Barbara Perkins may well have been the best candidate for the 7th District council seat in Tuesday’s city elections. Besides being up on the issues, she had the most experience in community activities, high recognition in the North Valley and the longest-standing connections at City Hall. She seemed to know just about everyone in her […]
Category: LA Weekly
Alatorre Takes the Fifth — 108 Times
It was not, on the whole, a good month for lame-duck Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. There was, for instance, the April 13 election to pick his successor. About which two things were, from the incumbent’s point of view, noteworthy. The first was that the candidate he endorsed, neophyte Luis Cetina, got about 8 […]
No Fun To Stay at the MTA
Graw, you may recall, is the former MTA construction executive who claims that, in part because he prepared the special panel of experts that rejected a certain dubious bid for a $65 million Eastside subway contract, he was fired out of hand in 1996. As we noted last week, that Metro East contract — 20 […]
Los Dos Richards
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovThey were sniggering together again, the Richards Alatorre and Riordan, at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting late last month. And why shouldn’t they share some mirth, old buddies that they are?There is, in fact, probably not an adequate English word for their kind of closeness, but there’s a great term in this […]
Enviros Can Kill Marsh, but not Playa Vista
Here’s a good example of the law of unintended consequences.You may have read how U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew’s decision earlier this month that halted grading at the future Playa Vista site actually applies only to 16.1 acres of “permitted area” – that is, an area in which no building was ever planned. By staying […]
Jail Time! – Or how to get higher-caliber L.A. public officials
Herewith a local conundrum: Why has no Los Angeles politician been arrested, sentenced and jailed for corruption for almost 60 years? Is it because, ever since the 1937 Frank Shaw scandals that dumped a mayor, a police chief and, ultimately, most of a City Council, they’ve all been so clean and respectable?Or is it, as […]
Enviro groups lose it at Playa Vista Wetlands
I’d really hate to have to forgo the affectionate mail I get every time I write about the Ballona Wetlands/Playa Vista controversy. But it seems I can stop beating this particular dead horse for a while. Since the anti-Playa forces’ wrong-way win in federal court – provoking a decision that halted wetlands conservation at Playa […]
Reform runs aground on redistricting
Some say the world will end in fire; some say it will end in ice. Others say the new city-charter effort will fizzle away for causes utterly unrelated to its objective of making the city run better.There was, for instance, that disruptive proposed bill of rights. No, I don’t want to get into that one […]
Squinting at the Future
No one really wants the future anymore. It certainly wasn’t always thus. I was raised on the future’s Jetsonian pledges: commercial space travel, personal air cars, picture-frame TVs on walls. And its threats: first, the Red menace and total nuclear annihilation, and then an ecological doom that somehow included California’s falling off the continent.From the […]
How Los Angeles transformed – and didn’t transform – Tom Bradley
Almost the last time I saw Tom Bradley, I didn’t recognize the slumped old man in the far corner of the City Council, whispering to a few friends. It was 1994, and he hadn’t been in City Hall since his retirement the year before. He’d returned for what seemed a strange reason: to counter then-Fire […]