ValleyVote Update for 5-14-01 |
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Mean while see how LA takes "care" of it problems"
Fed up with the lack of responsiveness, the arrogance, the impenetrable bureaucracy of City Hall? We'd recommend bringing your complaint to your neighborhood council, but that would be a cruel joke.
There are no neighborhood councils, and there won't be any anytime soon -- even though they were supposed to be up and running by July. After months of foot-dragging and delay, the City Council now proposes to start accepting applications for certification in October.
If all goes according to plan -- and it seldom does -- there will be 10 to 20 councils approved within the next year. By 2006, there could be as many as 100, assuming that City Hall delivers on one of its promises for once. The jewel of L.A.'s 1999 charter-reform measure, neighborhood councils still remain a mere flicker in the public eye.
Despite being a cheerleader for charter reform, Mayor Richard Riordan was never willing to use his leadership to get the neighborhood councils afoot. Neither he nor the City Council wanted them to actually have the power to do anything.
As a result, the under funded, undermanned and wrong-headed Department of Neighborhood Empowerment couldn't fulfill its duty to craft a detailed, coherent implementation scheme. That left the task up to the City Council, whose members dread the thought of being held accountable to their constituents.
That bias shows itself in the 21-page plan the council backed unanimously Monday. The plan is still subject to a second hearing and a mayoral veto, but if the council gets its way, neighborhood boards will be nothing more than another useless layer of the mammoth city bureaucracy.
The council and the Department of Neighborhoods have come up with extensive regulations for the neighborhood organizations' membership, operating procedures and officers. They also propose giving the neighborhoods some money, but they've left the question of how much up for grabs. That actual dollar amount that the council ends up providing should be a good measure of how serious its members are -- if at all -- about local control.
But neighborhoods need more than money. They also deserve a say, including real authority over spending and community concerns -- and there's practically no chance that City Hall will yield that much.
By stalling and thwarting the move toward decentralizing local government, City Hall has blatantly trampled on the spirit of charter reform. Neighborhood councils were supposed to restore power to the people, and thus prevent Valley secession.
But the indifference of the mayor, the bureaucratic mind-set of the Department of Neighborhoods and the recalcitrance of the City Council are combining to kill them even before they are born.
Like so many other politicians, mayoral candidates Antonio Villaraigosa and James Hahn have talked a good game. But it's time for both of them to nail down specific commitments to neighborhood councils, including real money and, most of all, strong and effective leadership to get them going citywide in a hurry.
So far neighborhood councils are nothing but another reminder of all that's wrong in City Hall. That's why half the people of Los Angeles are looking at secession as a healthy alternative.
Back in November, a small bedside table-drawer was dropped in the middle of Sherman Way near Laurel Canyon Boulevard. In a few days it had been reduced to a few chunks of chewed up wood and splinters that settled onto the curb and the center divider and are still there. A few months later, a videotape joined this display and now festoons the center divider clear down under the railroad bridge.
West of the intersection, pieces of a chair and some other bits of furniture decorate the center divider along with eye-high weeds all the way to the Hollywood Freeway. It seems like the city of Los Angeles would have accidentally swept this section of street sometime in the last six months, especially because the city of Los Angeles has a Street Maintenance Yard right there at Sherman Way and Laurel Canyon. Is the Valley getting its fair share? I think not.
George Ladd Palmdale
It doesn't get any lower than this.
In a comparative study of public services in 44 cities across the nation, Los Angeles ranked number 44 in terms of efficiency. Dead last.
True, New York and Chicago didn't participate in the survey, but that's probably just as well. If they had, L.A. would likely have come in at No. 46. The findings, which come from a report produced by the libertarian Reason Foundation, should surprise no one.
Anyone who has driven on one of the city's pothole-riddled streets, waited for the understaffed paramedics to respond to an emergency or dealt with the demoralized LAPD knows that L.A. got the ranking it deserves.
There is no efficiency in L.A. government. It was discarded long ago in favor of appeasing organized labor, providing cushy jobs for legions of extraneous administrators and rewarding friends with city contracts.
The situation is so bleak that most of the 11 city departments surveyed for the study didn't even manage to produce the requested data. Local government is no more open and honest than it is efficient. So what was Mayor Richard Riordan's response to the city's dismal ranking?
Shoot the messenger. One defensive mayoral flak told the Daily News that "there are significant flaws in the way that this alleged study, if you want to call it that, was done."
Boo-hoo.
While the survey relied heavily on old data, that's largely the city's own fault. Besides, Riordan might have had some small successes, but he's fooling himself if he thinks he's successfully overhauled the city bureaucracy.
He can quibble about methodology all he wants, but does he really doubt the study's ultimate conclusions? Would he have us believe that city government is anything but a bloated, wasteful mess?
This is why many residents of the San Fernando Valley want to secede from L.A. They're tired of high taxes and miserable services, of a government that operates behind closed doors and offers excuses instead of results.
They believe a smaller city would be leaner and better. An independent Valley city would have a population of 1.35 million.
It's noteworthy that Phoenix, the nation's sixth-largest city with a population only slightly less than the Valley at 1.32 million, was ranked as the most efficient city in the country. It was also the one that was most open about sharing its data with the public. Let's dream of topping that!
Sprawl has hit the wall in the greater Los Angeles area.
That's the conclusion of a two-year study by the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and the University of Southern California's Southern California Studies Center released Wednesday.
The report concludes that with 6 million new residents expected in the next 20 years and no place to put them, the region's approach to growth widens the gap between rich and poor, sends commute times skyrocketing, wastes energy and saps the area's limited natural resources. This isn't rocket science. It's just common sense.
With a current population of 16.7 million people in five counties -- Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside -- and 35,000 square miles, there isn't enough usable land that can be developed to house the new residents.
California's energy crisis is one manifestation of the problem. The study says that what the Los Angeles area needs is smarter growth, a euphemism for denser neighborhoods with bigger apartment buildings. Until now, that has meant more congestion, more smog, more crime.
Shutting the door on an influx of people to the state isn't going to happen. But residents clearly want to put the brakes on rapid and rampant growth. That was evident in this week's elections in Calabasas, where the candidates opposing the Ahmanson Ranch won, and in the city of San Fernando, where voters defeated the mayor and elected council members who opposed large-scale downtown development.
Residents sent a clear message. They want redevelopment and improvements, but only if they make life better for the people who already live here and enjoy the glorious climate and opportunity of greater Los Angeles.
As the study says, the only way that can be achieved is if local government becomes more responsible and if planning is done on a regional basis in which communities share the burdens and advantages of growth and work together to solve problems.
Given the dominance of the city of Los Angeles in the politics of Southern California, the commitment to starting a process that deals with sprawl starts at City Hall. Unfortunately, that's the most dysfunctional government in the whole region of 16 million people.
The election April 10 gives voters the chance to take the first step by choosing candidates who will serve them and the community as a whole rather than the special interests that have driven Los Angeles to the brink.
It will take a lot more people turning out on Election Day than the 15 percent to 20 percent expected to make any difference. If you don't vote, you'll have no one to blame but yourself. Mark April 10 on your calendar -- and please, pay close attention to what the candidates are saying.
When director Steven Spielberg quietly sought a zoning variance to build an indoor horse ring in the posh Brentwood neighborhood, his neighbors understandably had concerns. And because they also had money, the city of Los Angeles listened.
So did Spielberg, who took the plan for a five-story riding ring off the table. For now, anyway. Apparently, the city doesn't feel equally obliged to allow residents throughout Los Angeles the same chance for public discussion when it comes to building massive apartment complexes for low-income housing in their residential neighborhoods.
A city plan under consideration would ease land-use controls and provide bonuses to developers for building high-density, low-income apartments across much of Los Angeles. In the plan's current form, public hearings for some affordable housing projects could be eliminated entirely while the rules for development would hamstring neighborhood councils, which are only advisory. City planners say they hope to spur construction of about 60,000 apartments by 2005.
But homeowners and other community groups see something more nefarious. And rightly so. They see an attempt to skirt the concerns of neighborhoods just months before dozens of advisory councils are created across the city. Why did the city devise such a controversial plan with little or no public discussion?
We have to wonder how an idea this destructive of the spirit of the new City Charter could get this far. Was Con Howe, head of the Planning Department, asleep at the switch? Did he even read it, or are the tyrants of the bureaucracy running wild? Some mayoral candidates were completely caught off guard by the proposal.
Steve Soboroff, a former top aide to Mayor Richard Riordan now running to succeed him, and Councilman Joel Wachs, also a mayoral candidate, both saw the plan as an attempt to destroy single-family neighborhoods in places like Studio City, Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood and Van Nuys.
We hope they, and the other four major mayoral candidates, will make it perfectly clear that they intend to commit themselves and the entire government of the city, to solving Los Angeles' problems -- and not the problems of all the people of the world.
Planning Commissioner Bob Scott, a prominent Valley civic leader, made an important point: without attention to relieving already overburdened schools and building new infrastructure, stacking up apartments in established neighborhoods is a recipe for community deterioration.
It's one more example of a city divided by arrogant bureaucrats and elected officials who have one rule for Brentwood and Bel-Air, and another for Van Nuys and North Hollywood.
City leaders promise that if they make good on their scheme to bring the 2012 Olympics to Los Angeles, it won't cost taxpayers a dime. Of course, city leaders also promised that the Democratic National Convention wouldn't cost taxpayers more than $11 million. The final price tag was $35.8 million.
So Angelenos have good reason to be skeptical about any claim that there's such a thing as a free 2012 Olympiad.
Before the city starts bidding on the Games, residents deserve a chance to vote on whether they want to help pick up the bill. Councilwoman Laura Chick is right to call for a binding referendum on the matter. Because without the force of law hanging over their heads, there's no guarantee that city leaders won't reach into the taxpayer piggy bank yet again.
Distraught that L.A. is not a world-class city, City Hall hopes that the occasional high-profile event will make up for the glaring deficiencies of their leadership. But hosting the Olympics doesn't make a city great.
Great cities are defined by good schools, strong communities, reliable transportation, a police force that can keep crime in check, and a genuine spirit shared by its citizens of being part of something greater than themselves.
None of that's true about Los Angeles because the leaders of this city have for so long been dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement while belittling the lives of the average person. That's why taxpayers deserve the right to decide whether they want their money spent on another Olympics that will leave them no better off than the last one did.
By HANG NGUYEN, Times Staff Writer
The city of Los Angeles removed or covered about 20 million square feet of graffiti in the 10-month period ending Oct. 31, a 24% increase over cleanup efforts for the same period last year, city officials said Wednesday. The increase may be partly due to efforts to spruce up the city before last summer's Democratic National Convention, said Paul Racs, assistant director of Operation Clean Sweep, which oversees the city's graffiti removal efforts.
In August, the month of the convention, the city cleaned up 75% more graffiti than it had in August 1999, records show. Program director Delphia Jones said she believes the increase reflects a rise in graffiti incidents, but she said the city keeps no records of incidents or the amount of walls, signs and other structures defaced by vandals.
Even so, others agree the problem has gotten worse. In October, the Los Angeles Police Department's Community Tagger Task Force in the San Fernando Valley reactivated a 50-member volunteer surveillance team to help monitor graffiti, said Officer Ron Stilz, the task force leader. Ivor Alan-Lee, a reserve police officer with the task force, said his group is seeing more signs of tagging crews.
"It's gotten so big that it's harder to keep up and wash off," he said. And Northridge resident Candido Marez, who helps with anti-graffiti efforts through a church group, said he and other volunteers are "swamped" with work. "It's out of control," he said.
Operation Clean Sweep, a division of the city's Public Works Department, began in 1987 with a budget of $500,000. It currently has an annual budget of $2.7 million. The agency collects removal figures monthly from 16 abatement programs throughout the city.
At the urging of Councilman Hal Bernson, the City Council voted Tuesday to call for state legislation that would require people convicted of a second graffiti offense to serve either mandatory jail or community service terms. Currently, most vandals are charged with a misdemeanor and get community service if convicted.
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But until you get it to see the update and use the jumps you need to go to the website http://www.ValleyVote.org/updates/index.html and read the update from there with all the information that AOL strips.
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