LOS ANGELES

GELFAND’S WORLD--Last Friday, the South Bay Cities Council of Governments (sbccog) held its 18th Annual General Assembly. The assembly is a chance for city managers, elected officials, and the general public to hear some new ideas and chew over old problems. This year, the SBCCOG chose to take up an optimistic topic, the promise of innovative technologies in making the region both more livable and more wealthy. 

Techno-fixes for transportation 

This being the Los Angeles area, one topic was obvious: What's new in transportation? The subject the organizers chose for discussion was driverless cars. There are numerous advantages to the idea, along with a substantial hurdle. Actually, the advantages and the hurdle to be surmounted go together. You can't have one without the other. 

Here they are: 

The hurdle is that you really need to have every car on the road (and pretty much every other object that can move) under constant centralized control. The buzz word is totally managed systems. Maybe it's a buzz phrase instead of a buzz word, but it carries a heavy load of futuristic thinking. We'll get back to what some of that load entails a little later, but it's worth considering the advantages. 

Engineers who think about getting the most use out of driverless cars like to think of a substantial group of the m all moving together, going in the same direction, all at the same time. The buzz word for this grouping of cars is a platoon. There are several advantages to platooning our cars, if we could do it safely. For one, cars can move at high speed without a lot of separation. Instead of separations in the dozens or hundreds of feet, a platoon of electronically controlled driverless cars could be separated from each other by a few inches. Even if you give them a foot or two, that's putting a lot more cars on the same section of pavement. 

There is one more advantage that didn't come up at the meeting, but it's obvious if you think about it. Imagine sitting in a long line of cars at a traffic light. When the light turns green, do you start forward immediately? Not if you don't want to run into the car in front of you, you don't. You have to wait for the first car to move, then the second car to get moving, and so on. It would be a lot quicker if we could all start moving at the same time, the way that train cars all move together. But that would involve every driver in the line starting to move forward at exactly the same time. It would also require that we increase our speed in exactly the same increments. If I go two miles per hour too fast, I'll run into the car in front of me. 

Computerized control systems have it over us humans in terms of this level of control. Electronic signals move faster than our nerve impulses, and electronic computers calculate faster than our brains can. 

By the way, the sbccog program didn't seem to notice that when we imagine platoons of driverless vehicles all moving in tandem, able to execute speed-ups and slow-downs with precision, we are probably imagining that the vehicles are propelled by some electrical means rather than gasoline engines. For gasoline powered cars, there is a distinct lag in getting a car moving forward upon pushing down on the accelerator pedal, and every car is a little different. The way to solve this problem is to have speed sensors that control the movement of the cars with exquisite precision, which could be accomplished using electric motors. In this way, a platoon of fifty cars could move together as if they were all cars on the same train. 

There are also distinct advantages in terms of parking and storing driverless cars. You can drop your car at the garage, and it can be stored alongside other such cars, all of them parked only inches apart. You don't need to leave room to open the car door. The garage space can also be built with lower ceilings. All in all, we might imagine a doubling or tripling of the parking capacity for every square foot of ground. One speaker joked about not needing to park your car (and pay for parking) at all. Just send it by itself on a trip down the freeway so that it returns when you are ready to go. After all, it doesn't need a driver. 

Long-time readers of this column may notice that the concept of the driverless car is similar in a lot of ways to the concept of personal rapid transit (PRT). The idea behind PRT is that individual passenger pods travel along elevated guide rails. Both concepts involve a system in which a computerized system controls every aspect of moving, changing directions, and stopping. The PRT system has the advantage that you don't have to take over streets and highways. It's hard to imagine us driving our old gas-burners on the same road with a platoon of driverless vehicles moving like the proverbial bat out of Hell. For any roadway, it's the one or the other, not both. 

The disadvantage of the PRT network is that you have to build the elevated structures and supply the passenger pods. That is costly, although projected to be considerably cheaper than light rail. 

The disadvantage of the driverless vehicle concept is that the vehicles themselves will be costly (although not necessarily a lot more costly than a new car) and the roadway itself will be costly. The PRT system might turn out to be a lot cheaper, although it would be less versatile in terms of covering an entire city in dense detail. 

Municipal Fiber Optic Broadband 

Another topic at the sbccog was the idea of cities putting in their own digital broadband capability. That means that you can get high speed internet and all that this entails, including full speed, full sized movie downloads or high throughput data transmission for your business. The buzz word is fiber optic. It's a method of carrying information that has been around a long time, but has only recently started to be adopted in the U.S. as a way of connecting the internet to the end user. 

The term fiber optic sounds more complicated than it really is. A beam of light can carry information in the same way that a radio wave or television signal carries information. But the ray of light can carry a lot more information. Thousands of times more. Instead of copper wire or radio waves, fiber optics carry light down strands of glass. When the light reaches its destination, it can be decoded into electrical signals and sent to your computer or television set. 

We've come to refer to the ability to carry digital information as bandwidth. The ability to carry a lot of information is therefore called broadband. The thing is, current methods of internet service are mostly using outmoded systems. The same coaxial cable that carries your cable tv signal can also carry a modest amount of internet information, but even cable systems are becoming inadequate pretty quickly. That's because the need for bandwidth is increasing. High definition video and lots of other applications use up bandwidth. Also, when you are hooked up to a cable system, you are sharing bandwidth with all the other houses and apartments and businesses that are connected to the cable. 

The problem with relying on local cable and telephone companies for broadband is that they have been slow in upgrading, when they do it at all. They have a stranglehold on their own part of the market, and they don't think they have to improve a lot. Where I live, the telephone company is already a couple of generations behind in technology. The cable tv company is . . . a cable tv company, with all that this implies. 

What we learned at SBCCOG is that some cities have developed their own fiber optic broadband systems. We don't typically think of Chattanooga, Tennessee as a leader in high tech growth, but in terms of providing broadband to its residents, Chattanooga is way ahead of Los Angeles. Likewise for Ammon, Idaho. 

Another place that is working on getting fiber optic broadband installed is Santa Monica. City Manager Rick Cole (previously Deputy Mayor in charge of budgeting for the city of Los Angeles) spoke about it in detail. Cole spoke of Santa Monica's ambition to be Silicon Beach. Broadband internet is part of that process. 

The city of Los Angeles is way behind. It's worth thinking about municipal fiber optics for the entire region. We can expect the cable companies to resist mightily, with all that implies in the Los Angeles political environment, but the fight with their lobbyists to get us up to par with other areas would be worth it.

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

-cw

CAPITAL & MAIN SPECIAL REPORT--On election night last November, Nathan Damigo, a 30-year-old white nationalist and student at California State University, Stanislaus, met up with friends in the Northern California city of Folsom. As they bounced from bar to bar, it became clear that Donald Trump was outperforming most polls; when the election was called for the former reality TV star, Damigo and his buddies were euphoric. On the drive home, still buzzed by the victory, Damigo pulled out a bullhorn and shouted at passersby in the street, presumably those with darker skin than his, “You have to go back! You have to go back!” 

“Trump’s election has been a major boost to morale,” he later told an interviewer. “Something is happening. Things are changing and it’s not going to stop.” 

Damigo is part of an ascendant far-right movement, however uncoordinated, that sees the election of Trump as a sign that an extremist vision for the country -- which includes millions of undocumented immigrants deported and an open hostility to Muslims -- is moving from dream to reality. And this is not only about rhetoric. Since Trump’s election, groups that track hate crimes have reported spikes in the number of incidents, including within the deeply blue state of California. 

Damigo grew up in San Jose, joined the Marine Corps after graduating from high school, and completed two tours in Iraq. He returned with post-traumatic stress disorder and in 2007, after an afternoon of heavy drinking in San Diego, pulled a gun on a cabdriver who he believed was Iraqi, robbing him of $43. He pleaded guilty to a felony count of robbery and spent five years behind bars, where he discovered former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding. Last March, he founded a group called Identity Evropa, geared towards attracting college students to white nationalism, a broad term whose adherents espouse white separatist ideologies. 

Damigo has positioned himself as a sort of a West Coast sibling to Richard Spencer, the 38-year old who coined the term “alt-right” and who has become the country’s most prominent white supremacist, due in part to a video of him being punched by a presumed protester that went viral.

The pair appeared together at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Damigo live-streamed the event for Red Ice Radio, a white supremacist network broadcasting from Sweden. And last November, two-dozen members of Identity Evropa traveled to Washington, DC for Spencer’s National Policy Institute conference, at which many attendees were seen flashing the Nazi salute. 

When I reached out, Damigo emailed that he was on the East Coast in an area with limited cellphone coverage. Curious, I scanned Identity Evropa’s Twitter feed. Posted from early that morning were pictures of the group’s flyers plastered across the campus of Kutztown University, in rural Pennsylvania. The effort is part of “Project Siege,” which targets colleges with pro-white propaganda. A day earlier, the provost of Indiana University reported that the group’s flyers were posted on the office doors of faculty members of color. Also hit were schools in Illinois, Texas, Georgia and Virginia. 

“Our members tend to be whites from diverse areas, because they have actual experience with multiculturalism,” he tells me over Skype. Damigo keeps his blond hair in the “Hitler youth” style -- longer on top, shaved on the sides -- and on the day we speak is wearing a black sweater and looks tired. Asked for an example of a problem caused by multiculturalism, Damigo pauses a beat. “You know, black people constantly being dicks to white people, starting fights with them, harassing them.” His answer to what he sees as the problem of multiculturalism, which he views as inherently anti-white, is as simple as it is quixotic: the creation of a white ethno-state for Americans of European descent. (Damigo doesn’t consider Jews to be white, and they are barred from joining his group. Asked recently about whether the Holocaust occurred, he declined to answer, stating that he’s “not a history buff.”) 

Damigo says that the majority of Identity Evropa’s members are in California, but he dreams of taking his group, which he describes as “Identitarian,” national. “A lot of people started becoming interested in politics a year ago,” he says. “They knew something was wrong but didn’t quite get what. Advocating for whites is going to become normalized: People are waking up to subjects that were once very taboo.” Damigo first told me that over the past five months, Identity Evropa had signed up about five new members a day, which comes to roughly 750 members. A couple of days later, however, he estimated the membership at 300. 

He likens the white nationalist movement to the early years of the gay rights movement. “Back then, if someone was homosexual and came out, they would be dealing with chronic unemployment and ostracism. We’re dealing with the same thing.” But he tells me that he sees signs that change may be on the way, accelerated by the election of Trump. “It’s starting to snowball.” 

California is like America, only more so,” said novelist Wallace Stegner, echoing journalist Carey McWilliams’ earlier opinion that “Californians are more like the Americans than the Americans themselves.” California, McWilliams continued, “is the great catch-all, the vortex at the continent’s end into which elements of America’s diverse population have been drawn, whirled around.” 

The state is solidly liberal, with political leaders who have promised to resist Trump’s agenda.

“California is not turning back,” Governor Jerry Brown declared last January in his State of the State address. “Not now, not ever.” When San Francisco International Airport erupted in protest after Trump signed his executive order targeting Muslims, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom was there, shaking hands in the crowd and registering his dissent. And a week after Trump signed another sweeping executive order -- this one stepping up enforcement actions against undocumented immigrants-- the state took its first steps to create a “sanctuary state,” which would prohibit the state and its localities from enforcing federal immigration laws. 

Yet California also has a rich history of right-wing extremism, xenophobia and racism, which it has exported, with varying degrees of success, to the rest of the country. Perhaps the best example is Proposition 187, which was overwhelmingly passed by voters in 1994. The law was drafted in part by a lobbyist with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that seeks to severely curtail immigration to the U.S. and whose founder, John Tanton, believes that the U.S. must remain a majority-white state. FAIR is designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which defines the term as a group with “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” 

(Left, undated photo of KKK march, possibly taken in Santa Barbara.) 

Proposition 187 prevented undocumented immigrants from receiving most tax-supported benefits, including medical care at publicly funded hospitals and the use of public schools. (It was immediately challenged in court and eventually declared unconstitutional.) Less remembered is that Prop. 187 also compelled all law enforcement agents and school officials to investigate the immigration status of individuals they believed might be in the country illegally, and to refer such individuals to both federal immigration agencies and the state attorney general. It was the mother of all anti-immigrant bills, from SB 1070 in Arizona to HB 56 in Alabama, a specter that continues to haunt our country as a new wave of raids takes shape. 

Anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiments go back much further than the mid-1990s, of course. For the first half of the last century, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were forcibly segregated into second-class schools and shunted into fieldwork. When they attempted to organize for higher wages, they were met with violence from the state, surveilled by sprawling private spy networks or simply deported. Business owners posted “White Trade Only” signs in their windows, and care was made to prevent races from mixing in public facilities. For years the City of Orange, for example, allowed children of Mexican descent to use its public pool only on Mondays. The pool was drained on Monday night and cleaned and refilled on Tuesday, to protect white children from contamination. 

Racial hysteria swept the state during World War II, this time targeting the Japanese. In January of 1945, the federal government reopened the West Coast to Japanese-Americans, who had been rounded up into internment camps three years earlier. Fearing anti-Japanese hostility, the government offered funds to any former internee who decided to remain east of the Rockies, but most elected to return. This unleashed what the War Relocation Agency characterized as a “widespread campaign of terrorism.” In the first six months, Japanese-Americans were targeted in 22 shootings and 20 cases of arson. Vigilantes burnt their sheds to the ground and fired bullets into their homes. Most of the violence was in rural areas, but not all. In San Francisco, the windows of a hostel sheltering Japanese were smashed. 

The post-war period saw the resurgence of the Klan in California, in response to returning veterans of color who were impatient to finally live in the democracy they had fought for. In Fontana, 50 miles east of Los Angeles, an African American named O’Day Short moved his family into a new home in 1945. The house was south of Base Line Road; the saying around town was “Base Line is the race line.” Blacks were supposed to stay north of the road. A group of men, likely from the local KKK, visited Short and advised him to leave, but he didn’t budge. A few days later, his home was firebombed and Short, along with his wife and two young children, perished. A generation would pass before another black would buy property south of Base Line. 

This sort of racial segregation was the rule in California, often enforced through restrictive housing covenants that forbade selling a property to a person of color. (Short was light-skinned, so may not have been identified as black by the seller.) In addition, California had a comparatively high number of “sundown towns”—white communities that barred blacks and other people of color after nightfall. 

Damigo’s vision, then, of whites living apart from other races, does have a historical precedent, and his anxiety about the browning of the state comes from a deep strain of nativism. A century ago, boosters held up Los Angeles as a “city without slums” and “more Anglo-Saxon than the mother country today.” That Eden was soon spoiled, however. In 1928, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post complained that the city was filled with “the shacks of illiterate, diseased, pauperized Mexicans” who breed “with the reckless prodigality of rabbits.” This invasion of foreigners -- forgetting for the moment that California was once part of Mexico -- is the animating force behind white nationalists like Damigo. They long for a past that never was, and he hopes to tap into the power of Trump’s ahistorical nostalgia. One of the posters that Identity Evropa posts on college campuses proclaims, “Let’s Become Great Again.” 

In more recent decades, the state has cranked out a who’s who of notable racists and immigrant bashers. Richard Butler, the founder of Aryan Nations, spent decades in California before retreating to his compound in Idaho. Tom Metzger, who would launch White Aryan Resistance, got his start by attending John Birch Society meetings in Southern California in the 1960s. And it was a retired accountant from Orange County, Jim Gilchrist, who put out the call for armed volunteers, or so-called Minutemen, to patrol the southern border in 2005. 

According to the SPLC, there are currently 79 hate groups scattered across California, the state with the highest number in the nation. (Florida is second with 63.) Many keep a low profile, but last year they were impossible to miss, as two brawls erupted between white power groups and much larger contingents of counter protestors. The first was a Klan rally in Anaheim, the second a joint rally between the Golden State Skinheads and the Traditionalist Workers Party. In each, multiple people were stabbed. 

“California has been a cornucopia of extremism on all sides of the political spectrum,” says Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “It’s the place where you can come from anywhere and define your own American Dream, and everybody’s got a gripe. The fringes are as hot here as they are anywhere.” 

Muslims have borne the brunt of that hate. The SPLC recently claimed that anti-Muslim hate groups nearly tripled in the last year, from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016. According to Levin, hate crimes targeting Muslims in California jumped 122 percent between 2014 and 2015, a period that coincided with the San Bernardino terror attack and Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. This past January, someone broke the windows of a mosque in Davis and left bacon at the front door. Several days later, in a radio story about the Muslim ban, Jeff Schwilk of San Diegans for Secure Borders Coalition -- which supports dramatic curbs on immigration and opposed what it called Hillary Clinton’s “mass unvetted Muslim refugee dumping plans” -- told a KQED reporter that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” 

On the morning of January 29, in one of his Twitter bursts, Trump wrote: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” Later that evening, Alexandre Bissonnette, a college student and Trump supporter, walked into a Quebec mosque and opened fire during evening prayers, killing six worshipers. 

Such developments have Muslims in California on edge. Hamdy Abbass came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1979, and for more than three decades has lived in San Martin, a rural area south of San Jose. For years, he and his fellow worshipers have held services in a converted barn. In 2006 they bought a 16-acre lot with plans to build a mosque. But Abbass has run into fierce opposition from some local residents, led by a group called the Gilroy-Morgan Hill Patriots, whose president is Georgine Scott-Codiga. “They are claiming they are worried about the environmental impact, but that is a smokescreen,” Abbass says. “It’s Islamophobia.” 

In an interview, Scott-Codiga tells me that she doesn’t have anything against Muslims, but indeed has concerns about the environmental impact of the proposed mosque. I ask her about her group’s Facebook page, which is filled with links to articles with titles like “The Muslim Plot to Colonize America,” and interviews from a group called Political Islam, identified by the SPLC as an anti-Muslim hate group. Her organization also sponsored a local talk by Peter Friedman, who runs a website called Islamthreat.com -- again, listed as a hate group by SPLC -- entitled “What the Mosque Represents and the Threat of Islam.” 

“Well, the people that are committing all of these terrorist acts, they have one thing in common,” she says. “So you have to ask yourself, what’s going on?” 

I ask her what is going on. 

“Look, it has nothing to do with Islamophobia,” she says, and hangs up. 

At a recent community meeting, Abbass tells me, a man warned that the mosque would be used as a base for terrorist attacks. “That was maybe one of the kinder things that was said,” says Abbass. Still, he is undaunted. If all goes as planned, his congregation will begin building the mosque next year. “We have to go with the assumption that we will be targeted,” Abbass says. “But we have to also pray that nothing will happen.”

(Gabriel Thompson is an independent journalist who has written for publications that include the New York Times, Harper's, New York, Slate, and the Nation. His forthcoming book is Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture. This piece was first posted AT Capital & Main.)  Klan march photo credit: Los Angeles Public Library Collection. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MY TURN-I did not vote for Donald Trump, which I'm sure will come as no surprise to all of you. I have watched his administration the last forty days or so with an almost morbid curiosity, which runs from incredulity to terror. I am, however, an American (adopted) and he was elected President. 

There was a collective country-wide sigh of relief after his speech before Congress on Tuesday night – or maybe because the bar had been set so low, anything different sounded "Presidential." 

Noticeably missing from his remarks was any mention of Russia and even more importantly ... no blasts at the mainstream press. 

Perhaps since most news reports gave him high marks, he might enjoy getting accolades instead having brick bats hurled at him. Maybe he’ll continue in a less bombastic manner. Broad strokes and few details were the sum of the comments about the speech. But I was heartened by his referral to looking for a bi-partisan approach to an immigration bill. 

I love comparisons and the company WalletHub.com has the most amazing set of statistics and comparisons on almost every topic for all 50 States. 

In light of recent developments in U.S. immigration policy, WalletHub’s analysts compared the economic impact of foreign-born populations in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They determined which states benefit the most -- and least -- from immigration using 18 key indicators, ranging from “median household income of foreign-born population” to “jobs generated by immigrant-owned businesses as a share of total jobs.” 

It's no surprise that California ranks first in both foreign entrepreneurs and foreign workforce. New York and New Jersey are second and third respectively. The mass deportation would have a disastrous effect on our economy as well as a social impact. 

I flipped channels after the speech to see what the right, the left and pundits in the middle had to say. Naturally, there were raves and jeers depending on who was speaking. 

Being a half glass full kind of person I've spent a considerable amount of time trying to find something to cheer about. Some of you have accused me of being naïve. One of my loudest detractors said I was "nuts.” But I prefer to live in my half bubble that says one can almost always find something good in a given situation and I think I have found something positive. 

As an electorate...we suck! Half the eligible voters in our country…don't. Many who didn’t vote were either turned off by both candidates or thought Hillary Clinton had it in the bag and didn't need their votes. Others didn't care who won since they thought their votes wouldn't change anything anyway. 

But the Trump win has managed to do something that we haven't seen in a long time: it has caused a huge number of people to suddenly become "politically active." The Town Halls being held across the country have had huge turnouts with people who seem to understand the issues that affect them. Even with all of the enthusiasm for President Barak Obama's campaign, these crowds today have a different vibe. 

So, maybe it took something like a Donald Trump to get Americans to realize that they need to participate in democratic institutions. They need to communicate with their elected representatives and yes...they need to run for office. 

This is very timely because we have a local primary election next week, which historically gets an even lower turnout. We will have a good idea at the end of next week as to whether President Trump was instrumental in getting Angelenos out to vote...or whether all the marches, sit-ins, phone calls and Town Halls were just a reaction with no follow through. 

For as long as I have been writing for CityWatch, I have pontificated on the importance of voting. Those of you who read CW are among the most knowledgeable and I'm sure almost all of you take your voting responsibility seriously. It's the rest of our collective neighbors we need to motivate. 

There are new faces on the ballot. Will they get elected? We won't know until the finals in May.   There are some offices in which the incumbent is running unopposed. Both Controller Ron Galperin and City Attorney Mike Feurer are unopposed. City Councilman Bob Blumenfield in District 3 is also unopposed. 

District 3 is almost the easiest to manage District out of the 15 Council Districts. Blumenfield shows up for lots of events and issues proclamations, but aside from potholes and traffic concerns the challenges in his District are minor in comparison to the others. He wants to get the City wired, which is admirable, but keeping such a low profile should change now that he has five and a half years left. 

Maybe, now that we have term limits, potential candidates are looking at those three offices and are preferring to wait 5 1/2 years until a given seat is open. 

Beating an incumbent is very difficult. They have the name recognition and unless there has been some kind of scandal during their terms, it’s tough to raise the money and support. Surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times did NOT endorse all the incumbents for either City Council or the Board of Education. They did endorse a prior Trustee, an incumbent and a newcomer for the Community College Board of Trustees. Their endorsement list with explanations is on their website. 

It seems like there is a lot more interest and candidate meetings than ever before. It could be the folks involved now are just noisier. 

Next week will give us a clue as to whether President Donald Trump has given any real impetus to grassroots action. Or is it just more talk? 

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.

THE TWO FACES OF LAT--According to the Los Angeles Times editorial page, “Measure S isn't a solution to LA’s housing woes, it's a childish middle finger to City Hall.” Later, similar articles made the same and related points when the paper took the lead in opposing Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. 

Yet, the same newspaper’s investigative reporters have performed a tremendous public service by unearthing an extensive city planning pay-to-play operation at City Hall.  In what the Times called soft corruption, deep-pocketed developers make extensive contributions to elected officials in order to get their mega-projects permitted in locations where they are by barred by LA’s planning and zoning laws. Instead of telling the developers to move their projects to parcels where they are legally permitted, or to scale their projects down so they can legally build them in their preferred spots, the elected officials vote to change the planning and zoning laws for the individual lots where the mega-projects are proposed. 

Voila! Spot-zoning and spot-General Plan Amendments for those who pay-to-play. 

How can we make sense of this two-faced approach by LA’s most prominent newspaper? 

On one hand, the newspaper has totally substantiated one of the main arguments of the Yes of S campaign, City Hall pay-to-play to has become LA’s land use planning process. On the other hand, the same newspaper has repeated, nearly verbatim, the no on S campaign’s talking points. 

The easy part of my analysis – at the end of this column -- is to debunk the Times’ growing list of claims about Measure S. The harder part is to explain the paper’s two-faced approach. This is my explanation. 

For over a century, LA's land use planning process has been little more than real estate speculators calling the shots at City Hall. Los Angeles has experienced many waves of municipal reform – such as the adoption of the first zoning code in the United States in 1909 -- since the end of the 19^th Century to control this type of corruption. Nevertheless, after each reform, such as the new City Charter in 2000, AB 283, and The General Plan Framework Element, City Hall methodically undermined each of them.

When Los Angeles was a new city with raw land, real estate speculation focused on housing construction. Despite occasional victories by good government forces in Los Angeles, there was never much concern about the environment, infrastructure, and public services at City Hall. Now, in 21st Century LA there is hardly any raw land left. In a famous essay from former city planning professors at USC, the end of this economically-induced low-density development model was described as "Sprawl Hits the Wall."  Their account also dovetailed with Mayor Tom Bradley’s LA 2000 – A City for the Future report, which attempted to transform Los Angeles from an unrestrained fast growth city to a controlled growth city. Both visions were then turned into an official plan, the General Plan Framework.  

Infill Development. 

But, what these scholars and civil leaders did not fully realize was that the end of raw land Los Angeles hardly meant the end of real estate speculation. The old Urban Growth Machine simply put on a new set of clothes. The same Growth Machine real estate investors turned their attention away from tract housing to infill housing, including luxury towers, McMansions, and small lots subdivisions. 

While the schemes to demolish and replace existing, affordable homes with more expensive residences do not require any spot-zones from the City Council, most new high-rise luxury apartment buildings do. They are usually tall, dense structures because of real estate economics – high profits follow high buildings. This, then, is the old Growth Machine’s new real estate model: private infill projects regardless of social consequences adopted plans and zones. 

But, even though tract housing and luxury towers look much different, their political and economic content are the same. Real estate speculators need to move fast on their projects. They lose money when they are hemmed in by planning, zoning, and the California Environmental Quality Action (CEQA) laws and regulations. Like before, they want a pliant City Hall and are willing to liberally contribute to elected officials to make sure they get it. 

If they can’t wangle this through widespread up-zoning and up-planning ordinances, such as those appended to the overturned Hollywood Community Plan, they then move on to their Plan B. They resort to pay-to-play and spot-zoning to legalize their new lucrative projects, one-by-one, in all the wrong places. 

How Measure S fits into this history. 

This is what Measure S is all about, the historic struggle in Los Angeles between good governance types who know that large cities need to be carefully planned versus commercial real estate interests bound together in the Urban Growth Machine, including boosters from local newspapers. 

The updated Urban Growth Machine, though, has learned a few lessons through focus groups and strong voter support in Los Angeles for two affordable housing initiatives, Measures JJJ and HHH. One is that they should present their old free market Reaganesque arguments about deregulation with liberal buzzwords. This is why the “no on S” campaign frames their case around affordable housing, jobs, and transit. It also explains why they claim that spot-zoning and spot-planning is necessary to build affordable housing (it isn’t). It also accounts for their claim that the strong planning and zoning championed by Measure S is really a clever tool of the haves to wage class struggle against the have-nots, largely racial and ethnic minorities. 

But, these election ploys are just window dressing for the hidden agenda of the real estate firms enmeshed in pay-to-play, including their partners in the press. Their priority was and still is maximizing return on their real estate investment. It is not about carefully planning cities, and this is the conundrum of the Los Angeles Times editorial board. They are caught between these competing narratives, even when one side of the argument comes from their own reporters. 

Do they side with their traditional Urban Growth Machine allies in the real estate sector, or do they side with their own reporters, as well as the advocates of good government? Will the paper continue to side with topsy-turvy real estate markets, as they have since the days of Otis Chandler, Harry Chandler, and Harrison Gray?  Or will they line-up with the solid planning and zoning that has been the best option for Los Angeles since the 1980s? 

Torn by these conflicting forces, the LA Times has taken a Solomon-like approach when it comes to Measure S. The first half of their editorial approach gives credit to their own reporting, and the second half ignores their own reporting, and parrots the talking points of the no on S campaign. In so many words the paper states, as do many no on S advocates, “Yes, LA’s City Hall is corrupt and yes, the City’s planning process is broken, but we still need pay-to-play to overcome our problems of becoming a world-class city.” 

The LA Times Editorial Board approach, though, ultimately fails. 

To pull off this two faced approach, through its own editorials, and subsequent feature stories by its own reporters and guest columnists, the Times simply became a megaphone for the no on S campaign. Since these talking points are well known, I have selected the most prominent ones to debunk. 

“Measure S would enact a permanent ban on General Plan amendments for any property less than 15 acres.” 

Really? The LAT should review their own editorials supporting the new year 2000 Los Angeles City Charter.  It is the updated City Charter that states that all General Plan Amendments must be for geographically significant areas. Measure S simply clarifies this Charter provision to mean significant areas must be 15 acres of larger, a specific plan, or a community plan.

“Because the existing city’s land-use plans are so out of date and so riddled with inconsistencies that it’s not unusual to need a zone change to build a simple apartment building in a row of existing apartment buildings.” 

Really? The Times’ own reporter’s summary of Measure S notes that commercial zones in Los Angeles permit the by-right construction of apartment buildings. The only impediment in some cases is Proposition U, and this is routinely avoided through density bonuses. They do not require a City Council-spot zone or spot-plan amendment. This is why Measure S is not a barrier to the construction of apartment buildings, other than high-rise luxury towers located in areas with low-rise planning and zoning.

“Measure S would worsen the housing shortage.” 

Really? No argument that Measure S could hinder the construction of luxury apartments in low-rise areas because in these locations the building permits depend on spot-zoning. But this luxury housing market is totally disconnected from the middle income and low income housing in short-supply. Any developer who wants to build for these markets has massive pent-up demand, many by-right building sites, and lenders around the world interested in the Los Angeles real estate market. Measure S does not stand in the way of any of this since the only barrier is, essentially, self-imposed. Affordable housing has such low profit margins that developers avoid it. No change in local zoning laws will be able to change this basic feature of real estate economics, the need to make a profit. 

“The measure would do nothing to create more affordable housing or to protect existing affordable housing.” 

Really? Measure S requires that all land use decisions be consistent with the General Plan: “5) Require the City to make findings of General Plan consistency for planning amendments, project approvals and permit decisions.” This legal finding alone has the power to pull the rug out from underneath many types of speculative real estate leading to displacement, especially McMansions, Small Lot Subdivision, some mid-rise projects built through the demolition of older structures and the evictions of their tenants. For example the General Plan Framework’s Policy 4.3 is clearly one criteria that can and should be used to slow down gentrification and displacement, “Objective 4.3: Conserve the scale and character of residential neighborhoods.”

Furthermore, LA’s Community Plans, all part of the General Plan, contain anti-displacement policies, such as Policy 1.4-2 from the Wilshire Community Plan. It could easily be used as a finding to block gentrification, “Ensure that new housing opportunities minimize displacement of residents. Program: Decision-makers should adopt displacement findings in any decision relating to the construction of new housing.” 

Measure S will make it nearly impossible to convert a parking lot, a defunct public building or a strip mall into housing.” 

Really? Strip malls are built on commercially zoned lots, which allow by-right apartment buildings. As for public buildings and parking lots, it depends on the underlying zoning, but Los Angeles has no shortage of parcels on which apartments, both market-rate and affordable, can be built. In fact, the General Plan Framework Element concluded that Los Angeles has sufficient commercially zone land (which include apartment buildings) for all 21^st century growth scenarios: “The Plan's capacity for growth considerably exceeds any realistic market requirements for the future. For example, there is sufficient capacity for retail and office commercial uses for over 100 years even at optimistic, pre-recession, market growth rates.”  

Building on underused sites is the best way to create more housing without displacing existing residents. 

Really? LA Open Acres has created a searchable map of thousands of vacant lots in Los Angeles, including 3000 in South Los Angeles. Per the Times preference, most are suitable for residential construction without displacement, and Measure S does not affect them. But, since the year 2000 Los Angeles has lost 20,000 rest stabilized units, as well as many more affordable units, through demolitions and evictions. 

This is the dysfunctional city planning status quo that no on Measure S protects. In contrast, a Yes on S vote allows the city to slow down dislocation and gentrification through findings of inconsistency with the General Plan, as discussed above. 

In addition, Measure S would make it harder to address homelessness. Just three months ago, LA voters passed Measure HHH to build 10,000 units of low-income and permanent supportive housing for the homeless. 

Really? Measure S supporters also strongly supported Measure HHH. This is because the City of LA already owns thousands of parcels where affordable housing can be constructed by-right. It does not need to use private parcels or city-owned sites where the zoning does not allow residential. This is why the City of LA, which has had a program to use city-owned sites for housing since 1988, has never bothered to change the zoning or plan designations of sites not zoned for residential uses.

Don’t hold hostage badly needed housing with this overly broad ballot measure. 

Really? An updated General Plan can identify where in LA there is the greatest need for middle income and low-income housing. It can also determine where there is sufficient infrastructure and services capacity for increased housing, as well as which parts of the city have the greatest amount of zoning suitable for residential development. This information, especially if coupled with housing programs like HHH or a restoration of Federal and CRA housing programs, can address LA’s housing crisis. It is a much better model than the status quo, which almost entirely depends on the ups and downs of private real estate investors to provide a barely detectable trickle of affordable housing. 

Final words. 

In light of LA’s history, we know that a Measure S election victory will not be a permanent defeat for the Urban Growth Machine, but it will be a serious set back. Nevertheless, it will try to slowly worm its way back into City Hall with backdoor pay-to-play for spot-zones. Supporters of strong planning must, therefore, be vigilant. 

We also know that an election defeat of Measure S will quickly lead to backsliding over City Council promises to quickly update the General Plan, refuse campaign contributions from real estate investors, and improve Environmental Impact Reports. 

But, we also know that the process that Mayor Tom Bradley began in the late 1980’s to turn LA into a planned city will only grow. This is because Los Angeles’ future will become a dystopian world like Blade Runner if market forces continue to substitute for a strong, adhered to General Plan. 

As a result, either by choice or by urban implosion, an infill-focused Urban Growth Machine will lead to LA’s demise. The city will then have no choice but to fully embrace a planned future.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch LA. Please send your comments and corrections to [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LOOK AND LISTEN-Unfortunately, it appears we’re off to a red-flag-riddled start with Prop HHH. The first implementation meeting took place on February 17th, though you wouldn’t know it unless – well, actually, there is no “unless.” There was simply no reasonable way for any Angeleno to have found out about it. 

No worries. We’ll just listen to the audio recording of the meeting ... except that … 

The following brief letter is real and is reprinted here verbatim: 

Mr. Preven - earlier today you asked about audio recordings for both the COC [Civilian’s Oversight Committee] and AOC [Administrative Oversight Committee] meetings for Prop HHH. 

I followed up with staff and it is our intention, similar to all of our other bond oversight Committees, to record all of these meetings. However, there was a technical problem at the COC meeting last Friday and so we do not have an audio recording for that meeting. Tomorrow's meeting will be recorded assuming no problems with the equipment.  

We do not currently post audio recordings of any bond oversight meetings and do not currently have plans to begin doing so. We can and do provide them to the public when asked. 

Sincerely, [name redacted]

Assistant City Administrative Officer 

We’ll take that as …“Yes, I didn’t mean what I just wrote and of course we’ll post every audio recording immediately, so that the public doesn’t rise up and roar the Mayor and the rest of us out of City Hall and half way to Kingdom come.” 

Thank goodness that four out of the seven Citizens Oversight Committee members for HHH were appointed by the Mayor! With a straight shooter like Garcetti calling the shots, the public’s sure to get a good deal. Better yet, the other three Committee members were appointed by the not-at-all-compliant City Council. With that body’s integrity in the mix, the future couldn’t be brighter, right? 

Are you sitting down? One of the Mayor’s appointees for the Citizens Oversight Committee is former CAO Miguel Santana. Last we saw him he was receiving a commendatory resolution and a lionizing farewell. (By the way, he said that everyone can get in free to the County Fair  if they give him a jingle. We’ll keep that under our hats and not tell the people whose livelihoods depend on ticket sales.) 

But Miguel is back and although he has worked for the Mayor since forever, he’s turned over a new leaf during the past the six weeks and is now ready to do some 100% independent oversight.  

Here’s an idea; let’s lose the nascent obfuscations and secretiveness, and get this billion dollar operation off to a non-fishy start. Let’s make it so that an everyday resident can find an agenda or any notice of these oversight meetings without hiring a private detective. Trust and verify.  

And about that audio equipment? We know a great guy downtown. 

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

ELECTION WATCH--One of the most competitive Los Angeles City Council contests that voters could decide next week pits the incumbent against two challengers – one with a large campaign war chest to leverage. (Photo above: Jesse Creed, Mark Herd, Paul Koretz, candidates for LA’s CD5)

Councilmember Paul Koretz is running for his third term representing District 5. Covering communities like Bel Air, Encino, Hollywood and Westwood, the district is among the wealthiest and well-educated among the council's 15 represented areas.

Koretz' challengers are Mark Herd, who has been active in several community groups and is the founder of the Westwood Neighborhood Council, and attorney Jesse Creed.

Among the challengers in the eight City Council contests on Tuesday's primary election ballot, Creed is the top campaign fundraiser, with the exception of one candidate running for the open District 7 seat in the San Fernando Valley.

Creed has collected about $298,800 in contributions, as of the latest filling deadline, but is trailing incumbent Koretz who has about $440,300 in contributions. Both Koretz and Creed also accepted public matching funds. Herd has not reported any fundraising.  

Creed claims he's gained significant local support by walking the district's neighborhoods. He said he has spent three to five hours a day since December knocking on doors.

"Our donation base comes from individuals, people with a pulse, not PACs, corporations or LLCs. And it comes from people who live in and around the city," he said.  

Koretz points toward accomplishments like helping to save the Century Plaza Hotel, boosting code enforcements and his work on environmental issues. He is well-known as an advocate for animal rights and worked to outlaw declawing cats and puppy mills in Los Angeles.

For his next term, Koretz said he'll be able to get more done for constituents thanks to funding improvements, a reference to improved city revenues since the recession. 

"We'll trim more trees, but we've been doing that already. We'll fix more streets, but we've been doing that already. We have money committed to fix sidewalks and we'll do that more aggressively," he said.

Creed promises he will only be beholden to voters and he's taken a pledge not to accept any money from developers or lobbyists. 

"I will be an independent voice for the neighborhoods, for residents, for the basic issues that people care about on a day-to-day basis," he said.

Koretz dismisses Creed's charges that the incumbent is beholden to developers. Koretz took heat for his handling of the developer Rick Caruso's high-rise residential building project located across from the Beverly Center. 

The Los Angeles Times reported that Koretz received $2,200 in donations from Caruso. After the story ran, Koretz removed his support for the project, and then ultimately restored his support after Caruso lowered the project's height by 55 feet.

Koretz told KPCC "it didn't turn out perfectly." He said he'd intended to remove his support for the project all along unless it was shortened, but was motivated to act faster when the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association held a press conference to voice strong opposition to the project.

"At the end of the day, I think it was the right compromise," Koretz said. 

He called Creed's campaign "the most shockingly negative" that he's ever seen. 

"Every developer in town knows I've been their worst enemy," Koretz said. "The idea that contributions have made me any less independent, I think, is absurd."

Despite the Caruso project controversy, Koretz was among five incumbent City Council members endorsed by the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper praised him for caring "deeply about his district and his constituents" and for making himself available to them. 

On the other hand, the Los Angeles Daily News endorsed Creed, noting his work as an advocate for homeless veterans and what it described as his broad knowledge of district issues.

Koretz also has the backing of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and several politicians like Mayor Eric Garcetti.

If no candidate reaches the majority threshold of 50 percent of voter support plus one vote in the primary, then the top two vote-getters will move on to the general election on May 16.

Voters who are still undecided on the District 5 race can check out KPCC's candidate survey, which features the candidates' backgrounds and answers to campaign questions. 

(This analysis was posted originally at KPCC radio.) 

-cw

NEW GEOGRAPHY--The cracks in the 50-year-old Oroville Dam, and the massive spillage and massive evacuations that followed, shed light on the true legacy of Jerry Brown. The governor, most recently in Newsweek, has cast himself as both the Subcomandante Zero of the anti-Trump resistance and savior of the planet. But when Brown finally departs Sacramento next year, he will be leaving behind a state that is in danger of falling apart both physically and socially.

Jerry Brown’s California suffers the nation’s highest housing prices, largest percentage of people in or near poverty of any state and an exodus of middle-income, middle-aged people. Job growth is increasingly concentrated in low-wage sectors. By contrast, Brown’s father, Pat, notes his biographer, Ethan Rarick, helped make the 20th century “The California Century,” with our state providing “the template of American life.” There was then an “American Dream” across the nation, but here we called it the “California Dream.” His son is driving a stake through the heart of that very California Dream.

California crumbling

Nothing so illustrates the gap between the two Browns than infrastructure spending. Oroville Dam’s delayed maintenance, coupled with a lack of major new water storage facilities to serve a growing population, reflects a pattern of neglect. Just this year alone, the massive water losses at Oroville Dam and other storage overflows have almost certainly offset a significant portion of the hard-won drought water savings achieved by our state’s cities. A sensible state policy would have stored more water from before the drought, and would now be maximizing the current bounty.

Once a national and global leader in infrastructure, according to a report last year by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, California now spends the least percentage of its state budget on infrastructure of any state. In the critical Sacramento-San Francisco Delta, an ancient levee and dike system is decaying, and ever more stringent environmental regulations limit key state and federal water facility operations. To be sure, Brown has supported a “water fix” — a dual tunnel through the Delta — to address some of these problems, but his efforts have only produced a mountain of paper, rather than real-world improvements. In terms of preparing for the future, California’s current penchant for endless studies and environmental hand-wringing is fostering pre-Katrina Louisiana conditions, rather than the forward-looking capital investments previously the state’s hallmark.

Remarkably, this year’s water system fiasco could have been prevented if Brown had actually heeded his own climate change rhetoric, which anticipates that more rain and less snow will fall in the state. But his climate change obsession failed to spark any rush to modernize or expand water storage to capture the potentially increased rainfall. There has not been a major new dam or reservoir constructed since the first “Moonbeam” era — in large part, due to environmental opposition and Sacramento’s disinterest in basic state services.

You don’t have to be a hard-core climate activist to see the need to expand our storage capacity. Contrary to the prevailing media narrative, droughts and floods have been repeated throughout our history. Back in 1861, it rained for 54 days, flooding much of state and creating lakes in the Central Valley. Yet, Brown, and his immediate predecessors, have not chosen not to invest in this critical infrastructure, leaving us with an aging set of water resources that date, like the Oroville Dam, from the 1960s or earlier.

Nor is the water infrastructure alone in terms of neglect. California’s roads are among the worst maintained in the country. The Los Angeles area has the worst road conditions of all major metropolitan areas, followed closely by the Bay Area. But fixing roads is hardly a Brown priority, given that the state wants to put us all on a “road diet.” Instead, we are faced with the mounting costs for a high-speed choo choo that Brown wants to leave us as his legacy, but solves none of California’s basic transportation problems. Despite paying billions in gas taxes and other levies that are supposed to maintain roads, Californians, as the San Francisco Chronicle recently suggested, will be required to pay new, more regressive taxes if they want fewer potholes and sound bridges.

The wages of narcissism — and opportunism

Brown’s recent pronunciamentos suggest we will have ever more extreme climate policies, including virtual bans on all greenfield housing, and regulations covering everything from how houses are built to cow farts. Sadly, all this will have no real effect on the global climate, given California’s relatively small footprint; the shift of people, jobs and productive industries to other, less temperate states like Texas all but wipes out whatever might be gained from the state’s increasingly extreme greenhouse gas limitations.

Brown’s actions seem rooted in a desire to present himself as the savior of the planet. Yet, while he postures, Brown is leaving a legacy not of salvation, but rather of devastation — at least for everyone but a handful of tech oligarchs and the state’s pensioners. His successors must cope with voter ire over such mundane things as ever more crowded roads, a perennial shortage of secure water supplies and cascading prices for everything from electricity to housing. These realities, not the praise heaped on Brown from the media, will constitute the essence of his legacy.

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

-cw

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Donald J. Trump and Co. have occupied the Oval Office for over a third of his first 100 days or edging toward 1,000  hours, give or take a few trips to Mar A Lago. Thirty-eight days have passed since Women’s Marches were held across the planet. 

To date, social media feeds are still primarily occupied by political posts, to the chagrin of those who long for the days of “cute puppies and grandmas” (this from an actual Facebook post I read a couple of weeks ago!) 

Since that first Tuesday in November, many of us have experienced disappointment leading to fear and anxiety. I’ve described the slew of executive orders and statements as brush fires we’re working to extinguish all over the yard while hosing down the house to protect it from going up in flames. 

So what can we do next? Can we survive this pace for another three years, ten and a half months? 

This past week, I co-hosted a Huddle event, a follow up effort in coordination with The Sister March Network. I attended a Town Hall hosted by Assemblyman Matt Dababneh (D-Encino) in the Van Nuys State Building atrium. Rep. Dababneh, Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) fielded questions from a standing-room only crowd of constituents. Over the weekend, I also joined a group of Santa Monica and westside residents at the first Bake & Gather event coordinated by baker/restaurateur Zoe Nathan and colleagues. Lines snaked around a park and pastries sold out for the first time within the first hour as participants jammed twenty dollar bills into jars to raise money for the ACLU and Public Counsel. 

I spoke with and listened to participants at all these events. Here’s my takeaway. As much as we need to formulate concrete plans to address what’s going on in Washington, D.C., we also need to gather to heal. It’s far too easy to slip into hopelessness and despair. Knowing we are not alone goes a long way toward being able to address and even survive the days of this administration. 

During the election cycle, I joined a number of private Facebook groups that either supported Hillary Clinton or opposed Trump, as much to share information and grievances as to help me to process what was happening. During the final days before the election, we questioned what would happen should these groups disband. As a reaction to the outcome, many of the groups are still active but the focus has shifted to resistance, as well as commiserating and venting. 

Since the election, and certainly since January 20, we have seen the rise of many groups in response to Trump’s executive orders, cabinet picks, and presidency in general. The shift has attracted many who were previously not engaged in the process but who are fully embracing their new roles as activists. Throughout the country, hundreds of people attend town hall meetings, a far greater number than in years past. I’ve heard from friends who attended town hall meetings in red states where the constituents in attendance were plentiful, infuriated and anxious, just like us in blue states. In fact, more than a few members of Congress have refused to participate in town hall meetings because they don’t want to face the rage and questions of their constituents. 

Throughout the country, people are sharing to-do lists to contact representatives and address numerous issues and pending legislation. People are continuing to gather for marches, meetings, and to plan the next steps at every turn. They are mobilizing to turn around seats in the midterm elections. Others are contemplating running for local offices. 

This administration is a bit like a dysfunctional or unhappy marriage. Venting and commiserating certainly have value for getting through each day in response to all the landmines -- but taking the next step is equally, if not more, crucial. Complain, express disapproval, find like-minded people for peace of mind but also take steps to move forward. 

To find a Huddle group in your neighborhood, visit www.womensmarch.com/100/action2/.
Join the next Bake & Gather March 11, 12-3 p.m. at the (Silver Lake Reservoir’s Meadow 1850 W. Silverlake Drive), hosted by Roxana Jullapat (behind the forthcoming Friends & Family,) Proof Bakery’s Na Young Ma, and Alimento’s Harriet Ha.

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

@THE GUSS REPORT-An article I wrote last year cautioned that when speaking with politicians, and those surrounding them, one should “listen closely, because what they say matters; their evasion matters more; and their evasion while speaking matters most.”

Today’s column starts innocently at a community meeting in Hollywood a few weeks ago when a woman named Del Richardson offered money to the residents of 12 rent-stabilized addresses on Yucca Avenue and Vista del Mar Avenue to persuade them to move elsewhere so developers could use their landlord’s property for more lucrative purposes. (Photo above: Del Richardson, blue dress; Councilman Price, white jacket.)

What Richardson and her company, Del Richardson Associates (DRA), were in the habit of not offering is this tidbit of information: according to media sources, she is married to Curren DeMille Price, Jr., the Los Angeles City Councilmember who happens to be on the city’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee. (DRA which has been in business for decades does not appear to have a website, or at least not one that is currently functioning.)

When the locals confronted Richardson (who is listed as “Del Richardson Price” on the Councilmember’s Wikipedia page and elsewhere) about that relationship, and whether she was offering fair market money to vacate their units, she begrudgingly admitted that she is married to Price but claimed that she had no conflict of interest. Still, it is believed that she left or was removed from the project days after the disclosure.

In order to determine how long Price and Richardson have been married, a search of public records shows that Price was, indeed, married…to Lynn Suzette Price, his first wife, and that he twice filed for divorce from her in the Los Angeles court system, with neither effort finalized. Mr. Price’s second such effort to obtain that divorce tells a curious story, to say the least.

In 2012, Mr. Price tried to persuade the LA court to grant him a divorce hearing because, he claimed, he was unable to locate Lynn, and he wanted to serve notice on her via a paid announcement in a newspaper. But the court staff directed Mr. Price to ascertain from the post office whether Lynn used a change of address form, and to explore serving her at that address, if one was provided.

The case file shows no further activity in that divorce pursuit…because Mr. Price knew quite well where Lynn was living and working.

Lynn Price is an attorney practicing in Trenton, New Jersey. It says so on her website, and in various bar associations to which she has belonged since 2003, after receiving her law degree from Southwestern University. Her physical address, an active phone number and email address are all readily available.

Price knew all along where to serve his wife with divorce papers – had he wanted to.

Instead of having a New Jersey process server go to Lynn’s office address, Mr. Price’s SoCal process server swore to the court in a misdated 2012 document that no response was ever received to the two letters mailed to her Trenton office address.

No one can know why the process server or Mr. Price misled the court in declaring under penalty of perjury that Lynn could not be located, though his not wanting to split assets with his first wife that he currently co-owns with his second wife is a prevailing thought. Mr. Price is no amateur when it comes to serving legal papers. According to his biography, he earned a law degree from the University of Santa Clara. But according to the California Bar Association, he never received a license to practice law in California.

In addition to there being no record of a divorce between Mr. Price and his first wife in Los Angeles courts, court clerks in Sacramento, Houston, Trenton and Washington, D.C. (i.e. places where either or both were known to have lived prior to Price marrying Richardson) indicate there is no such divorce record in those locations either.

Lynn Price did not respond to several voicemail messages requesting comment on the status of her marriage to Mr. Price. Del Richardson, for weeks, did not respond to questions about her real estate dealings. And Mr. Price similarly dodged questions about either subject.

Until last week.

That’s when the LA Times endorsed Jorge Nuño, Price’s young Latino challenger for his CD9 seat on the LA City Council, a community which is quickly transitioning from largely African-American to predominantly Latino.

Within minutes of my publicly pointing out Nuño’s rise, I received coordinated emails – within minutes of each other – from Del Richardson and Price’s media relations person, Angelina Valencia.

Richardson declared, “I conduct all my business with honesty and integrity in a fair, ethical and forthright manner, and in compliance with laws and regulations.”

But this 2004 LAUSD audit concluded that Richardson’s firm overbilled the school district by $83,128 for unauthorized charges. The audit recommended that the amount should be recovered from DRA, or deducted from its future invoices. It is unclear whether Richardson’s excess fees were ever repaid, or if any of her other government contracts are under audit.

Moreover, while Richardson stated that there was “public disclosure of my business interests in the Councilmember’s ‘Form 700,’ economic interest statement,” there was no such mention of it in Price’s 2012 Ethics Commission Form 700, when he was a candidate for LA City Council. He only made that disclosure in subsequent years, when he already had the job.

The huge financial increase between Mr. Price’s 2012 and 2013 economic interest disclosures are the likeliest reason why he wanted a divorce from his first wife without serving her directly.

So if the LAUSD could not rely on Richardson’s financial figures, it comes as no surprise that the residents of rent-stabilized apartments were no less concerned that she dealt fairly with them, either.

And finally, there were the emails from Angelina Valencia, Mr. Price’s Communications Director, who, when asked when and where Price divorced his first wife, wrote back, “I am currently running your request by the City Attorney's Office. I will have a response for you shortly.”

Why would the City Attorney’s office have knowledge of, let alone anything to say about, when, where – and whether – Mr. Price divorced his first wife? Ms. Valencia has yet to reply.

More on the Councilmember’s connubial chaos soon.

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

PLATKIN ON PLANNING--It is a serious chore to keep up with the deceptive claims about Measure S. Today I heard that it would cause rents to increase because of supply and demand, while yesterday I heard just the opposite. Supposedly Measure S will block the construction of luxury housing (partially true), and it therefore reduces the amount of affordable housing because of supply and demand. (Graphic above: Caruso luxury development on Burton Way, Los Angeles.) 

Only one of these contradictory claims could possibly be true, even though as a city planner, I think they are both false.   This is why. Rents for luxury apartments, like Caruso Affiliated's at 8150 Burton Way and 333 S. LaCienega, are not connected to middle class and affordable housing markets. 

In response to Caruso's projects, charging average rents of $12,000 per month, nearby landlords are not going to move their rents either up or down. They will continue to impose the three percent annual rent increases allowed through LA’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance. And, because of vacancy decontrol, they will attempt to rent-out newly vacated units at slightly higher prices. Finally, when given the right combination of carrots and sticks, some landlords will sell out to the likes of the Wiseman Company. 

As the new owner, they will evict the tenants they inherited and then demolish the small apartment building they just bought. All of this takes place in a universe separate from the luxury apartments that sprout up down the street through City Council spot-zoning ordinances. 

Anyone, including opponents of Measure S, who truly wants to maintain affordable apartments and houses, needs to first stop the dislocation caused by urban infill, whether for luxury mega-projects, medium-rise apartment buildings, Small Lot Subdivisions, or McMansions. They then need to toughen up LA's Rent Stabilization Ordinance to eliminate automatic rent increases and vacancy decontrol. 

Beyond those defensive steps, if they want to increase the supply of affordable housing, they need to campaign for the restoration of all the slashed HUD public housing programs and the local Community Redevelopment Agency. 

“Law” of supply and demand: But what about the miraculous law of supply and demand that can simultaneously cause rents to increase and affordable housing units to appear from thin air? This assumed feature of capitalism actually plays little role in LA’s housing market for one obvious reason.   Supply and demand only works within capitalism's one true iron law, profit maximization. 

Maximizing profit is the purpose of all capitalist ventures and investment decisions. As a result, no one buys or sells things for long – including real estate -- when they are not making sufficient profit, regardless of surplus supply or unmet demand.   

If you look at housing in LA, there is a massive unmet demand for middle income and affordable housing, even when thousands of foreclosed properties sit empty. There are also vast piles of underperforming capital available for housing construction, as well as ample building sites for new market and affordable apartment buildings. How so? Because all commercially zoned property in Los Angeles can be used for by-right apartment houses.  While it is true that Proposition U limits the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) on some commercial lots, the subsequent Density Bonus Ordinance allows developers to dodge this restriction by including 10 or 20 percent affordable housing in their projects.

So given available capital, potential building sites, and enormous demand, why is there is so little construction of market and affordable housing in LA? As far as I know, no Los Angeles developers are choosing to meet this pent-up demand for affordable housing by building low-priced housing, even though it would immediately fill up or sell.  They can't make enough money at it, so they don't do it.  They need subsidies, and these subsidies have totally dried up through the elimination of Federal housing programs and the dissolution of the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Nevertheless, some anti-Measure S true believers maintain -- without a shred of evidence -- that the construction of luxury housing increases the supply of affordable housing. Through CityWatch I have repeatedly asked them where in Los Angeles one can find these new affordable units. So far no one has given me an addresses or told me about a neighborhood where this affordable housing can be found. If some reader knows its location, please speak up. 

Until I learn otherwise, my explanation is simple. There is no area in Los Angeles where new luxury housing causes the price of older housing to go down. Even when there is a glut of luxury housing, such as Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), the price of non-luxury housing stays fixed or also slowly rises, as part of broad market trends.  At best, the landlords of the luxury housing repond to high vacancy rates with offers of free parking or a month of free rent. That is as far as they go, which is many thousands of dollars away from affordability.   

Filtering: The anti-S diehards also argue that new luxury housing eventually filters down to become affordable housing, although it takes 25 years.  I have therefore asked them where in Los Angeles one can find affordable housing that was built as luxury housing in 1992 or earlier.  If it actually exists, it is such a well-kept secret that even those who make these claims do not identify these hidden locations. They are as mum as could be, so if they know, they, too, need to finally speak up.

Domino Theory: Another new anti-Measure S supply and demand argument is a domino theory.  It argues that a new tenant of luxury housing frees up a lower priced unit, and this cascades through the entire housing market, creating affordable housing at the lowest ends.   

But, quite frankly this is just a quack theory contrived by the anti-S campaign.  There are no facts and studies whatsoever to back up this newly minted domino theory.  There is simply no evidence that the construction of luxury housing triggers a chain reaction that methodically generates low priced housing at another location.   

If this were the case, Hollywood should have lots of new affordable housing, but reality is just the opposite. Affordable housing, including rent-stabilized apartments, has largely disappeared in Hollywood. The supply of low priced units and the low-income people who lived in them have plummeted, alongside the construction of new luxury housing.   

Part of the reason is the demolition of affordable housing, about 20,000 units, since 2000, as well as broad increases in rents that have displaced the poor.  They have no choice but to double up, live in cars, live on the streets, live in garages and warehouses, or move to far-flung regions like Palmdale. 

It is time for Angelinos to get real and stop believing in the fairly tales dreamed up by the no on S campaign. The only housing bans in L.A. are the end of affordable housing programs funded by the Federal government and the CRA, as well as the profit-based business model of developers. The supposed law of supply and demand will never substitute for these programs, which is one more reason Angelinos should vote for Measure S.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch LA. Please send your comments and corrections to [email protected].)

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SKID ROW POLITICS-LA City Council will soon decide whether to activate or delay online voting for the upcoming Skid Row Neighborhood Council (SRNC) subdivision vote. 

With so many underlying factors, one thing is definitely for sure, this decision will greatly influence the outcome of this grassroots, community-led effort. 

Skid Row has thousands of homeless residents without access to computers which greatly limits their participation in online voting. On the other hand, potential opponents of a Skid Row NC are more likely to have access to computers, cell phones, wi-fi tablets and other online options with electronic voting capability. 

City Council voted in June, 2016 to temporarily delay online voting, mostly because of the significantly-flawed Studio City Neighborhood Council online voting process. (It should be noted that the online voting option in NC elections was a brand-new pilot project for 2016 NC elections.) 

Initially it was thought that there was plenty of time to correct those flaws prior to the 2018 NC elections. 

But suddenly, it became apparent that the 2017 neighborhood council subdivision elections would also be included within the previously established timeframe for corrective online voting. (There are two communities vying to become newly-formed NC’s -- Skid Row in Downtown and Hermon in Northeast LA.) 

The City’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) reported to City Council in January, 2017 stating they would be able to meet City Council deadlines and encouraged the re-instatement of online voting. (DONE was also hoping to receive over $340,000 in funding for the pilot program’s corrections.) 

While it is unclear if City Council is willing to allocate the requested amount of money, there’s another problem: City Council isn’t close to reaching it’s final decision, mostly due to its legal obligation to give the new system a test-run prior to a final vote, also known as, “due diligence.” 

What’s even more problematic is the fast-approaching subdivision election dates which have already been selected by the City: April 6 for Skid Row and April 8 for Hermon. These subdivision elections are less than 40 days away. 

Is that really enough time to allow for adequate outreach to all potential voters? 

The Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee says “No!” 

As SRNC-FC Chair, I have officially filed a letter with the City Clerk’s office this week supporting the City Council motion to suspend NC online voting and also extend the delay beyond the upcoming subdivision vote, which is scheduled to happen only a little more than a month from now. 

Council File 15-1022 (S)(2), moved by Councilmember Krekorian and seconded by Council President Wesson, was originally filed in June, 2016 shortly after the April, 2016 Studio City NC elections which had online voting woes that included widespread failure to safely secure the personal data of voters. Also, DONE’s January, 2017 report to City Council included an admission that “voters were reluctant to upload sensitive documents to complete voter registration online.” 

Furthermore, Skid Row NC-FC’s letter to extend the delay includes the following points of contention: 

“With said SRNC-FC subdivision election vote being arguably the most important vote in the history of our Skid Row community…our outreach efforts are severely compromised as long as the status of online voting remains pending, which thereby prohibits any type of realistic implementation of outreach strategies to ensure as high voter turnout as possible.” 

Another point seemingly laid the groundwork for “possible civil litigation.” 

Not only should the Skid Row NC-FC do outreach to potential voters within the Downtown Los Angeles NC boundaries (whom they seek to subdivide from,) they also need to reach out to potential voters within the Historic Cultural NC (because the HCNC boundaries overlap with the “natural boundaries” Skid Row NC-FC applied for.) 

This thereby means that the maximum outreach campaign area where the Skid Row NC-FC has to “shake hands and kiss babies” spreads all across Downtown, from areas around Dodger Stadium over to the 10 freeway (north and south) and from the LA River to just past the 110 freeway near Good Samaritan Hospital in City West (east and west.) 

And this has to be done in a little more than 30 days? 

How can this be a fair and square democratic process? 

The only solution that makes sense is for City Council to further delay the online voting option for the unusually-close subdivision elections and instruct DONE to instead have the online voting option comfortably ready for the NC elections in 2018. 

And after researching California State Law, Election Code 19217 clearly speaks to this matter in a way that our City Council should heed: 

Section 19217 - A voting system shall comply with all of the following: ⁽⁶⁰⁴¹⁾ 

(a) No voting system or part of a voting system shall be connected to the Internet at any time. ⁽⁶⁰⁴²⁾ 

(b) No voting system or part of a voting system shall electronically receive or transmit election data through an exterior communication network, including the public telephone system, when the communication originates from or terminates at a polling place, satellite location, or counting center. ⁽⁶⁰⁴³⁾ 

(c) No voting system or part of a voting system shall receive or transmit wireless communications or wireless data transfers. ⁽⁶⁰⁴⁴⁾ 

Also: 

Section 19210 - The governing board may adopt for use at elections any kind of voting system, any combination of voting systems, any combination of a voting system and paper ballots, provided that the use of the voting system or systems involved has been approved by the Secretary of State...  

It is quite apparent that no correspondence and/or determination by the Secretary of State can be located anywhere in Council File 15-1022(S)(2) regarding online voting in neighborhood council subdivision elections. 

The Skid Row Neighborhood Council Formation Committee has laid out its case. Now, it’s all on City Council to decide!

(General Jeff is a homelessness activist and leader in Downtown Los Angeles. Jeff’s views are his own.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ENVIRONMENT POLITICS-Lately there's been a lot of talk about reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA. A number of people, many of them developers and politicians, have been speaking out against CEQA, saying that it's basically a tool used by rabid NIMBYs to stifle development. On the other side there are community groups who see the law as their only protection against projects that destroy their neighborhoods. 

But before I go on, let's do a little review. CEQA was enacted by the California state legislature in 1970. This landmark law was the result of a growing awareness that we had been way too reckless in the way we treated the environment. Across the U.S., cities were choking on toxic air and there were a number of horror stories about polluted water. The Federal government enacted the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, and the following year California went even further by adopting CEQA. This was not the result of a coup backed by a few whiny tree-huggers. There was broad support from citizens concerned about levels of air and water pollution. A nasty oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, which dumped 200,000 gallons of crude into the ocean, helped make the case for immediate action. 

That was over 40 years ago. These days it seems like the folks at City Hall and the Department of City Planning (DCP) consider CEQA nothing more than a useless impediment. But they aren't going to wait around for someone to try and reform the law. They've decided it's easier to just ignore it. 

You think I'm kidding? The environmental review process in LA has become a joke. The DCP thinks nothing of adopting incomplete and inaccurate environmental documents. Citizens show up at hearings to point out the numerous problems with these assessments. City officials listen politely and then go ahead and approve the project. They know the only way anybody can stop them is by filing a lawsuit, and there are very few people who have the resources to do that. So the City routinely flouts the law, knowing that they have a damn good chance of getting away with it. 

Let me give you a few examples... 

One of the most mind-boggling experiences I've had in recent years was the City Planning Commission (CPC) hearing on the proposed Tommie Hotel at 6516 Selma in Hollywood (ENV-2016-4313-MND). This project should have warranted a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR), but the DCP chose to do a less rigorous Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND). The developer wants to build an 8-story hotel that includes bar/lounges on the ground floor and the rooftop, while also offering live entertainment. During the hearing the project reps talked about how this would be a great addition to Hollywood nightlife, but I kept wondering why the MND didn't mention Selma Avenue Elementary School in the section titled Surrounding Land Uses. The authors list the Capitol Records building and the Palladium, both about half a mile away, but neglect to mention an elementary school that's less than 500 feet away. 

I was wondering if the Commissioners knew about the school, so I made sure to bring it up during public comment. Didn't even faze them. The prospect of building a party hotel offering liquor and live entertainment less than 500 feet from an elementary school apparently doesn't worry them at all. They did not mention the school once during the entire hearing. 

This kind of thing isn’t unusual. Environmental assessments approved by the City routinely downplay or exclude information that might cause problems for the developer. Just take a look at the MND for the Ivar Gardens project (ENV-2015-2895-MND), a 21-story hotel to be built at Sunset and Cahuenga. This is one of the most congested areas in Hollywood, and driving through it during evening rush hour can be a grueling ordeal. But you’d never know that looking at the MND. The consultants who did the traffic assessment studied six intersections, and found that all but one operates at Level of Service A during PM rush hour, which means that traffic is flowing freely. 

But anyone who’s travelled through this neighborhood after working hours knows that traffic northbound on Cahuenga and eastbound on Sunset often slows to a crawl. A number of people who spoke at the CPC hearing on the project pointed out how bad congestion already was in the area, and said a 21-story hotel would make things even worse. Did that stop the Commissioners from adopting the MND? Of course not. After some squabbling over community benefits, they voted to give it the green light. 

The Mayor and the City Council do a lot of grandstanding about the environment, and to listen to them talk you’d think they were making LA the cleanest, greenest city on the planet. But their actions tell a different story. Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are a huge concern these days, since the vast majority of climate scientists agree that they cause global warming. CEQA requires an assessment of a proposed project’s GHG impacts, but the documents approved by the City often play fast and loose with the numbers. In assessing CO2 emissions for Ivar Gardens, the MND says the “project net total” will be 1,921 metric tons per year (MTY). But if you look at the numbers carefully, you’ll see that the real total is 3,102 MTY. The first number actually represents the INCREASE in CO2 emissions caused by the project. 

The scary thing is, this isn't the exception, it's the norm. At a time when we should be doing everything we can to stave off global warming, the DCP routinely approves environmental assessments that play games with the numbers to downplay GHG emissions. Take a look at the Draft EIR for the Wyvernwood redevelopment project (ENV-2008-2141-EIR), which would have tripled the size of an existing multi-family complex. Most developments these days incorporate some measures to reduce GHG emissions, and the law allows developers to make a case for their project based on what reductions they'll achieve compared to standard development practices, or a "business-as-usual" project. In the Wyvernwood EIR, the authors argued that the project would produce 30% to 31% less GHG emissions than a business-as-usual project. They come to the conclusion that, "...the project would not have a significant impact on the environment due to its GHG emissions." 

What the authors don't mention is that the new development would actually MORE THAN DOUBLE the GHGs produced by the existing multi-family complex. There's no question that the proposed redevelopment of the site would have a significant impact on the environment. But the City doesn't challenge these bogus assessments, and in fact, the DCP does everything it can to push them through as quickly as possible. 

A number of Boyle Heights community groups were staunchly opposed to the project, citing issues including displacement, loss of open space and historic preservation. After years of protests, Councilmember Jose Huizar finally listened to the community and announced that he opposed the project, which seems to have scuttled it. Still, there are those in Boyle Heights who fear it could be revived. 

But to my mind, the most outrageous example of City Hall's absolute contempt for CEQA is the EIR for the Southern California International Gateway.  The proposed SCIG involved the construction of a huge new rail facility for handling containerized cargo from the Port of Los Angeles. 

From the outset, it was clear to the surrounding communities that the project would have severe negative impacts on air quality. Citizens groups protested that the SCIG would be detrimental to the health of nearby residential communities, which included schools and a veterans housing facility. In fact, the project was so toxic that the opposition grew to include the City of Long Beach, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). 

Apparently unconcerned about the possibility of long-term health impacts to surrounding communities, the LA City Council approved the SCIG. Numerous plaintiffs took the City to court and, no surprise, they won. The judge who heard the case found that the EIR failed to address the project's impacts, not only in terms of air quality, but also in its analysis of noise and traffic. So we have to ask, why did City Hall ignore the pleas of so many people who obviously knew what they were talking about? Why did City Hall turn a deaf ear to the City of Long Beach, the SCAQMD and the NRDC? And ultimately, why does City Hall care so little about the health and safety of the people of Los Angeles? 

You may view CEQA as a law crafted to protect the environment that all of us live in. That's not how City Hall sees it. In their view it's nothing more than a roadblock. And how do they deal with it? They step on the accelerator, bust right through, and keep on driving as if nothing happened.

(Casey Maddren is a native Angeleno, and currently serves as president of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (www.un4la.com). He also blogs about the city at The Horizon and the Skyline.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GUEST WORDS--Standing stiffly in overly-starched police blues it was obvious, even before he admitted so himself, that Officer Sean Dinse wished he wasn’t addressing the congregation of the Community Church in Woodland Hills, California. 

But, in the tremulous wake of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic and terrifyingly aggressive immigration policies, Officer Dinse said it was important as a matter of both public and police safety for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to “put the word out” that local police do not – and they will not – enforce federal immigration laws. Dinse said that beginning in January the department began reaching out to religious and other community-based organizations to schedule speaking engagements where they could communicate this message directly to the people.    

Stressing the difference between LAPD and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Dinse said: “We are all human. We have to respect the law. But we also have to respect people who are just trying to survive.”  

Notably, over fifty-six years earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached a similar message of unity and inclusion at Woodland Hills Community Church (photo left). Invited to Southern California by a persistent white pastor named Fred Doty who revered King and wouldn’t let the extremely busy and over-extended civil rights leader refuse, King addressed the congregation on his birthday, on January 15, 1961, saying: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself … You are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life.” 

Asked whether Trump’s immigration policies were going to make police work harder, Officer Dinse squinted, looked down at his boots, and sighed. Standing even more uncomfortably ramrod straight than before, Dinse said: “It’s inevitable that people are going to be scared of us now.” 

Dinse explained that whereas before Trump took office, LAPD could count on citizens and even “gangsters” to willingly come forward with information about neighborhood crime – information critical to effective law enforcement – he believed fear, paranoia, and the downright panic engendered by Trump’s hastily executed executive orders on immigration would soon change all that. Dinse wryly observed that, after all, that was why he was there at a church on a Sunday, on official police duty, in the first place. “We can’t control what ICE and the federal government does,” Dinse said, but “we do want people in Los Angeles to know that the LAPD will treat people as humans. And we will not separate ourselves from [our] community.”            

Asked whether President Trump’s immigration policies would make his work less safe because undocumented people may, in desperation, flee police contact and act more volatile – even violent – in an effort to escape deportation, Dinse unhesitatingly opined: “I can guarantee you that we will see an increase in [police] pursuits.” 

Shaking his head in disbelief, Dinse related in a halting and pained fashion how recently a rumor had spread along Sherman Way (a bustling neighborhood thoroughfare lined with strip malls and heavily patronized by Latinos) that a mounted LAPD unit on routine patrol was really ICE coming to round everyone up. Projecting a genuine and deeply felt sadness, Officer Dinse remarked how the people had fled the area in fear until the street was completely barren. Dolefully ending this account, Dinse stared down again at his big black boots and his eyes widened as if he was seeing them for the first time; he said it was impossible not to draw parallels to the reaction of Jews fleeing Nazi patrols during World War II. 

After Officer Dinse finished speaking we thanked him profusely for his address, for his honesty and most of all, for his service. Then both the congregants and Officer Dinse left the sanctuary of the church, none of us feeling any safer.   

(Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers … including CityWatch … in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on Twitter@SteveCooperEsq)

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TINSELTOWN POLITICS--In Hollywood, nerds have always held a soft spot for ridicule. Tinseltown has a history of movies making fun of geeks, and there’s even an entertaining list of film titles that reveled in nerd glory.

Rarely, though, have they made it to the Oscars. On Sunday, they did – and this revenge of the nerds has possibly put the Academy Awards at the same laughable low spot that was once the unenviable cellar of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and its Golden Globes awards.

Those nerds behind the most humiliating flub in the almost nine decades of Oscar history are the geeks from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the London-based accounting multinational that has handled the balloting process at the Academy Awards for years.

They are the geeks who are responsible for the monumental error at the 89th Academy Awards Sunday night when Hollywood legends Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announced the Oscar for best film had been won by fan favorite “La La Land,” instead of low-budget outlier “Moonlight.”

The morning after the Oscars it’s likely most people who watched the show or had attended in person had even viewed the award-winning film “Moonlight,” but they probably had seen news or online video and pictures of the Dolby Theatre onstage uproar -- and possibly of the pair of PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants identified with the goof.

It wasn’t as if PricewaterhouseCoopers geeks had sought to avoid the limelight before the Oscars, and they certainly couldn’t avoid it afterwards.

The fancy bean-counters behind the incredible goof include Brian Cullinan, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who possibly has been doing this Oscars job too long. His biography on the PricewaterhouseCoopers website describes him as a Matt Damon lookalike. Seriously? In his dreams, is this Cornell Ivy Leaguer a Jason Borne wannabe as well?

His Oscar show PricewaterhouseCoopers teammate since 2015 has been Martha Ruiz, a tax partner in the company’s entertainment, media and communications practice. For the Oscars she wore a beautiful red gown that outshone some of the bad choices of a few presenters. Tax deductible as well, no doubt.

And make no mistake, Cullinan and Ruiz obviously see themselves as more than mere accountants and more than just  book keepers to the stars. Think of it. They attended the annual Oscar nominee luncheon, rubbed shoulders with the world’s biggest movie stars and basked in the glory of Hollywood believing themselves to be more than just privileged tourists.

They were also themselves the stars of a promotional video on the PricewaterhouseCoopers website, and they likely did more interviews leading up to the Oscars than any accountants since those who testified against Capone.

The pair even boasted their own Twitter accounts on which Cullinan Sunday tweeted photos of himself with Oscar winning composer/singer John Legend and his wife, model and actress Chrissy Teigen.

The tweets, however, stopped after the Oscar disaster, and by Monday morning, news reports had made more mention of the names Brian Cullinan  and Martha Ruiz than of most Academy Awards winners.

And The London Sun headlined a story: “Is Brian Cullinan the man who caused the most epic blunder in Oscar’s history?” There were also numerous photos showing Cullinan and Ruiz taking heat, including one where the caption read: “Brian was seen getting a stern talking to by Warren Beatty as he was told of the error.”

In the moments after the worldwide telecast that showed the onstage bewilderment over how this could have happened, the flub that could be called the revenge of nerds Cullinan and Ruiz have brought them more attention than they probably ever thought they would get. Gone were the days of anonymity. Here were the days of notoriety.

As the Oscars show was ending, it quickly became apparent that Dunaway and Beatty had been given the wrong red envelope by the team of nerds from PricewaterhouseCoopers whose only real job at that moment had been to hand them the correct name of the winner.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the star struck Cullinan was seen tweeting backstage just minutes before giving the wrong envelope to Best Picture presenter Warren Beatty — and then tried to cover up that he had been posting on the social media site.

Cullinan tweeted “Best Actress Emma Stone backstage! #PWC” along with a photo of the Oscar-winning actress at 9:05 p.m. Pacific time — about three minutes before Beatty and Dunaway walked on stage to present the award for best picture.

"Mr. Cullinan gave Mr. Beatty the envelope that was supposed to contain the name of the best-picture winner, people close to the production said,” the Journal reported. "In reality, however, Mr. Beatty was given a duplicate copy of the envelope containing Ms. Stone’s name as best actress. As a result, Ms. Dunaway mistakenly named 'La La Land,' in which Ms. Stone starred, as best picture.”

Cullinan later deleted the tweet, but the Journal reported having seen copies of it.

Soon PricewaterhouseCoopers issued a heart-felt apology, promising to investigate how this had happened. EnvelopeGate, some were calling it. Maybe Cullinan and Ruiz weren’t really at fault. If so, our apologies. The producers and cast of “Moonlight” are examples of how to graciously handle terrible mistakes.

But how do you roll back the flub? How do you give the correct winners of “Moonlight” the brief minutes to deservingly bask in their well-earned Oscar glory and make their emotional speeches that they were denied giving before a U.S. audience of 32.9 million and tens of millions more worldwide?

You don’t. How do you write that off?

The Oscars now have an accounting nightmare you once could only imagine in the movies.

(Tony Castro, a former political reporter and columnist, is the author of five books, the most recent being “Looking for Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage” (Lyons Press) He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tony_Castro).

-cw

GELFAND’S WORLD--It was a hollow ball about a foot across, the surface built up out of rivulets of glass. Through the glass channels, light itself moved up, as if it were plant tendrils photographed in slow motion, themselves splitting off into multiple pathways and different shades. We could have been looking at an artistic rendition of the human brain, or a variation on a prop in a science fiction film. 

There is a problem with trying to describe what you see in the Museum of Neon Art using words. There are amazing glass sculptures, but they are more than sculptures because they contain moving parts. But the moving parts are the light that is produced by passing electromagnetic waves through a gas or a plasma. Like I said, you kind of have to be there to really get it. The sculpture described is by Bernd Weinmayer and can be caught at the current show at MONA's new site on Brand Blvd in Glendale. 

At the show, I met Ed Kirshner of Oakland, California (photo left). He is not just a pioneer in the technology of this art form, he is an engaging teacher who began to explain to me some of the craft (and the physics) of working with plasma. Here, we are using the word plasma to refer to the substance that results when electrons and atomic nuclei are knocked away from each other by electricity or heat energy. What results is the aurora borealis, or the surface of the sun. Plasmas can also exist right here on earth, within a glass sculpture that has been filled with the right gas (or gasses) at the right concentration. When electromagnetic energy is applied to the gas, plasma is created. The effect of this process is to generate light. But in the sculptures we are talking about, the light isn't monolithic like in the fluorescent light hanging over your sink. It spins and crackles and writhes its way up and around. It is almost literally lightning in a bottle. 

If this sounds like something out of a 1930s era monster film like Frankenstein, or a silent era classic like Metropolis, it's not mere coincidence. The lightning in a bottle effect was used by early filmmakers to represent something futuristic. It helped to have a mad scientist wringing his hands and muttering in a vaguely eastern European accent. 

In MONA's new show, the work of Wayne Strattman (Designing the Improbable) has a distinctly Fritz Lang sense to it. In fact, one of his light sculptures is frankly robotic, and based on Lang's film Metropolis. 

Other works by other artists went from the delicate to the naturalistic, or played on Day of the Dead themes that would be directly understood by southern Californians. 

Mundy Hepburn's work Hummingbird drew a lot of attention as an abstraction based on a natural form. Hepburn is related to the late actress of the same last name, but explained (curiously enough) that this was his first visit to Los Angeles. 

Candice Gawne is familiar to San Pedro folks based on her undersea images which have been shown at the Loft gallery quite a few times. 

The show included a performance by Susan Rawcliffe, who works in clay but is also a musician. She played a glass didgeridoo which itself featured a plasma effect. I have to say I know I'm not in Kansas anymore when I can write a sentence like that last one. 

Michael Flechtner was walking around wearing a portable neon sculpture of a camera. He does interesting work [www.flektro.com] including doing the first U.S. postage stamp of a neon sculpture. 

In conversations with the artists, it became apparent that this was more than just a show, as it was also an attempt to bring together some of the foremost practitioners of the art in order for them to discuss the practical aspects of gas sculpture with each other. As Ed Kirshner explained to me, there is a lot of this craft that isn't actually written down in textbook form. I suspect that a record of this meeting would be of interest to art historians half a century from now. 

There is one more point worth making here. In earlier days, neon signs were thought of as just one more bit of the commercial environment -- if not total schlock, then merely plebeian. They were the signs on highway 99 and Route 66 that you could see from a long distance away on a dark night, telling you whether a motel was open or closed. The word neon itself suggested something garish. We even have cultural jokes about part of a sign going dark, like the play titled Hot L Baltimore, or the even older joke about the time that the letter C burned out on the big Sinclair sign. 

But to borrow from critic Walter Kerr, the great art that we recognize in the present came out of the commercial entertainment of its time, whether it was Shakespeare or Casablanca. Likewise, there were a lot of schlocky neon signs in their day, just as there were a lot of Elizabethan plays that we don't remember. But what survives from an earlier era of signage includes some elegant paintings in light. It took a long while for intellectuals to recognize the art in cinema. Perhaps the same evolution will occur for neon. 

MONA is dedicated to preserving and celebrating that commercial work that rises to the level of art while simultaneously featuring modern gas sculptures that are conceived and constructed purely as works of art.

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

-cw

ALPERN AT LARGE--Some of us obsess about President Trump.  Some of us obsess about the Oscars.  And then some of us focus mainly on the day-to-day challenges of our jobs, families and neighborhoods ... which is one of the main reasons we should know when government has OUR backs because they demand their own political and fiscal loyal from US. 

Well, let's give credit (both favorable and unfavorable) where it's due.  It's only fair, right? 

My last CityWatch article was supportive of Metro, yet complained about travel time and safety/security problems.  Metro DOES listen, and hence it's out of support that I point out their problems ... because they DO strive to do better for their taxpaying, farepaying constituents. 

So imagine my surprise when--on the same day I submitted my last article--it was announced by Metro that both delays/travel time and increasing security were to be addressed for the Metro Blue Line. 

In other words, Metro "gets it".  Operations and quality of "the ride" means something to them. A speedier and safer ride makes for better ridership, of course.  So Metro won't be turning a blind eye lest its ridership plunge more now that gasoline prices are overall lower (and the economy is doing sufficiently better to allow riders a choice between traffic and Metro). 

Bigger-ticket items includes grade separation of its light rail lines, and/or signal prioritization, but for now the option of more trains and careful operations at the shared portion of the Blue and Expo Lines is do-able, and do-able right now. 

Similarly, the use of multiple police forces to replace the LA Sheriff's Department (using the LAPD and Long Beach Police Department) is long overdue.  The creeps need to be limit-set (and they are very much present), and the law-abiding and vulnerable need to be protected. 

It's delightful when government listens! 

Yet it's awful when government does not listen, or actually preys upon the general population that begs for honest representation. 

Case in point #1:  

So many efforts on the part of the City Council to provide lip service to those grassroots Angelenos forming a small army to pass Measure S begs the question:  if we hadn't finally howled for Downtown and the Planning Politburo to obey the laws on development, zoning, and the environment, would they ever have done it on their own? 

Case in point #2: 

The Los Angeles Times editorial board can "piss off" because they've overseen a diminution of the economic growth of the City of Los Angeles while favoring overdevelopment and law-breaking to the detriment of all law-abiding, compromising, and civic-minded Angelenos who were open-minded ... but not OK with being abused.   

And the LA Times editorial board (not so much its reporters, who work hard to reach out to the citizenry), with its contemptuous approach towards those who are wanting the City to obey its laws, should be ignored on its merciless attacks on those promoting Measure S.   

The Times has for too long been an offshoot of bad-behaving government and they've earned the right to have the rest of us vote "opposite to what the Times says". 

Worsening this is the role that Sacramento has played in promoting overdevelopment no matter what law-breaking is needed to do that environmentally-harmful activity.   

No water?  No problem.  No infrastructure?  No problem.  No fiscal oversight?  No problem.

Build, dammit, build! 

And if cities and counties want to be sustainable and live within their means with respect to growth, infrastructure, environmental sustainability, etc.?  Well along come childish jackasses like Assemblyman Miguel Santiago to make it harder for slow-growth measures? 

And gone are the days when Governor Jerry Brown gave a damn about the environment and the law. 

Gutting CEQA and Coastal Act protections just to promote development...sure.   

Attacking those volunteers who are promoting Measure S just to save the livability of LA for its residents ... sure.  Way to go, Guv!  Are you "progressively" losing your soul or just out of touch with those of us still in tune with ... the law? 

So let's give credit to Metro and any other branch of government that listens, and cares, and works for the people.  As for those who collectively hurt us?   

Well, you'll get your own credit, too--but not the kind that you'd probably like.  But hey ... you've earned it.

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

-cw

SPECIAL TO CITYWATCH--A storm is brewing in the City of Los Angeles. Despite clear direction by the Los Angeles City Council to move the City along a path to 100% clean renewable energy, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is moving forward plans to dump money into  new and  costly fossil fueled power plants.   LADWP’s insistence on these power plants also puts it at odds with Mayor Garcetti, on the need to address climate changing emissions--and appoints all of the members of LADWPs Board of Commissioners. 

This fight comes during a time of renewed scrutiny of how we meet our energy needs across the state. Recently, a Los Angeles Times investigation found that “Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need.”    The story is an important look at why California’s energy regulators keep approving new natural gas power plants even though it is clear that California “has a big--and growing—glut of power.”  I am confident that I don’t need to label the following as a spoiler alert: the answer is a poorly designed deregulation scheme adopted in 1996, combined with poor regulatory oversight, and utility company self-interest that exploits the system to maximize its profits. 

DWP faces a much deeper problem than self-interested profit maximization: intransigence.  The DWP is fighting for its own very expensive glut of natural gas power.   It has proposed to spend $2.2 billion by 2029 on rebuilding natural gas power plants, not because it needs the energy, but because, it seems, it cannot envision an energy system for the 21^st century.   

LADWP is anchored to the past—the energy vision of its founding more than100 years ago when giant, centralized fossil fuel power plants churned out electricity (and pollution) to the sprawling city. 

While visionary in 1916, when DWP started delivering electricity, it’s anachronistic today.  Electricity today—and, importantly, tomorrow—is clean and distributed; centralized power plants are solar, wind, and geothermal supported by battery storage for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.   

Further, energy generation isn’t only centralized fossil fueled power plants, it’s on roof tops and in garages with resilient micro-grids and interactive communication networks between users and generators of energy. 

Instead of embracing the future of energy, the DWP staff is trying to push through power plants even though it has plenty of capacity to generate electricity that is needed to meet the City’s energy needs.  The record peak demand for DWP was in 2014, when it reached 6,396 MW.  DWP has 7,880 MWs of capacity—that’s nearly 20% more than the City has ever used.   

Also, the City’s energy use is declining because of increases in energy efficiency over time. The DWP forecasts the trend will continue with at least a 2% decline over the next 5 years—and that decline doesn’t acknowledge the increasing levels of rooftop solar, or expanding energy efficiency, or demand response programs. And you know what else? The power plant units that DWP insists upon rebuilding don’t run very often.  One ran at about 44% of its capacity in 2015.  The others ran between about 2% and 24%.   

Look, facts are facts—even today.  And in the LADWP’s massive 596 page energy plan, it never provides a clear answer to the obvious question: why do you need to sink all this money into these power plants?  

We asked DWP to provide data to support its claim that this massive investment in these fossil fueled power plants is needed.  To date, DWP has not provided that data. Instead, they say the new units will use less ocean water than the current units and make the truly shocking claim that natural gas is a “bridge fuel.” Not only do neither of those responses have anything to do with meeting the City’s energy needs, it’s also as if the DWP has slept through both the Aliso Canyon gas release disaster and the revolutionary advances in battery storage technology.   

For example, last year Southern California Edison decided to build a massive battery plant in Long Beach to eliminate a natural gas peaker power plant—and use less ocean water.  A “bridge” to the future?  More like an anchor to the past.   

The next step DWP should take is quite small, really.  DWP staff is requesting approval from its Board of Commissioners to sink an estimated $630 million into rebuilding portions of the Scattergood power plant.  Last year, because those units almost never ran, they provided less than 50 MWs of energy capacity to the City. Replacing that capacity with clean energy is a project that should easily be within the reach of DWP. The Commissioners should refuse to allow the Scattergood rebuild to move forward.  The ratepayers, and breathers, of Los Angeles deserve better. 

The City Council and the Mayor have articulated a vision of a clean energy system for the City of Los Angeles.  If the staff of LA DWP won’t provide the leadership to make that vision a reality, the Board of Commissioners should. If they won’t, Mayor Garcetti must.

(Angela Johnson Meszaros is an Earthjustice staff attorney with the California regional office in Los Angeles)

-cw

TRANSIT LA--Much of our current society's problems is that we're too often willing to be apologists: apologists for Bush's Iraq War, apologists for Obamacare failures, and apologists for our personal causes.  Well, I doubt I am the only one who supports Metro but notes two glaring problems:  the trains are too slow, and there's a big problem with safety/security. 

First, the Good (we love that Sergio Leone paradigm, don't we?):  I think that Metro's leadership and staff, at this immediate time, are among the greatest examples of successful government I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.  They are responsive, they do care, and they're trying to improve their operations. 

Then, the Bad: We are decades behind in building a countywide network that serves the needs of all commuters and of all commuting modes.  We've made some amazing progress, and compared to other cities/counties, LA is the city/county to be beat--but we've done it without hardly any help from Sacramento, and only slight and recent help from Washington. 

Finally, the Ugly: We've got a combination of NIMBY's, transit zealots, and small-minded "neighborhood leaders" who've messed things up for the long-term.   

But things are fixable--and it should be remembered that the "line to nowhere", that Green Line, still had to make the painful, awkward first step before it could potentially be extended to LAX, the South Bay, and Norwalk. 

As aforementioned, there are TWO major problems with our Metro Rail/transit system right now: Speed and Safety/Security.  And those problems HAVE affected ridership.

That said, ridership isn't just related to Metro operations--and it should be remembered that the recently-passed Measure M has lots of money for operations.  Again--Metro KNOWS what problems there are, and compared to other branches of government, Metro DOES have a working paradigm of listening more than others. 

To be blunt, though: 

1) It's NOT Metro's fault that their opponents who fought Metro Rail expansion focused more on blocking the line than fairly mitigating the line.  Case in point--the Expo Line Authority and Metro wanted elevation/grade separation in Santa Monica, but that city dogmatically insisted it be at-grade (street level) and the line is slower there. 

2) It's NOT Metro's fault that the sheriffs and other security personnel don't ride the trains as much as they should, and it's NOT Metro's fault that we're so damned politically correct as to ignore the danger of gang members, thugs, and troublemakers who ride the lines within arm's reach of threatened civilian and law-abiding riders. 

With respect to speed--and I'll use the Expo Line as a case in point yet again--the more the line is grade-separated over major commercial thoroughfares, the faster the line goes and the less invasive the line is for car commuters who want to cross the line (particularly during rush hour). 

Where it's mega-tight, going underground makes the most sense.  Otherwise, a rail bridge works well--and let's knock off the canards about rail bridges being ugly:  the new bridges are not like the elevated trains in the old Chicago network ... in fact, they're downright beautiful and modern. 

FIRST, the SPEED: 

With the Downtown Connector Subway almost completed to connect the Expo/Blue Lines with the Gold Lines, the speed of crossing and accessing Downtown will go way up.  But the street-running portion of the Downtown Expo/Blue Lines will certain be considered for a fix in the years to come...because those lines are too darned slow there. 

In the Westside, the results of the stupid, STUPID political battles opposing the line was that the consideration of a rail bridge at the critical freeway-accessing Overland Avenue was thrown away.  

The LADOT knew the rail bridge idea had merit, but the locals demanded a subterranean crossing or nothing...so the Expo/Metro folks saved some money and threw away the bridge option.  I saw the PowerPoint for that option--and if Paul Koretz and the Westside had demanded a rail bridge at Overland (like Culver City did for its rail crossings), it would have been there. 

Now the trains are a little slower there, and cars are--you guessed it--backed up for 10-15 minutes or more during rush hour.  Feel lied to?  Well, talk to those either too NIMBY or too cowardly to demand a rail bridge because they insisted on an underground, mega-expensive fix instead of the cheaper bridge alternative. 

(Sigh).  At least we can consider now building roads that bridge over the rails...maybe.  And

Downtown should have better signal prioritization favoring traffic--or that Downtown Connector tunnel should be extended further in the future to make it easier for both train and car commuters. 

SECOND, the SAFETY/SECURITY:

I've lost my concerns about offending anyone with this statement:  it's not "progressive" or "liberal" but downright STUPID to let career criminals out of prison, particularly when the police are screaming for us not to do that. 

With the death of a beloved Whittier police officer at the hands of some mutant who had NO business being shuffled repeatedly out of prison, the question of asking when IS it fair to decry Assembly Bill 109, and Props. 47 and 57? 

Good government?  Saving a few bucks on prisons?  Offering second chances?  Not being too harsh on nonviolent drug offenders? 

Well, both violent and non-violent crime are going UP.  We used to enjoy DECREASING crime with Three Strikes.  Some kindness and flexibility was nice to prevent too many individuals from having their lives destroyed, but ... 

... we've gone TOO far. 

Homeowners, business owners, and...transit riders...will increasingly experience "close encounters" with folks who used to safely be thrown behind bars for very long times.  And law-abiding individuals of all colors will continue to be ignored by those of us who want a strong police presence on our trains, buses, etc. 

Apps for quietly and safely calling for help should be installed on all transit vehicles, and trains should be notorious NOT for thugs, hookers, and crazies bothering innocent riders, but for sheriff's deputies who get on and off trains frequently and often. 

It's not racist to demand speedier rides, and it's not racist to demand safer rides, on our taxpayer-funded networks.  We paid for all this...so why SHOULDN'T we get nothing but the best for our taxpayer dollars?

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

-cw

SPECIAL ELECTION DEOMGRAPHICS-Three decades ago, as Latinos were about to overtake African Americans as the largest ethnic voting bloc in California, a founder of the state’s oldest and most influential Hispanic political organization admitted his fear that too much was being made of the anticipated age of Latino Power. 

Joe Sanchez, a rags-to-riches Los Angeles businessman and co-founder of the Mexican American Political Association in the 1960s, worried that the historic Latino population changing the face of California would fail to produce equally dramatic changes in politics. 

“The nightmare that scares the hell out of Latinos,” he said, “is one day waking up and finding African Americans holding the governorship, one if not both of the U.S. Senate seats and many of the offices in California that we’ve all thought that Hispanics were destined to win in the future when we are the majority in the state.” 

Indeed, today that fear – or was it prophecy? – already has been partly self-fulfilled, even as the black population of Los Angeles and California has been steadily declining, from more than 14 percent in LA in 1990 to 9.5 percent today. 

And despite the shifting demographic changes, African Americans today wield incredible political power, arguably more than Latinos: The LA County district attorney, the LA City Council President and the chairman of the LA County Board of Supervisors are all African American. 

In 2010, Kamala Harris, daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, was elected the state’s Attorney General, and last November she became only the second black woman in America to win a seat in the U.S. Senate – both offices to which no California Latino has ever been elected. 

Now Harris’ historic senate election, which led to the gubernatorial appointment of longtime Los Angeles Congressman Xavier Becerra to succeed her as Attorney General, threatens to open an old political wound for Latinos. 

For 12 terms, since about the time of Joe Sanchez’s dire warning for Latino politics, Becerra served in Congress representing an inner city district that over the years changed numerical designation and boundaries but has long been considered a politically safe Hispanic seat, especially since its population is almost two-thirds Latino. 

In an upcoming April 4 special election, Becerra’s own successor in California’s 34^th Congressional District stretching from the Latino Los Angeles Eastside through downtown and west to Koreatown will come from a field of 23 candidates on the ballot – of whom no fewer than 15 are Hispanic, including two who are immigrants and 11 who are the children of immigrants. 

So ethno-centric is the speculation and jockeying in this special election campaign that has no established frontrunner that the Los Angeles Times, in a Feb. 15 preview, featured photographs of only six candidates – all of them Hispanic Democrats. Only two of those have ever held or run for elective office, indicative of the new blood and politically inexperienced hands drawn to the race. 

Still, the resumes of many of the candidates shone with brilliance and exceptionalism: Ivy League educations; former organizers in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign; a former staffer of the Obama White House; City commissioners and community volunteers; labor organizers and heads of non-profits; successful sons and daughters of immigrants chasing American dreams. 

But what was that great line that the legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn once used to caution Vice President Lyndon Johnson about raving too much about the genius that John F. Kennedy’s Ivy League appointees had shown in the administration’s first Cabinet meeting? 

“Lyndon, you may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn said to LBJ, according to David Halberstam’s landmark 1972 book The Best and the Brightest, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” 

This perhaps underscores the political shortcomings of most of the candidates in the 34^th District race, not to mention the failure of some to understand that a savvy politician recognizes the importance of identifying closely with the lives and lifestyles of the people they seek to represent.

At recent campaign events, for instance, some candidates who should know better have appeared wearing $500 boots, expensive designer coats and looking as fashionably attired as they would be at an art show opening on the trendy Westside. 

This in a campaign in which many of the candidates don’t even live in what is a predominantly working class district of immigrants, working mothers, garment laborers and minimum wage workers who, in some neighborhoods, are being pushed out by new development, gentrification and millennials. 

Make no mistake. Progressive politics are being heavily pushed. Some are even using an inconclusive Latino Decisions poll released in mid-January to laughably maintain that a Bernie Sanders’ connection could make the difference in an area that has been voting heavily for liberal Democrats dating back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt. 

My own month-long door-to-door walking survey of the district, talking to over 500 registered voters, suggests that longstanding concerns – jobs, schools, crime, immigration, health care, the economy – weigh more heavily on people’s minds than on any white progressive political hero. 

And in that survey, more than three-fourths of those interviewed had no idea who any of the 23 candidates on the special election ballot were. 

In fact, the only candidates who registered recognition from even 10 percent of residents I interviewed were: 

-- State Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, 42, a Los Angeles area political insider whose endorsements include the Democratic Party, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Congresswoman Grace Naplitano (D-Norwalk) and State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon.

-- Former Los Angeles school board member Yolie Flores, 54, a social worker who was once the political darling among the Latinas who have historically fought against the good ol’ Latino boy Eastside political machine.

-- And Sara Hernandez (photo above center), 33, the former downtown-area director and special counsel to 14th District LA City Councilmember Jose Huizar, for whom she tackled such issues as urban planning and homelessness policy. 

If there was a favorite or front-runner who emerged in my conversations with voters, many held over a cup of coffee or dinner in their homes, it was Sara Hernandez.

A former middle school teacher in the Teach for America program, Hernandez has also been the first candidate in the 34th Congressional District to air a television commercial, which began running on TV and cable channels in mid-February.

Fitting of the temperament of the time, the 30-second spot goes after President Trump, the bane of many in Latino America.

“How do you stand up to a bully?” a woman narrator’s voice asks. “It takes a classroom teacher… “Vote Sara Hernandez for Congress and take Trump back to school.”

The ad was immediately successful enough to grab the ire of Trump supporters who retaliated by protesting in front of Hernandez’s campaign headquarters.

The expensive ad campaign is also indicative of who has the money in the race. So far it appears to be Gomez, who has raised more than $300,000, and Hernandez with more than $200,000.

Additionally, my door-to-door canvassing mirrors the conclusion of another recent survey showing that the campaign to succeed Xavier Becerra appears to be wide open. No candidate is expected to win 50 percent or more of the votes, meaning that the two highest primary vote-getters likely will face off in a special election runoff June 6.

So remember Joe Sanchez’s words, and enter Adrienne Nicole Edwards (photo left), 28, a community advocate and business owner -- and an African American mom who today can boast what no other candidates in the race can.

Edwards ran against Becerra in two campaigns in which she carved out a niche in a district where 4.4 percent of the residents are black.

But African Americans historically vote at a high rate in Los Angeles. Just look at Los Angeles’ ninth City Council district in South LA, where blacks comprise less than 20 percent of the population but make up more than a third of the people who vote. In 2013, Curren Price, who is African American, defeated a popular Latina for the council seat -- even though the district is 75 percent Hispanic.

In the last two congressional campaigns in District 34, the underdog, under-financed Edwards has won 27 and 23 per cent of the vote running against the longtime incumbent Becerra when he was one of the most powerful members of Congress. That includes Edwards taking 16,924 votes in the mid-term election of 2014 and 36,314 votes in 2016.

Edwards ran those campaigns on so little money you couldn’t even accurately call the one-woman staff and operation as a shoe-string budget. Her biggest asset in those races was a Twitter account with over 34,000 followers.

So what does her past experience count for in this election, one that like in most special elections -- especially in non-Presidential voting years -- is expected to have an abysmally low turnout? And in a heavily Latino district, where voter turnouts are notoriously bad? Not to mention that while Latinos make up 65 percent of the district’s residents, only 38 percent of them are eligible to vote.

Was Edwards’ showing at the polls just an anti-Becerra protest vote or did Edwards tap into something more? Has Latino Power been little more than a myth, a question that former Assembly Speaker John Perez’s stunning defeat in his 2014 California State Controller's race also raised?

In that campaign, Perez had what seemed insurmountable advantages. He was heavily favored, running on the mantel of his legislative power in a state where Hispanics now outnumber whites as well as blacks and Asians. He also had the statewide connections of his famous cousin, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who remains arguably California’s most influential Latino.

But in the 2014 primary, Perez finished a disappointing 481 votes behind fellow Democrat Betty Yee in the race for the second and final spot on the November General Election ballot. That political debacle left Perez and Latino pols across California stunned and looking for excuses.

Understandably, seeking vindication and a comeback, Perez last December was the first candidate to jump into the 34^th district race just 45 minutes after Gov. Jerry Brown nominated Becerra to succeed Kamala Harris -- only to drop out a little more than a week later, citing a recent diagnosis of a serious health problem.

His departure opened the floodgates to today’s slew of candidates -- and to the decades-old question of whether Latino Power is real, or just more spray-painted graffiti vandalizing walls in the barrios.

(Tony Castro, a former political reporter and columnist, is the author of five books, the most recent being “Looking for Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage” (Lyons Press) He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tony_Castro). Prepped for CityWatch for Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS-The NAACP Charter School Task Force held a hearing in Los Angeles on Thursday, February 9. After calling for a national moratorium on charter schools until certain concerns were addressed (see below), the NAACP received blowback from charter school advocates. But Jitu Brown, of the Journey for Justice, defended the moratorium in the Washington Post's education blog, the Answer Sheet, saying, "corporate reform has failed to bring equitable educational opportunities to all children." 

This hearing was one in a series, a listening tour, making its way across the country. The distinguished members of the Task Force, all pre-eminent civil rights leaders in cities from Boston to Sacramento, states from Mississippi to Minnesota, gathered testimony from people with direct experience with the issues the moratorium seeks to provide the breathing room to address. 

There was massive organized presence by charter advocates. One charter supporter stacked the speaker sign-up sheet with people who would speak against the moratorium, by copying a typed-up charter school roster she had brought. 

The unions showed up, too. UTLA brought a contingent from Dorsey High School and CSEA came. The Santa Ana Teachers Association’s charter school task force came. Former Education Chair of the California Assembly, Jackie Goldberg, gave public comment. 

I was part of a group of the California Badass Teachers Association (BATs), a grassroots group of about 2000 teachers and education activists. I testified as a recovering charter school parent, but what I heard was more important than anything I said. 

I go anywhere if people are willing to talk about what charter schools are doing to public education due to their lack of oversight. Few official bodies in California, and perhaps none in Los Angeles, will openly discuss the need for charter school oversight for fear of the powerful California Charter Schools Association lobby. (Gubernatorial candidate and California State Treasurer John Chiang is a rare exception).

So the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in our country, provided us with a rare opportunity. I was grateful for my two minutes at the mic. When the charter advocates in the back of the room shouted me down, Alice Huffman, the chair, promptly regained order. 

I’m sure for some in the audience it wasn’t my anti-charter message that got them riled up. Some were rightly suspicious of a white Westsider telling them anything about educating urban, black youth. Heck, my own school board member’s chief-of-staff told me not to go to school board meetings, and to find a Latina instead, because it made things awkward for him in our primarily Latino district. 

But I didn’t come to tell them anything about educating black youth. I came to share how charter schools are being used in my neighborhood to segregate our schools. 

The west side of Los Angeles had, for a while, more charter schools than anywhere else on the planet (that distinction now belongs to South LA.) In my neighborhood, charter schools marketed themselves to white, middle class families as a way to send their kids to school without “those kids.” Of course, they phrased it differently. At the charter elementary school my kids attended, we considered our mostly white, middle class school community to be “like minded."

That’s where better oversight might have turned good intentions into fairer access for all children, not just mine. That is what I wanted to tell the NAACP task force. 

After my children transferred to the district middle school across the street, we drove past the charter school every day. One day, my then 11-year old daughter looked out at the charter students during our drive to school and said, “Why was my elementary school almost all white and my middle school is almost all black and brown?” 

Remember, these two schools were separated only by a little street. The middle school was half Latino and half African American. There, my children’s race was indicated as “statistically insignificant” on demographic reports one year. It was a neighborhood school and a magnet school, part of LAUSD's voluntary integration program, for black and Latino children living in parts of the city beleaguered by poverty, violence, and other harms of racial isolation. 

Yet LAUSD has approved nearly every charter school that has been proposed to compete with that school, and offered little extra support to our neighborhood schools. There's no question that charters deserve credit for pushing district schools to step up, but the charter brand also benefits from a grass-is-greener mentality among parents. More choices mean fewer students in each school. That, in turn, means less funding in district schools which results in fewer elective classes and less support. 

I am grateful to the NAACP for the opportunity to share my experience.  

However, far more important than my comments were those made by the Task Force members themselves. (I’m counting on the formal presenters like LAUSD board member George McKenna, California NAACP education chair Julian Vasquez Heilig, Green Dot's Cristina de Jesus, and UTLA's Cecily Myart Cruz, to post their presentations on their own widely read blogs and other forums.) 

The room was mostly cleared out by the time the committee members made their closing remarks. Unsurprisingly, they revealed deeply thought out views by pre-eminent civil rights leaders who are immersed in the issues of equity for black youth in regions across the country. Their thorough understanding of the charter school issue shone in stark contrast to some op-eds that have portrayed the NAACP as out of touch with its members. 

Here is a transcript of their closing remarks: 

Michael Curry is a civil rights leader in Boston, an attorney and President of the nation’s oldest NAACP chapter. He has been involved in redistricting, pushed for Police body cameras and helped to press for a federal inquiry into racial incidents at an elite Boston school. 

“…about their history and about Du Bois and Booker T and Marcus Garvey. Excellent school. So I think the conversation is somewhat twisted. Because people believe that they’re here to tell us not to oppose charter schools, and that’s a false premise. This was never about opposing charter schools. I think we need to lift that up again. That this was a conversation about a traditional public education system that we fight all the time. Another false perception. We fight unions at times about policies. We fight school systems. We just sued--not sued--we brought a civil rights complaint against the Boston Public Schools just a few months ago, and had a civil rights finding against the Boston Public Schools. So it’s not like we don’t fight on the other side too. This is about, now you have a new evolving system.

“And I love to hear the great stories, but what I need to hear from the charter advocates for expansion is that you have problems, too, and how you’re going to work together to solve the problems within this new system. It’s disingenuous if you come and tell a great story about what’s happening in your school, but right down the street, is another charter school that’s expelling kids, suspending kids, not accepting kids, not enrolling kids. 

“And as you have this national conversation about charter schools, let’s keep it real. It’s a problem. It doesn’t mean that your school—that it’s an attack on your personal school but we’ve got to have an honest conversation about what’s going on across the country. My last point on that is I’m always concerned about any new, evolving solution that’s finding us by people who don’t look like us and people who quite frankly wasn’t on the front lines of solving public education since the problem before. So it makes me question why they’re putting this money where they wouldn’t put this money when we were fighting traditional public school. 

“We were asking for higher funding, and trying to pass legislation and bring lawsuits. They weren’t there. But now, all the sudden, they’re putting all this money behind charters. You need to ask that question. I don’t know what the answer is, but I look forward to having that conversation soon.” 

James Gallman is a civil rights leader, the retired President of the NAACP South Carolina which, he said, has “the longest running lawsuit in the country because our state refuses to fund all schools the same way.”

“My comments, on comments that Michael made early, very early on in this process. This is my fourth hearing. And I think that we need to clearly understand what we have called for and then I think we need to understand how the NAACP operates. There was a resolution, or there have been resolutions, coming out of our national meetings. It was not the Board that made that decision. We get a unit that would bring forth a resolution. That resolution is presented to a resolution committee, and it is screened and decided how we move forward. And then it goes to those delegates who come to the convention, and they say that this is what they want to have happen. 

“So just being a member is one thing, but you need to understand how the NAACP operates. It’s not just having a $30 card, it’s how we operate. So when we got to the discussion about it, we made this decision. Let’s call for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools at least until such time as--and we identified four things that we wanted to see happen. Nobody said “let’s stop these charter schools.” 

“We said we need to clearly—we need to be sure that there are things that are being done that fit all schools. Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools; public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system; charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate; and cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet obvious. 

“So we want to make sure these things are happening at every school. So we didn’t come here tonight to beat up on charter schools or to praise public schools. This young lady here, I can’t remember her name, but she said something about, “we’re on a listening tour.” We are trying to get information from both sides. Then we will, at the end of these hearings, go back and sit down as a group, talk about what we’ve heard, present that to the board and then let the board make a decision. 

“We didn’t come here angry with you. We came here to share with—to hear from you—about what is it that’s being done in your community. What’s going on in this country? And then we can make an intelligent decision as to what’s the best way to move forward with ALL children being given a quality education.”

(Audience: Is the moratorium for a specific amount of time?) No.

Da’quan Love is a civil rights leader, a charter school administrator, and community organizer. As president of the Virginia NAACP Youth and College Division, he led an effort that defeated attempts to invalidate over 16,000 voter registration applications in Virginia during the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. 

“I saw a lot of students, a lot of scholars here today. Are there any scholars still here? Probably left. But nevertheless, as someone who has worked since July in a charter school—a little history on myself. I have worked elementary all the way up to the higher ed level in North Carolina, Virginia, and now Minnesota. As someone who’s worked since July to build a first-year charter school, I was a fifth grade teacher, I was recently promoted to Dean of Institutional Advancement, I understand how difficult it is to get a charter school up and running. So before I move any further, I heard a lot of folks say that ‘I started this school,’ or ‘I started a network of schools.’ And I just want to applaud your efforts because you saw a need and you are trying and you are fulfilling that need in your community. 

“I want to first say that. We should give them a round of applause. It’s no easy feat to do that. Secondly, as it has been stated previously, we are not against charter schools. We want top quality, fair, equitable education for all our kids. Now, if that’s at a charter school, that’s fine. If that’s in a public school, that’s fine.  We just want transparency, as Board member Gallman stated. And we want those four things to be outlined. 

“As I prepare to leave this hearing, one of the things that I am taking away is, quite frankly, many of us have the same objectives. We all want our scholars to be on a pathway to college, and/or career, and ultimately to be successful. We all want to ensure that our teachers have access and are able to feel, as I forgot who said it from, I believe the Green Dot schools, making sure they feel like they’re being empowered, they’re appreciated and they’re ultimately being successful. We’re really all pretty much on the same page. It’s just the manner in which we are approaching reaching these goals. 

“And so I think that there are some things that we can do, and there are some things that we as a task force can take away from this and listen to the ideas and suggestions that you all present. But, moreover, the folks that are in this room and many of the folks who have testified today are the good folks. The bigger folks aren’t here. The folks who we’ve been talking about all afternoon aren’t here. Those are the school management organizations, those charter management organizations -- those big folks are who we really need to be having those conversations with. Those tough schools, those tough charter schools that have not really made adequate performance progress. Those are the schools we need to be really concerned about. And the same for our public schools. So thank you. I appreciate you all for coming and I applaud your efforts. I think that we as a task force have some helpful information to move forward with.” 

Derrick Johnson is a civil rights leaders, an attorney, founder of One Voice, a social justice nonprofit, and President of the NAACP Mississippi. He lectures annually at Harvard University and throughout the country on Voting Rights Act, civil rights, civic engagement, and redistricting. 

“I want to thank Da’quan Love for speaking up because he is a charter school teacher. He’s now a charter school administrator. We are perhaps the worst public school system in the country: Mississippi. We have the weakest teachers unions in the country: Mississippi. So for me, it is not about charter versus public. We have a system of education in this country that has pitted poor and Latino and black children in the worst position possible. 

“And now what I’m seeing is the distraction of charter versus public because many folks do not want to fully fund education for all children. And every time we come to one of these meetings, we have well intended, good people—be them charter or public—speaking from their positions, not understanding that we are being used as a distraction. And the real question is, why have we not transformed education to ensure that all children are provided with a quality education? 

“Now, in that process, it’s disheartening to see the multi-billionaire class utilize tax dollars to extract, to increase their wealth, on the back of our communities and then give talking points to folks in our communities to say this is where we want the NAACP, when in fact, they never show up here. Ms. Jesus had one of the best comments today: bad schools is our common enemy. And let’s be real. We have some really bad public schools and we have some really bad charter schools. And our children are being exploited and used as pawns. 

“Our role, as the NAACP, is to do all we can to be the stopgap. And that’s [inaudible]. So I fight public education all day long in Mississippi. But I see the problem. When you privatize tax dollars, people are exploited. And if we don’t have transparency and standards and accountability, we will find ourselves just like Detroit, all the charter schools you can find. And I grew up in Detroit and education is worse now because it's like the Wild, Wild West. So we’re not, anyone in this room, enemies. I think we all want the same thing. But let’s not be fooled about what’s really going on. This is about who gets taxed, who’s not taxed, and how those tax dollars are being utilized to increase other people’s profits.”

Alice Huffman is a civil rights leader and has been a political powerhouse in California for decades, as a political consultant. She earned her degree from UC Berkeley, Cum Laude, in two years. She is President of the California/Hawaii NAACP. 

“I want to thank the board members. I do want to make a comment. I came from public schools. And we sat in here and bashed the public schools like they’re all bad. They’re not all bad. They educated most of us in this room, that we’re now educated to run charter schools. And for my [charter] friends in the back, what I wanted to tell you, you need to stop bashing your NAACP. Like you don’t want us to bash charter schools, don’t bash your NAACP for doing its job. Thank you for being here.” 

Next stop on the listening tour: New Orleans.

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

EASTSIDER-A crowd of somewhere between four and six hundred people showed up at the first Council District 1 debate, held at the Sotomayor Learning Academies. My best guess is there were about 450. That’s a lot of people. And on a Thursday evening. Wow! 

Hats off to the group who put this event together: The Glassell Park Improvement Association, with co-sponsorship from the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council, Mt. Washington Homeowners Alliance, Arroyo Arts Collective, Uptown Gay and Lesbian Alliance, LAUSD, Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council, Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council, Echo Park Neighborhood Council and the North East Youth Council. Oversight was provided by the League of Women Voters, and the moderator was Univision’s own Gabriela Teissier. 

This was a great example of what can happen when a community gets together at the grassroots level to do actually do something. There were a lot more people attending this event than the debate between Jose Huizar and Gloria Molina a few years ago. And the 2015 Huizar/Molina debate was co-sponsored by Cal State LA, the Pat Brown Institute, the League of Women Voters, and Eyewitness News Channel 7 -- so let’s hear it for our community. 

The Candidates 

Who are these four candidates? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the incumbent is Gil Cedillo. You may even remember his epic knock-down-drag-out battle with Ed Reyes’ Chief Deputy, Jose Gardea, over replacing the termed out Reyes. A couple of million bucks and a runoff later, Gil won. 

Readers of this column know Joe Bray-Ali from my recent article in CityWatch, “Get Ready for a Fight In CD1: Joe Bray-Ali Cleans Up Nice!” 

Joe has moved far beyond his original, contentious bicycle lane revolution and is garnering support from environmental groups, small business owners (he owns his own bike shop), and various constituencies feeling left out by the incumbent. 

Jesse Rosas has been running for office in Northeast LA for a while. In fact, during the last election, he got 7% of the vote and caused the runoff between Gil Cedillo and Jose Gardea. Originally from Mexico City, he’s been very active in Highland Park politics for years. A product of our school system (LAUSD at Belmont High, and then LACC), Jesse is a businessman and is running as such, to get the community the attention we deserve. You can find out more here.  

Giovany Hernandez is by far the youngest candidate for office, and shows the hallmarks of an up and comer. Born and raised in the Pico Union slice of CD1, he graduated from UC Santa Cruz and has worked for SEIU, both as an organizer and signing up community members for Obamacare. 

Currently he’s a parent organizer for the CCSA (California Charter Schools Association). You can find more about him here.

The Debate Questions 

This was a very obstreperous crowd, often loud and rooting for their candidate. Given these circumstances, the League and moderator Gabriela Tessier (Univision) did a great job in maintaining order and making sure that each candidate got equal time for the questions. 

I won’t get into too much detail on the responses -- this column would be way too long. Suffice it to say there were 13 questions in all, bookmarked by opening and closing statements, which is a lot of questions. It was nice that these questions came from the community, and here’s my best recollection of what they were. (After all, I can only take notes so fast.) 

-How long have you lived in CD1? 

-Given the number of homeless, how do you propose to help them in CD1? 

-What’s your position on Measure S (the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative)? 

-What’s your position on Rent Control for residents of CD1? 

-How do you feel about Open Space and Development in CD1? 

-How about small businesses, Community Plans and Neighborhood Councils in CD1? 

-What’s your position on local arts, theater groups, and preservation in CD1? 

-How about keeping CD1 clean? 

-What’s your position on green energy, solar, and the DWP? 

-How do you feel about crime and public safety in CD1? 

-What issues are important for the LAUSD, even though the Council isn’t directly involved? 

-What about transit issues in the District? 

-How about the Figueroa St. corridor and bike lanes? 

Sifting Through the Answers 

It was evident that each of the candidates brought their supporters to the event. Of interest to me were the number of students attending. I assume this was because of Giovany and more particularly, our representative on the LAUSD Board (District 5), Ref Rodriguez. He was kind enough to provide the auditorium at Sotomayor Learning Academies for the event. Political junkies will remember that Ref, backed by the CCSA Charter folks, unseated incumbent Bennett Kayser in the last LAUSD Board election. 

Anyhow, themes emerged as the candidates answered each of the questions. Gil Cedillo was clearly the professional politician at the height of his powers; he had done his homework in giving detailed specifics for each question based on his record in office. He repeatedly made a valid point that it’s easy to say what you will do when running for office, but it’s a different matter to actually legislate in the City Hall environment. He did not go into the 15-0 voting system of the Council. 

In the overall area of Planning, I was very surprised that the only candidate openly supporting Measure S was Jesse Rosas. For me, that was a large disappointment. As many CityWatch articles have detailed, I believe that absent the passage of Measure S, the candidates are all just “blowin’ smoke” when it comes to effecting any change in the City’s development process. I can only assume that the multi-million dollar “No on S” campaign waged by the developers and their cronies is having an impact on voters. 

Joe Bray-Ali shined when it came to small business, bikes, open space, and the environment and he has the endorsements to back it up. I have no doubt that he’s the real deal and is much more community-based than the incumbent. And while his bike lane buddies were wildly enthusiastic, they were much better behaved than during the bike wars. 

To me, the biggest surprise of the evening was Giovany Hernandez. He was bright, energetic, well spoken, and clearly lives, works and plays in CD1. Not to mention that Pico Union has not had anyone from the community be successful in politics that I can remember. He was hell on wheels when it came to rent control, and was the only candidate to deal up front with gentrification. The youth crowd (students & Charter) were clearly in his camp, and he should have a promising future. 

Jesse Rosas was motivated when it came to crime and public safety, and he was less politically correct and more direct than the other candidates about a police/business/town hall approach to involving the community in policing. Since he is intimately involved in the Figueroa St. corridor and the tragic deaths which have occurred there, this was not surprising. The other candidates were more nuanced, but in fairness, this issue is extremely complicated and way beyond the scope of a 13 question candidate forum. 

The Takeaway 

Let’s be honest. The odds are in favor of Gil Cedillo being re-elected. He’s endorsed by the entire LA City establishment, from Mayor Garcetti to the Parke Skelton (now rebranded as SG&A Consultants) stable of insiders, with all their money and clout. Heck, I even received a Local 1014 Firefighters Union endorsement sticker for Gil, although I don’t know how many firefighters actually live in CD1. 

Most important, this election gives the winner 5 1/2 years in office. That’s right, a one-time only deal. I will never underestimate an incumbent with that level of security on the line. 

I must also note that over the years Gil has taken a lot of heat for his very real concerns for our immigrant communities, helping out Dreamers and legislating driver’s licenses for the undocumented, when neither of these stands were popular. I know for a fact that his passion for these issues is genuine and I respect him for that. And he’s been knowledgeably pro-union in an environment where saying that get’s folks like my friend Jack Humphreville all revved up about bankrupting the City. 

At the same time, on the PLUM Committee he has never met a developer that he doesn’t love, just like the rest of City Hall and the Mayor. 

It also seemed pretty clear from the crowd’s reaction that there is a significant chunk of the electorate who are not in love with Mr. Cedillo. 

If I were betting, of all the other candidates, Joe Bray-Ali stands the best chance of getting in to a runoff. He has an innovative Facebook & social media campaign going, which allows him to leverage limited resources in a manner that reminds me of Bernie’s Presidential campaign, and I suspect that the same generational change may be happening here. Surprisingly, he also has the endorsement of the LA Times. 

Giovany Hernandez is a wild card. He did very well with the crowd and his answers were specific to the questions and on point. While his public campaign seems limited, I will never underestimate what the CCSA can do by pouring large sums of money into an election. Just ask Bennett Kayser. 

My best guess is that Jesse Rosas will get about the same percentage as last time. He’s a decent person, but absent any real donor base and/or ground game, this is simply too competitive a race for him to stay in the hunt. 

All in all the real winner in this debate were the members of our community, and everyone and every organization who participated deserves a great big “well done!” I have never seen all our various community groups work together like this. Such a huge crowd size on a school night was awesome. 

So do your bit -- VOTE! Who knows, we could see that rarity in LA politics…a runoff.

(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.