Discretionary Spending, Discretionary Voting

POLITICS--It's hard to figure out how to "heal Los Angeles" when there are so many forces at play in the City of the Angels, and when there are so many voters who support the status quo either through their voting patterns, or through their non-voting patterns, but consider the following realities, as unpleasant as they are: 

1) Whether it's Measure R (the sales tax initiative for transportation projects) or any other county or city source of funding, it's always in the budget of the City of Los Angeles to determine how high or low sidewalks, roads, transit amenities will be prioritized.   

Transportation and public works aren't the only priorities that Downtown must contend with, but its prioritization appears to have been too low for too long...and still are too low for most voters' tastes.  Until we have a way to codify or confirm that these will be properly prioritized in our City budget, the notion that a Measure R-2 can fix our broken infrastructure is just NOT true. 

2) The LAUSD and the City are separate entities, and one has virtually no control over the other.  But they do have one thing in common--they spend so much on overhead and previous early retirees, and are so unaccountable to their constituents, that our dollars aren't anywhere near going to where they're presumed to be going. 

There are small armies of excellent teachers, City workers, firefighters, police officers, etc. who are being unrepresented by both our political leaders and their union leaders...and teachers, in particular, are all too often being unrepresented by the administrative leaders of the LAUSD.  The answer might be more spending, but probably that's a big waste of effort and resources until we have better processes and operations in place. 

Is sharing of library and park/schoolground resources for educational and open space something that would help families?  Is the process of opening up park and other positions for aging firefighters and police officers one that would make fiscal sense and keep City workers on the payroll one that's for the workers or for the birds? 

3) The DWP is more concerned about the greenbacks than about being green from an environmental sense. One would think that fixing aging pipes and upgrading infrastructure would be built into the DWP budget...but one would be wrong to presume that is the reality. 

Want new pipes and upgraded infrastructure?  That'll cost you.  Want a green infrastructure?  That'll cost you. Want money from your rate hikes to go for solar?  That'll cost you... 

...and those rate hikes are tax hikes, because a regular budget balancing act by the City for years has been to take some of the DWP funds and throw it into the City budget. 

4) Our Neighborhood Councils are still being shut out of our budget making process, and they're increasingly irrelevant by our current City Council.   

And only one thing can fix this problem:  a revisitation of charter reform, with new redefinitions of the roles and abilities of Neighborhood Councils to ensure true democracy, and to ensure their relevance in City governance and spending. 

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When Herb Wesson (photo), City Council President, can shut out and prevent former Mayor Richard Riordan, who founded the Neighborhood Council system and built it into a previous charter reform effort, from even speaking at a City Council meeting you know it's trouble. 

One can't with certainty accuse Herb Wesson of being corrupt, but it's no secret that he runs the City like a "boss" and doesn't give a rip about true stakeholder/voter input.  There will be no public neighborhood council/union meetings, where taxpayer dollars and public funding is discussed and laid open to public scrutiny. There will be no evening meetings to ensure that working Angelenos can play a role in the public discourse. 

And so long as Downtown's practices of discretionary spending are performed and rationalized as being "for the greater good", and so long as our "leaders" are encouraged to keep doing this with our votes and non-votes, we will continue to see poor operations and oversight of local government at all levels. 

And so long as citizen participation in government is dismissed as crazy talk, the problems will remain to be decried...but with no true fix anywhere on the horizon.

 

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee.  He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected].   He also does regular commentary on the Mark Isler Radio Show on AM 870, and co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.) 

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 92

Pub: Nov 13, 2015