LOS ANGELES

VOICES-- In its new budget, the Los Angeles City Council is throwing another $91 million of taxpayer dollars into road diets ignoring the fact that Venice Boulevard --  the plan’s “poster child” – has proven to be an Epic Fail during its year-long pilot test, according to data from the city’s own Department of Transportation.

@THE GUSS REPORT-The corporate chaos continues at the Los Angeles Timesand its parent company, Tronc, which may be resulting in poor supervision over transparency on stories it publishes. 

RANTZ & RAVEZ-I am sure like most voters you have felt duped in previous elections when you were promised one thing for agreeing to tax increases but ended up with something else that was hiding deep in the proposition.

ICE RAID, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL—(Editor’s note: Numerous similar ICE raids are occurring regularly in our own SoCal backyard.) A woman in southern California repeatedly told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that her seven children were present and demanded to see their warrant as they forced their way—guns drawn and using heavy shields—into the family's home.

BELL VIEW-I have a conservative friend from my old neighborhood. Let’s call her Jane (not her real name). She lives in a comfortable suburb of Chicago, has a couple kids who graduated college, and voted for Donald Trump. Even though she herself graduated college, she voted the same as forty-four percent of college-educated white women. 

FIRST PERSON-Why is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) limited by regulation as to how much residentially produced solar electricity it can buy from residential customers like you and me?

CAL BUZZ REPORT--Nothing that transpired in Tuesday’s “debate” among candidates for governor of California changed the one and only political question worth discussing about the June 5 preliminary vote: Will Antonio Villaraigosa finish second and set up a serious runoff contest, or will the fall campaign be the Gavin Newsom Coronation Tour?

EASTSIDER-When Ann Stausboll retired from CalPERS a couple of years ago, everyone knew there was going to be a sea change. What no one knew was how much worse the governance of the nation’s largest ($350 billion) public pension plan was going to get. 

RENTERS’ REDEMPTION-Real estate speculation and price-gouging are driving Californians to impossible commutes, overcrowded housing, and into the streets.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Finally, some potentially good news. The Los Angeles City Council has taken a long over due baby step to create a new City department, whose mission will be adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.  

GUEST WORDS--Urban planning exists to serve people and communities, not the other way around. Unfortunately, urban planners these days, perhaps under the influence of academic arrogance as well as the lure of developer dollars, seem to forget this simple truism.

CORRUPTION WATCH-The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) does not list a Sadistic Personality Disorder. But the DSM is a work in progress, so its on and off approach to sadism does not mean the problem is not real.

ALPERN AT LARGE--There's been a lot of increases in the Mar Vista region (which is smack dab in the center of the Westside), and a lot of decreases as well.  We've got increased commute times, increased cut-through traffic through residential neighborhoods, potentially an increased response time for first-responders, and certainly an increased division among neighbors, thanks to "the Road Diet". 

GELFAND’S WORLD--Earlier this week, Donald Trump was shown on television pulling the United States out of the Iranian anti-nuclear deal. Trump likes to say that unlike other politicians, he keeps his word. We got a bit more of that bragging this time around: 

GUEST WORDS--The City has a problem. The Urban Forestry Division (UFD) has scores of trees sitting in boxes in storage that it can’t plant. Why is this? In large part it’s because when developers remove trees to build projects, they agree to replace them by purchasing new ones for the City to plant elsewhere.

BCK FILE--A GOP candidate for the Senate seat held by longtime incumbent Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Little was removed from the Republican state convention in San Diego on Saturday. Patrick Little, a Holocaust denier who characterizes himself as a “Counter-Semitic” and a white nationalist, polled as high as 18 percent in an April 27 SurveyUSA poll. 

GELFAND’S WORLD--I took a swipe at the annual Neighborhood Council Congress in a previous column and got some positive feedback. In brief, I suggested that the yearly meeting spend less time on goody-goody subjects.

ALPERN AT LARGE--For the past several decades, honest and generous taxpayers have bravely offered their hardworking dollars to creating an Expo Line, a Wilshire Subway, a Foothill Gold Line, a LAX/Metro Connection, and a Downtown Light Rail Connector to help wrap these projects together in a coherent rail network. 

@THE GUSS REPORT-It was a brutal suggestion, to say the least, from a member of the public at Friday’s LA City Council Jewish Heritage Month event, where Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke a few minutes earlier at the same podium: 

VIEW FROM HERE--Loyalists of the western empire have been growing increasingly honest about their desire to use censorship and propaganda in order to win an “information war” against Russia.

PERSPECTIVE--Serious issues are surfacing at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). These issues are reflected in disparities’ that involve civil rights, education, discrimination and employment. An adverse treatment that has a direct impact on members of a particular minority group and the failure to enforce implicit rules that regulate behaviors seem to be non-existent.