In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.Where Alph the Sacred River Ran is actually not one of the named destinations of Mayor Richard Riordan’s current Asian safari. But there aren’t too many other Far Eastern places the city’s 80-person official trade task force – enough people to found a colony – is […]
Month: July 2018
Council Ousts Ostrich
I woke with a start. The Tuesday council meeting had been droning along with mesmeric predictability. There was a six-figure transfer from the Storm Water Abatement Fund. Some General Plan updates. A Request for Proposal for an L.A. Triathlon. A list of new “Technical Corrections for the Plumbing Code.” My chin drooped. Unconsciousness beckoned appealingly.Then […]
A River Should Run Through It
An otherwise conservationist friend once said, “The problem with the Los Angeles River is that there is really no such thing. It’s a concrete flood channel.”That was what I thought. Until I attended my first Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) conference last week.It wasn’t just a routine meeting. Perhaps 300 “Friends” gathered at […]
Upgrades on the Gravy Train
The Daily News had fun lately with the aftermath of the “triumphant” Riordan Far East junket.The News found plenty of witnesses to several cases of upgrading the mayor’s party’s airline accommodations from business to first class. The upgraded included Mr. and Mrs. Riordan (though the mayor later claimed he’d paid these fares himself). Such upgrades […]
The Eleventh Plague
A skeptical young Metropolitan Water District chemist explained it to me 10 years ago. Over a dinner of Montana Avenue pasta, she laid it out straight: “In the environment, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”I noted the remark and filed it away. At that precise time, though, we believed in solutions. I was […]
Alatorre’s Tangled Web
A startling plaudit appeared in last week’s letters section from none other than school-board member David Tokofsky. Tokofsky alleged, “I suspect that the constituents of the 14th [City Council District] are in for a dramatic loss of services and representation if Councilman Alatorre is not there in 1999.”Actually, the rest of us 14th District residents […]
Cleaning Up Tujunga Wash
Driving up the 210 from the Eastside to Lakeview Terrace, you get that suddenly-I’m-lost anxiety. Just where am I? And just where is this place? The foothills between La Canada and Tujunga Wash seem as grand, vacant and imposing as any mountain range. Thanks to El Nino, they’re still wearing that late Southern California spring […]
Budgetary Beguilement
For nearly a decade, Los Angeles County’s major annual ritual was the week of daylong sessions that comprised the Hall of Administration budget hearings. We all had to plan our lives around them.And then this year, the unimaginable happened: This year, the hearings somehow slipped past almost unnoticed. It felt as though the local course […]
Commissars in the ‘Hood
How much power should neighborhood councils wield in an updated, more responsive city government? Division on that key issue has produced a rift between the two Los Angeles charter commissions and may also signal a break between two major factions of L.A. labor.Although last month the commissions seemed to agree on promoting appointed local councils, […]
Crime Takes a Bite Out of Riordan
To read about it in the Times, the thing might have been the worst local catastrophe since the 1994 quake. On the front page of Saturday’s Metro section, Dick Riordan publicist and occasional Times reporter Jim Newton called a federal decision not to hand the city some law-enforcement money “a stunning slap at Los Angeles’ […]