Thomas L. Garthwaite may have just taken on the toughest job in California, even if it pays — at $275,000 per year — the highest public government salary in Los Angeles County. Garthwaite is the new chief of the county‘s Department of Health Services (DHS), with its six public hospitals and nearly 150 clinics. And […]
Category: LA Weekly
Break Time
As reported in the L.A. Daily Journal by Gina Keating last week, in a recent preliminary hearing, the foundation’s lawyers raised the issue of who is a county employee: They contended that classifying home health-care workers as county employees is illegal, since the county doesn‘t hire, fire or supervise the workers and carries no legal […]
Sunshine Homecoming Day
A wild and assorted flock of chickens — in every plumage, weight and breed — came home to roost before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last week. All of them were as mad as wet hens, and none of them were pleasant to deal with.But the habitually aloof little kings and queens of […]
So Long, Bernie
Police Chief Bernard Parks asked the Los Angeles City Council to overturn the Police Commission‘s vote not to grant him a second term and cranked up his long-simmering war with Mayor Jim Hahn. He accused the mayor of prejudgment and virtually of corruption.In his hourlong speech Tuesday, Parks did not admit the slightest professional imperfection […]
What Goes Around
Race, Republicans and revenge combined to slow Los Angeles‘ Latino electoral-empowerment steamroller in the San Fernando Valley’s 2nd City Council District last month. Underdog Wendy Greuel, who came in second in last December‘s primary, edged out Assemblyman Tony Cardenas in the March runoff for the seat held for 30 years by Joel Wachs.It now goes […]
Good, Honest and Gone
Joel Wachs‘ announcement that he’d retire from the Los Angeles City Council in October did more than tell us that we‘re losing the city’s senior career politician. It also proclaimed the end of city elected office as a lifetime option.This, of course, was the voters‘ choice nine years ago — way back when, on a […]
Dear Losers
It’s one thing to refuse to fight dirty, and it’s another to just stand there and let a bully beat you up. This is a difference that Antonio Villaraigosa, unfortunately, never figured out in the last days of his losing campaign. With his unrelenting TV hit ads, some of them perfectly fair and many of […]
Skunk at the Picnic
Now that Los Angeles has selected its first German-American mayor of the millennium and the postmortem reports are all in, can we perhaps finally move beyond this recent election to something else? You’d think so, but not so fast there. It’s tempting, for instance, to speculate about what awaits us in the inside stickball game […]
Living With AIDS
AIDS was big in the news this week: 3,000 experts, politicians and patients were gathered at the United Nations to discuss new treatments and progress toward a cure. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that $10 billion a year is needed to fight the plague that afflicts 36 million people and has killed 22 million. […]
Jim Hahn’s L.A.
Big questions left standing after the somewhat anal city inaugural ceremonies last week: What‘s Jim Hahn going to be like in office? What will his new administration look like? The insider consensus is that Hahn’s first official speech was long on generalities, short on assuring specifics.”Everything right now is in free fall,“ said one council […]