I can’t tell you exactly how many hours dribbled away in the process, but it was too many. There was a two-hour committee meeting early this month, and then another committee meeting that was shorter because almost no one attended. Then there was the 90-minute council-meeting debate and passage on Tuesday last week, through which […]
Category: LA Weekly
Victims of Prosperity
You won’t ever see a much happier crowd than the hundreds of nattily dressed people who sat in sunny Plummer Park late last month, celebrating a victory of a sort. The people were home health-care workers, and they were hearing our governor, Gray Davis, exultantly proclaiming how he was bringing them into the gladsome realm […]
Waving the Waiver
The Times columnist (this was more than a year ago) was trying to prove how much East Los Angeles needed the largest possible new County USC Medical Center. So he went down to a clinic adjoining the old hospital and spoke to some people standing in line to get inside. They said: If only the […]
Doctor’s Orders
One of the most senior doctor-professors at the county‘s Martin Luther King Jr. Medical CenterCharles Drew University Medical School has been accused, in a union grievance, of ordering faculty physicians to work, sometimes without pay, in his own private clinic.A top county Department of Health Services official acknowledged the grievance this week, and assured the […]
Sucker Among the Sharks
Never give a sucker an even break.–W.C. Fields, 1926Moments after the release last week of Los Angeles Unified School District auditor Don Mullinax‘s latest 600-plus-page report on the Belmont Learning Complex shipwreck, cynics were digging in their claws.This, one said, was exactly what you get when you give a bean counter subpoena power. Our own […]
Smelly Buses
For years now, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, the doughty local-transit lobby, has rabble-roused for more buses to carry the vast majority of Los Angeles–area transit users. Now, disclosures in a recent report from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s inspector general suggest that the union might also take interest in just how well the MTA […]
Down, Boy
Nearly four months after it first appeared, a highly publicized report critical of Mayor Richard Riordan’s efforts to bolster the city economy was attacked in turn by the mayor’s own business team this week.The original report, largely compiled under grant aid by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) with UCLA’s Center for […]
Growth Is Great
It’s another old saying, but sometimes you can‘t avoid them: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” And on. The dogs may not like who’s on the camels, the color of their saddles and where they‘re headed. But the caravan’s on the road, headed toward its destination anyway. Despite the ambient canine noise.I‘m talking […]
Sport of Supes
Some people collect little trains; others heap up stamps and coins in tidy folders. Here in Southern California, hobbies tend to be strenuous: kickboxing, sailboarding, surfing.But Alan Clayton‘s hobby is political redistricting. “It’s like the world‘s biggest puzzle,” he says.And he wants to redistrict Los Angeles County — the nation’s most populous. No, he doesn‘t […]
Rough Justice
Now the Los Angeles School District officially wants to abandon the Belmont Learning Complex as a school site. This may not be a good idea, but who could blame the LAUSD superintendent and COO for their finding? Whether Belmont is irremediably dangerous due to its oil-field history is something that may never be proved. But […]