LOS ANGELES

(Editor’s Note: As regular readers know, CityWatch was founded 15 years ago to promote civic engagement. And, it is our belief that the best engagement is the result of information and education. We also believe that for this divided country to ever come together it will be necessary for all sides on these divisive issues to be heard … and listened to. No progress comes from ‘preaching to the choir.’ That is why we post perspectives and positions from all sides of the political spectrum. We believe your voice should be heard … even if we disagree with what you have to say. It is with that belief in mind that we make this Heather MacDonald speech available to you.)

TRANSPORTATION WATCH--Most of us like paying for a given thing only once.  But hey, maybe some of us like paying for transportation and infrastructure so much that we'll pay not once, but three, four, five times for the exact same thing until finally, sort of, maybe, it gets paid for. 

As for little old me? I like paying for something once ... although I realize that budgets and disasters require some significant flexibility when reality makes yesterday's predictions null, void, and moot. And I've recommended sales taxes and higher gas taxes for decades to pay for transportation and infrastructure. 

I'm all for appropriate taxation...but I'm also for "Alpern's Law of Taxes" which states that the one thing taxpayers are more concerned about than the amount of taxes they pay is the perception about how well those taxes are spent. 

Let me repeat that again, more slowly … 

 ... the ... perception ... about ... how ... well ... those ... taxes ... are ... spent! 

But a funny thing happened over the past few decades.  The education unions needed to be FED. The public sector employee unions decided that early retirement in the mid-fifties, and getting paid big time in retirement at a salary similar to those still working, took precedence over that little thing called financial sustainability. 

And even former Governor Schwarzenegger showed he had no spine or willingness to explain that one could be PRO-teacher, PRO-education, PRO-roads, PRO-rail, PRO-business, PRO-health care, and PRO-taxpayer all at once. 

So, here’s the drill: We scream about the roads, gather more taxes, bonds, fees, whatever and then when we get more money for infrastructure we yank money from the general fund for “other” things to placate the unions. 

And whadaya know?  We don't have enough money for roads, rail, sewage, water, and other infrastructure all over again!  But the percentage of our budget going to pensions and inefficient/inappropriate spending continues to rise. 

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Seen any new universities get built lately?  The cost of education go down?  The ability of the middle class to thrive?  Businesses with lots of middle or upper class jobs go up, with either an industrial or intellectual economic base go up to pay for everything? 

I didn't see any of that, either. 

And here's the kicker, fellow taxpayers, and fellow Californians: 

You already paid for universities, and roads, and everything nice, several times over and got that tax/bond/fee money indirectly yanked towards ‘something else’ … and you will now pay for all of that yet again. 

I'm not for ANY one-party state, either Republican or Democrat.  Boondoggles and sweetheart deals that favor a few and thrash the majority is not OK. 

We now have an upper economic class of technological and other professionals who are in nice and/or gated communities.  They may grumble and get angry about taxes, but they're moving forward and living nice lives. 

Then there's the middle class, comprised primarily of suffering but hanging-in-there small businesses and public sector workers.  And if you're too stupid to become one of them, then woe be unto you. And after you retire, you'd be well advised to flee California to keep (gasp!) your hard-earned money. 

And then there's the former industrial/manufacturing middle class, who are now working fast food jobs in a service industry that's anything but helpful for those who want to live sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyles...and a minimum wage increase will too often lead to automation replacing their jobs, not more money. 

But those who stayed awake in economics class, or who lived long enough in California to remember how economics works in different venues and climates, either have been shut down, died, or fled the state. 

And now we have a new gas tax that ... perhaps after the last 4-5 failures ... will actually go to transportation. 

There ARE answers: 

1) Require a minimum of the state general fund, and safeguard all transportation taxes/fees/bonds, to remain invested in transportation/infrastructure.  10% of the general fund ought to do it. 

2) Change the education portion of the state general fund to alter inefficient K-12 funding (the K-12 population is going DOWN...did you know that?) to be diverted and establish 5-10 new UC and Cal State universities over the next ten years.  And pay education employees in a responsible and sustainable manner! 

3) Increase the costs of transportation/infrastructure for Silicon Valley/Beach businesses and developers who are impacting, but NOT paying their fair share, of the costs needed for them to be among those few who are profiting handsomely off the sweat and toil of the rest of our state. 

Until then, we've got the gas tax from those we elected to "lead".  Shut up and pay, right? 

Let's just make sure that our money actually goes to where it's supposed to, with transportation money actually having a net INCREASE as a result of this gas tax. 

Otherwise, we can look forward to our next tax/bond/fee increase because--you know--there's just not enough money for our crumbling roads and infrastructure because we spent our recent gas tax money ... directly or indirectly ... on SOMETHING ELSE. 

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He was co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chaired the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw

ANIMAL WATCH-If anything will get viewers for TV news, it is reporting that animals are going to be killed at a shelter. Activists know this well. Occasionally, frantic calls to reporters come from well-meaning--but misinformed--visitors or volunteers, because there is little time for quiet, detailed communication while managing facilities with hundreds of animals leaving and entering daily.  

Most stations know this and confirm the full facts with the agency's management so the broadcast can, hopefully, provide a positive way the public can be part of the solution--if there is a problem. 

But, on Thursday, KTLA News completely caught LA County Animal Care & Control by surprise when it broadcast and posted, “Some local rescue pet organizations are upset over a new policy at LA County Animal Services. They say the policy allows shelters to euthanize animals that are deemed 'unsafe,' instead of being made available for adoption by rescue organization." 

Sayalan Orng, identified by the station as a shelter volunteer, said ominously, "My concern is that, if this continues and we can't save dogs that are deemed aggressive, this will be a “mass murder.”" 

Although reporter Kareen Wynter announced that shelter volunteers had started a petition opposing the change, the on-line document which KTLA posted for the convenience of critics indicates it was actually started by a woman in Littleton, CO, who does not appear to have affiliation with L.A. County shelters or any other animal organization. 

A spokesperson for LACAC&C said they were not aware of the broadcast. When they were notified that an e-mail to one of their Carson rescue partners had been misinterpreted, the Department promptly posted a media release on the LA County Animal Care and Control website to clarify:

As an animal care organization DACC is committed to finding homes for all adoptable pets sheltered that are not reclaimed by their owners. While we strive for adoption outcomes for all dogs, we also have a responsibility to public safety. In some cases, dogs that find their way to our animal care centers have a documented history of such aggressive tendencies that they pose a threat to public safety. 

Eighty-four percent (84%) of the dogs that come into our Los Angeles County Animal Care are adopted to families or placed with our very valued adoption partners (rescues). However, because of our commitment to public safety, DACC will not place dogs—even with our adoption partners—when the dog has a documented history of aggressive behavior, or has exhibited a pattern of threatening or aggressive behavior while in our care. 

The reality is that very few dogs in our animal care centers will be deemed to pose a risk to public safety. We want to reassure concerned animal advocates that fears that have recently been conveyed to us -- that any dog that shows fear in the stressful kennel environment will be euthanized -- is simply not correct. Our policy is limited to dogs whose documented history demonstrates a high likelihood that they will injure or kill another animal or attack a human. 

We do not take lightly the decision to euthanize a dog for behavioral reasons and are committed to taking that action only when the dog poses a very strong propensity to do harm if placed in a new home. We will continue to evaluate each dog as an individual, taking into consideration all available information including temperament test, documented history and behavior while in our care. 

We continue to collaborate with our adoption partners to place dogs with less serious behavior issues, such as those whose evaluation would suggest special placement that our adoption partners may have the resources to address. 

The release also cites State law supporting the department’s policy. 

It is hard to believe that most County residents and rescuers would not support a decision to reduce the risk of harm to people, their pets and other animals by dogs which have a documented history or pattern of aggressive behavior—especially with attack reports on shelter employees, volunteers and the public by impounded or adopted animals increasing at an alarming rate. 

Here are just a few: 

RECENT DOG ATTACKS IN SHELTERS 

On January 23, 2017, CityWatchLA told the story of Priscilla Romero, Animal Care Technician for L.A. Animal Services, who was savagely mauled by a dog that had bitten before while in the shelter and had other notations by employees that the dog was not safe. 

On February 24, 2017, according to the Orlando Sentinel, “Lake man is recovering from attack by pit bull at animal shelter, -- “The victim of a pit bull bite in the Lake County Animal Shelter talks ... A worker came running with a mop and used it to beat the dog off.” 

On March 18, 2017, the Daily World, wrote, Pit bull attacks worker; animal shelter shut down – Stacey McKnight was alone in the back of the St. Landry Parish Animal Control shelter Thursday when the unthinkable happened. ... ‘The dog's aim was to attack me,’ she said.” 

WHO ARE ‘ANIMAL RESCUERS’? 

Responsible animal rescuers perform a valuable service for the shelters and homeless animals by keeping them in a quiet, safe environment while they seek adopters that are a good match for each dog's personality, energy level and potential needs for the rest of its life. 

Some rescuers believe they are able to change the behavior of even a very aggressive dog or that behavior assessment tests do not show the dog’s true nature. Because of the increase in breeding and ownership of certain breeds of dogs for property protection (or to guard criminal enterprises), often those impounded in shelters have serious anti-social behavior or genetic propensities which have caused them to threaten or to have already attacked a person or kill other animals. 

There is no clear legal definition of a “rescuer” or a “rescue organization” in California or most states. Anyone -- including those without dog-handling, training, or other animal-management education or experience -- can become a “rescue” and solicit donations merely by obtaining or being remotely covered under a federal 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt umbrella. 

There are no other federal laws, nor is there a state or local agency in California that maintains jurisdiction, monitors or reviews "rescue" activities for compliance with laws or ordinances. Nor are there prescribed background checks to start a "rescue" or determine qualifications for employees or volunteers. 

Hoarding, noise or animal cruelty complaints may be made to the local animal-control department -- which is often where the rescue has “pulled” many of its animals to help reduce shelter population. 

There is also no statewide agency (such as Department of Consumer Affairs) for anyone dissatisfied with the health or temperament of an animal adopted from a rescue to make a report and have its license or permit revoked, because none is required. 

ANIMAL RESCUERS ARE NOT IMMUNE TO DOG ATTACKS 

April 5, 2017, Rescue Group Volunteer, Son Injured in Dog Attack … A volunteer and her young son were hospitalized after two large-breed dogs attacked and bit them at “For the Love of Dogs” private animal shelter. "The Rottweilers went up to the children and they started to pet one of the dogs … the dog suddenly grabbed one of the children off the picnic table and took him to the ground, and the second dog started to attack the child as well.” Samuel said, “the volunteer rushed to her son’s aid and was bitten when she tried to shoo the dogs.” 

May 23, 2016, CityWatch article, LA Animal Services: Pit Bull with a Violent History Attacks Potential Adopter... 

-- "A Pit Bull named Sammy with a prior record of repeated aggression and who had just bitten a Los Angeles Animal Services kennel worker in the abdomen, was released on April 28 to NovaStar Rescue, at the personal instruction of LA Animal Services General Manager Brenda Barnette."  

August 12, 2013, Darla Napora, Pregnant, Killed by Her Pit Bull . .. . 

Two Years Ago Father Writes ... "Darla's husband wanted a male pit bull and one was rescued… Darla was described as being "...an avid, long-time supporter and member of Bay Area Dog Lovers Responsible About Pit Bulls [BAD RAP], a Pit bull advocacy group.” 

On August 20, 2012, Dog Rescuer Rebecca Carey Killed at Georgia Home by Dogs She Saved ...One or more of the rescued dogs in her home attacked Carey and killed her. ...at the time of her death—two Pit Bulls, a Boxer mix, and two Presa Canarios…” 

ANIMAL CONTROL, HUMANE SOCIETIES CAN BE SUED 

Aug 5, 2016 -- Animal control director can be sued for dog attack death, court rules ... Court rejects animal control chief Mark Kumpf’s defenses. ... Two complaints specifically alleged that the dogs’ owners, Andrew Nason and Julie Custer, had directly threatened her with attack. Andrew Nason and Julie Custer, above, were convicted of offenses pertaining to. . ."..

April 3, 2017 -- Adopted Pit Bull Attacks Toddler - Animal Shelter Sued for ‘Product Liability’ "Although the dog in Clinton, Iowa, had been listed as a 'Boxer-Labrador-mix,' it was determined to be a Pit Bull  that had been transported from a Louisiana shelter. The dog was subsequently declared a dangerous dog by Clinton authorities..." 

INCREASE IN FATAL ATTACKS BY RESCUE OR SHELTER DOGS

Colleen Lynn, of Dogsbite.org, compiled the following stats:

In the 7-year period of 2005 through 2011, dogs inflicted 214 deadly attacks in the United States. Only 2% (4) of those deaths involved rescue or adopted dogs. Of these 4 cases, 75% (3) of the dogs were vetted by rescues or shelters.[Vetted indicates a certified rescue or shelter.] All of the victims were children ages 4 and younger. 

In the 5-year period of 2012 through 2016, dogs inflicted 178 deadly attacks in the United States. A stunning 9% (16) of these deaths involved a rescue or adopted dog, making it the fastest growing category of the 47 measurable parameters that DogsBite.org tracks per death between the two time periods. 

Of the rescue or adopted dogs that killed during the 5-year period, 63% (10) were vetted. 50% (8) of these deaths involved children 7 years and younger and the other half involved adults 23 to 93 years old. 

Between the two periods, there has been a 350% increase in rescue or adopted dogs inflicting fatal attacks in the U.S. Combining both periods, 2005 through 2016, pit bulls and American bulldogs accounted for 70% of all rescue or adopted dogs that killed a person in the United States. 

PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM MARCIA MAYEDA, DIRECTOR, L.A. COUNTY ANIMAL CARE & CONTROL 

The Department of Animal Care and Control is committed to protecting human and animal safety, while placing as many unwanted animals as possible into new homes. Unfortunately, some dogs that arrive at our care centers have documented histories of aggression, or exhibit behavior so dangerous that they cannot be safely placed back into the community. Doing so places other animals, as well as people, at risk for serious  injury or death. While, sadly, these aggressive dogs cannot be safely rehomed, this decision is essential to public safety. 

To be clear, this policy relates to relatively few dogs. Other dogs may not pass a temperament assessment, but we feel are able to be further assessed and rehabilitated by experienced animal adoption partners (rescue groups). We work closely with many such organizations to provide these dogs with the opportunity for behavior modification and placement into new homes. 

It is disheartening that a venomous attack on LA County Animal Care & Control was promoted by KTLA -- which has been a strong supporter of animal shelters -- before the station had determined all the facts. As conveyed by Director Mayeda, a discussion with management could have diffused the angst of those making these claims and this damaging controversy would not have occurred.

(Phyllis M. Daugherty is a former City of LA employee and a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

DEEGAN ON LA-In today’s uneasy political climate, threatened by storm clouds of unwanted change, many are expressing their grievances by either complaining about, arguing against, or resisting something political. 

Education, and how it’s delivered, has become one of the flash points for collective dissatisfaction -- all the way from the Federal government, where we have a Cabinet level Education Secretary (who many claim lacks the understanding and experience to do the job) to the local neighborhood level here in LA, where Charter school “co-locations” on LAUSD campuses are an issue. 

A “co-location” (which became state law seventeen years ago) means having a charter school share a campus that has extra classrooms not used full time by the school district -- although those rooms may sometimes be in use for special-ed needs, art, drama and other extra-curricular after-class programs. 

The co-location process has received pushback from parents who don’t want their campuses hosting charter schools, bringing a minimum of eighty additional students from a different school and culture (private school versus public school) into their LAUSD schools. Is the politically expedient anti-globalism movement now going local, where students are becoming the spoils of the education wars? 

For the first ten years of the state law authorizing co-locations, LAUSD mounted legal challenges that they eventually lost. Yet, school district educators, administrators and parents still try to deny implementation of this law that reflected the will of the people in a public vote. Aligning this to the will of the LAUSD has not been easy. 

Expansion of charter schools by “co-locating” onto LAUSD campuses is at a crossroads now, with the May 16 run-off for seats in Districts 4 and 6 crucial to both pro and anti-charter school forces. The people on both sides of the issue have a chance to speak by casting their votes in this election. 

It doesn't take many votes to make a difference; change is lurking in this current school board race. The biggest vote getter in the municipal election -- the Mayor -- was given a second term with the votes of just 15% of the city’s registered voters. Not so lucky was the incumbent and anti-charter-school school board president Steve Zimmer, who is now fighting to hold onto his seat in District 4, jeopardized when he captured slightly under half of the votes cast in his district. This gave him just short of a majority in the close race, forcing a run-off. That slight margin is how little it takes to get elected to a position that could help freeze charter school growth. The flip side is that charter school supporters, seeing this vulnerability, can mobilize and achieve the required votes to win.

A mostly boring, poorly attended municipal election a few weeks ago had a historically low 16% voter turnout that would make anyone’s claim of having a “mandate” sound like something Trump would tweet. This resulted in a run-off for the LAUSD school board seats in District 4, which includes the Westside and part of the west Valley where pro-charter Nick Melvoin faces anti-charter Steve Zimmer; and District 6, the east San Fernando Valley, where charter-backer Kelly Gonez faces union-supported Imelda Padilla. Results in Districts 4 and 6 could tip the school board to a “pro-charter” or an “anti-charter” majority, so lots is at stake. This run-off could tilt the scales in the charter versus traditional school controversy as well as reveal the union versus non-union biases that exist in this, the second largest school district in the country. 

After voters passed Prop 39 in the year 2000, adding to the State Education Code "that public school facilities should be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools....that school districts to make ‘reasonably equivalent’ facilities available to charter schools upon request,” the LAUSD fought back, delaying implementation for ten years until forced to comply. In 2010 they lost a lawsuit brought by the California Charter School Association to compel LAUSD compliance with Prop 39. 

Now, seven years later, the power ratio at the LAUSD school board is vulnerable to a major shake-up. All it will take is two more pro-charter board members to be elected on May 16 and the pro-charter forces will have a majority on the board. It has been seventeen years since Prop 39 was passed -- enough time for a kid to matriculate from kindergarten to the doorsteps of college. 

Across the city, on the neighborhood level (such as in Hancock Park) there are charter schools wanting to use Prop 39 to co-locate onto LAUSD campuses. But many face resistance. Is this a state law versus neighborhood preference conflict? Or is it something more -- possibly a form of NIMBYism? 

“To Be, or Not To Be? That is the question” is what many students learn when they are exposed to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” for the first time. It’s a question many of their parents are asking now with the increasing number of charter schools taking up space on LAUSD campuses. In Hancock Park, they are asking if the LAUSD Third Street School campus will also be home for a charter school. That would swap out a few rooms that are now used for extracurricular activities for a charter school co-location by Citizens of the World Charter Schools which already operates charters in Hollywood, Silverlake and Mar Vista. 

A recent LAUSD presentation about a possible charter school co-location at Third Street School was shouted down by mostly moms who are against co-location. It was as if parents were using another Hamlet quote: “There’s something rotten in Denmark”, although the laws are pretty specific: it’s the adjustment to them that’s causing the emotional turmoil. 

The boiling point will come with the May 16 run-off election. Charter-advocate and Zimmer opponent Nick Melvoin (District 4) and charter-backer Kelly Gonez (District 6) will have to win seats if it’s going to be “goodnight sweet prince” for school board president Zimmer. We may see a school board that says hello to charter school expansion.

(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.

EDUCATION POLITICS-On Sunday April 2, the Committee for Racial Justice in Santa Monica had as their guest speaker Dr. Ben Drati, the relatively new African American superintendent of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD). What Dr. Drati discussed in his presentation was SMMUSD's decision to once and for all effectively deal with the unacceptable realities behind why African American and Latino students continue to do poorly at SMMUSD -- and what can be done to close this achievement gap with verifiable results. 

While I had some problems with Dr. Drati's approach to achieving minority student parity with their generally more affluent and academically successful non-minority peers, what I nonetheless found refreshing in his approach was a his willingness to incorporate ideas that might enable him and SMMUSD to help minority students to achieve their potential. 

The "coherent and cohesive focus" that Dr. Drati seeks to implement at SMMUSD to improve minority achievement, will require that he not underestimate the entrenched "culture of opposition" he will surely encounter when his reforms challenge the profitable vested interests of those who are doing just fine financially under the present system. 

Dr. Drati believes the "people leading schools have best intentions in mind." The reality is that we have 2.3 million people presently incarcerated in our prisons, one million of whom are African American. Fixing our schools so that minority students come out highly educated, socialized and employable, could not help but cut into these rates of incarceration and the obscene corporate profits that have been generated by them for so long.

There is also a tendency to minimize or not really understand the profoundly positive effect a good pragmatically driven public education system can have when it does more than mouth platitudes that most of those running the system don't even really believe. For example, Dr. Drati presented a list of several factors that schools could not control in dealing with minority underachievement. The reality is that a well functioning school is the actual mechanism that eliminates these negative factors. 

According to Dr. Drati, schools "don't control the level of poverty and living conditions" of its student population. But in American history, functioning public schools have always been the social integration mechanism that has assured students will more often than not do better socio-economically than their parents, who often had inferior educations. So far, this has eluded Black and Latino students. Why is that? 

If the "parents’ education level" continues to function as a continuing negative indicator of their children's achievement, because they are incapable of helping their children with homework, there are certain measures to try. Something as easy and relatively inexpensive as keeping the schools open after regular school hours and into the evening, so that students can get supplemental help with homework, can not only give underachieving students a place to get help but it might also serve as a forum for drawing back to school some of the students -- and parents -- who may have become frustrated and dropped out. It would be a lot cheaper than incarceration in the juvenile justice system that costs $78,000 a year per youth. 

Most importantly, Dr. Drati needs to know that any K-12 education system cannot assume that students arriving into a school at a given grade-level are objectively at that grade-level as measured by mastery of all prior grade-level standards. The existing system that now socially promotes students irrespective of their true grade-levels, has been and continues to be the greatest factor in creating student apathy, classroom disruption, and the lack of self-worth these students continue to suffer from unnecessarily. Could this have something to do with explaining why 70% of students who ultimately make it into the community college system in California wind up taking remedial courses in subjects that should have been remediated while in K-12? And how was it their K-12 schools awarded them high school diplomas? 

In dealing with the present de facto segregated public education system that still exists throughout the vast majority of inner city schools, there are some very difficult truths that cannot be avoided or ignored. For the past 400 years, there has been a systematic decimation a people based on race. It cannot be overcome without addressing the quantifiable, predictable damage this system has had and would have on any people unwillingly subjugated to it. A belated "equal education" for people who have been assured that they are not equal will not work to turn this travesty around – to the benefit of all Americans -- unless a pragmatic, subjective assessment of each student’s academic standing is done to ensure a relevant education the students can benefit from. 

One of the hardest issues to address and get the public to accept in order to turn around our failed public education system is to recognize that we as a society have perpetrated immutable damage that has limited the future of what were once the unlimited possibilities of the poor and minority students subjected to it. It now behooves us to transition from this "inherently unequal" low expectation school system to one "with liberty and justice for all." We must not ignore the damage we have done, which if left unaddressed, would continue to preclude these students from attaining any possible remaining success in the future. 

As we move to lessen the negative impact of this necessary transition period, it might be advisable to stop using empty, disingenuous rhetoric. More specifically, with a total college and university capacity in this country of 40% of high school graduates, why have public schools all but eliminated industrial arts and career training programs that students could use to achieve gainful employment after leaving school or to enable them to defray the ever increasing costs of post-secondary education? 

Another temptation that reformers like Dr. Drati need to avoid if they are to assure that minority students get the timely education they are entitled to, is not to adapt the system to the current low, negative achievement results of a racist system. In successfully educating any student, their age and grade levels need to be ignored and replaced with an assessment of where the individual student is subjectively – while at the same time assessing what each one is capable of learning. Such an approach might result in a pleasant surprise, a system in which minority students finally feel safe and respected and able to let down their guard, becoming "school boys or girls" without suffering the slings and arrows of their peers. 

In his talk, Dr. Drati posed the question: "What is going on in the mind of somebody who thinks it's okay to kill" without understanding that such a person has neither Drati's education nor vocabulary to understand the ramifications of such an action. With an average 500 word vocabulary, these young people engaging in violence on the streets of Los Angeles or Chicago are the logical result of failing to educate too many of this country's most important asset: its kids. This is important for all of our futures...if we want to have one. 

Although a product of the Los Angeles public school system who had the atypical ability to go on to college and get degrees in both biochemistry and a doctorate in education, I must confess I was not surprised to find out that Dr. Drati's family had immigrated to the United States. To me, this means that his family was probably not subjected to the systematic siege that most Black American families have suffered for far too long. Imagine what African American and Latinos students might achieve in school if they were given a level playing field like Dr. Drati had. 

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

DITHERING DYSTOPIA-As the Mayor was winging around the world touting Los Angeles as a venue ready for the World Stage, his bumbling surrogates -- Councilmembers Herb Wesson (photo above) and Mitch Englander (literally unable to keep their lies straight) -- rolled out a motion last Wednesday to make the violation of City Hall rules become a “trespass,” a misdemeanor which can carry with it a six-month prison sentence.  

It’s the “if-you-dare-break-one-of-our-rules-we-will-send-you-to-jail” ordinance, and it will render City Hall a dystopian haunted house, where members of the public will actually be stripped of civil liberties as they pass through the metal detector.  

A necessary evil? Absolutely, they contend, given the deadly and/or noisy nature of the City’s murderous and/or blabber-mouthed gadflies. All this is in addition to the prospect of the transient who hopped over Councilmember Bonin’s desk in 2014 coming back for another bite of the apple. 

Cops in City Hall take orders directly from whomever happens to be sitting in Council President’s seat. It could be a psychopathic drug addict, but if that person’s in the chair, he has at his disposal a private army of Taser-toting cops.  

So watch your back. Herb Wesson and the frequently defensive and irritable Mitch Englander are taking the civic out of civic engagement. 

It’s the watchdogs that are to blame. If they weren’t so nosy and abrasive and fault-finding, then the Council wouldn’t need to crackdown.  

Where’s the press? Most of the major outlets swallowed Wesson’s barely coherent talking points and then dutifully circulated them to the public, but it’s not too late to set things straight. 

We should be storming City Hall, kicking down doors and taking names. If not now, then when? 

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

NEW GEOGRAPHY--California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.

Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”

Virtually all the polices now embraced by Sacramento — from water and energy regulations to the embrace of sanctuary status and a $15-an-hour minimum wage — come right out of San Francisco central casting. Little consideration is given to the needs of the interior, and little respect is given to their economies.

San Francisco, for example, recently decided to not pump oil from land owned by the city in Kern County, although one wonders what the new rich in that region use to fill the tanks of their BMWs. California’s “enlightened” green policies help boost energy prices 50 percent above those of neighboring states, which makes a bigger difference in the less temperate interior, where many face longer commutes than workers in more compact coastal areas.

The new Bantustans

Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.

This disparity has worsened in recent years. Until the 2008 housing crash, the interior counties served, as the Kern EDC’s Chapman puts it, as “an incubator for mobility.” These areas were places that Californians of modest means, and companies no longer able to afford coastal prices, could get a second shot.

But state policies, notably those tied to Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate jihad, suggests Inland Empire economist John Husing, have placed California  “at war” with blue-collar industries like homebuilding, energy, agriculture and manufacturing. These kinds of jobs are critical for regions where almost half the workforce has a high school education or less.

Why the interior matters

In legislating against the interior, the state is trying to counter the national trend — evident in the most recent census numbers — that shows people seeking less dense, more affordable areas. Both millennial and immigrant populations are growing rapidly in these regions. Between 2000 and 2013, the Inland region experienced a 91 percent jump in its population with bachelor’s degrees or higher, a far more rapid increase than either Orange or Los Angeles counties.

By curtailing new housing supply, California is systematically shutting off this aspirational migration. Chapman University forecaster James Doti notes that, in large part due to regulation, Inland Empire housing prices have jumped 80 percent since 2009 — almost twice the rate for Orange County. Doti links this rapid rise to helping slow the area’s once buoyant job growth in half over the past two years. Population growth has also slowed, particularly in comparison to a decade ago.

Weighed down by coastal-imposed regulations, the interior is losing its allure for relocating firms. Many firms fleeing regulation, high taxes and housing costs used to head inland. Now, many are migrating to Nevada, Texas, Arizona and other states. “Many of the projects we saw years ago have surfaced in Phoenix,” lamented Mary Jane Ohlasso, assistant executive officer for San Bernardino County, in an interview. “The whole way California has grown has been hopelessly terminated,” she told me.

Over time, however, constraining the interior will backfire on the coastal enclaves. In recent weeks, coastal technology and professional service providers have raised a growing alarm about attracting and retaining thirtysomething skilled workers. Some have even suggested that new transportation infrastructure — for example, a tunnel between Corona and south Orange County — could provide an alternative for family-aged workers who cannot afford a residence closer to the coast. Others, to keep key employees, are purposely setting up offices in places like San Antonio for workers entering their thirties.

If this crisis of the interior is not addressed, the prognosis for California will be ever-growing class and race bifurcation and an ever-rising demand for welfare and other subsidies for those unable to pay for housing. California needs, in reasonable and sustainable ways, to keep open its regions of opportunity, not to seek to close them off to future generations.

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

-cw

@THE GUSS REPORT-Aloof and incompetent government has been mocked by the masses since time immemorial. Outside of elections, it is sometimes the only way to have your dissent heard.

The increasingly antagonistic mockery of LA City Councilmembers at their thrice weekly gatherings has become a slapstick art form which has intensified during the five years that its president Herb Wesson has run the meetings, yet Wesson seems oblivious as ever to what he has done to increase the hostility in his quest to reduce civic participation. Specifically, he has: 

• Reduced public speaking time from a total five minutes to three for items on the agenda. 

• Reduced public speaking time from two minutes to one on any single agenda item. 

• Reduced general public comment (for items not on the agenda) from two minutes to one minute. 

• Moved general public comment from the beginning of the meeting, to the end of the meeting, back to the beginning and, now, in dribs and drabs, as filler throughout the meeting. 

• Consistently called for peoples’ speaker cards the moment they step outside of City Council chambers to go to the restroom, declaring their time forfeited. 

• Interrupted speakers, calling them “off-topic” without giving them a chance to make their point in their own way, including doing this to some whose primary language is not English and some who may be disabled or homeless and do not speak as swiftly as Wesson. 

• Repeatedly interrupted speakers while their already reduced speaking time ticks off the clock. 

• Called people to speak on a topic even though the agenda item is not yet ready to be voted on. 

• Allowed Councilmembers to mill around or even stray away from Council chambers during public debate, and set Council’s voting software default to an “aye” yes vote without paying attention to speakers’ concerns. 

• Squandered hours at the start of most City Council meetings with breathless, repetitious, fawning ceremony and celebration (which should be moved to a once-per-month weekend event) rather than put the peoples’ business first. 

• Misplaced speaker cards so that, when the person gets in line to speak, he or she is declared “disruptive” and thrown out of the meeting under threat of arrest. (Then he suddenly locates the cards once speakers have been ejected from the room. 

Just last week, on a day when City Council squandered hours on fluff before getting down to business, Wesson’s sarcastic, Napoleonic back-up, Councilmember Mitch Englander, told a disabled speaker who had an opinion with which he disagreed, “your prescription is now ready.” 

Where was Wesson’s reprimand for that? While Wesson and Englander whine, they give as good as they get. 

The situation is far worse now than during the years Mayor Eric Garcetti served as City Council president, although his interference with free speech resulted in a losing, costly-to-the-taxpayers federal 1^st Amendment lawsuit won by David “Zuma Dogg” Saltsburg. As a result, all new elected officials and commissioners who run public meetings are now warned about “The Zuma Dogg Ruling” before they enter the City Hall fray. And Mr. Saltsburg wasn’t the only critic to win a free speech battle in court against City Hall. 

Wesson’s restrictiveness and inability to find common ground is not only arbitrary and retaliatory against the City Hall regulars, it also hurts other people who may come to City Hall only one time in their lives to fight something like an unfair property lien, forcing them to wait hours for a paltry 60-seconds to speak, often without even being heard. 

Last week, Wesson dealt what will eventually become another losing hand for City Hall when he and the other Councilmembers instructed City Attorney Mike Feuer, who has cultivated his own retaliatory reputation, to figure out a way to (mis-)use trespass laws to silence critics.  

In typical Wesson-Englander fashion, they didn’t first hash out the specifics of how and where the legislation will be applied. From City News Service: 

“Vanessa Rodriguez, spokeswoman for Council President Herb Wesson, said that despite Englander's interpretation, the ordinance would not apply to public meetings.” 

According to Englander, the law will be applied to any city meeting or building where someone is deemed disruptive. He is the last person whose judgement should determine that. A year ago last week, Englander was swatted-down by a judge in his recent campaign for County Supervisor in an attempt to list on the ballot his profession as “police officer” even though he isn’t and never was one. 

Regardless, City Council unanimously approved its motion to suffocate criticism in Nancy Pelosi-fashion -- i.e., voting on it without knowing what’s in it.

While the gadflies love goading Englander into calling phony speaker names such as Mohammed Atta and this gem, to derisive laughter, things weren’t always this bad for Wesson. 

When Wesson first came to the City Council presidency as a skilled career politician who is fairly likable in one-on-one settings, he not only knew virtually everyone in the room, but in many instances, knew where they were headed once they left it. If he saw regulars in Council chambers on a given day, he instinctively knew that they probably wanted to get to another meeting up in the City Hall Tower, so he would reliably call on them early to make their points at City Council and send them on their way. It also helped Wesson get critics away from the Channel 35 cameras broadcasting the meetings sooner.

Now that is good political instinct! 

But over the course of time, Wesson has lost that sense of fairness -- to the detriment of the public and his ever-growling stomach -- whose churning can often be heard over his open City Council microphone. 

If Wesson returned to that more reasonable mindset and started running meetings in a more efficient and fair way, it might not halt the disruptions, but it would be a wise step in a better direction because where it’s headed now, the taxpayers and Wesson are going to lose in the end. And another 1^st Amendment win for the gadflies is fuel for the fire.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a CityWatch contributor, a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CALWATCHDOG--An immigration-enforcement headache anticipated by President Trump’s sister — federal appellate court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — is roiling law enforcement authorities in California. 

They say federal court rulings impede their ability to cooperate with demands from Attorney General Jeff Sessions that they cooperate more fully with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in turning over undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

At issue is how long jails and prisons can hold undocumented immigrants for pickup by ICE agents after their sentences are completed. The present practice in California is to give agents up to 48 hours. But especially in heavily populated areas with many jails — such as the Los Angeles region — ICE agents struggle to meet this deadline in picking up criminals set to be released.

Last month, Sessions blasted local authorities for being unwilling to hold these inmates up to 96 hours — four days — after their scheduled release and said failing to do so amounted to defiance of the federal government. A list released by the Justice Department cited eight California law enforcement agencies that it said had “refused” detainer requests: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department and local jailers in Alameda County, Madera County, Santa Clara County, Sacramento County, Santa Barbara County and the city of Anaheim.

Sheriffs say federal court ruling blocks longer jail detentions

But the California State Sheriffs’ Association says that only giving ICE 48 hours to get released criminals is not a matter of defiance. It’s to avoid costly lawsuits.

Association officials cited U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart’s 2014 ruling in a case from Clackamas County, Oregon, in which an undocumented immigrant accused of domestic violence, Maria Miranda-Olivares, was detained beyond the normal release time at ICE’s request. Stewart cited a federal appellate court ruling from earlier in 2014 that said ICE requests were just that — requests — and were not legally binding. She ruled that Miranda-Olivares could sue Clackamas County for unlawful detention.

The circumstances of the appeals case — Galarza v. Szalczyk — were somewhat different than the Oregon case. It dealt with a U.S. citizen who was detained at length by local authorities in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, then released by ICE agents after they determined he was a citizen, as claimed. 

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that threw out Ernesto Galarza’s lawsuit alleging illegal detention by Lehigh County. (Galarza had previously settled his lawsuit against ICE and its agents.) The opinion, written by Judge Julio M. Fuentes, cited a long list of precedents in which requests from ICE and its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, were treated by courts and the federal agency itself as nonbinding. Fuentes’ key finding:

“Under the Tenth Amendment, immigration officials may not order state and local officials to imprison suspected aliens subject to removal at the request of the federal government. Essentially, the federal government cannot command the government agencies of the states to imprison persons of interest to federal officials.”

Trump’s sister warned of ‘enormous ramifications’

But one of the three appellate judges who heard the Galarza appeal — Trump’s sister — dissented from Fuentes’ ruling and lamented the fact that the Obama administration had not filed an amicus brief:

“I am deeply concerned that the United States has not been heard on the seminal issue in this appeal, an issue that goes to the heart of the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. And make no mistake about it. The conclusion reached by my friends in the Majority that immigration detainers issued pursuant to 8 C.F.R. § 287.7 do not impose any obligation on state and local law enforcement agencies to detain suspected aliens subject to removal, but are merely requests that they do so, has enormous implications and will have, I predict, enormous ramifications,” Barry wrote.

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones told the Los Angeles Times that state sheriffs had urged the Obama administration without success to appeal the Oregon ruling. Jones and other sheriffs interviewed by the Times said they had explained the bind they were in to Trump administration officials. But that didn’t deter Sessions from his criticism.

(Chris Reed is an editorial writer for U-T San Diego. Before joining the U-T in July 2005, he was the opinion-page columns editor and wrote the featured weekly Unspin column for The Orange County Register. This piece was posted originally at CalWatchDog.) 

-cw

NOISE POLLUTION NIGHTMARE-Nextdoor is lit up as neighbors in the West Adams community weigh in on the onslaught of air traffic noise over their community. Indeed, on the second day after relocating from one street north of the 10 freeway to 3 blocks south of it I recall thinking, "Oh no. I live under a flight path.” Jeff Camp, a West Adams resident spearheading local response, reported over 300 flights in one day, while neighbor Linda Marais stayed up and counted nine flights in the early morning, between 3 and 6 a.m., a practice that apparently is prohibited.   

According to the LAX website, it “is the fourth busiest passenger airport in the world, second in the United States. It served more than 80.9 million passengers in 2016 an increase of almost 8 percent from the previous year. As of March 2017, LAX offers 692 daily nonstop flights to 91 U.S. cities and 1,220 weekly nonstop flights to 78 international destinations in 41 countries on 66 commercial air carriers.  LAX ranks 14th in the world and fifth in the U.S. in air cargo tonnage processed, with more than 2.2 million tons of air cargo valued at over $101.4 billion.  LAX handled 697,138 operations (landings and takeoffs) in 2016.”

Technology is changing everything and the National Airspace System is not exempt. According to Wikipedia - “Between 2015 and 2025 they are transforming the air traffic control system in an effort to reduce gridlock in the sky and the airport. The project is dubbed NextGen [referred to as Metroplex in Southern California] and 'proposes to transform America’s air traffic control system from a radar-based system with radio communication to a satellite-based one.' GPS technology will be used to shorten routes, save time and fuel, reduce traffic delays, increase capacity, and permit controllers to monitor and manage aircraft with greater safety margins. Radio communications will be increasingly replaced by data exchange and automation will reduce the amount of information the air crew must process at one time.

As a result of these changes, planes will be able to fly closer together, take more direct routes and avoid delays caused by airport 'stacking' as planes wait for an open runway.” 

Aye. And there’s the rub.  

As the campaign is implemented throughout the country, the direct routes of airplanes following each other more closely have created noisy highways in the sky, a shower of pollution raining down onto communities below and a spike in complaints from 904 in February of 2016 to 3,247 in February of 2017. Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, New York, Phoenix, Culver City along with our adjacent community, and San Diego are primarily impacted and lawsuits have ensued. 

A local pilot weighing in on Nextdoor disputed that the Nexgen project has redirected flights over our community; rather, he said, it was the result of airport construction. It is both. So in October of 2016, Culver City decided to challenge the environmental review by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Southern California Metroplex Project. The FAA review conveniently found that there was no significant impact to the environment. Culver City filed a Petition for Review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit claiming that the FAA did not adequately consider the affect of noise and pollution on affected communities and did not do an adequate technical analysis before redesigning the airspace. 

“Our residents have already experienced a significant impact on their quality of life from current flight path changes. The citizens and businesses of Culver City deserve a full analysis and discussion of the location, altitude, and impacts of these new approach and departure procedures created by the Project, which are absent from the FAA’s Environmental Assessment,” said Culver City Mayor Jim B. Clarke.”

Numerous calls to Representative Karen Bass from the rising tide of Nextdoor activists, have resulted in an upcoming sit down and this statement from Representative Bass: “The continual barrage of airplane noise and pollution at all hours is absolutely unacceptable. My office has received numerous complaints over the past years about both daytime noise from frequent, lower flights, and about nighttime noise from planes landing over homes instead of over the ocean.  I encourage constituents to actively report the noise events to LAX noise management in order to build an official record of the problems. 

In the meantime, I have directed my staff to set up a meeting between the relevant agencies and affected constituents as soon as it can be arranged. I have also been working with my colleagues in the Congressional Quiet Skies Caucus to direct funds to address the airplane noise issues being felt across the country.  Please stay in touch with my office so I can continue to track how this is affecting our district.”

To file a complaint CLICK HERE. Complaints influence outcomes. 

(Dianne Lawrence is the editor and publisher of The Neighborhood News and an occasional contributor to CityWatch) Photo credit: Michael Kelly. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-The jury is no longer out. Our new President, Donald Trump, is the climate change denier-in-chief. He has called climate change a Chinese plot. He has appointed another unabashed climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a Federal agency established by Republican “moderate,” Richard Nixon. Trump has also withdrawn many Obama era climate-change regulations, such as restrictions on power plant emissions. Last, but hardly least, Trump nominated retiring Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, to become Secretary of State. On his way out the door, Exxon gave Tillerson a $180 million severance package, about six times what Exxon spent under his leadership to foster doubt about climate change.

If this situation strikes you as grim, you are correct, and given the upward trend of all climate change indicators, such as CO2 levels, extreme weather events, sea level rises, and the loss of polar ice caps, the world’s climate situation will only get worse. In fact, even before Trump, these trends were already quickly unfolding, which means his historical role is to make an already bad situation much worse.  

In light of these harsh realities, some Angelinos might become smug about climate change. After all, we live in a state, California, and a city, Los Angeles, where prominent elected officials, especially Governor Jerry Brown and Mayor Eric Garcetti, have assumed a major leadership role in opposing the Trump administration’s dangerous pushback against modest Obama era climate change programs. 

But, this smugness is premature. A closer look at LA’s actual climate change policies and practices issues reveals that our glass, too, is mostly empty. The following information should wipe the smile off anyone gloating about how forward thinking their city and state really are when it comes to climate change. 

Basic Environmental Programs where the City of LA falls short. 

CEQA: As I have previously written, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a potentially powerful tool to stop climate change. It provides appointed and elected decision makers detailed information on a specific project’s climate impacts, especially its likely generation of Green House Gases. Through CEQA, Environmental Impact Reports (EIR’s) also provide these decision makers with specific data on at least four project alternatives, including those identified as environmentally superior. Given the extraordinary dangers from climate change, some of which are already appearing, like mounting forest fires, most of us would assume that elected officials obviously opt for the environmentally superior alternatives. 

Wrong. In Los Angeles this does not happen. Instead, our elected officials reflexively select the most environmentally destructive alternative. This action, which sweeps hard evidence of unmitigatable climate change impacts under the carpet, requires the decision makers to adopt a Statement of Overriding Considerations. These statements sideline an EIR’s environmental findings through a text that routinely echoes a project’s claims about job and transit ridership generation. While these promises could conceivably be true, we will never know for sure because the approval process stops with the decision maker’s vote to adopt their Statement of Overriding Considerations. After that no approvals are contingent on evidence that a project actually boosts transit ridership or jobs, much less that these supposed outcomes offset the project’s actual generation of unmitigatable Green House Gases. 

Trees: The lowest hanging fruit in fighting climate is quite literally growing on trees, a basic infrastructure component that is, year-after-year, one of City Hall’s lowest budget priorities. As a result, most LA streets and parkways are either barren or haphazardly planted with inappropriate trees that are seldom pruned or watered. 

Nevertheless, when it comes to addressing climate change, trees are the closest things we have to a miracle cure. As we learned in high school biology classes, trees absorb CO2, sequester carbon in wood and leaves, and then exhale oxygen through photosynthesis. In addition, some trees, like Ficus, filter out other air pollutants, such as particulate matter. But, these benefits are just the beginning since trees also create beauty and a shade canopy. Both features promote walking in a city whose built environment remains auto-centric and whose natural environment is getting hotter.

Furthermore, trees also buffer another feature of climate change, heavier rains. Without trees these rains cause soil erosion and runoff. With trees, most of this damage is prevented because the rain hits the leave and then slowly percolates into the ground. 

Pedestrianization: Any successful climate mitigation program attempts to reduce automobile driving, the largest source of Green House Gases in California. This means that all alternative transportation modes, whether walking, bicycling, busses, light rail, heavy rails, commuter rail, and high speed interurban rail deserve more political and financial support. Among these, walking and bicycling are the low-cost alternatives. Furthermore, three other West Coast cities, notably Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have already demonstrated that walking and bicycling can become significant alternatives to automobiles. But, in Los Angeles the sidewalks are crumbling, and most do not have a proper tree canopy or ADA curb cuts. As for bicycling, even though Los Angeles has perfect weather, many wide corridors, and broad bicycle-friendly flat areas, LA ranks 24th in the United States when it comes to bicycling. 

Planning Documents: The City of Los Angeles has a Mayoral climate change document, pLAn, which markets itself as LA’s first climate action plan. This is an odd boast since Mayor Villaraigosa’s even more detailed climate action plan, Green LA, is still easily found on the City of LA’s website. But, such piddling details aside, the real problem with the City of LA’s overall approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation is that there is no there there. Other than another short-lived executive document, there are no legally adopted policy documents, implementing ordinances, or independent monitoring. 

Furthermore, the official city planning process, the General Plan, does not yet directly address the environment. While climate change related goals and programs are coincidentally scattered through many General Plan elements, especially Air Quality, Mobility, and the General Plan Framework, nothing links them together and nothing measures their effectiveness. 

While City Planning has resumed preparing its required annual General Plan monitoring report, the current document makes no mention to either the Villaraigosa or Garcetti climate action plans. For that matter, it makes no direct references to many existing City department climate-related programs, especially those at the Bureau of Sanitation. In theory, they all have a bearing on climate change adaptation (securing water) and mitigation (transit), but this is only implicit. They are never identified per se, and the monitoring report does not draw any climate connections from these programs to any executive climate initiatives or to multiple State of California climate mandates, such as AB 32 and SB 375. 

As for the preparation and adoption of a new General Plan Climate Change element that could build on executive documents and a vast array of city programs, we can always make a wish. After all, some California cities, like San Francisco, already have a General Plan environmental element, and the Governors Office of Research and Climate, has posted detailed policy guidelines and data bases for new General Plan environmental/climate change elements. 

Theoretical issues: The most common form of climate change denialism, exhibited by Donald Trump and his cronies, is rejection of the natural science climate consensus. The planet is now experiencing relentless climate change resulting from human activity. It has been observable for at least a century, and is now accelerating because of the increased generation of Green House Gases through industrial production, power generation, and transportation. 

But, one of the most astute climate change analysts, University of Oregon environmental sociologist, John Bellamy Foster, convincingly argues that there are two additional types of climate change denialism. They equally apply to the President, the Governor, and the Mayor. 

Foster’s second type of climate change denial is the belief that climate change is disconnected from the economy. Foster argues that “growth,” or what he terms capital accumulation, inevitably leads to climate change. By extension, he also argues that capitalism cannot be tweaked to allow perpetual expansion (i.e., growth), whether slow, like the United States, or fast, such as China, without adverse climate impacts. This is what he considers to be third level of climate change denialism, the belief that climate change can be controlled or even reversed without changing the economic system. 

Needless to say, California, including Los Angeles, does not yet have elected officials who link climate change to the country’s economic system. As demonstrated by their repeated efforts to undermine the California Environmental Quality Act in order to promote real estate speculation, it is clear that their pronouncements and their actions reject Foster’s contention that economic “growth” stands in the way of environmental protection. 

Final thoughts: This list of deficient programs, plans, and approaches to address climate change is hardly definitive. A closer look at Los Angeles reveals many more efforts to undercut policies and programs to reduce Green House Gases, such as exempting more real estate categories from CEQA. 

If smugness is creeping up on you, please stay tuned for a review of these programs.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatchLA. He has also taught courses of Sustainable City Planning at USC’s Price School of Social Policy. Comments and corrections welcomed at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EASTSIDER-Don’t misunderstand. I like Ron Galperin, and as both a lawyer and a budget guy, he is the real deal. Of course it is important to remember that auditors are numbers and data freaks, living in their own closed universe. On the plus side, their work product, within their “scope of work” parameters, will always add up. Which doesn’t mean the real world works like that. 

Case in point is the recent Audit by City Controller Galperin, which you can find here.  

The major finding of the audit, that made headlines in the LA Times, was the one about DWP training program has high costs and low graduation rates, audit finds. 

The other major finding tied in with this, was that many trainees leave the DWP after completing the program, lured by better deals from other Utilities. 

I have no doubt that the data supports these findings. What this actually means in the real world, however, is another thing entirely. I believe that the training costs are well spent to train employees in a very hazardous business -- the reliable delivery of power to us under any and all adverse circumstances. 

Training and the Power Employees 

Some 80% of the DWP training money goes to the Power System. That’s the folks who used to be called ‘linemen’ and are now called EDMT -- Line Worker, Cable Splicer -- the people who climb up to those humungous power lines stretching into three states (California, Utah, and Arizona), and the people who work the power generation plants, stations and substations, as well as on the telephone poles to our houses. 

This is seriously hazardous business, often performed 24/7 without respite, in the worst weather conditions. You and I can be without power for hours or days if these people do not perform their jobs efficiently. 

They are also being trained to perform their jobs in an era of rapid technological change, as we switch from traditional energy sources like coal and nuclear to wind and solar. 

The three major complaints in the Audit relate to the length of time that it takes to train these power system employees (up to 42 months), the dropout rate (about 67% for Line Worker/Cable Splicer), and the fact that a lot of successful employees are hired away from DWP by other Utilities such as Southern California Edison. 

The Safety Employee Analogy 

I use the comparison of training a power line worker to that of a police officer. Without stretching the comparison too much, in each case we have a system designed to take unskilled candidates, and through a rigorous, expensive and lengthy process, turn them into safe, skilled workers who can reliably function under sometimes dangerous or hazardous conditions, all while avoiding mistakes. In each of these systems, the goal is to perform under unpredictable conditions without errors that could result in injury or even death. Not to mention litigation. 

In the case of police officers, POST training is rigorous and expensive, just as apprenticeship training is rigorous and expensive tor the DWP. The goal is to wind up with highly trained employees who want to have a long, successful career, and to assure safety to these employees and to the public. 

Although it is rarely talked about, in each of these systems, one of the primary purposes of the training is to weed out potential employees who are unsuitable for a career in that field. We don’t want an employee who discovers that the job isn’t for him or her after completing the period of instruction. The potential risks are simply too high, and might not be exposed until the candidate is faced with a lot of pressure under really crummy, dangerous conditions. Thus the rigorous training. 

Please understand that I’m not making a case for equality of between police and Line Workers (sorry, IBEW) when it comes to their importance, their pay, or the two retirement systems. It is simply that long, expensive and rigorous training systems are critical for success in each field. 

Dropout Is Important 

Back when I was living in Lincoln Heights, I knew a number of young high school students who would not blink an eye at the thought of joining a gang, which always seemed to me to be a relatively hazardous life choice. But talk to those same young people about making a lot of money and have a good paying job climbing up one of those big power poles for DWP, and most of them would look at me like I was crazy and say, “No Way!” 

The point is that in any training program, you want to make sure that the candidate is a good fit for the job as early in the program as possible. While I did not see any statistics on point, dropouts are a normal part of doing business. The best programs will have the highest dropout rates early on -- before that huge amount of time and money is spent making candidates highly trained. 

In the case of DWP, with the high winds, rainstorms and crazy weather we have enjoyed over the last year, one major error can cause or extend a power outage to thousands of customers, not to mention cause injury or death. 

Wages and Benefits 

I know that all my friends on the DWP Committee will cringe at this one, but there is a certain poetic justice in the Audit Report. It (correctly) notes that DWP is being successfully poached by other utilities that grab successful employees who graduate from the apprenticeship program. 

Well, gee, that would have to do with wages and benefits, wouldn’t it? So it may be all well and good that, relative to certain benchmark positions, DWP employees are paid significantly more than other City employees. However, looking at the utility industry as a whole, that simply isn’t the case. Thus the poaching. I suspect that on the Power side, Galperin’s Audit Report is going to become Exhibit A in the ongoing negotiations between the IBEW and the DWP over a successor contract. 

Also, having opened that particular can of worms, someone is going to have to take a serious look at the Office of Public Accountability/Ratepayer Advocate’s (OPA) recent Joint Compensation Study, which you can find here.  

Generally, the DWP Pension plan for newer employees (Tier 2) makes no sense as compared to mainstream defined benefit plans, such as CalPERS -- even as most public sector pension plans are the reason employees stay until retirement. 

Regarding administrative types, their IT infrastructure might as well be written in Cobol or RPG (and some probably is), and like most of the City, needs major upgrades and integration. So while the Auditor correctly wants better data, the existing system is not going to be of much use. 

The DWP employment pyramid is upside down compared to everyone else. That is, there are serious compression issues that literally create dis-incentives for mid-managers and up to hire on or stay. In plain English, for most employers, wages and benefits go up geometrically the higher up in the food chain you are. Witness the executives making hundreds of times what a base worker gets. In the DWP, it is almost the reverse. 

The Takaway 

Truth is, large municipalities are the training grounds for everyone in the State. In LA City and County, the LAPD and the Sheriff spend huge sums of money in providing POST training, and in the end many of those officers leave for other agencies that simply can’t afford to provide the training. They’re poached. 

Same deal for DWP and its apprenticeship program. If utilities like SCE can swoop in at the end and lure a trained DWP employee away with sugarplum dreams and bags of cash, they will do so. It’s an economic fact of life, and it’s cheaper for them. 

Such is the cost of doing business in the public sector. On the plus side, it is also a tribute to the quality and value of the training programs, and that’s a good thing for all of us. 

For a real solution, maybe, someday, the Mayor and the City Council will let the DWP have its very own satellite Personnel Division, and fix some of this goofy stuff. Maybe Controller Ron Galperin will even support such a concept.

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

PERSPECTIVE--The first thought that popped into my mind when Governor Brown proposed his gas tax hike was former mayor Villaraigosa’s infamous trash collection fee increase.

You may recall, the fee was hyped as a means to hire 1,000 new LAPD officers.

Less than half that number were hired; the rest of the funds went to overhead,

As I told NPR’s Patt Morrison and the LA Weekly in interviews back in 2008, controls and reporting are insufficient  to assure the proper allocation of taxes and fees. 

This is especially true with state tax revenues, which are allocated to various funds, including those at the local level.  At every layer, allocations are made for multiple purposes. Such is the case with gasoline taxes. They are also used to fund mass transit and other transportation projects unrelated to automobiles. Gasoline excise tax revenue is also used to pay the debt service on highway bonds (Brown’s proposal is an excise tax), effectively relieving the general fund of the obligation.

This all makes for quite a trail to follow. Few individuals have the time or wherewithal to do so.

Determining how much of gas taxes actually improve roads is almost a fool’s errand. Politicians know this and use it to their advantage.  Lack of accountability gives them all the cover they need to divert funds.

This much is known: Brown’s plan would increase taxes by $52 billion; $7.5 billion would go to public transportation and another $1 billion for bike lanes and walkways, not exactly what you would call road and bridge improvements. 

It also includes a constitutional amendment requiring spending to be limited to transportation projects.  And Villaraigosa’s trash fee was supposed to cover hiring officers.

You can be assured that new definitions of transportation will abound if the proposal is passed. If it fails – and it could – don’t be surprised if it is resurrected.

Here’s an idea: instead of the tax increase, let’s just pass a constitutional amendment requiring all existing gas tax revenue be spent on roads and bridges.  We might then see a major decrease in the maintenance backlog.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-Not at the moment. All of the recent years for which final (“actual”) budget data are published show every single annual budget has finished in the black. While the entirety of the LAUSD budget includes various capital and internal funds, for the purposes of tracking the actual operating budget, the General Fund revenues and expenditures are of most importance.

Recent school board candidate’s statements casting shade on LAUSD’s current solvency are just wrong. But what about the future? Is the District simply swirling that bankruptcy toilet, circling inevitably toward the abyss? Even if currently flush, how well can past financial performance predict the future? 

The District’s Chief Financial Officer (who just resigned after 10 years of constitutional, if not justifiable, worry), publishes a projected budget for one and two years beyond the current operating year. That current operating year’s budget is finalized in June prior to the start of the upcoming schoolyear. And there’s a big accounting midyear to check up on things. 

So this means there are four forecasts for any given year -- snapshots of how budget forecasts stack up against the facts of what actually come to pass: (i) at mid-year, (ii) right before the start of a new fiscal/school year, (iii) one year out from that year and (iv) two years out from that year. 

Each one of these sets of guesses is expected to have different tendencies. They will vary by how far in the future the forecast projects, by what sorts of monies are considered, revenue or expenditure. And each can be assessed for accuracy, what direction these forecasts trend for any given point, etc.

The forecasts are key in assessing whether the “sky is falling” – the origin of the claim that LAUSD is sinking financially, whether it’s accurate, what has been and what should be done about it. 

Revenue projections, especially with increasing time in the future (by two years out,) have been conservative, or favorable to the bottom line; less has been anticipated and planned for coming in, than wound up coming in when all was said and done. That’s responsible and it makes for good planning. The relatively small percentages of unfavorable, negative variance for the upcoming year’s final budgets was always offset by underspending. Every successive year has maintained a positive carryover. 

It is in the expenditures that the district has carefully offset the volatility of state and federal monies so vulnerable to political caprice. LAUSD has consistently, favorably, underspent its budget in every year. What is clear is that the pessimistic, Henny-Penny terror of projecting a future so influenced by vagaries, is hedged through persistent projections of underfunding and overspending…which don’t then come to pass in reality. 

That’s OK, sort of. Life happens.

But what isn’t OK is insisting that forecasts – particularly the sort that are inherently conservative – are blueprints of tomorrow’s future. Because that’s the partisan agenda furthered by the voice of corporate Democrats and school privatizers in the guise of “Charter Reform.” 

That voice is prophesied by LA School Report and The 74 (“partners” of: Broad, CA Community, DeVos, Gates, Gen Next, Karsh, Simon, Triad and Walton Foundations; Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corp., Fisher Fund, Park Ave Charitable Trust, Sackler and Strauch,) and by the California Charter School Association-sponsored school board candidates Gonez (LAUSD6) and Melvoin (LAUSD4). And it’s asserted religiously, without ever cross-checking how past projections compare with future reality once it actually comes to pass. 

The data actually show two things: First, careful projections and husbandry of its funds has actually served LAUSD well fiscally. Despite tumultuous financial circumstances in our city, state and at the federal level, LAUSD has managed to keep a laudably steady keel. Its administrators have done themselves proud. 

Secondly, however, this fiscal responsibility in the face of predictive doom-saying has come at the expense of the District’s very own Commons. LAUSD’s students and staff cinch their belts every year on cue to defend the institution from the fallout of the partisan fake outrage at the risk of deficit. LAUSD has balanced the books every year despite tumultuous swings in funding, because the institution extracts an enormous carryover buffer from every year’s operations. 

During each of the five years in question, LAUSD’s carryover has been on average 12.5% of that year’s eventual actual revenue intake. In three of these five years, the carryover was never broached because revenues wound up larger than expenditures. In the two years when the carryover was tapped, 9% was used in 2011-12 and 17% was used in 2012-13. 

But that translates to hundreds of millions of dollars due for our students and teachers, money that, year after year, is never realized. Far from overspending our way to insolvency, there’s an important case to be made that LAUSD underspends each year. 

For example, for want of less than $2.5 million in 2012, then-Superintendent Deasy summarily cut all Title I funds to schools of middling diversity overnight, causing enormous financial hardship to schools of poverty percentage between 40%-49% (the burden was partially mitigated through a one year “hold-harmless” fund that has since been discontinued.) Twenty-three of these high-functioning schools weathered the unforeseen shortfall via privatization, converting their schools to “fiscally dependent” charters. 

And yet $687 million remained that year to rollover into the following year’s budget. That amounts to 12% of 2012-13’s eventual $5.7 billion revenue. That carryover could address so many worthy needs; it could lower LAUSD’s vital teacher:student ratio, for example – certainly more effectively than eventually came to pass.  There is no shortage of important needs to address, but one of these should be the size of the accounting cushion itself, because every dollar spent politically mollifying appearances, is a dollar not spend substantively at the school-site. 

It’s not clear what amount of carryover is optimal for a large government agency, or even whether there is any.  Certainly every budget is a political document and collateral choices are forced by the way it is designed. But those choices are also implied in the way the budget is interpreted. 

LAUSD isn’t going broke and the institution should have the courage to stand up to those who would wish to paint it so in order to further the narrative of “churn and disaster” that only leaves us poorer than when we started. Our public funds are to be spent on us the public, by us the public. And while we could use more of these funds, what we have is precious.

(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BELL VIEW-In 2009, I got involved in my first unsuccessful attempt to put an independent voice on the LA City Council. I didn’t run. A guy I’d met on the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council – a Harvard lawyer, a treasurer for two neighborhood councils, a community activist, and an all-around good guy – decided to challenge the incumbent councilmember. 

We lost in a landslide. At the election night get together in a small booth in a Thai Restaurant in East Hollywood, someone said “you just can’t beat the machine.” 

I thought – “machine?” I grew up in Chicago, where the Democratic Party built by the first Mayor Daley created a machine like no other. Daley would start the election with a million votes in his pocket. That’s a machine. In that 2009 LA City Council election, the incumbent won with a little more than 8,000 votes.

After that, I was snake bit. Eight thousand votes! This is doable, I thought. So, two years later, I worked my heart out for another candidate against an incumbent in another district.

Yeah – we lost. 

In that race, two supremely-qualified candidates went up against an incumbent that could barely put two words together. Between the two candidates, we couldn’t force a runoff.

This year, I supported an old friend of mine from my neighborhood council days who decided to make a run for it. The truth is: I liked three candidates in that race. On Election Day, I stood outside a polling place (beyond the 100-foot barrier) and passed out fliers for my friend. The cordiality of the voters heading in to vote that day really surprised me. I know how it is: I never want to talk to strangers on the street about anything. But the voters I met – with a few exceptions – were overwhelmingly polite, and a large proportion of them actually stopped to talk with me.

The conversation usually went something like this: I would talk about my friend, what he’d done for the community, and why I thought he would make a great City Councilmember. If I sensed I’d gotten through to them, I’d hand them a flier and they would be on their way. But, if I didn’t feel like I’d closed the deal on my friend, I had one last pitch. 

“You know,” I’d say as they were walking away from me, “there’s only one woman on the LA City Council.” Invariably, they would turn around. “That’s right,” I’d say, “one woman. And there are two women running today. I like them both, but I like one better than the other, and here’s why.”

I can’t tell you how many people I turned that day. I just don’t know. But, among the small percentage of Angelenos who actually go to the polling place on Election Day to cast their votes – the issue of women in government is on their minds.

That’s why Tuesday’s special congressional election in the 34th district is so disappointing. I don’t live in the district, so I couldn’t vote. But of the 300,000 registered voters who do, less than 30,000 of them bothered to vote at all. Of the 24 candidates, 12 of them were women. In the end, the two top fundraisers – both men – made it into the runoff. 

Without commenting on the merits of the two contenders, it’s a shame that in a year when the country elected a misogynist president; when we have a vice president who will not sit down with another woman outside the presence of his wife; when the fate of women’s healthcare is decided by a roomful of men – that barely 10% of the electorate could even bother to vote in an election that presented a dozen opportunities to put a woman in the U.S. Congress.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand people marched in the streets of Los Angeles for The Women’s March following the presidential election. Where did everyone go?

(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MY TURN-How about a change of topic today? I don't know about you, but the constant stream of nefarious political accusations is giving me heart burn ... literally. 

Looking back over the last few Presidents and their visions, I keep coming back to John F. Kennedy and the famous line from his Inaugural Address: "Don't ask what your country can do for you...ask what you can do for your country.” 

What if we bring it down to, "What can you do for your City?" Fortunately, there are Angelenos who are doing their part to improve living conditions here. But just as it is not enough to just feed and house your children, it is not enough to say, "I pay my taxes, so let the government make sure I have a good life.” 

We both -- private citizens and businesses large and small -- have a moral responsibility to participate in this effort. Usually we spotlight individuals or not-for-profit organizations that are engaged in making Los Angeles a more livable city. Recently, though, I came across a for profit company in South Los Angeles that is engaged in literally helping to "clean up" its community. 

Errol Segal, the Senior Recycling Consultant for Active Recycling and his program, is a good example of what companies can do to help the communities from which they benefit. He’s LA’s ‘Trashsamaritan’. 

He told me, "My business has been in South Los Angeles for over 40 years. We are a Trash and Recycling Center on Slauson Avenue. We have tried to be a good community partner and over the years have given away free Christmas trees, gasoline and other items to those in need within our community. 

"I reside in the San Fernando Valley and one day as I was leaving for work, I noticed a couch, a mattress and table along the street near my home. My first thought was that they were dumped illegally or had been put out for Bulky Item Pick-up day. These items were gone within three days. 

"As I drove to work along Slauson Ave, I began to notice the amount of illegally dumped items on the streets and in the alleyways. If caught it could result in a substantial fine, which wouldn't solve the root problem. I asked myself, what could I do to address the issue in South Los Angeles? 

"About one week later, I read an article in the LA Times about illegally dumped trash in the Black and Latino Neighborhoods of South LA. It was an investigative report that said bulky items and illegally dumped trash took weeks to be picked up... if they were picked up at all. It was very critical of the services being provided to the communities in South LA. In comparison it took three days in the more affluent parts of LA." 

Twenty-three months ago, Active Recycling started its Clean Up LA Campaign, allowing people to bring in trash for free rather than dump it on the street illegally or being forced to pay a fee to a recycling center. The community has responded and so far this company has processed over three million pounds of trash. (Photo above: Resident Charletta Butler poses with community trash that has been brought to Segal’s Active Recycling.) 

Since the study by the LA Times was done more than two years ago, some changes have taken place. The Mayor introduced a new program which will go into effect this summer to revamp and improve trash recycling throughout the City of Los Angeles. 

According to Enrique C. Zaldivar, P.E. Director of LA Sanitation, Zero Waste LA is a new public private partnership. It establishes an exclusive, zone-based franchise system that will offer regulated and customer friendly waste and recycling services to all commercial and industrial businesses, institutions and large multi-family buildings. 

He said, "Zero Waste LA” 

will be transformative for residents, customers, and businesses who have long sought to participate in and have more access to the City’s sustainability efforts. It will move the City closer to achieving zero waste through innovative waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery programs. Through coordination, collaboration, and communication, I am confident that we will meet the partnership’s goals: 

• Reduce city landfill disposal by 1,000,000 tons per year by 2025. 

• Set transparent and predictable waste and recycling service rates. 

• Offer accountability and quality customer services. 

• Enforce compliance with environmental mandates. 

• Reduce greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. 

• Decrease food waste and increase food rescue and donations. 

"In April 2014, the Mayor and City Council approved the ordinance establishing the new franchise system and delineated 11 zones. The franchisees for each of these specific areas were subsequently selected to partner with the City through an open and competitive bidding process that included extensive evaluation and negotiations over a two year period." 

LA Sanitation will continue to provide solid waste and recycling services to single family homes and small multi-family residences, and specific waste streams such as construction and demolition, medical, hazardous, and radioactive waste will continue to be serviced by permitted private waste haulers. 

Errol Segal will still be helping his community as all costs for the Free Trash Dumping project are being shouldered by Active Recycling; single and small multi-family residences are not covered under the new initiative. 

I know the topic of trash isn't exciting, but when we manage it efficiently it helps improve our quality of life. Come to think of it, maybe we could find a way to alleviate some of the political "Trash Talk" under a new initiative! 

As always...comments welcome.

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MEMO TO LAUSD--My grade school summer vacations seemed to last forever, pairing well with the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer double album I wore out on the record changer. During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair -- ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts -- while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. 

And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer. 

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp! despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank. 

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around January 15, just after the three-week-long Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation. 

Our daughter, now eight, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a week-long, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.  

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork. 

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves websites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens. 

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources -- public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries -- is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation. 

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again August 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling. 

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly. 

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD Board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move towards a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass. 

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position -- and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the State of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance. 

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained -- yes, abstained -- when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond. 

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy -- there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10 a.m. 

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?  

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

(David Gershwin is a Los Angeles-based public affairs consultant, Zócalo Public Square board member, and teaching fellow at UCLA Anderson School of Management.) Primary Editor: Joe Mathews. Secondary Editor: Sara Catania. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GELFAND’S WORLD--I have a scar running through my right eyebrow, and it symbolizes why I don't give a damn whether the NFL comes back to Los Angeles or not. I intend this column to be a polite response to the piece by Daniel Guss in which he faults the elected leadership of Los Angeles for losing the Raiders to Las Vegas. 

The unstated implication in that column is that it is a great achievement to get a professional football team for your city. And the further unstated assumption is that it makes a difference whether that football team is located within your city limits or just outside of them. Otherwise, the writer would presumably be jumping with joy over the return of two professional football teams to the L.A. adjacent city of Inglewood. There may be a further unstated assumption with regard to the relative merits of the Raiders vs. the Rams and/or Chargers, but I'm unable to identify whether that specific view exists. 

I disagree with the basic assumption. I don't think that having one professional football team (among so many others, all over the country) compares in any way with being the foremost town for movie making, being the nation's prime seaport, or being a world capitol of theoretical physics. Furthermore, my view is that the city of Los Angeles won this round with the NFL, just as it has won numerous rounds previously. 

Winning vs losing depends on what you are trying to achieve, and whether or not you achieved it. 

The payoff from watching sports, I would suggest, comes from our ability to identify with the athlete and the team. For one magical Saturday afternoon, we get to be the guy carrying the ball against Notre Dame, or the base runner on first against the Giants. I can still remember Craig Fertig throwing the winning touchdown pass against a previously undefeated Notre Dame team, and who can forget Gibson's home run? 

Magic moments, yes. We all get to be David battling Goliath for a few seconds. But there is a difference between fandom and city governance, because there is a difference between identifying with the team vs really being on the team or owning the team. One is make believe. The other isn't. 

There is also a difference between college sports and professional sports. I would argue that our ability to identify with the local college comes a lot easier than our ability to identify with the professional sports team that has just announced that it is leaving town. UCLA isn't going to pack up its buildings and move to a different town that makes a better offer. It's always going to be UCLA in terms of film studies, chemistry, and ancient history. 

So back to that scar and how it relates to the comments by Mr Guss about Las Vegas winning the battle for the Oakland etc Raiders. When I started college, one of my classmates mentioned that I might be interested in something called Rugby (technically it's Rugby Football) because that's what my college had, and it was something like American football. That last statement turned out to be only partly right. Rugby is something like American football if you leave in the tackling and leave out the blocking. Oh, and you also leave out the helmet and the pads, although being an American, I used a mouth guard. 

So over the years, Rugby was my game. After 17 years of playing rugby, first at the intercollegiate level and then at the club level, I no longer feel any urge to identify with professional football players. I just don't need to have a professional team at hand to provide me with self esteem. It's true that the pros are at a completely different level as athletes and hitters, but it also became true that I no longer had to prove something to myself along the lines of athletics and physicality. I had knocked heads with the Big Ten and with Cal, had been knocked cold a few times, and somehow avoided the big knee injury. I enjoyed sports a lot in my day, but at this point, having another team win for me (and for the strength of my ego) has lessened. 

And then there is that scar through the eyebrow. Why it is germane in this discussion is that it was inflicted on me by one of my teammates in a practice, and it was this same teammate who went on to become a famous professor who studied the impact of professional sports on local economies. Along with other careful observers, he found that adding a professional football stadium (and team) to the local economy may not do a lot of harm, money-wise, but it doesn't do much good, either. All those ticket sales? That money is taken away from other expenditures. People with enough discretionary income to go to professional football games could spend the same amount of money in lots of other ways. People who live in cities lacking a pro football team find ways to entertain themselves. Local boosters seeking a team always promote the economic benefits in terms of hotel occupancy and local sales taxes, but in the net, the results have been unimpressive over a large number of decades and over a lot of teams. 

In bidding on the services of a professional football team, we are trying to buy two things -- the entertainment value of the sporting events, and the emotional value of having the team to identify with. In the case of professional sports, that identification is at best a stretch, because the team is only committed to you as long as the money doesn't run out. Some leagues fold and some teams leave Baltimore in the middle of the night and drive to Indianapolis. How can we view Los Angeles as anything but a way station for NFL teams? 

It's up to the sports fan to decide whether the price of a pair of tickets and a couple of beers is worth the hefty price. That's a personal decision for you to make. But things get beyond the personal when a sports team wants the tax payers to subsidize the construction. Half a billion or a billion dollars is a substantial amount of money, even for a big city like Los Angeles. Whether the mayor should chase after a professional sports team by chasing after the City Council to invest tax dollars is a collective decision that belongs to the voters as a group. 

The history of the past several decades is that Los Angeles tax payers don't want to cover the costs of a new stadium just to service billionaire owners. We've got a couple of perfectly good fields if the intent is to watch a football game. The stadium boxes would only be there to serve the interests of the few. Our elected officials have held the line against such public expenditures. 

This is not to say that a lot of our elected City Council members didn't want to bring back the Rams (or some team, any team). They begged and pleaded, negotiated, got down on their hands and knees, and then begged some more. The one thing they wouldn't do was to shovel public dollars into a new billion-dollar stadium designed to service the wealthy. 

Even the die-hard fans who still were carrying a torch for the old L.A. Rams admitted that for the NFL, the function of Los Angeles was to be a threat to other cities. If those Minneapolis (et al) tax payers didn't come up with the big bucks, their teams -- the Vikings, Ravens, Rams, or Raiders -- would move to Los Angeles. The extortion racket worked pretty well. You had St Louis and San Diego begging like jilted lovers for One More Try. We'll try to find maybe three hundred million, and get some local billionaire to pony up another half billion. 

During the long winter of no professional football, Los Angeles mayors have been asked how much money they will support for the construction of that new stadium. Eric Garcetti was succinct: "Zero." Other L.A. mayors were equally straightforward. "Bring us back a team," they would say, "But don't expect the taxpayers to cover your team's costs." By refusing to get rolled by the NFL owners, the mayors and City Council of Los Angeles have won their end of the battle. The city didn't get a team, but the taxpayers didn't get fleeced, either. I think we can take pride in the fact that we have a greater sense of self worth than the cities which caved. Extortion victims like Minneapolis can't say the same thing. 

Every city which is in the running for a sports franchise has the same choice. It's a question of funding the existence of a sports team that we (as individuals) can learn to love, or saving our money. It's a balance between spending real money and expecting the taxpayers as a whole to engage in mass psychological identification vs. spending the money on something else. 

Like I was saying, the scar tells me that I don't have a need to identify with some other set of athletes anymore. Sure I will root for the U.S. soccer team in the World Cup and for the Dodgers if they ever get out of the first round of the playoffs. But I don't need to. If it happens it will be fun, and if it doesn't, so be it. 

Interestingly, I was chatting with a former professional athlete a few weeks ago. When I asked him whether he felt any need to identify with professional sports teams, he responded No. He only watches college football. It was obvious that he had proved himself to himself and didn't feel the same way that a frustrated adolescent fan would feel. 

I have to give Mr Guss credit for one observation. I think that there is at least a possibility that Las Vegas will break the odds and actually develop some financial gain from bringing in a professional football team. This would of course depend on Las Vegas merchandising football tickets to the tourist trade. Football would be one more entertainment option along with magic, lounge singers, and burlesque. It probably wouldn't add any money to city government revenues, but it would go well in the usual Vegas advertising blitzes. The point for Vegas is to bring in elbows to pull the slots and finger tips to add chips to the roulette tables. The taxpayers of Nevada can cover a little bit of football as part of that giant advertising machine that is the Vegas strip. 

But things are different here in greater Los Angeles. However you slice it, the existence of the Rams in Inglewood is unlikely to affect the local economy very much, one way or the other. The economists who have studied this question over multiple decades and dozens of cities have made this clear, and that includes the one who split my eyebrow with his forehead. If there is to be any contribution to the local economy, it will be to the region as a whole. A few tens of thousands of people who travel to Los Angeles will stay in hotels all over the area, not just in Inglewood. Yes, a Super Bowl is a big deal nowadays (the first one wasn't so big, even if it was held right here in L.A.), but LAX moves seventy million people a year, with or without a Roman Numeraled football game. 

And notice something else. New York nominally hosts a couple of pro football teams, but they play in a place called East Rutherford, New Jersey. That distancing doesn't seem to have depressed the price of tickets to Hamilton. San Francisco nominally hosts a pro football team, but it plays forty miles down the coast. This doesn't seem to have made the city any less desirable to Silicon Valley millionaires or to tourists. 

One interesting point raised by The Economist: Pro football teams not only cost the locals a lot of money, they result in increased crime. 

Just Breaking 

The next one to fall is Devin Nunes, who will step down from chairing the House investigation of Trump's Russian ties. At what point will the elected politicians start to realize that there is real danger in becoming associated with Trump's criminality?

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

-cw

THAT CEREMONIAL SPIRIT-In the Olympic spirit, the LA County Board of Supervisors and LA City Council have been vying to see which highly-compensated municipal body can more thoroughly cram its meetings full of vacuous ceremonial presentations. 

Vegas has all but written off the County -- for which tomorrow’s meeting is do or die. The City’s final “at bat” was Friday, when it shattered its own world record set on June 26, 2015.  If you subtract from the City’s past two Friday meetings the collective four hours of ceremonial commendations which took place, you are left with barely an hour’s worth of public business being done -- though that depends to some extent on whether you include as public business Councilmember Blumenfield speaking Farsi and/or Controller Galperin texting incessantly during the Nowruz celebration (Persian New Year.)  

Regardless, as he stated proudly at the second meeting, the Mayor hopes we can “incorporate a gender lens through everything we do now.” 

Meanwhile, those who would write off the County in this race should know that its agenda for tomorrow bristles with thirteen presentations plus a televised pet adoption appeal. To be sure, most of those commendation recipients -- ArtsforLA, Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 13 President, LA County Occupational Therapists -- won’t burn up much time, but one of the honorees -- SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A. (to be honored for their great work in reducing the number of children who suffer from tragic injuries in car collisions) -- could turn out to be a real doozy, if they bring some kids downtown. 

Moreover, if all else fails, Supervisor Ridley-Thomas can go thermonuclear with an “adjournment for the fallen,” which entails each Supervisor lecturing in remembrance of someone recently deceased. Not even half of a typical Janice Hahn encomium could tip the balance in favor of the County. 

In other words, this race is far from a sealed deal; and the fat lady, though slated for one-hour performances at both the City and County next week, has yet to sing.

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

ANIMAL WATCH-On March 15, after adopting a dog named “Emmet” from the Clinton Humane Society, Kris and Ashley Greene took their new pet to the home of Tyler and Holly Harrison, where the dog bit the Harrison’s 15-month-old son, Lucas, in the face, leaving massive facial wounds, the Clinton Herald reported.

With the increasing number of reports of aggressive dog attacks in Los Angeles and nationwide, there may be some important lessons to be learned. 

Although the dog in Clinton, Iowa, had been listed as a "Boxer-Labrador-mix," it was determined to be a Pit Bull  that had been transported from a Louisiana shelter. 

The dog was subsequently declared a dangerous dog by Clinton authorities, and Ashley Greene was cited for owning a dangerous dog. She pleaded not guilty on March 28, according to the Herald. 

The photos of the horrific disfigurement of this beautiful child are chilling. Lucas’ injuries are described and photos shown before and after surgery on the family’s GoFundMe page: 

He was airlifted to the University of Iowa Childrens' Hospital where he had a 6- hour surgery involving at least 3 surgeons. A large part of his gum/bone including permanent teeth were ripped out, most of his nose cartilage was destroyed, and he will have lifelong damage. He will not have any upper front teeth, will need dental reconstruction to hopefully support false teeth when he is an adult, and have more facial surgeries in the future. 

Colleen Lynn of Dogsbite.org did a thorough investigation of the background of the Pit Bull, Emmet, and describes the mechanisms by which dogs with a propensity for aggression are transported nationwide for adoption to an unsuspecting public. 

She writes, "Animals of IPAC advertised Emmet as a 'great dog with a great temperament.'" 

“Three weeks before the attack, a pit bull-mix named Emmet, was on death row at the New Iberia Parish Animal Shelter in Louisiana. On February 22, after social media rallied to "save Emmet," by raising over $300, the dog was "approved for transport."  (Read more)  

HUMANE SOCIETY SUED 

On Thursday, March 29, 2017, the Herald announced that a civil lawsuit against the Clinton Humane Society and the owners of the dog that attacked Lucas had been filed on Tuesday by Attorney John Frey, on behalf of the parents of Lucas Harrison. 

The following items are excerpted and summarized from the Herald report: 

The petition alleges one count against Kris and Ashley Greene for dog owners’ strict liability, and two counts against the Clinton Humane Society for product liability, negligence and breach of express warranty.” 

It states the “foreseeable risks of harm” posed by the dog could have been reduced or avoided by the provision of reasonable instructions or warnings.

Among these instructions should have been the precautions for bringing the dog into a home “where another dog, an infant and small children are present.”  

The petition asserts that the Greenes should have been warned that the Humane Society’s ability to determine whether a dog is child friendly is extremely limited, rather than “expressly warranting” that the dog was “child friendly.” 

The new owners should have been warned that the dog had been moved from a shelter in Louisiana to Clinton Humane Society after being impounded for over five months and was scheduled for euthanasia.  

The Greenes should have been warned that the dog in question could be a pit bull mix, even though it was allegedly advertised by the Clinton Humane Society as a Boxer-mix. 

The petition states "the omission of the instructions or warnings renders the dog not reasonably safe." 

The petition lists one count against the Greenes for strictly liability for all damages done by their dog, citing Iowa code section 351.28. 

WHY THIS LAWSUIT IS IMPORTANT 

Traditionally those who rehome unwanted pets -- mainly animal shelters and humane society -- have been held harmless from prosecution and/or liability for the future misconduct of the animal. Courts have taken a Caveat emptor approach, meaning, "let the buyer beware."

Findlaw advises this means "sold as is,” and the buyer assumes the risk that a product may fail to meet expectations or may have defects. However, implicit in this concept is the presumption that buyers will be able to inspect or otherwise ensure the integrity of the product before they decide to complete the transaction. 

Of course, with a shelter animal that is almost impossible. There is no way, based upon looking through the bars of a cage or kennel or taking a pet into an introduction area, that health or temperament can be accurately assessed.

Although some dogs adapt to a new home immediately, it can take several weeks, or longer, before a new pet has "settled in" and relaxes enough to express its true character and personality and/or begins to show territorial dominance. Therefore, in the past, shelters have been cautious about absolute, positive statements and have made notes on all observed behavior by employees visible on posted kennel cards or otherwise easily available, so that potential adopters could make a more-informed decision. 

But, the “No Kill” movement has changed that. The industry-wide competition to have the highest “live-save” rate and specific pressure from leading humane groups to not interfere with the right to breed and own combat Pit Bulls (“No BSL”), has resulted in withholding negative behavioral information and sometimes making misleading statements to get these animals adopted and so they don't inflate the shelter’s euthanasia rate.

To further this effort, Pit Bulls are commonly misidentified as Boxer-mix or listed as American Staffordshire Terriers, and referred to as “Nanny Dogs” that are “great with kids.” San Francisco SPCA tried calling them “St. Francis Terriers” and New York introduced “New Yorkies” -- a program which reportedly lasted three days. 

At first, “no kill” applied to humane societies, many of which are “limited entry” and have the option to only accept adoptable dogs. This gave them a heads up on receiving donations, because no one wants to support a "kill shelter." 

But the pressure to be "no kill" then shifted to the “open-admission” tax-funded municipal shelters, which must accept all strays and animals in need, regardless of temperament or condition. This has forced governmental agencies -- which have direct responsibility to protect the public -- into keeping alive animals that have serious aggression or behavior concerns and applying any remotely plausible description to them, except “dogs bred to kill each other.” 

Of course, not every Pit Bull unpredictably attacks and some can be loyal, loving pets; but the genetics and recent history of this breed requires an acceptance that, increasingly, the desire for winning fighting dogs has led to producing Pit Bulls that may react with unpredictable violence to almost any stimulation that "challenges" them.

This often includes pets, children, or even the hand that feeds them. On March 30, the NY Post reports, Man Fatally Mauled by his Dog during Interview with Film Crew. The article describes that this was not the first attack by this Pit Bull on his owner, but a neighbor said that Mario Perivoitos, 41, “loved the dog more than himself.” The Pit Bull was also described as generally quiet and never seen to be vicious. 

Thus, shelters are packed with Pit Bulls whose true natures begin to show usually between eight months to two years and often become such a problem or potential liability that they are just dumped in the streets or relinquished; in either case, these animals proliferate in animal shelters nationwide. 

The Michael Vick case created two new industries -- (1) “rescues” that thrive on donations for saving the “misunderstood" underdogs and which “pull” known aggressive dogs from shelters to save them; and (2) transport businesses that charge per animal to move these often-unadoptable animals to a shelter in another city or state. Thousands of dangerous animals that have already shown vicious or anti-social behavior are packed into trucks or airplanes and shipped to known or unknown destinations, rather than being humanely euthanized. 

This deceptive shell game allows shelters, humane societies and the rescuers bragging rights to a higher “live-save” rate (after all, the animals left alive) and the historical “caveat emptor” and governmental-immunity laws have allowed them to avoid responsibility for damages to a future adopter or harm to animals or humans. 

This could soon change, based on a lawsuit filed after the tragic event that occurred on March 15.

(Note: The above does not include the many responsible "rescues" nationwide who carefully screen both the animals and every potential adoptive home.) 

HOW "PRODUCT LIABILITY" IS ASSESSED 

I asked a local attorney who works for a government agency to explain “Product Liability" and also asked, if it is granted in the lawsuit filed on behalf of a 15-week-old Iowa boy, could all agencies or parties involved in impounding/rescuing or transporting homeless animals potentially find themselves liable for any future damages caused by these animals?

Here is his informal response: 

“Strict product liability "applies to everyone in the “stream of commerce." Everyone along the stream is jointly and severally liable for any resulting harm. Manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer -- in this case, each shelter that made the animal available for adoption, transported it or had any part in placing it in the stream of commerce -- could be liable even if it was unknown to any of those parities that there was a defect in the product or the product posed a hazard.  That is the nature of strict liability. 

“Additionally, any party who had knowledge of the propensity of a defect but did not warn or disclose that knowledge could also face liability for negligence. Liability for negligence may apply to anyone of those who moved the animal through the steam of commerce.   

“Anybody who  has knowledge of a potential defect or danger has a duty to warn or inform consumers (adopters) and failure to do so is breach of that duty, resulting in liability for harm that results from that omission.” 

For those seriously interested, the following comment is presented by Animal Law:

EVERY DOG CAN HAVE ITS DAY: EXTENDING LIABILITY BEYOND THE SELLER BY DEFINING PETS AS “PRODUCTS” UNDER PRODUCTS LIABILITY THEORY  

ARE ATTACKS BY SHELTER DOGS INCREASING? 

In a July 11, 2015 article, Pit bull from Asheville Humane Society kills six-year-old, Merritt Clifton of Animals 24-7, describes the tragic death of John Phillip Strother, 6, in NC, brutally killed by a Pit Bull adopted three weeks earlier. 

He describes the Asheville Humane Society as, "An adoption program promotion partner of both the Best Friends Animal Society and the American SPCA, both of which have long fought legislation meant to stop pit bull proliferation." 

He also provides some valuable statistics to that date, citing that Joshua Strother was, "...the 38th fatality involving U.S. shelter dogs from 2010 to present, in attacks involving 30 pit bulls, seven bull mastiffs, two Rottweilers, a Lab who may have been part pit bull, and a husky." 

"By contrast, there were no fatalities involving shelter dogs from 1858 through 1987. Two fatalities occurred, both involving wolf hybrids, in 1988 and 1989." 

He noted that, ". . .there were only 32 disfiguring maulings by shelter dogs from 1858 through 2009, 19 of them involving pit bulls." 

"From 2010 to present [July 11, 2015], there have been at least 138 disfiguring maulings by shelter dogs, 99 of them involving pit bulls. Nineteen shelter dogs have killed or disfigured people thus far in 2015, all of them pit bulls." 

On August 6, 2015, Buncombe County officials completed its review of the screening and transferring procedures by the Asheville Humane Society (AHS). Among other revisions, both parties "agreed to enhance current standards."

One of the revisions was, "Assuring that all adoption agencies provide complete information gathered on the adoptive animal through the sheltering process to all adoptive owners."

(Phyllis M. Daugherty is a former City of LA employee and a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

My April Fool’s column, Garcetti Says No to Higher Office, was based on the reasonable speculation that Mayor Eric Garcetti was not going to run for Governor or Senator in 2018. 

If Garcetti entered the race for Governor, he would risk a career-ending loss in a primary brawl with three well-funded candidates, Lt. Governor Gavin Newson, State Treasurer John Chiang, and former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  And he is certainly not going to mess with Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the State’s most popular and respected politicians. 

As for Garcetti’s side deals with Newsom, Chiang, and Feinstein, they were inspired by my love for April Fool’s Day, especially when it comes to poking fun at the political establishment and their self-serving side deals.  

But I should have continued the ruse by developing a scenario so preposterous that anybody in their right mind, including members of the media, would know that there was no way it could be true.  

If I wrote that Mayor Garcetti was going to focus on balancing the budget, eliminating the Structural Deficit (where personnel costs increase faster than revenues), developing a comprehensive plan for the repair and maintenance of our streets, reforming the City’s two underfunded pension plans, and establishing an Office of Transparency and Accountability to oversee the City’s precarious finances, everybody would know that our fiscally irresponsible Elected Elite and the leaders of the public sector unions would never allow this to occur. 

But this is exactly what needs to happen if LA is to be a world class city.  Otherwise, the next generations of Angelenos will be paying for today’s sins.  And that is not a joking matter. 

(Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee and is the Budget and DWP representative for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council.  He is a Neighborhood Council Budget Advocate.  Jack is affiliated with Recycler Classifieds -- www.recycler.com.  He can be reached at:  [email protected].)

-cw