Assembly & the Senate. 

First there is Dana Hollinger, the Insurance Industry Representative, appointed by the Governor in 2014 to the CalPERS Board. Her public resume says virtually nothing other than she is a 25 year veteran of the life insurance industry, and “is a sought after speaker”. She got a JD from Southwestern, her insurance group The Hollinger Group is based in Century City, and she’s licensed in Beverly Hills :-).

The second gubernatorial appointee is Bill Slaton, first appointed in 2012. He originally came out of IBM in the seventies, handled structured asset financing for public agencies with particular emphasis on IT projects, and was on the Board of two Northern California community banks. He is on the high profile SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District), where he was President for two terms and is currently Vice-President. 

The final appointee is Ron Lind, jointly appointed by the Assembly & Senate. Wouldn’t you like to know how that one gets handled:-). Anyhow, Mr. Lind comes via a large private sector union, the UFCW (United Food & Commercial Workers) in the Bay area. He was appointed in 2013, and stepped down from his union positions - UFCW International, California Labor Federation, South Bay Labor Council, and the Northern California UFCW Employers Pension Fund - in 2014. 

So There You Have It - the CalPERS Board of Administration

I should be clear that I do not personally know any of these people. This article was derived from publically available information, and notes from some prior articles I”ve written about CalPERS over the last couple of years. 

It is important to know who these 13 Board members are, however, as we go forward and analyze their actions, and their interactions with CalPERS staff. As should be apparent from these brief descriptions, the composition and range of the CalPERS Board members is a lot more complex than advertised in the Times article.  

The second part of this series will be about the staff of the agency, their history and how the interactions between the staff and the Board take place. Also by then further articles from the LA Times series should have appeared. 

Stay tuned.

(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.)

-cw

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-If you think a Hillary Clinton administration, even with another Great Recession and the Democrats in control of Congress, will result in an Urban New Deal, don’t hold your breath. It is not going to happen. This is why. 

Part of the story is the steady decline of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years. It does not just consist of negative campaigning and shallow debates, rigging the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders, smearing Dr. Jill Stein; endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya; flooding the Middle East with US weaponry; and unleashing aerial death squads called drone missiles. Nor is it just mass incarceration of US citizens and refugees, wholehearted support of fracking, and record levels of deportations. 

Less obviously, the Democratic Party’s downward trajectory also includes the total abandonment of the urban programs it once championed, such as public housing. As evidenced by the White House’s recent position paper on affordable housing, as well as a succession of ineffective affordable housing programs in Los Angeles from the 1980s to date, the party’s urban policy has imploded into unrestrained capitalism, also called urban neo-liberalism.  

Long gone are urban programs that included public investment in infrastructure and services, as well as careful regulation of private investment. Since the days of LA Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1980s to date, from Washington, DC, to LA’s City Hall, the Democratic Party’s approach has been a three-legged stool: jettison zoning and environmental laws, abolish government housing programs, and bend over backwards for glad-handing real estate speculators. When challenged, they invariably resort to name-calling. Their critics are always NIMBYs, not supporters of strong planning and environmental regulation. 

So, let’s get into the specifics, including the House LA approach now underway at LA’s City Hall. 

More Revelations from the Mountain Top: Straight from Washington, DC, the Obama Administration has issued a White House Housing Development Toolkit. It identifies two barriers to affordable housing production: local zoning and environmental laws. It never mentions that the U.S. has been in a perpetual housing crisis for the past 40 years and that this crisis coincides with the wholesale elimination of Federal housing programs in the 1970s and 1980s. 

As for the White House’s solutions, they are the same market-based mantras that have been recited by real estate speculators since today’s boomer retirees started paying off their student loans. I have listed them below, with my plain English translation written in italics. 

• Establishing by-right development. (Up-zone commercial properties to avoid discretionary zoning applications, environmental reviews, public notices, public hearings, and appeals.) 

• Taxing vacant land or donate it to non-profit developers. (Thirty years ago Mayor Tom Bradley called for using the air rights above City parking lots for affordable housing.) 

• Streamlining or shortening permitting processes and timelines. (Cutting corners for well-connected real estate investors.) 

• Eliminate off-street parking requirements. (Under-park apartments before a mass transit system is in place.)

• Allowing accessory dwelling units. (Turn single-family homes into duplexes without upgrading public facilities and infrastructure to accommodate a population increase.) 

• Establishing density bonuses. (Allow developers to get free variances in exchange for a handful of unverified affordable units.) 

• Enacting high-density and multifamily zoning. (Permit apartment houses in single-family neighborhoods without upgrading infrastructure and services.) 

• Employing inclusionary zoning. (Require new market-rate apartment buildings to include a small percentage of uninspected affordable units.) 

• Establishing development tax or value capture incentives. (Allow developers of market housing to pay an in lieu fee for off-site affordable units.) 

• Using property tax abatements. (In addition to Prop. 13 provisions that freeze most commercial property taxes to late 1970 rates, any increase in assessed valuations would also be exempt from property taxes.) 

It is my contention, especially for Los Angeles, these programs did not work several decades ago, and they will not work now. The simple reason is that the private sector has never been able to meet the housing needs of lower-income Americans. You can easily enrich the crony capitalists buzzing around elected officials intoxicated by the sweet nectar of laissez faire capitalism, but the cumulative, long-term result is dismal. After several decades, these market schemes have only managed to build a tiny fraction of the affordable housing needed in the United States. In fact, the situation is now so bad that every county in the entire county has an affordable housing shortage.  

Bradley Administration: To understand House LA, we need to step back in time to the Tom Bradley administration, when LA first acknowledged that it had an affordable housing crisis. Like the Depression, in the 1980s, only one family in five could afford to buy a home, 200,000 families were doubled or tripled up, 40,000 families lived in garages, and 150,000 families were homeless at some point in a year. 

Initially slow to respond, Mayor Bradley eventually made it clear that the crisis resulted from the extensive cutbacks in urban programs that began during the Nixon-Ford years (1968-1976), and only got worse under Carter (1976-1980), Bush 1 (1980-84), and Clinton (1984-1992). By the late 1980s, nearly all Federal urban programs, especially housing, had been eliminated. This era marked the end of New Deal liberalism and the beginning or urban neo-liberalism: the myth that the private market could solve persistent urban problem if showered with enough deregulation and financial incentives. 

Beginning in 1988, that is exactly what Mayor Bradley undertook through a detailed proposal whose premise was a quickly discredited low-ball calculation of LA’s residential zoning potential. The Bradley program intended to eliminate environmental reviews of small and medium sized apartment houses, permit apartment houses and second units in single-family neighborhoods, demolish houses with code violations to furnish free building sites to non-profit housing corporations, impose linkage fees on new residential projects to fund affordable housing projects, and build affordable housing in the airspace above 105 city-owned parking lots, beginning with 10 prototypes. 

In response to widespread community opposition, however, the initial Bradley program was modified to include the rehabilitation homes and apartments in low-income neighborhoods and a slumlord task force to target slum properties for criminal prosecution. It also shifted the construction of affordable apartments from single-family neighborhoods to transit corridors and stations. 

The Planning Department’s updated housing calculations also revealed that Los Angeles had sufficient zoning for one million additional housing units, or 25,000 new units per year for the next 40 years. Other Planning Department estimates from the early 1990s indicated an even larger buildout potential. Based on existing zoning, Los Angeles could add nearly 5,000,000 more people, reaching a total population of 8,000,000. In the intervening 26 years, however, the City has never updated any of its zoning build out calculations. Despite claims and counter-claims, the actual changes between 1990 and 2016 are not known. 

House LA - Old Wine in New Bottles: Based on information from the Los Angeles Business Council, House LA appears to be the Los Angeles version of the White House Housing Tool Kit. It mostly repackages old, off-the-shelf market programs. Unfortunately, most of them go back nearly three decades, with little to show for themselves. As before, my translation is in italics. 

• Expansion of Expedited Processing Section in Planning. (Pay to Play: Quick zoning approvals for well-off real estate speculators.) 

• Site Plan Review Modifications. (Zoning deregulation.) 

• Permitting Micro Unit Housing (Increasing density without upgrading public services and infrastructure.) 

• Deferring Fees. (Municipal subsidies for well-connected real estate speculators, like AEG.) 

• Expanding the Use of Shared Vehicles. (Under-parking new buildings prior to the build-out of the mass transit system.) 

• Facilitating Accessory Dwelling Units for Affordable Housing. (Turning single family’s homes into duplexes without upgrading public services and infrastructure and without collecting additional property taxes.) 

• Using City-owned parking lots for affordable housing. (House LA recently added Tom Bradley’s long-neglected program to use City-owned properties, mostly parking lots, as affordable housing sites. Other than a 30 year hiatus, the only other differences is that House LA identifies 100 not parking lots and proposes 11 not 10 affordable housing sites.) 

Why so much hostility from House LA to the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative? Gil Cedillo, the City Councilmember who has campaigned for the House LA market-incentive proposals, has sharply criticized the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. But, his talking points come straight from the Astroturf funders: CH Palladium, LLC and Westfield DD&C, LLC. These Big Real Estate players have every reason to oppose an Initiative that will force the City of Los Angeles to systematically and quickly update its General Plan, including permanent bans on parcel level spot-zoning and spot-General Plan amendments. 

This is because the Palladium and Westfield business models rely on spot-zoning and spot-planning. As they scour Los Angeles for shopping center and high-rise building sites, they inevitably run into conflicts with zoning and planning ordinances. But, they could care less if their projects conflict with the character and scale of existing neighborhoods or exceed the capacity of existing infrastructure.

For them, their criterion is profitability. But, they can hardly go to the city’s voters and fess up that they oppose the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative because it impinges on their bottom line. So instead, they have created an Astroturf organization, the Coalition to Save Los Angeles Neighborhoods and Jobs, that claims spot-zoning and spot-planning is essential to the production of affordable housing. 

It doesn’t matter that they cannot identify projects from the Bradley to the Garcetti eras where affordable housing projects required zone changes and General Plan Amendments. Even their latest gambit, grabbing a hold of the Tom Bradley program of using city parking lots for affordable housing sites, is a desperate act. This is because this option has been around for nearly 30 years, has hardly ever worked, and could be easily pursued on city-owned parcels that did not require the City Council to adopt spot-zones and spot-plans. 

So, with deception in one hand, and a check in the other, they march on to block a voter initiative that would force the City of LA to properly plan, including rigorous criteria for the approval of any deviations from legally adopted plans and zones.

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He also serves on the boards of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Planning Committee. Please send comments and corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

OPENING UP THE PROCESS-The importance of women's leadership in politics is not only apparent in Democrats' selection of Hillary Clinton to run for President, but also in the candidacy of another talented woman pursuing the top leadership role in the state party in 2017. 

Kimberly Ellis, a progressive Black woman from the Bay Area city of Richmond, is running to become chair of the California Democratic Party. She heads the statewide nonprofit Emerge California and trains women candidates, some inspired by Hillary Clinton, in how to mount effective campaigns for office. She has a remarkable record in fund-raising and building her organization to equip a diverse group of women for public service. As party chair, she would succeed John Burton. 

During Burton's 8-year tenure as chair, the state party has secured its own headquarters and paid it off while championing healthcare expansion, LGBT equality, gun safety, climate protection, vaccination for all, and opposition to the death penalty. Everyone takes his calls -- perhaps to hear a revealing story of politics past, told in his signature salty language, or more likely to touch base with someone who influences politicos and shapes policies in California. 

As former state Senator Burton steps down, a political insider from LA has stepped up alongside Ellis to seek the chair's role. Eric Bauman, the senior adviser to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, is also chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee and male vice chair of the state party. 

Ellis, at age 43, is also a leader in state Democratic circles. She is recording secretary of the state party's African American Caucus and a member of the party's Finance Committee. 

But if she is a queen of empowering women candidates and African Americans, Bauman fancies himself a kingmaker. 

About to turn 58, he has the ear of many elected Democrats and personifies the bullying tactics of an old-school boss. The manner in which he peddles his influence can sometimes be a problem. In June, for instance, the Beach Cities Democratic Club in LA invited him and Ellis to address them to enlighten the club's consideration of endorsement in the contest for state Democratic Party chair. At the event, Bauman modestly claimed it was the first such speech he had given. Yet he was already listing endorsements from 16 clubs on his flyer before that meeting. Shouldn't open and even-handed opportunities to address clubs come before an endorsement -- especially for a role as weighty as state party chair when that election is still a year up the road? 

How does Bauman's style of campaigning promote inclusiveness, diversity, and participation? This is an example of old-boys' favoritism that shows how it can corrupt party politics. We give credit to the Beach Cities Democrats for actually seeking out more than one candidate. 

Using his influence, Bauman has also made connections for his own profit that have attracted the critical eye of good-government watchdogs. His consulting business, Victory Land Partners, solicited and received $12,500-per month payments from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as Pharma, to stop an initiative to reduce prescription drug prices for Californians, which turned into Proposition 61, the Drug Price Relief Act. All this happened while he drew $145,000, plus benefits, as a state employee. 

President Obama has said the big pharmaceutical companies put Americans' health at risk, writing that they "oppose any change to drug pricing, no matter how justifiable and modest, because they believe it threatens their profits." Trading on his party role for personal profit, Bauman is treading on the same thin ice that has collapsed under past operatives who put self above public service. Do we want the chair of the party to be an expert at this icky kind of manipulation? 

In contrast, Ellis has worked to make the state Democratic Party a bastion for progressive ideas and candidates. She believes that progressive voters -- including people of color, environmentalists, union members, professionals, the disabled, the elderly, millennials, the poor, the tired, those yearning to be free -- make up a largely untapped majority of the electorate. It's the job of the state Democratic Party to seek out those voters, energize them, show that elections are relevant to their interests, engage them as voters, and train promising advocates among them as the next generation of Democratic leaders. 

Commanding a reliable progressive majority in the electorate, California Democrats will have to recruit and support progressive candidates, and overcome resistance to the kind of legislation that aggressively promotes great education for all from preschool to grad school, protects the environment, revamps the criminal justice system, and promotes income equality. That's how California Democrats will write and pass the kind of legislation that can reinvigorate our public schools, our community and state colleges and universities, and our pre-kindergarten programs.
Young voters sent a message in this year's primary election about wanting an open, inclusive party that delivers on policy goals like an affordable path to a college degree for them and the next generation. Ellis is listening. 

California Democrats are about to make a major choice for state party chair. They can take a timid step to dance with the old-boys' club or a bold progressive step to dance with the future. The opportunity to select Kimberly Ellis in 2017 will follow the election this fall, when Hillary Clinton is likely to gain more than 60 percent of Californians' votes. Electing Ellis will send another strong message that the door to leadership for women and progressives in the Democratic Party is finally open.

(Delaine Eastin is a former state Superintendent of Public Instruction who served four terms in California's state Assembly. Ron Kaye is former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News who continues to advocate for honesty in public service and a better informed electorate.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOX POP--“Since I’ve been displaced, I’ve seen more people who weren’t here before. Where my house was before, now it’s a fancy condominium.” Caridad Vasquez is talking about the changes that have come upon her neighborhood in the years since Metro – Los Angeles’ transportation system – expanded its subway and light-rail services, and helped turn this working-class, traditionally Latino neighborhood into a desirable new destination for young professionals. She is a long-time street vendor and local resident of the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. Today, sitting in an office of the East LA Community Corporation, Vasquez is wearing short turquoise flannel pants, a “Legalize Street Vending” T-shirt and sneakers with pink laces, loosely tied and no socks.

Vasquez is a supporter of Build Better LA (BBLA), a ballot initiative (officially, Measure JJJ) crafted by a consortium of transportation advocates and neighborhood groups – including the Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles (ACT-LA), the land trust organization TRUST South LA, the tenants advocacy group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance — along with the LA County Federation of  Labor and another union group, the Building Trades Council. The proposal emerged from a number of policy discussions from 2015 onwards, and was placed on the November ballot to take the steam out of a competing measure – now pushed back to March, 2017 – that would impose a two-year development moratorium in many areas, protecting old housing stock but doing nothing to alleviate the growing lack of access to affordable housing.

Since 2008 America’s second-largest city has embarked on a $40 billion, long-overdue drive to provide itself with a comprehensive public transit system. That system is made up of Metro’s subway, light rail and bus lines, and at long last it is becoming possible and easy to use mass transit to journey from the Pacific to the far eastern suburbs, and from Pasadena in the north to Long Beach far in the south. Yet one of the side effects of this transformation has been displacement of older, poor communities – ironically, the very demographic that most uses public transport — along these rapidly gentrifying corridors.

To attack the problem, BBLA presents two goals. The first is to provide a series of carrot-and-stick incentives to developers along transit corridors to include a large number of affordable housing units in their new developments. This would essentially refuse to allow the general plan amendments and zoning changes that are needed for almost any new large development, along transit routes, unless developers either build a percentage of units to be affordable, or pay into the city’s affordable housing trust fund so as to allow units to be built elsewhere.

It is a recognition of the reality that, despite LA moving toward a higher minimum wage, for many workers the cost of housing remains entirely prohibitive. According to attorney Doug Smith, of Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that works with affordable housing advocates citywide, a higher percentage of L.A. residents are “rent burdened” – meaning that they are paying over 30 percent of their income on rent or on a mortgage — than any other large city residents in the United States.

“The fight in 2015 was to raise and enforce the wage in the city of L.A.,” says Rusty Hicks, executive secretary-treasurer of the County Federation of Labor. “But it became clear you also had to address issues connected to housing and housing affordability.”

BBLA’s second part, which is being pushed by Hicks and other allies in L.A.’s powerful unions, is a series of labor standards to ensure that workers on these projects are paid decently, come out of union apprenticeship programs, that at least 30 percent are local hires and that 10 percent have to be from disadvantaged communities – that are made up of nine criteria, including foster care youth, single mothers, veterans, the homeless and ex-prisoners.

“We’re making clear what the rules of the road are with regards to development,” Hicks says.

Supporters of BBLA calculate that had these rules been in place over the last few years during the city’s building boom, more than 5,500 affordable units would have been built along transit corridors between 2013 and 2015, and more than 11,000 good-paying construction jobs would have been generated. While these numbers are guesstimates, they are based on an analysis of the development projects that did go through during this time and an understanding of how different those projects would have been had they incorporated BBLA levels of affordable housing into their designs.

Despite some opposition from the Chamber of Commerce, from some tenants’ groups and from the Coalition to Preserve LA , the group behind the competing initiative, with less than a month to go before the election BBLA continues to poll strongly – internal numbers from the campaign suggest support in the 70 percent region, and most proponents are assuming that come next year it will be a core part of L.A.’s affordable housing strategy. In fact, so sure are developers that it will pass that at least some have apparently sought to push through city planning commission requests to approve development projects before November, as a way to get around the anticipated new affordable housing requirements.

City planning officials didn’t respond to repeated requests to comment on this, nor did they address advocates’ concerns that the commission will be holding more frequent, and longer, hearings between now and November in order to process more projects; but Kevin Keller, deputy director of city planning, acknowledges that it’s at least possible that the developers of some projects already close to the approval process finishing line may be trying to sneak in under the wire. “Regulatory changes often do create a little blip, a spike in filing,” he says.

Jill Stewart, campaign director of the Coalition to Preserve LA, argues that the developers actually don’t have much to lose should BBLA pass. “It sets up a series of backroom meetings between individual council members and the developer,” she argues, in explaining her group’s opposition. “All of whom give the council members campaign cash, and wine and dine them.”  It is, she believes, a bad deal for the city, one that would create what she calls “backroom deals on steroids” as a central part of the city’s development strategy. She also argues that the way the measure is worded it would, in fact, give developers plenty of leeway to argue that including affordable housing would unfairly limit their profits, and thus to wiggle out of their promises to provide such units on site. “It’s going to be a disaster. Over-building without affordable housing.”

Amongst housing activists in the city, however, Stewart’s stance is in the minority. Many groups argue strongly that the initiative is a far better way of bulking up the affordable housing stock than other plans that have been put forward in recent years.

Assuming Measure JJJ passes, and assuming that, despite the concerns of Stewart and others, its changes will indeed protect and expand affordable housing, it  won’t come too soon for Caridad Vasquez.

“For me, Boyle Heights is a very humble community,” Vasquez says.  She feels, fairly or not, that “Metro didn’t benefit this community.” She talks of soaring rents, of older buildings demolished and replaced by luxury apartments, of families who have had to move out, and of mom and pop businesses replaced by chain stores. “Right before the Metro came, there were a lot of rumors it would bring change, and a lot of us would be displaced. And the rumors came true.”

What has happened in Boyle Heights is occurring in Koreatown, in South Los Angeles, in Chinatown (along the route of a soon-to-be-expanded Gold Line Metro Rail) and in old communities nestled around the huge University of Southern California campus.

Transit advocates such as Laura Raymond, of the Alliance for Community Transit, estimate that 60 percent of new housing development in L.A. is now occurring near new Metro stations; and the great majority of this housing is unaffordable to low-income Angelenos.

In addition to promoting BBLA, city officials, affordable housing experts, labor unions, transportation advocates and neighborhood groups have been pushing rule changes around development to encourage an expansion of the city’s woefully inadequate affordable housing stock. Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced a goal for the building of 100,000 more housing units in the city by 2021, of which at least 15,000 will be specifically earmarked as affordable to low-income renters. Los Angeles, explains the city planning department’s Keller, is using an array of zoning tools to incentivize mixed-income developments, “to really produce housing along our commercial corridors.” It’s a good start, but not nearly enough to meet the cascading need as both real estate values and rental prices continue to soar in the City of Dreams.

This is, after all, a crisis decades in the making. Since the Reagan years, the federal government has failed to build up a stock of new public housing. California’s redevelopment agencies, which were once major facilitators of public housing, no longer exist. And while in LA many existing rental units are rent-controlled, recent law changes and court rulings mean that new developments are not subject to such controls. Moreover, the statewide Costa-Hawkins law, passed in 1995, has prevented cities from limiting rents on newly vacated apartments, which has diluted the rent-controlled housing stock. And a legal ruling in a lawsuit filed against the city by one of the region’s leading developers, Geoffrey Palmer, also prohibits LA from mandating affordable housing set-asides in new developments.

As a result, the city’s affordable housing stock is crumbling in quality and, as older buildings are replaced by newer developments, also declining in quantity. All of this feeds into an affordable housing crisis of huge proportions, one that helps explain the city’s homelessness epidemic, the overcrowding seen in apartment buildings in poorer neighborhoods and the increased displacement of working-class residents to the far reaches of the megalopolis.

Alan Greenlee, executive director of the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing, quotes data produced by his members estimating the city has a shortfall of more than half a million affordable housing units. “Dang man,” he says in the organization’s fourth-floor offices in a Koreatown tower block, while explaining why he threw his organization’s support behind BBLA, despite some members’ concerns about the high costs of the initiative’s labor provisions. “That’s an emergency,” Greenlee says. “We’re at a break-the-glass-pull-the-fire-alarm kind of moment.”

Nati R’s (her last name has been withheld at her request) apartment, in South Los Angeles’ Trinity Park neighborhood, is a case study of the risks in play there for long-established residents.

For years, her building has been allowed to deteriorate, with disintegrating, damp walls, floors that periodically collapse in places, an elevator that frequently doesn’t work. For years, too, the streets surrounding the apartment block were home to gangs, to shootings, to what residents euphemistically term “activity.”

The trade-off for these abysmal conditions has been cheap rent for low-income residents who don’t have other options in the city. Nati shares the apartment, whose walls are covered with Mexican artwork, with her husband, her daughter and, at times, her son and his growing family.

Over the last few years, however, Nati and her neighbors have helped reclaim their streets, prettifying the local parks while working to tamp down the violence that for too long plagued their community.

Now, however, she fears that all of that hard work will, ultimately, benefit not her but newer, more affluent residents. Recently her building was, according to SAJE staffers, sold for $2.4 million, and apartments that used to rent for $850 are now going for $1,200. “The biggest fear,” she says in Spanish at her kitchen table, “is to be displaced, to be pushed out, to be left on the edges of the city where we don’t have our community. We make minimum wage. We can’t pay $1,000 rent.”

South of Downtown, at the Tuesday afternoon tenants’ clinic, run out of the SAJE offices that are adorned with banners from an array of tenants’ fights over the years, a middle-aged woman named Sonya tells the volunteer attorney about the eviction notice she received in early summer.

Sonya, who requested that only her first name be used, lives just two blocks west of the USC campus and the city’s Natural History Museum, in a one-bedroom, $850-per-month, rent-controlled apartment complex where long-time residents now find themselves competing with university faculty — who come onto the market with tens of thousands of dollars in housing subsidies given them by the university. Ostensibly, the reason the company that owns Sonya’s building wants her out is so that it can renovate the unit – even though, under the city’s Housing and Community Investment Department rules, that is not a legitimate reason to evict a tenant from a rent-controlled building. The SAJE people suspect that, in reality, the owners want her gone so that they can bring in a tenant who would pay a far higher rent.

The SAJE team and the attorney advise her not to vacate, that the eviction isn’t legal. Sonya, wearing glasses, her hair dyed brown, seems to breathe easier. She knows that at her stage in life, beginning anew isn’t something to take lightly. But then the SAJE team gently brings her down to earth. Be prepared, they warn her — the landlord will almost certainly try again, looking for another excuse to kick her out, looking for some other way to take advantage of the red-hot real estate markets created by the city’s investments in its transit corridors.

“The value of the investment in public transit is diminished if you’re driving transit users away,” argues Sandra McNeill of TRUST South LA, speaking in the group’s cluttered offices in a converted storefront church a couple miles from Downtown. “There’s a tremendous rationale to having a comprehensive policy in place.” With BBLA, she says, there’s finally a chance of stabilizing neighborhoods too long roiled by unconstrained real estate speculation. “We’re just doing what I think the city should have done a long time ago.”

(Sasha Abramsky writes for Capital and Main  … where this column was first posted.) All photos by Pandora Young

-cw

ELECTION 2016--We all like a soap opera, don't we?  Well, this campaign season has been thrilled with antics, debauchery, and backroom sleaze.  But sooner or later, there are issues, and the host of financial issues and societal/moral issues MUST be addressed.

And YOU must address them.  YOU must address taxes, the economy, law and order, etc. 
Will the money be spent well?  Do we have a pension problem, in that we're now paying as much or more for retired state workers than current workers, with equivalent problems for the cities and counties of our state?  Do you think our taxes are at reasonable levels?

There are a lot of city, county, and state governmental hands in our faces, asking for money, money, and more money!  Our money.

Yet if things are better, with unemployment DOWN and the economy UP, then why so many hands in our faces?  There's an answer, but it's only acceptable to those willing to acknowledge the painful, awful, and ugly nature of economics:

This state has exported, if not shoved out, much of our middle class tax base, and replaced it with a two-tier system of very rich and very poor individuals.  And the cost of living is such that it's hard to know the difference between "lower middle class vs. poor" and "upper middle class vs. rich".  Good-bye TAX BASE, hello DEBT.

If you think that socialism, liberalism, and class warfare is just fine, and that the examples of Greece and Venezuela just doesn't apply to our city, county, and state, then vote "Yes" to all the tax hikes.  After all, it's not YOUR problem, is it?

Except that it is.  If you work for a small business and lose your job, any "Yes" votes on new taxes will simply be a result of taking a swing at "the man" and realizing you just punched yourself HARD in the mouth.  That taste in your mouth?  It's your own blood, not that sweet taste of victory (or if it is victory, then it's as futile a victory as any).

So here we go:

• City: This is painful for me, but I recommend a "NO" vote on Measure HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure that is sponsored by one of my personal heroes (Mike Bonin). In large part, I oppose this measure by saying publicly what I hear privately from so many of my neighbors--the money won't be spent well, because most of LA's city government is NOT as kind or virtuous as Bonin.  Also, I don't want LA to be a homeless magnet.

I oppose the Build Better LA (Measure JJJ) and recommend a "NO" vote because while it has some "feel-good" features of minimum wages for workers and requiring Angelenos be hired as workers for development projects, the top-down approach to governmental requirements repeats the mistake that well-meant socialism always teaches: it doesn't work!!! 

This spring, vote in the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative instead!!!

Measure RRR:  Vote "YES".  It's reform, but only modest reform.  It's a start, though, yet woefully insufficient...yet something is better than nothing.

Measure SSS: Vote "NO".  Yes, LA Airport Police Officers deserve a good pension, but allowing them into the same unsustainable LA City police/fire department pension plan is just throwing more weight on a train that just can't be expected to move forward forever.
And speaking of trains...

• County:  Vote YES on Measure M--It's one of the most defined tax measures we have if not THE most defined measure, and its biggest detractors claim it doesn't go far enough. Yes, I am a "pro-train" guy, but had serious doubts about this measure until I realized how popular transportation still is for our county. And I very much do want ALL of our county to advocate for each of our regions' mobility.

This next one is also painful, because I absolutely LOVE parks and recreation!  Vote "NO" on Measure A because it's a "modest parcel tax" to maintain our parks, recreation centers, rivers and beaches.  Yet if it's a cause good enough for all of us, why is the middle class the one being asked to pay for it all?  I can't think of a better way to create a future draconian "Proposition 13-style" initiative than to keep smacking around homeowners--virtually none of them are in "1%".

• LA Community College District--this is an easy one: Vote "NO" on Measure CC. What the hell is that district doing, asking for more money when they burned through billions of dollars on scandal-plagued, often-subpar work? And what the hell would be OUR problem if we fed that beast more money at this time? 

...aaaaand it's now understood that time and space probably prevents me from addressing other issues (like the state measures) for now.  But educate yourselves! Ignore the Trump/Clinton soap opera long enough to focus on the city, county, and state issues that will really affect your lives!

And vote, darn it, vote!  Even if you hate the two main presidential candidates, the "down" races and measures are more critical and affect you, your paycheck, your family, and your neighborhood more than any presidential race.  Democracy is NOT for sissies, so dig in, do your research, and vote!

(Ken Alpern is 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 Mr. Alpern.)

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DEEGAN ON LA-Many attempts have been made over the decades to empower the voice of communities, often with some success through Homeowner Associations (HOA.) That community voice was organized and amplified fifteen years ago with the creation, through Charter reform, of the Neighborhood Council (NC) system. There are now 96 NC’s with 1,800 board members, representing every area of the city, and there are also countless HOA’s ranging from coalitions of a few members to huge alliances of multiple HOAs. The NC’s often work closely with the HOA’s, and some even share board members. 

Every voice in these NCs and HOAs is important as the city experiences a growth spurt unseen since the end of World War II, when LA’s population exploded and the city went through massive densification. 

Post World War II, it became evident that Los Angeles was experiencing a population boom, and that the formerly quiet neighborhoods would expand, and outlying areas, such as the San Fernando Valley, would also grow. Homeowners began to voice concerns that their well-manicured and sometimes “non-inclusionary neighborhoods” (i.e. neighborhoods in which covenants and conditions, now illegal, were attached to land deeds spelling out “who” could own property) would either be invaded by growth or bypassed for attention as newer communities sprang up to house a growing population. 

In a reaction to this, city officials made a series of attempts over the next twenty-five years to empower communities, starting in the 1950s when the County Department of Community Services created “community coordinating councils” as a way to identify specific neighborhoods, in effect giving them a “pedigree” separate from the “new growth” areas. It also created a system to coordinate county services to those community councils. Significantly, those “councils” were not activist initiators of change, but rather, passive receptors of services who were not called on for advice. 

Following the Watts Riots of 1965, the school board created a system of “neighborhood advisory councils,” to serve as a platform for public calming and give voice to distressed communities after that epochal upheaval. This was more like a super-PTA than an advisory body. 

It was not until 1969 that there was any attempt to add teeth to the empowering of neighborhood communities when Mayor Sam Yorty tried to change the City Charter to create specific neighborhoods that would have what he called “elected neighbormen” to act as local governments. Not surprisingly, because this would cut into their jurisdictions, the City Council vetoed this. 

In 1977, City Planning Director Calvin Hamilton created thirty-five “citizens advisory committees” to be a type of participatory democracy to help develop community plans that would eventually become a new master plan for the city’s growth. The City Council retired the idea, and its originator, leaving a vacuum for how to deal with growth issues. That vacuum was filled by developers who began working directly with councilmembers to get what they wanted. 

The most successful scheme to encourage participatory involvement of communities in city government has been the Neighborhood Council system, now in its fifteenth year, now with 95 NC’s that come under the direction of the City’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. DONE is led by General Manager Grayce Liu on its mission of “leading the EmpowerLA team as they support Neighborhood Councils in engaging the community and make government more responsive to local needs.” 

What then is the difference between a homeowner’s association (HOA) and a Neighborhood Council (NC), if both are dedicated to advocating for their respective communities and often work in tandem to meet those goals? In a word: training. 

Every fall, EmpowerLA (the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment) hosts a Congress of Neighborhood Councils that focuses on training board members to be more expert in land use, transportation, public safety and a host of other topics, including many administrative trainings to help NC’s function. On Saturday, September 24, 2016, the annual Congress of Neighborhoods was in session at City Hall, where nearly 1,000 neighborhood council board members assembled. They met first in council chambers and then attended a series of workshops that focused on specific community issues as well as topics addressing how to administratively run an NC. 

The very well attended workshops included “Meet Your City Officials,” “Planning and Land Use 101 and 102,” “How To Make A Difference at City Hall (Lobby Like a Pro),” “Community Partnerships for Better Outcomes,” “Unlocking the Traffic Grid,” “Public Safety in LA,” “The Future of the Neighborhood Council Movement,” “Code Enforcement-Solving Code Violation Problems,” “Persuasion in a Nutshell,” “LA 2040-Our City, Our General Plan, Our Future,” and “Emergency Preparedness.” 

While advisory only, NC board members are elected in City Clerk-run elections, and must meet the same kind of ethics and financial training standards as all city employees. Workshops like “Ethics,” “Leadership Skills,” “Parliamentary Procedures,” “How to Run a Successful Meeting,” “NC’s and the City Attorney's Office,” “Outreach and Events,” and “Board Basics 101,” all provided a basic training curriculum to strengthen the skills of NC board members. 

What differentiates the two groups (NC’s and HOA’s) is the holistic approach to neighborhood and community concerns taken by the NCs -- they look at the bigger community picture with multiple issues that go beyond the traditional concerns of preserving property values. (That’s how HOAs started and it’s still a valuable function of these organizations that often do additional helpful work for their members.) The workshops at the Congress provide valuable training and tools to people who are newly empowered (through election by their community to board seats) but arrive in office often unprepared to deal with the complicated details of land use, public safety, transportation, and education issues. Votes can be squandered by board members who do not take the time to be trained -- one of the truly great advantages of attending the Congress. 

The Congress this year was a success. According to Cindy Cleghorn, Chair of the Neighborhood Council Congress 2016, “…803 registrations and 150 walk-ins signed in. Attendance exceeded 850 throughout the day. Most all workshops were at capacity. This is the sixth consecutive Congress for NCs. There have been others but not consistent. We are anxious for feedback and making the NC Congress better each year.” 

Empower LA General Manager Grayce Liu added, "I love the Congress of Neighborhoods because it brings together all of our amazing Neighborhood Council volunteers across the City to share their successes and to learn how to overcome the obstacles they are facing in their work. It is this type of collaboration that has made LA's Neighborhood Council system so successful and is a big part of the reason why we'll still be here to celebrate the 15th year anniversary for the first Neighborhood Councils in December." 

Looking at the arc of the past six decades since WWII, and the various attempts to bring communities to the table, it’s apparent that having a seat is not the same as having a voice. Having a voice is not the same as having a trained voice. This is the critical advancement of the NC system: it brings professionalism to bear. 

What can you do? Start attending your Neighborhood Council meetings and make public comment. Join a board committee as a stakeholder. Run for a board seat. And become one of the people in the community with the loudest, trained voice.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

HOW IT’S DONE AT CITY HALL--Is the so-called Neighborhood Integrity Initiative really something to be feared?

I think it could be a great advancement for the city of Los Angeles. But business people seem to view the possibility that it will pass in the March 7 election with much the same kind of dread that 14th century Europeans looked upon the arrival of the bubonic plague in the nearby village.

At least, at a Sept. 22 politically oriented luncheon held by the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce, denunciations of the initiative got hearty applause, such as when Los Angeles City Councilmember Nury Martinez said, “This initiative is dangerous.”

What’s more, what’s been called the broadest coalition in LA history to fight an initiative has formed to oppose the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. It is made up of chambers of commerce, developers and other business interests, but also labor groups, affordable housing proponents, a few city councilmembers and others. Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad is among the contributors.

Yes, lots of folks – not just business people – hate the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.

Why the wrath? It’s mainly because the initiative calls for a two-year moratorium on most major construction in the city of Los Angeles. Well, either two years or until the city updates its general zoning plan, whichever comes first. Opponents say it is nigh onto impossible to accomplish such a mammoth task in less than two years. So, realistically, construction will seize up for that span.

Opponents also imply that the entire initiative is cynical because it was started and bankrolled out of self-interest by Michael Weinstein, the head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and an unrepentant gadfly. (He’s the guy behind the successful initiative requiring condoms on porn movie sets.) Weinstein is irked because the 28-story Palladium Residences towers are going up next to his Hollywood office, blocking the view from his 21st floor window, and that makes his new initiative a selfish and petulant attack against the city, some believe.

Well, maybe so. But Weinstein experienced the same fury and frustration that thousands of powerless Angelenos feel when they wake up one morning to see a tower under construction next door on land that wasn’t supposed to allow such structures. If they investigate, they likely discover that – surprise! – a deal was cut in City Hall.

Indeed, that’s how development is done in Los Angeles. Deals are cut, one by one, in City Hall. Since the city’s zoning map is woefully outdated (intentionally so, the initiative’s backers claim), that means developers must get a variance, an exception to the zoning code, whenever they want to build much of anything substantive. To get that variance – guess what? – they must schmooze the appropriate city councilmember to get his or her sign-off. Weinstein’s group claims city councilmembers and the mayor have gotten $6 million from developers since 2000, and that’s just in campaign contributions. Has anything other than campaign contributions been forked over? Well, I’ll leave that up to you to guess.

By the way, if a business did what the city is doing, that business could be charged with running an extortion racket. And rightfully so.

I agree with the proponents in this regard: The city must be forced, bludgeoned if necessary, to meaningfully update its zoning codes. It needs to come up with a realistic and transparent set of rules to guide what kind of city we want built. That way, citizens and businesses would be forewarned about the type and scale of development that may go up around them. And once the codes are set and understood – and provided they are realistic – developers could simply get routine permits and wave to the elected folks as they walk by their offices. They would no longer have to stop and pay, ahem, homage.

Sorry to be cynical, but this points out why several city councilmembers hate the initiative. If it passes, it would derail their gravy train.

Having said all that, I agree with the initiative’s opponents in this regard: That two-year moratorium is a killer. It is simply unrealistic to presume a meaningful general plan and all that goes with it (think public hearings in every neighborhood) can be done quickly. As a result, we would be stuck with a two-year hiatus for most construction throughout Los Angeles, and that makes the initiative lethally flawed.

Doesn’t this feel like prime time for a compromise? A statesman is needed to come forward. (Former Mayor Richard Riordan, who supports the initiative, pops to mind, but surely there are other candidates.) Someone needs to work with the Weinstein group to help them achieve their goals but not with that two-year prohibition on construction. Perhaps there can be a waiting period of two or three years before the hammer of that punitive construction moratorium comes down, which would provide time and a deadline for the city to come up with a new general plan. Call it a moratorium for the moratorium if you wish, but a compromise of some type is needed.

If that type of solution were figured out, then we’d have the chance to achieve something truly meaningful: a transparent general plan that creates rational building patterns and doesn’t virtually require a shakedown of developers. And it could be done without a two-year construction moratorium.

That would be something not to be feared by businesses. Indeed, it would be embraced by the grateful arms of a relieved city.

(Charles Crumpley is editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal. This perspective was posted most recently at Fox and Hounds.) 

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POLITICS-Even before the Washington Post reported the videotape revealing Donald Trump’s lewd comments about women, the Republican candidate was proving to be an anchor weighing down Republicans in California. Campaign pollsters say that Republicans running for assembly and senate seats that were doing well suffered a drop in numbers after a barrage of negative hit pieces tying them to Trump—whether the local candidate supported Trump or not.

Post debate, it appears many Republican voters will hang with Trump despite Trump’s braggadocio on the videotape. According to a Politico Poll taken after the tape was made public (but before the debate), Republican voters that supported Trump were sticking by him. The debate won’t change that. In fact, his debate performance might have lessened the bleeding his campaign was experiencing among some Republicans. 

The attacks and counter punches were there last night. Hillary Clinton was either the devil (according to Trump) or acting like Abe Lincoln (according to Clinton.) But its unlikely few minds were changed by the debate performances.

In California there are fewer and fewer Republicans as the latest figures from the Secretary of State’s office reveals. While a number of Republicans stick with Trump, it is less certain that independent voters will come his way and that could hurt down-ticket Republicans even if, as Congressional candidate Scott Jones has done, candidates announce they will not vote for Trump.

Of course, the Trump tape is not the first time that sexual misconduct has been an issue in a presidential campaign.

Go back to the beginning of the Republic when disaffected Thomas Jefferson supporter turned political journalist, James T. Callender, put in print the long rumored story that Jefferson had several children with a slave named Sally.

Another episode was Grover Cleveland’s child out of wedlock and the tale concocted by his aides to put the blame on the child’s mother. And, of course, more recently, there was Bill Clinton’s history that Trump brought up during the debate and with his pre-debate press conference featuring some of Bill Clinton’s accusers.

It should be noted that all three candidates painted with the brush of scandal won the White House.

Tying down-ticket Republican candidates to Trump in deep blue California could well lead to supermajorities for the Democrats in both houses of the state legislature. Could Trump’s anchor bring the number of Democrats to a large enough supermajority to offset some moderate Democrats abandoning legislative leaders on certain issues?

Turnout is the key. If this latest episode with Trump solidifies Clinton’s standing through Election Day, her California supporters may see no need to vote, which would help down-ticket Republicans. Or could the revelation that Hillary Clinton is speaking out of both sides of her mouth on issues important to Bernie Sanders progressives reduce the Democratic vote in California? Both scenarios could counter the Trump anchor effect that has shown up in state polling.

(Joel Fox is the Editor of Fox & Hounds  … where this perspective was first posted … and President of the Small Business Action Committee.)

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SKID ROW- “Bad math,” “bad leadership” and “bad direction” or “BBB” is how Angelenos should respond to Measure HHH. 

“Bad math” because with Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Count of almost 50,000 homeless individuals in LA County, why would voters generate 1.2 billion dollars to house only 10,000, leaving a whopping 40,000 all over our streets and still visibly present throughout our communities? Over a billion dollars to support a so-called solution that only accounts for one fifth of all the homeless, leaving four fifths stranded on the street? All this with no follow-up solutions in place? Wow. 

THE PLANNING REPORT-“Metrolink moves a lot of folks in Southern California -- 60 percent of them across county lines.” -- Art Leahy 

In April 2015, Arthur Leahy assumed leadership of Metrolink, Southern California's second-busiest transit provider based on passenger miles. Leahy, a longtime regional public transportation leader, took the reigns of an agency with serious issues of declining ridership and financial transparency. Speaking to the Transit Coalition in late August, Leahy provided an overview of his priorities at Metrolink as he looks to lead the regional transportation agency into a new era of ridership. He spoke about his efforts to recruit young talent, find common-sense solutions to fiscal and organizational hurdles, and rebrand Metrolink as the region’s most effective way to cut freeway congestion. 

TPR is pleased to present an excerpt of Leahy's remarks.  

Art Leahy: “When I came to Metrolink, not only did we have a board that was ready to break up, but within the management staff, we had a culture of avoidance, deferral, and concealment or denial. 

“Let me tell a few anecdotes to illustrate the culture in the organization at that time. 

“I remember once, the then-CFO wrote a board report that was devoid of content. When I asked him why he didn’t include more real content, his answer was: ‘If we do, they’ll just ask more questions.’ 

“That’s exactly backward. Another time, shortly after I arrived, we were about to rehab a bunch of old locomotives. I realized that in the long run, it would be cheaper to buy new ones that had better fuel economy, higher horsepower, and lower emissions. On every dimension, it made more sense to buy new ones.  

“But when I went to fellow who had made the decision and said, ‘It makes more sense to buy new ones,’ he said, ‘I know -- but the advisory committee said not to.’ I said to him, ‘We must make the business case. We must talk about dollars and cents and outcomes and results. We cannot make recommendations based on this person liking it and that person not liking it.’ In a matter of a couple months, we had all five counties in line to buy new locomotives. 

“Now, we’re rebuilding the organization for the future. We have a new deputy CEO, new deputy COO, new communications director, new chief financial officer, new government affairs manager, and other new leaders. These folks are all very smart and very committed, and we’re going to focus on the classic values of safety and service.  

“We’re very pleased to be among the first in the country to have positive train control (PTC), which we’ve had in effect for about 14 months. We’re working closely with the Federal Railroad Administration on that. We’re also among the first in the world to have Tier 4 locomotives. We recently got our first one; it’s in testing. I look forward to beginning to release the rest in a month or two. We’ve done a great deal of work on our locomotives, and the old ones are in the process of being replaced over the next year or two. 

“In the 16 months I’ve been here, one of our tasks has been to rebuild our relationships with the five counties. In the past, we were not forthcoming with them. But they are the stockholders; they pay the bills. And if we’re not honest with them, they’re not going to trust us. It’s okay to make a mistake, but we have to confront it, we have to tell the counties and the Board, and we have to fix it. A year and a half ago, we could not give our county stakeholders any financial reports on expenditures, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. You can imagine the level of distrust that this created. 

“Now, we’re doing regular financials. Our new CFO talks to the county CFOs and the technical advisory committee. Our financial situation has improved significantly, including our reserves. There’s no rocket science here: We’re talking to the stakeholders about our status and accomplishments.

The JPA with the counties is now much stronger. We still have some issues to work out, but we’re not in crisis; we’re making progress on it. 

“Another area where we’ve had big issues in making progress is project delivery and keeping projects on schedule. Metro, our major funder, has had a great deal of concern about this. They wanted to know: “Why are we giving you more money for projects when you haven’t delivered the old projects?” Fair enough; it’s hard to argue with that. But I’m pleased to say that we’re making some progress, and have also become more forthright in communicating with the Metro Board. 

“I do want to comment on the Raymer to Bernson Double Track -- a double-tracking project in the San Fernando Valley. Everything that was said is accurate about a small group of people blocking the track. I think the messaging done by Metro was perhaps more. Metro’s justification for the project was that it would allow them to carry additional trains. The neighborhood’s not crazy about that. The bulk of the area along that line going out to Chatsworth is industrial and commercial. There’s one short segment that’s residential. If there’s one area that might be sensitive, it’s right there. Now, we’re going back to Metro and trying to figure out how to reinvigorate this discussion. We’re having a parallel discussion on the San Bernardino line. Much of that line is single-track. As a consequence, the on-time performance is not very good. 

“We’re not trying to do double-tracking in order to increase capacity. We want to do it so that we can reduce the time that trains have to stand idly while they’re waiting for another train to pass. In this case, there is a community benefit to double-tracking. And if we link double-tracking to quiet zones, and maybe sound walls, we can begin to put together a partnership among Metro, Metrolink, and the host cities. 

“We had an issue with the joint powers authority with the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo Rail Corridor (LOSSAN). I was back in Orange County 12 or 13 years ago when the idea of empowering the LOSSAN board occurred to me. I was in Oceanside, and I saw a Metrolink train and a COASTER train standing right next to each other, both waiting to depart with their engines running. As I’m sure you know, buses, trains, and airplanes cost money by the minute. To have two trains standing there while they reverse directions is just not a good use of public resources. The real charge of LOSSAN should be to generate synergy among Metrolink, Amtrak, and COASTER commuter trains. 

“Citizens could care less about the difference between Metrolink and Amtrak. All they want to do is get where they’re going. To have institutional rivalries between two organizations is not productive from the taxpayer’s point of view. 

“This is particularly acute because the taxpayers of California pay for the Amtrak services, and the taxpayers of Southern California pay for the Metrolink service. In other words, it’s the same people. We ought to be creating synergy among one another, not rivalry and competition. That synergy manifests itself in our customer experience. For example, I think our Metrolink service shuts down way too early. Here we are, the second biggest city in the country, with plays and concerts, and the train shuts down so early you can’t even go to a Dodger game. I hope to work with LOSSAN and the counties to get later-night train service. 

“I was COO when Metro opened the Blue Line back in 1990, and I learned a good lesson about later-night train service. Because construction was not yet done when the line opened, the last southbound departure was at around 7:00 in the evening. That train was always dead, but all the trains before it were very busy. When we added an 8:00 train, it was dead -- but the 7:00 pm train got busy. And when we opened up the 9:00 train, the 8:00 train got busy. The lesson is this: The last train is the insurance train. If we open later-night service, we’ll get more riders on the earlier trains. 

“We have an issue with maintenance of our track.  

“There are significant segments of the track that have not been maintained properly. There are ties that are rotting, there is some track that is worn on curves that needs to be replaced, and there are some short bridges that need some work. We’re redoing our messaging to the counties so that we can show in detail what we need.  

“At the moment, our engineers will come forward and say, ‘We need to place some ties between Milepost 12 and Milepost 19 on the Antelope Valley line.’ As accurate as it may be, it sounds like these areas are distant and irrelevant to daily life. 

“I’m telling them, ‘Say something like: Between Burbank Airport and Van Nuys, the ties are no good! Show them photographs and take them out there to look at it, tell them what you’re going to do, and tell them what it’s going to cost. You have to put some meat on the bones. “Milepost 12” doesn’t mean a thing to anybody except us.’ I’m critical of our overall messaging as well -- how we’ve described our role and our benefit to the region, and how we’re positioned in the market. 

“For example, we say, ‘We carry 403,000 people a day.’ Metro says, ‘Well, we carry a million and a half.’ It’s easy to see that Metrolink’s ridership is very small. Now, we’re trying to re-message that. We’re positioning Metrolink in the region to show why it’s a good investment and what the benefits are. Our conclusion is that Metrolink is the best investment to reduce traffic and clean the air. 

“It’s true that in boardings, our ridership is small. But our trip length is 10-15 times longer than other agencies. In terms of passenger miles, we’re one of the busiest carriers in SoCal -- after Metro, but ahead of Riverside and Orange Co. combined. Metrolink moves a lot of folks in SoCal -- 60 percent across county lines. 

“Another benefit is that Metrolink takes cars off the road. The demographics of Metrolink riders are different from bus riders or Metro train riders: Their per capita income is higher. While many Metro and CTA riders are transit-dependent, Metrolink riders, more often than not, have access to cars. What this means is that almost on a one-to-one basis, a Metrolink passenger is a car off the freeway. 

“Metrolink relieves the 5, the 91, the 60, the 10, the 134, the Hollywood, and more. Our fare-box return is higher than other transit agencies in the area, at about 43 percent. Metro’s is 25 percent -- and dropping -- and so is OCTA’s. This is powerful: Because our fares are high, and our trips are long, our subsidy per passenger mile is the second lowest of any carriers in Southern California. It’s cheaper by far than Metro’s or OCTA’s. (AVTA runs express buses on the freeway, so theirs is very low.) In other words, Metrolink is the best investment. 

“I’ll close by talking about the need for new people at Metrolink. I’m seeking to hire people who are very intense, very intelligent, and very willing to learn and understand the railroad business, as well as Southern California. I very strongly hope that, in a few years, somebody who works at Metrolink will succeed me, so that they understand the service area, the service requirements, and the politics and the complex issues that we have to deal with. At Metrolink, in addition to addressing the right-now problems of budgets and maintenance and things like that, we’re building an organization.” 

Audience Question: “Driverless technology is developing much more rapidly than analysts expected. Uber is going to have a fleet of driverless cars in the next few months. Elon Musk says he’ll have them by 2019. That’s going to be quite a disruptive new element to public transportation, given that a lot of these will be cars on-demand. Do you figure this eventuality into your strategies?” 

Art Leahy: “We are working on agreements with Lyft and Uber. Union Station is a major destination for people taking Lyft -- and they’re coming to take Metrolink or Amtrak. They won’t take Lyft or Uber 80 miles, but they’ll take it five miles to get to the train station, which can take them 80 miles for a fraction of the cost. I think the disruption will be a bigger issue for shorter-distance carriers; it’s a market niche. We had some objections on the Metrolink Board to such an agreement, but I think we’ll get past them. These things are happening; we’ve got to get used to it. Our executive staff needs to understand the business. The business is not in the headquarters building; the business is out in the field. And you’ve got to get out there and see it. That’s why about once a month, Metrolink has an executive staff meeting on a train.  

“That happens to be fun, but there’s a dismal aspect to this, as well: I’ve told our deputy CEO that she must visit some scenes of fatal accidents. I said, ‘I’m sorry for saying that to you, but you have to understand that safety is not just a technical or financial issue. When you see what happens -- the awful consequences of one moment of bad decision-making -- you become a believer in safety.’ The first fatal I had to go to was in 1981 -- 35 years ago -- off of York and Armadale in Highland Park. I can still see it. But if you’re going to be in transit, you’ve got to understand profoundly how committed you must be to safety.” 

(The Planning Report is published by Abel and Associates. This piece appeared in the September 2016 issue.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ELECTION 2016--After seeing the last presidential debate and witnessing the last 48 hours of insanity and hypocrisy take over the nation with respect to "who owes whom an apology", it struck me that--in a different but very real way--this traffic-plagued, overtaxed County of the Angels has been harmed not only by past misdeeds but by the need to dwell on them.

I won't get into any presidential politics (not now, at least), but I will say that there are times to talk, and to debate, and to apologize, and then there are times to ACT:

1) There are a few reasons why, until recently, I was on the fence for Measure M--but no longer.  In a nutshell, the ultimate factor in my decision was the amazingly popular response and increase in ridership from the far-flung Westside and San Gabriel Valley regions, which now each have their own light rail lines.

2) The openings of these lines were followed by a loud outcry from the San Fernando Valley and South Bay Cities about how long it would take for them to get an Orange Busway-to-Rail Line conversion and a South Bay Green Line Extension.

3) And I learned from attending key Eastside Light Rail meetings that those regions wanted inclusion into the Metro Rail Network.  Apparently, ditto for the Southeast Los Angeles Cities.

It is certainly easier (and tempting!) to tell the civic leaders of the San Fernando Valley, South Bay, and Southeast Cities that they OWE their own constituents and the rest of the county a bevy of apologies for their misbehavior:

1) After  witnessing the cowardice of the political leaders of the San Fernando Valley fail to repeal the Robbins Bill, and allow the Orange Line to be built as a light rail the first time, it would be tempting--yet self-defeating--to tell that region to go pound sand.

2) After witnessing how a few small-minded South Bay leaders (and they know who they are!) obstruct and prevent the South Bay Green Line Extension from being prioritized for years, it would be tempting--yet self-defeating--to "punish" and tell that region to wait.

3) Aftering witnessing how a few conflicted Southeast/Gateway Cities leaders (conflicted as in ambivalent, while others were conflicted as in conflicts of interest) led their region on a quixotic quest to make the Santa Ana Rail Right of Way a MagLev high speed rail line, it would also be tempting--yet self-defeating--to "punish" that region and making them wait.

Because it's the old adage of "when you point one finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you".  

Because there is plenty of baggage and bad history with the Expo Line and Gold Line Construction Authorities...and their leaders are so guilty of past bad behavior that whether it's human nature, the nature of politics, or just dumb luck that the Mid-City, Westside, and San Fernando Valley got their rail lines first, it's pointless to trot out old regional missteps.

Because we have a Metro Long Range Transportation Plan that ranks the different rail lines (and freeway projects, too!!!) in terms of cost-effectiveness, and that is only tangentially related to Measure M, the half-cent sales tax which extends funding for transportation for decades to come.

If Measure M is to be passed Tuesday, November 8th, then it is entirely reasonable and appropriate to demand that certain battles and changes take place on Wednesday, November 9th:

1) For example, I very much DO want the Orange Line Busway to be converted into a light rail...and sooner, not later.  And I am not alone.

2) I very much DO want a South Bay Green Line Extension to Torrance, with a Major Investment Study, to boot, of linking the Green Line to San Pedro and the Blue Line.  And I am not alone.

3) I very much DO want a Southeast/Gateway Cities rail line to connect that portion of the county with the Green Line and Union Station, with a Major Investment Study, to boot, of revisiting the Green Line Eastern Extension to the Norwalk Metrolink Station. And I am not alone.

In my last CityWatch article, I mentioned a "domino effect" of regions wanting "in" to the budding county passenger rail network that would be established once Metro Rail connected to LAX, and once the MetroRail system became a logical network with the Downtown Light Rail Connector.

Well, that's going to happen by 2022-24.  Perhaps it's the Olympics bid, perhaps it's a host of other factors, but that's going to happen.

But the system established by the Metro Long Range Transportation Plan requires a hard, tough prioritizing of projects that forces the regions of our large and balkanized county to work together.  In other words, if YOU want something for YOUR region, you had better be prepared to put up your dukes for the other regions' projects.

Because until those higher-ranked projects have to be paid for before YOUR project will be properly funded and constructed.

Right now we've got major parts of the county (particularly from the south and east) who want their own rail lines, and their major complaint about Measure M is that it doesn't go FAR enough to guarantee and expedite each region's rail lines.

Which sounds like there are quite a few battles and changes to be made on November 9th...but they can ONLY be fought until Measure M passes!

So while it would certainly be a fine and timely idea to have Mayor Garcetti, Westside Councilmember Mike Bonin, and other Metro leaders demand an expedited South Bay Cities Green Line, and an expedited Southeast Cities Light Rail Line ...

... and while it would certainly be a fine and timely idea to make those two rail lines a major talking point in the Hahn/Napolitano county supervisor race...

... it behooves our county to pass Measure M and let old screwups remain in the irrelevant dustbin of past failed ideas and misguided efforts.

... and on the day AFTER a passed Measure M, we can ALL put up our dukes together to demand federal and state matching grants to build the rest of our countywide rail network, after we've shown Washington,DC and Sacramento that we're willing to put our money where our collective mouth is.

(Ken Alpern is 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 Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-Joe Mathews of KCRW's Zocalo thinks so. I listened to Mathews complain about California's new accountability plan today on Los Angeles' NPR affiliate. He said the new program, which gives feedback on multiple measures rather than API, is confusing and lacks coherence. 

He's missing the purpose of this shift. 

“People want simplicity (that test scores provide) but simplicity hasn’t gotten us very far,” said former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, in an Edsource interview.  “We really have to look at the breadth of what is going on.” 

If we encourage parents to choose a school based on a Yelp-like rating, we're encouraging a superficial look -- usually based on test scores. 

The new accountability plan aims to give parents a picture of many aspects of a school. That's important, because more and more research shows that test scores are a result of a lot that is beyond a school's control. 

Encouraging parents to look at the many aspects of the school is a good thing. 

Through most of the years of my children's education, schools were reduced to a single number. That meant that schools that were well-resourced, with students who were well supported at home and easy to teach, scored high, while those schools that served needier students scored lower.

Should I look only at schools with one type of student? No. Diversity is better than division.

Walgrove Elementary school in my neighborhood of Venice has had a stellar special education program whose families are embraced by the whole school community. It's a large part of the culture of the school. Consequently, special ed students come from all over. But this impacted the school's overall test scores for a while, making it look like there was a problem. One parent tried repeatedly to get the rating website GreatSchools.org to broaden its criteria, to no avail. I told LA Times columnist Steve Lopez about it, hoping he'd write about it. But he found it hard to believe that many parents really picked schools based on online ratings. (Isn't that almost sweet?) 

The new accountability plan gives a school like this a better chance of continuing to do its good work because it provides some context to parents. 

There's another reason the broader focus is better. The obsession with test scores pushed too many schools to narrow class offerings to what is tested. 

We want to help parents navigate, but we don't want to be overly simplistic. It's important we get it right, too. 

"All across the country people are paying attention to what California is doing,” Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond recently said. 

What do you think? You can leave comments on Joe Mathew's story here: KCRW Zocalo. 

(Karen Wolfe is a public school parent, the Executive Director of PS Connect and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE VIEW FROM MID CITY--Herb Wesson, the man who would be king, recently appointed himself Councilman of District 7 in the San Fernando Valley (17 miles north of his home in CD10) after Councilman Felipe Fuentes stepped down to become a lobbyist for the Associated General Contractors of California. Wesson loves to bend rules but may have gone too far with this one. 

A CityWatch article by Eric and Joshua Preven reports that "according to Section 407, [of the City Charter] only individuals who live in the district are eligible to fill the seat. The Charter also makes clear that appointments are not made by the Mayor or Council President but by the Council as a whole." 

Typically someone from the chief legislative analysts office would step in to run things until the March election but ever mindful of what it takes to "move on up" Herb grabbed control of the district rather than follow the City Charter requirements. Why? Doesn't he have enough responsibilities handling Council District 10 AND Council President? 

One scenario has it that when and if Garcetti is re-elected he may leave midterm in 2018 to run for Governor. In this case, the Council President (Wesson) steps in to complete the term. Becoming mayor in this easy slide to power puts him in a very favorable position to run for re-election as an incumbent mayor. Incumbents are typically difficult to unseat. Herb is very good at avoiding truly competitive elections. So this little power grab is seen by some as a way to ingratiate himself with the valley folk in preparation for an eventual run at Mayor when he fights for a second term. Why else would he want the job? Well ... maybe it's because he needs the money. 

Daniel Guss writes in CityWatch about Wesson's inability to meet his mortgage obligations many times over. The article clearly exposes a critical weakness in Wesson's thinking and a financial management style that raises serious concerns about his ability to control the city. 

With one of the top government salaries in the country and income from rental property why can't he make his mortgages? Why does he keep defaulting and more importantly, who keeps bailing him out? 

It appears as if one of his favorite political strategies has been the concept of being “beholding”. If he is considered a top power player in our city, isn't it important for us to know if he is beholding to anyone? 

Even better why not just start playing by the rules and follow the City Charter and let a new leader be legally appointed, take a step back and start focusing on his own district.   He could start by visiting small local businesses and asking what he could do to help. Something he hasn't done in 8 years in the district.

(Dianne V. Lawrence Is publisher and editor of THE NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS … founded in 2008 to cover the events, people, history, politics and historic architecture of communities throughout the Mid-City and West Adams area in Los Angeles Council District 10. She is an important voice in her community and will soon help launch a new online section in CityWatch: Neighborhood Politics.)

-CW

@THE GUSS REPORT-According to voter registration records, Herb Wesson, the current Los Angeles City Council president, may have voted illegally for up to 11½ years between November 1993 and June 2005 by providing false address information -- and confirming that false information -- each time he voted. Whether the LA County District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s Public Integrity Division gives him a James Comey/Hillary Clinton free pass remains to be seen.