The Man Who Can Bring Pro Football Ba...
What you most miss in the continuing debate over bringing football back to Los Angeles is any hint that anyone, apart from potential investors, really cares whether it returns.
A Diesel-Powered Intrusion
To hard-core environmentalists, it was as though John Muir had suggested clear-cutting Sequoia National Forest. "We have confidence that, given past history, the auto industry will rise to the challenge and we will have light-duty diesel in California." This was Alan Lloyd, longtime electric-c...
The Politics of Downtown SurvivalR...
A woman best known to TV news viewers for her frog-suited protests against wetland development has attacked the ecological record of the major backer of the proposed
L.A.’s vanishing vacancies
Last week’s City Council vote to double and possibly triple relocation fees that condominium developers must pay tenants before evicting them is not a real solution to Los Angeles’ condo-convers- ion crisis. The condo still gets built, and the unit is off the rental housing market
A ‘green’ industrial belt...
An idea to create jobs along the L.A. River deserves a public hearing.Source: A 'green' industrial belt should run through it - Los Angeles Times
The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up...
The July 4 holiday being what it is, Los Angeles won't get to use its new City Charter, which kicks in Saturday, until July 5.Source: The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall...
Solis Challenges the Democrats’...
U.S. Rep. Matthew G. "Marty" Martinez (D-Monterey Park) isn't famous for his sagacity or much else.Source: Solis Challenges the Democrats' Seniority System - Los Angeles Times
Why Antilabor L.A. Embraced the Strik...
Los Angeles, harsh company town with an antilabor reputation and a strike-busting, organization-killing old guard, opened its heart to a well-organized walkout of some of its lowest-paid workers seeking better pay. Motorists endured congestion and waved their fists, not in rage but in...
Why We Have More Bad-Air Days
It was grim reading for the breathing. Eleven California counties are among the nation’s 25 dirtiest for ozone pollution, according to the latest survey of the American Lung Assn. Just a few years ago, bad air was a local problem here--in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties...
What comes after Baca?
The 18 acting and former deputy sheriffs charged with federal crimes in connection with the running of the Los Angeles County jails have yet to stand trial. But whether or not they are convicted, the arrests make one thing perfectly clear: As presently structured, the Los Angeles County Sherif...
Falklands or Malvinas?
Some of the biggest winds in the world blow through the stormy South Atlantic, but none stormier than the political hyperbole that's sweeping through the region lately. It's just 30 years since the Falkland Islands war that took 900 young lives and saved the government of British Prime Minister M...
Will Latin America tolerate a free pr...
Last month, one of Latin America's top journalism prizes went to a man whose only known investigative coup was a recent finding that capitalism may have destroyed life on Mars. Yes, none other than Hugo Chavez, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, waltzed off with the Rodolfo Walsh ...
Will UC buy into the ‘new’...
It still doesn't have a name. But this week, L.A. County will try to sell the University of California Board of Regents on a plan to create a UC-supervised entity to run a new incarnation of the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The media has described the proposed 320,000-square-foo...
Is UC opening the door to trouble?
For 13 years, University of California officials have wrestled with a seemingly insoluble problem: how to sustain a student body that reflects the state's vast diversity without violating Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure banning race-based affirmative action. The latest attempt to form...
Resurrecting the moderate Republican
Sixty years ago last month, I watched my parents pull the curtains of their voting booths in a Michigan town hall basement to vote for the man who lost the 1948 presidential election. He was Thomas E. Dewey, a Republican widely expected, even by the Democrats, to vanquish wounded incumbent Harry ...
A ‘green’ industrial belt...
For more than a generation, great cities in the American West have sought to repossess, regain or even re-create the rivers that run through them. San Antonio vaunts its 60-year-old Riverwalk as Texas' foremost tourist attraction. Dallas takes pride in the Trinity River it has reclaimed as a chai...
The undeveloper
The density wars in Los Angeles are heating up. On one side are homeowner associations, neighborhood councils and a smattering of politicians. They are becoming increasingly outspoken in their opposition to what they believe is City Hall's insatiable desire to build taller in order to create m...
Unsnarling traffic can be a mess
It's probably not a neighborhood in which you'd want to spend a lot of time. Not that it's dangerous. It's just 11 gritty blocks of small enterprises on West Pico Boulevard on the Westside. There's a charter school, a couple of strip clubs, a mattress store and one that sells grand pianos. A c...
The whole enchilada
BUENOS AIRES — Argentine President-elect Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner wants more foreigners to invest in her country's economy, which is growing by 8% annually. But Argentina's recent history of runaway inflation, currency devaluations and huge foreign debt, coupled with the generally low reput...
Revisiting ‘toilet to tap’
Los Angeles' water supplies are getting lower. The once-desolate Owens River Valley burst into flower this year because the Department of Water and Power brought less water to the city. Other states are increasing the amount of water they are able to tap from the Colorado River, L.A.'s primary so...
Let the sunshine in
In the 1950s, Los Angeles County's raging growth and increasing national importance made it an essential local news beat. The Hall of Administration's news corps included dozens of broadcast, print and wire reporters from as far away as Long Beach, the Antelope Valley and San Diego. Today, bec...
The return of the recall
I'VE NEVER SEEN Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss wearing a "Do I look like a people person?" T-shirt, but to some of his 5th District constituents, that's his everyday vibe: aloof and abrasive. As a result, halfway through his second term, Weiss, could face a recall vote just as he comme...
California’s Rail Pokes Along a...
If you are not driving, 186 mph isn't a spectacular land speed. The horizon creeps along, subjectively, no quicker than it does at 65 mph. Absent the jerky, erratic motion often associated with rail travel, ...
New Jail Options Needed
Even Sheriff Lee Baca probably knows that Los Angeles County's jail system is failing. From October to April, inmates, including some key witnesses in murder cases, were being killed almost every month. The ratio of deputy guards to prisoners in the troubled Central Jail was an abysmal 1 to 45, a...
A Chance for Hahn to Leave the Doghouse
As chief of Los Angeles Animal Services, Jerry Greenwalt may not have been the most important manager in L.A.'s city government. But his announced retirement in April provides Mayor James K. Hahn with at least two opportunities: to improve his most cantankerous city agency, and to show that he ca...
A Foul Political Wind Blowing In From...
Californians, who already have the dirtiest air in the nation, may have to breathe an extra 2.5 million new cars' worth of atmospheric pollution by 2007. The state's fresh extra tonnage of vaporous schmutz would come not from the exhaust-clogged skies of greater Los Angeles, nor from its new air-...
Over the Long Haul, a Big Problem
Drive six miles up Sand Canyon Road, past well-shaded ranch houses, well-groomed horses and spotless white longhorns, up toward the steep, sage- covered hills of the Angeles National Forest and you'll quickly sense why people live there: the utter silence of the slopes surrounding the Antelope Va...
Zacarias Casts Shadow of Former Schoo...
Depending on your point of view, the overthrow of Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias was either the straightforward consequence of June's lawful LAUSD election or a brutal palace coup. Whichever way you see it, you probably agreed that board President Genethia Hayes' abrupt ...
Will Defeat at the Polls Get the Scho...
On the east-facing cliff of the downtown mesa atop which sits the Los Angeles Unified School District offices, there's a carved memorial to the last time these heights were stormed. The inscription tells...
Amid Good News, L.A. Gets a Pie in th...
So Los Angeles can have itself a new pro football team, if it only can pony up the money and settle other details by September. Is that good news? Sports columnists, at least, say it is. Other reacti...
L.A. Chamber Talks With a New Voice
The ideological battle lines in California's just-ended budget fight were recently broken by a surprising foray out of right field. The largest local chamber of commerce in the state asked the Legislatu...
‘Reform’ Imperils a Force...
The worn 1981 coupe in my driveway emits more pollution -- in the form of oil drips, vapors and gas fumes -- while parked under its tarp than a new Honda Accord...
County Should Look for a Merger, Not ...
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems unable to decide how to blunt the disaster facing its Department of Health Services. As one union representative recently put it, "Th...
Is L.A. Charter Reform Headed for a C...
Is this the beginning of the endgame or the beginning of the end for Los Angeles' 20th-century fling with charter reform? As the days grow shorter, so does the time left to conclude the reinvention of c...
Help Renters Be Buyers
LOS ANGELES faces an enormous rental housing crisis. Condominium conversions are taking thousands of apartment units off the market, which is driving up rents even as the number of people who can only afford to rent increases. About 12,000 rent-controlled apartments have been converted into condo...
L.A.’s vanishing vacancies
Last week's City Council vote to double and possibly triple relocation fees that condominium developers must pay tenants before evicting them is not a real solution to Los Angeles' condo-convers- ion crisis. The condo still gets built, and the unit is off the rental housing market in a city wh...
Another California Trend: Gun Ownersh...
It's scarcely a decade since some Angelenos met for dates on pistol ranges. But today, even some conservative Republicans are coming around to the idea that firearms are not fashionable. For example, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a presidential contender, has said that he would consider a ban on as...