ValleyVote Update for 5-21-01 |
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By PATRICK MCGREEVY, Times Staff Writer
A top aide to Mayor Richard Riordan said he told a panel of religious and civic leaders Thursday that the San Fernando Valley's proposal to break away from Los Angeles will hurt all residents, especially the poor. Addressing a committee appointed by Cardinal Roger Mahony to investigate the ethical and moral implications of secession, Deputy Mayor Bill Violante said during the closed-door hearing that breaking up Los Angeles will not benefit anyone. "The mayor believes a breakup of the city is going to adversely affect the poor," Violante said in an interview afterward in which he summarized his statements to the panel.
--- m-"In a divorce, nobody wins, no matter how you divide things up," Violante added. "The mayor believes that there is no way breaking up could be of benefit to the haves or the have-nots." After listening to Violante list the many reasons Riordan opposes secession, the 10-member working group asked the mayor's aide to return with a more detailed explanation of how secession would hurt the poor, according to Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese.
Violante's appearance before the committee
launched a series of hearings that will eventually result in the 12-member
Council of Religious Leaders issuing a report on the issue next spring.
"The committee is set up to listen to all of
the different voices, pro and con, those favoring secession and those
opposed," Tamberg said. "In terms of Valley secession, the mayor is an
important voice as an opponent."
Riordan, who has previously urged Mahony to get
more involved in the secession issue, has called the proposed breakup
"downright immoral."
On Wednesday, leaders of the secession group
Valley VOTE, including chairman Richard Close, will address the committee in
another closed hearing.
Close said his group already has prepared its rebuttal to Violante's charges. "We will show next week when we meet with the group that local control will help people of all economic levels," said Close, a Sherman Oaks attorney. "We are going to talk to them about the current conditions. If the city believes that the poor of the city have been adequately taken care of, they need to go to the northeast San Fernando Valley or South-Central [Los Angeles], and they will see that the poor of this city are most in need of local control."
Violante said he told the religious leaders that keeping Los Angeles together is the best way to help all residents, in part because a larger city is more effective at getting grants to help with issues such as poverty, homelessness and public safety. "Because Los Angeles is the [nation's] second-largest city, it has a strong unified voice in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.," Violante said. "After the Northridge earthquake, because of our size, the city was able to get a better and quicker response from the federal government."
He said a Valley municipality will still be a large city, with all of the urban problems currently facing Los Angeles, including crime and an ineffective school system. Close questioned the decision of the working group to hold the hearings behind closed doors. "I would think that they would want them open to the public so the public will have more confidence in what they are doing," Close said. "People do not like closed meetings. It raises suspicions. A lot of people feel this is just a method for Riordan to try to stop the reorganization."
Tamberg said the group decided to exclude the public because it is only gathering information, which the Council of Religious Leaders will consider in making its conclusions. Thomas Chabolla, who heads the archdiocese's office of justice and peace and is representing the church on the panel, said Thursday's session went well, but he said the group will not be talking to the press about details of the hearings.
Other members of the panel include the Rev. Madison Shockley, representing the United Church of Christ; Rabbi Mark S. Diamond of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California; the Rev. Jim Conn, representing the United Methodist Church; Father Arshag Khatchadourian of the Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church; and Fran Burnford, representing the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
Poverty: Some react angrily, asking where was the mayor earlier in his two terms.
By MICHAEL FINNEGAN, Times Staff Writer
In the closing weeks of his final term, Mayor Richard Riordan is mounting a campaign to draw attention to the plight of the city's poor neighborhoods. At the same time, he is accusing elected officials of neglecting the poor, and he's doing it in blunt, provocative language that has astonished and angered some of them. According to those officials, the mayor, a nationally recognized elected leader who has been touted as a possible Republican candidate for governor next year, should have made poor neighborhoods a top priority eight years ago when he had more power to shape public policy.
Riordan, a multimillionaire who lives in a Brentwood estate, told Times reporters and editors last week that politicians generally pay too little attention to the impoverished areas of Los Angeles. "They work to get friends of theirs contracts, jobs, and you see this with the poverty pimps," he said.
With those remarks and other less inflammatory observations, Riordan has tried vigorously to prod the political establishment to improve its record on tackling poverty. The mayor declined, however, to identify any specific contracts or jobs that he believes have been compromised by political mishandling. He also declined to identify any "poverty pimps," a term he uses to describe people who enrich themselves through nonprofits that are supposed to offer social services to the poor.
In the meeting with The Times and in other conversations, the mayor went on to attack--again without naming names--members of the county Board of Supervisors, which oversees the area's vast welfare system and social service programs. "So much of the social services, which are basically county . . . go to friends of minority politicians in those areas," Riordan said, specifically citing the Board of Supervisors, where only two members are nonwhite. "They're not putting the poor children first."
Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the only African American county supervisor, called Riordan's remarks "shocking." "It sounds like someone who's a racist, and I don't think he is a racist," she said. "I don't know what he's talking about. There are only two minority politicians on the county Board of Supervisors. And I would be very interested in knowing what friends he's talking about."
Burke, whose southern Los Angeles district includes some of California's poorest communities, gave Riordan credit for trying to improve the quality of life in those areas, but said he was wrong to single out "minority politicians." "I think it's unfortunate if he's leaving [office] with the thinking that only white politicians are providing services," she said.
Supervisor Gloria Molina, who is Latino, declined to respond to Riordan's comments.
In his second term as mayor, Riordan has tried to focus political attention and dialogue on issues relating to poverty. Government decisions, he often says, should be evaluated principally on "what is in the best interests of the poor." That has helped frame his support for school reform, among other things. Analyzing his own record, Riordan takes considerable pride in the work that he and his administration have done to improve Los Angeles' quality of life--from extending library hours to razing abandoned buildings to improving police services, tree trimming and street repairs. Those improvements, he argues, have helped all residents but in particular the city's poor.
Riordan is not so generous when it comes to assessing the work of others, however. His criticism extends beyond the county supervisors. He accused the City Council of discriminating against poor areas by shortchanging them on street repair money. And he denounced a state law that distributes a disproportionate share of park money to communities where new housing is built, a practice that in Los Angeles tends to favor middle-class suburbs over low-income areas.
In the final months of his mayoralty, which ends June 30, Riordan has sharpened his focus on poverty. In December, he took a campaign-style bus tour of some of the city's poorest neighborhoods to spotlight his efforts to expand services there. In March, he denounced the San Fernando Valley's threatened secession from L.A. as an immoral abandonment of poor communities in other parts of the city. And last month, he proposed a budget that for the first time would pave some of the dirt roads and alleys that have symbolized City Hall's neglect of Pacoima, Arleta and other impoverished areas.
Still, some City Council members who represent low-income neighborhoods have been taken aback by Riordan's increasingly high visibility on poverty issues. "It's interesting that we have this perspective being articulated as the curtain closes on his tenure as mayor," said Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. "There was a conspicuous absence of this kind of discourse coming from the mayor's office" over the previous eight years.
Bob Erlenbusch, the executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, was aghast. He recalled the anti-panhandling ordinance that Riordan signed into law four years ago. "Then, he was defining quality of life as homeless people being an intrusion on the quality of life of middle-class or upper-class people who work in the downtown area," Erlenbusch said.
But Alice Callaghan, the founder of Las Familias del Pueblo day-care center on the edge of skid row, applauded Riordan for providing homeless in the area with public toilets on the streets. And she welcomed his remarks on "poverty pimps" and contract favoritism. "People tend to treat all nonprofit organizations as Mother Teresa," she said. "But look at all the nonprofit groups that wound up being indicted and investigated. There's no question that there's nothing inherently righteous about a group just because they're a nonprofit."
Riordan has emphasized discrimination against the poor in two areas: parks and street repaving. On parks, he attacked a state law that restricts cities' spending of certain developer fees to parks in the immediate vicinity of the housing they build. In effect, it steers ample park money to the parts of L.A. where housing is built--often middle-class or wealthy suburban areas--and very little to poor neighborhoods with scarce open space and limited housing construction. Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a former Los Angeles City Council member, has introduced legislation to enable cities to spend the developer fees in areas farther from new housing.
On street repaving, Riordan accused the City Council of cheating poor neighborhoods. For years, council members have split repaving money into equal chunks for each of their 15 districts, regardless of need. The "Rule of 15," as Riordan called it, means that the city's poorest, most densely populated districts, with the oldest and most heavily traveled streets, get less repaving money than districts with newer streets that carry less traffic. "This is essentially a council policy that is discriminatory," Riordan said.
Two years ago, Riordan persuaded the council to set aside a third of the repaving money for streets where it was needed most--regardless of the district. The rest was split, as usual, into 15 equal pots of money. Under Riordan's new budget, the portion distributed based on need would shrink to less than a third--a step backward from his goal even as overall spending on repaving rises.
Goldberg, a longtime Riordan critic who fought as
a council member to distribute street repaving money based solely on need,
welcomed his support for that approach. But she said he could have shifted more
services into low-income neighborhoods if he had applied strong public pressure
on the council back at the beginning of his first term.
"I certainly could have used the help of the
chief executive of my city," she said.
I resent both the allegation that Valley secession is "immoral" and the one who made it.
Now, our lame-duck mayor who couldn't kill Valley secession with politics is conducting a religious crusade by tossing clerics into the mix suggesting the immorality of secession and its deleterious effects on the poor of Los Angeles. This from a mayor who needs a political ethics committee because our governing body does not know right from wrong.
To end the Valley's long nightmare of city service abandonment, perhaps we should offer to name our first sports arena, first cultural arts center, first museum, first major public library, first "Taj Mahal" learning center and maybe a Van Nuys Plaza de Riordan in his honor. See how the political winds shift dramatically.
Roger B. Huntman Woodland Hills
I read with interest the May 4 Daily News article announcing that, at the urging of Mayor Riordan, Cardinal Roger Mahony has entered the secession debate by appointing a group of religious leaders to study the moral and ethical implications of the division of Los Angeles into smaller cities.
To do justice to this questionable moral dilemma, the cardinal and his august ethical body must first address the larger ethical question: What moral or ethical right does government have to take the wealth created by productive members of society and redistribute it to those who are either minimally productive or totally nonproductive?
Stephen A. Downs Valley Village
What is hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is the sudden interest in the inner-city poor in order to stop secession. Where were these concerned religious leaders while the city fathers doubled the size of the Convention Center, built the Staples Center, launched a multimillion-dollar remodeling of the City Hall, handed out millions of dollars to the Democratic National Convention and sought desperately to find an excuse to spend more millions remodeling the Coliseum?
Where were the calls for moral and ethical behavior as the City Council mismanaged the city, ignoring the real needs of Los Angeles? Now those of us who want no more of the self-serving, downtown politics are accused of white flight and the abandonment of the poor. Indeed, hypocrisy is alive and well here in the city of Los Angeles, right where it belongs -- downtown.
Harlan Campbell Tujunga
Let's see, L.A. has demonstrably the worst large-city government in the country, the most corrupt and least conscious of the burden to the taxpayers. Mayor Richard Riordan is the head of the municipal government for L.A., and a politician, and he's asking for religious leaders to advise him on the morality and ethics of part of the city seceding.
I've not seen any evidence of moral or ethical concerns prior to the threat of losing a very large part of the tax base. I don't buy it.
A.C. Carden California City
Mayor Riordan has asked Cardinal Roger Mahony to examine the "moral and ethical implications" of Valley secession. In what chapter of the Bible has Cardinal Mahony studied up on this issue? I suspect it would come after the chapter on the public being disenfranchised and suffering taxation without representation. Obviously, Mayor Riordan and the City Council are not familiar with the history of our country. Remember the Boston Tea Party and the events that followed? Did we act morally and ethically in 1776?
The smoke screen from City Hall is that secession would be unfair to the poor people in the city. The reality is that the current system is unfair for the poor and the rich and the rest of us in the Valley.
Jerry Hays Studio City
In the stack of literature I've received from several candidates running for City Council in District 5, there are promises to trim trees, fill potholes, relieve traffic congestion and extend library hours. I'd like to hear from the candidate who has a plan to contain or reduce population growth in areas with schools that are grievously overcrowded--which is just about everywhere. Why is it that apartment buildings, condos, and housing developments have been permitted to proliferate in our city without regard to whether or not children who move into them will have a seat in a school that isn't already filled to double or triple its intended capacity?
If the school district hasn't been able to afford to build a high school in three decades, how can the city permit all this residential growth? Don't the school board and City Hall talk to each other? This should have been addressed long before the Los Angeles Unified School District's student population exceeded 700,000.
An article stated that the San Fernando Valley is "the growth engine for the city--its total population growing more than three times faster than the area on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains," ("Figures Show Latinos Near Equal Clout in Valley," March 31). Candidates for City Council ought to ponder that one. I'm not the only parent who's wondering why this problem has been allowed to reach crisis proportions, but I promise you many of us have come to the same conclusion about city planning in Los Angeles: There isn't any.
MAUREEN FOSTER Sherman Oaks
Each month of the new fiscal year has seen Los Angeles' tax revenues increase at their highest levels in more than 10 years, but the windfall of riches won't mean new programs, improved services or tax rebates for the city's residents and businesses. That's because the surplus is being eaten up by recently approved salary increases, ongoing programs and unexpected expenses like lawsuits from the Rampart police scandal.
From July to December, revenue came in at about $47 million more than the $2.93 billion the city expected, a 5 percent bonus. In December alone, the actual net revenues as tracked by the City Clerk's Tax and Permit Division were at $38 million -- $10 million more than in 1999, a 34 percent jump.
"All of our revenue categories are looking positive for the year," said Deputy Mayor Jennifer Roth, who oversees the budget for Mayor Richard Riordan. "This is great news for L.A. because it means our economy is strong and it seems to be based on solid growth.
Chief Administrator Bill Fujioka will release a forecast within the next two weeks of revenues for the rest of the fiscal year that will include recommendations on what to do with any extra money.
The city must budget for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in Rampart-related cases and must pay off some other lawsuits, such as those involving corporations that successfully sued the city for the improper collection of some taxes.
The city also must pay for 13 percent salary increases in a three-year contract with police officers and is continuing its negotiations with firefighters. Negotiations also are to open this week with other city workers.
"We have some large costs coming in with Rampart, and we will be paying out more in salary increases, so we have to be cautious with how we use this money," Roth said. The city must also plan for a possible economic slowdown. "Revenues are coming in at above estimates," Fujioka said. "What we don't know is if that will continue. That's the million-dollar question."
Councilman Mike Feuer, chairman of the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee, said the city should be "extremely conservative" about spending the tax windfall. "What I think is happening is that this might be a onetime windfall, and if it is, we should bank it for the time being and then use it for onetime things, like street and sidewalk repair, and not put it into programs with ongoing costs," Feuer said.
"What I'm afraid of is the economy will flatten out, and we'll be on the hook for programs we can no longer afford."
Rex Oliff, an economic financial specialist working for Fujioka, said the city's revenues are up in all sectors, from sales and hotel taxes to property taxes. Fujioka said the city experienced large growth from tourism -- reflected in the hotel bed tax -- by hosting the Democratic National Convention last summer as well as the national economic growth last year.
Even the present energy crisis has helped boost revenues slightly, Oliff said. "We don't have the exact figures, but when energy prices go up, we get more money from the utility users tax," Oliff said.
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