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Mayor Puts Brakes on Parks Eviction Order-Here’s Why |
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Points Political
By Betty Pleasant (Posted first in the WAVE Newspapers)
(Mayor Villaraigosa has asked the city to block the eviction of a nonprofit organization instigated by County Supervisor candidate Bernard Parks. Many see the Parks move as strictly political.
Times story here. This is Wave Newspaper’s columnist Betty Pleasant’s take on the controversy.)
The stuff Councilman Bernard Parks is doing to community organizer Anthony Thigpenn that made Herb Wesson III so angry that he quit Parks’ supervisorial campaign has hit the fan, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has stepped in to stop it.
Parks had ordered the eviction of the Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education (SCOPE), the nonprofit organization Thigpenn heads, from the city-owned building SCOPE has leased for more than seven years.
Responding to the Aug. 19 directive from Parks, the city Department of General Services issued SCOPE, on Aug. 28, a 60-day notice to vacate what is called the Old Fire Station No. 66, located at 1715 W. Florence Ave. in Parks’ 8th District.
On Wednesday, the mayor said, “Oh, no you don’t,” and directed Tony Royster, the general manager of the Department of General Services — who reports directly to the mayor — “to rescind any actions relating to the termination of a city lease agreement at 1715 W. Florence Ave.”
And for added measure, Villaraigosa said, in essence, that nobody is to even think about terminating that lease without talking to him about it first.
Funded by Santa Monica-based Liberty Hill Foundation, SCOPE is universally acknowledged to be South Los Angeles’ most effective grassroots community organizing and research entity. It has been headquartered in the Old Fire Station No. 66 since 2001 on a $1-a-year lease.
In his Aug. 19 letter to Royster — to which Wesson took extreme umbrage — Parks directed the Department of General Services to “take immediate action to begin the process of officially terminating the lease” at the SCOPE site because he had been “inundated” with requests from other nonprofit and for-profit organizations who, in essence, could put the building to better use than SCOPE. In the interest of bringing in “valuable services to this community, we have decided that the city has a need for this site other than its current use,” Parks wrote.
Mayor Villaraigosa noted that the Department of General Services administers approximately 100 facility lease agreements with nonprofit organizations. “These nonprofit organizations generally provide important public services in the areas of health care, education and the arts, among other services,” the mayor said, adding that actions relating to these leases must be dealt with “in a transparent and open process.”
SCOPE is well-known as a dynamic community organizing mechanism, but it has also conducted oft-quoted research on the economic needs of South Los Angeles, and a couple of years ago, SCOPE created a job training program that helped open the entertainment industry to South L.A. residents. Barbara Osborn, SCOPE’s communications director, said SCOPE was the engine behind the creation of an L.A. Apollo Alliance, linking new environmental industries to good jobs that sustain prosperous communities. “If SCOPE was in my district, I’d do everything I can to help them,” Osborn wrote on her blog.
The “transparent and open process” the mayor requires is the only means left for Parks to evict SCOPE, because he still has the option of taking the matter to the City Council. But then, the people of the city of Los Angeles and of the 8th Council District and the media and I can weigh in on the issue and make a public spectacle of it!
Wesson was unaffected by the verbiage in Parks’ eviction directive and believed Parks’ action was a politically-motivated attack on a popular associate of state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, his rival for the 2nd District supervisorial seat. “The fact that Parks would pick on Thigpenn, a man who has the skills and resources to recall him, shows you that something’s the matter with him,” Wesson said of Parks during our interviews two weeks ago.
Parks did not respond to my list of questions seeking information as to why he wanted SCOPE evicted and whether Wesson’s assessment of his reasons had any validity.
Nevertheless, Osborn indicated in her blog that the Thigpenn-led group’s nonpartisan work to create a more informed and organized electorate, plus its dynamic get-out-the-vote work prior to elections, could be a threat to Parks’ political ambitions. “Do the math: 60-day eviction notice received Sept. 3. Eviction date: Nov. 3. Election date: Nov. 4,” she wrote. (Read more Betty Pleasant and more Wave news and views at: www.wavenewspapers.com ) _
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 78
Pub: Sept 26, 2008
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