A Stretch for Garcetti
FOR A WHILE LAST YEAR, I SEEMED TO RUN into former District Attorney Gil Garcetti every week. He was hyperactive in his son Eric's successful campaign for the City Council, and wherever Eric, a dogged campaigner, turned up, so did Gil, his top adviser. On one of those occasions, I ask...
Imperial Times
Has our freshly Chicagoized L.A. Times really forgotten which new century we‘re in? In June and July, columnists James Ricci and Steve Lopez cascaded blame for all California’s problems upon the immigrant population. Suddenly, we found ourselves back in the foreigner-bashing, night-ri...
Cruel Priorities
LAST WEEK NOT ONLY DID THE COUNTY of Los Angeles resolve to close 11 public and four school clinics belonging to its Department of Health Services, reduce beds in one hospital and cut immunizations for more than 80,000 children. It also decided, on grounds that it was improving the ur...
Call Rewrite!
THE HEADWATERS OF MOST LOS ANGELES COUNTY police reporting is a very small pond known as the Norman "Jake" Jacoby Press Room. Named for a legendary City News Service police reporter who retired a decade ago, it sits to the rear of the first floor of Parker Center, the 40-year-old, six...
Autumn Follies
CITY GOVERNMENT SANK INTO TROPICAL lassitude during the council's recent summer recess. But in one critical area, things actually sped up: Would-be council candidates were scurrying to roust signatures for their initial filings for the 2003 election. The new haste is because next year...
Still Kicking
SO EX-CHIEF BERNARD PARKS IS thinking of running for the City Council instead of suing it. Although he doesn't appear to live there at the moment, Parks certainly has a better-than-even chance next year of winning the 8th District seat that Mark Ridley-Thomas will vacate this December...
Reporter’s Notebook
The families of the defendants are elated as the LAPD quartet go free. My boss at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Lowell Forte, who was once a small-town prosecutor, makes a lawyer joke about the legal strategy of Sergeant Stacey Koon, the senior LAPD officer at the beating scene. K...
Senseless Steve
Someone shut down a newspaper last week. His name was Steve Cooley, and he’s the district attorney most voters -- including me -- chose two years ago because we thought he was the best man in the race.Now it looks like we were wrong.In shutting the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, Cooley...
The Old Ball Game
Summer is nearly upon us, and, in what has become almost a biennial rite, so is L.A.’s professional football season. What, you say we have no pro football team in L.A.?Exactly, folks; the game is about getting a team.Because seemingly every two or three years a bunch of guys with a bu...
Power From the People
There are no checks and balances in our county government. If you don’t believe me, just look at the closed-meeting-law dispute of the past few weeks. There‘s a simple reason for this lack of oversight. The Los Angeles County supervisors own the franchise. They ordain the spending. Th...
Urban Fission
What makes a city fly apart? It’s not yet clear: Urbanologists don‘t have many precedents. Just as it pioneered so many other lifestyle innovations -- swimming-pool-centered apartment complexes, muscle-toned surf bunnies, Kung Pao pizza, free alternative weeklies and an NFL-free major...
The Lakers Lesson
So when was the last time you saw Los Angeles happy?I mean, happy like it was happy Friday morning, when the big guys, Shaq and his titanic pals, trundled down Figueroa Street, not in sumptuous convertibles like a bunch of mere astronauts, but atop double-decker sightseeing buses.And ...
Health-System Meltdown
CAN HEALTH CARE FOR THE POOR AS IT NOW exists be saved in Los Angeles County?The answer looks like "no." Even the Department of Health Services' (DHS) usual strong supporters -- Supervisor Gloria Molina, for instance -- seem resigned to an "inevitable" downsizing that will make for lo...
Sickness and Subways
One thing was made perfectly clear from the Shock Corridor reductions of Los Angeles County health care last week: providing health care for this region’s needy is not a problem that can be handled, ultimately, on either the state or local level.The Board of Supervisors last week tent...
A Platter of Prejudice
Way back in the ’60s, those with entry-level salaries, including me, had our own Great Good Place in New York‘s Chinatown. Lin’s Garden offered the best Big Apple Cantonese -- fried-duck won ton soup and beef-with-black-bean-sauce kind of stuff -- I‘ve ever had. All for upward of 85 c...
County Sneaks Through Museum Rebuild ...
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week voted unanimously to authorize a $250 million bond initiative that would enhance fire and seismic safety at the two major county museums. Sources confirmed that the initiative also could provide the lion’s share of funding for the ...
News From Up North
PARIS IS A CITY OF THE NORTH, LOCATED ALONG THE SAME 49TH PARALLEL that forms the U.S.-Canada border. That's why, in mid-July, you still need your sunglasses at 9 p.m. and twilight waits until 10:30 to conquer the day. During their warm and blessed 10-hour summer afternoons, couples a...
Cooley Cops Out
It’s no longer up to Steve, our almost brand-new district attorney, who last week formally abandoned any further interest in the Rampart-area police-corruption cases. These are the very cases, you‘ll recall, whose neglect helped Steve Cooley beat incumbent Gil Garcetti in last year’s ...
The Battle for Tujunga
It‘s important to realize that the impossible diversity of L.A.’s 2nd Council District came about 15 years ago as a move aimed at dumping Joel Wachs. The suave, cosmopolitan Wachs was seldom popular with his council colleagues. And never less so than in 1986, when the death of Council...
L.A.’s Watchdog
Maybe it was simply that in the end, she had to fight her way into a job she‘d planned to walk into -- unchallenged -- in this year’s election. But Laura Chick came out swinging and won big. Now, Los Angeles‘ new controller has managed to land some hard punches in her first 100 days o...
Beyond Potholes
1. A new LAPD chief.2. A ban on memorializing public figures who have been convicted of crimes. This would eliminate former Supervisor Pete Schabarum’s name on a south-county park and Richard Alatorre’s memorial by the MTA Building.3. An LAPD civilian review board.4. A district attorn...
Trouble in Paradise
Just last month, Mary Angle was a star in the rarefied firmament of Southern California natural-resource management.She had been a park ranger, a member of former Senator Alan Cranston’s staff and an executive for Save the Redwoods before taking on the $77,000-a-year job as director o...
Redistricting Revulsion
By this summer, if her colleagues adopt their favored redistricting plan, Ruth Galanter could end up representing some 246,000 San Fernando Valley residents during her last year in office. The new turf is about seven miles north of her present Westside district.Galanter, one of the th...
Hahn to Bernie: Drop Out
Two hours before Mayor Jim Hahn began his Tuesday news conference to state his opposition to Bernie Parks getting a second term as police chief, South Los Angeles activist Najee Ali was already reacting. He’d gone to the Los Angeles City Clerk’s Office to file papers to petition for t...
Twisting Slowly
The debate is over on Bernie Parks. It‘s a foregone conclusion that the Los Angeles Police Commission will support the mayor’s wish that the police chief not be re-appointed for another term, and informal polling suggests the City Council will not override that decision.All of the tal...
The Toad vs. the Big Cement Company
County supervisors will vote next week on a project that would demolish a great hunk of northern L.A. County‘s remaining natural habitat.If they reject the long-delayed Transit Mix Concrete gravel-digging project, supervisors will stand with its fastest-growing and third largest city,...
Biting Back
As a covered entity under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the City of Los Angeles does not discriminate on the basis of disability and, upon request, will provide reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access to its programs, services, and activities . . .Dan Knapp...
Supervisorial Misconduct
The buck-and-a-half word for today is tergiversate, which means ”to change repeatedly one’s attitude or opinions.“ And as of this week, Los Angeles County Counsel Lloyd Pellman is Civic Center‘s prime tergiversator.Just look at the way he flipped through his options a few weeks ago on...
Beyond Bernie
Early last week, top leaders in the local African-American clergy held a private breakfast meeting. I don’t know what it was about. But whatever decision was made, it doesn‘t seem to have been to amp up the protest against Mayor Jim Hahn’s decision not to rehire his police chief. New ...
The Knife
Facing the tightest budget in seven years, L.A. County’s new health-services director, Thomas Garthwaite, told a skeptical Board of Supervisors this week that he is willing to consider service cuts far beyond the $10 million reduction already approved.But it won‘t be easy to do. In li...
Vital Signs
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 hospi...
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 hi...
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 qu...
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 Tuesd...
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 Marc...
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...
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 ...
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 abo...
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 milli...
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 speci...
City of Status Quo
So here we go again, another week in the Hahn administration, and one would forbear: Cut young Jim some slack. The guy‘s only been here half a month. Give him a chance to get the feel of things before we get judgmental. Remember how long it took Dick Riordan to start rolling?But just ...
Million-Dollar Understanding
Unfortunately, between a valve job on my beater and the usual payments to credit-card usurers, I just haven’t got a spare quarter-million dollars this month. Which is too bad.Because if I did, I could have my name engraved on a memorial metal thingy that would stand in front of City H...
Green City
Just as Mayor Jim Hahn’s new administration was beginning to feel like the latest thing in regional torpor, last week saw a series of outright triumphs on the city‘s Green Front. Triumphs that promise a new era of livability to inner-city Angelenos and the rest of us besides.I’m not s...
Times Cancels City Hall Party
With no detectable fanfare, the Los Angeles Times has spiked a special advertising section tied to a costly downtown Labor Day–weekend extravaganza called “The Celebration at City Hall.”Times corporate declined to explain the about-face, but there’s no doubt that the organization want...
A Case of Water Carrying
Traditionally, every citizen is subject to the call of public service. When you were young, you used to get a draft notice. In the fullness of retirement, you could be summoned downtown to jury duty. Along with taxation, such obligations are said to be the costs of civilization. Gener...
Animal Nature
The asking price was $1,200 a pup -- high for what could have been giveaway mongrels. But these critters‘ grandfather was Bane, the nefarious attack dog -- bred by prison inmates -- who mauled and killed a young San Francisco soccer coach last spring. Thus the ad’s sales pitch: “Bad t...
Lucky Little Sleazebag
The question remains why Alatorre — arguably the most corrupt and corrupting Los Angeles politician of his generation — went down for just one easy count of income-tax evasion. And why the feds passed on their own investigators’ allegations of corruption, bribery, loan fraud, extortio...
Fourth and Long Shots
A few of you lucky readers out there are going to get a chance to vote in next week’s special election to select the successor to the late John Ferraro, longtime City Council president and, for well over a generation, representative of Los Angeles‘ 4th Council District. Go to it!Last ...
Two Toms
Tom Gilmore walks fast, with a big man’s stride. “A developer is like a shark,” he says. “He has to keep moving.” Gilmore is moving west along Sixth Street at more than 4 mph. He’s heading toward lunch at one of Los Angeles’ fanciest downtown restaurants, Cicada, of which he owns a bi...
Life Goes On
Fear is a strange passion that strikes from the sky, from the wind, from the air in the room. All sensible thought goes out of the mind. You’re consumed with a vision of an atom bomb or disease as you walk across the street and get run over by a trailer truck.—Jimmy Breslin, Newsday, ...
Power Turf
In a city where many council districts seem to have been pounded together out of random bits, Los Angeles’ 4th District is right at home. It includes a smattering of the east San Fernando Valley and a bit of bohemian Silver Lake. It has a gangy smidgen of the Rampart area. It has most...
Guarding the Pound
Mayor Jim Hahn really put his foot in it last week. It might not be the biggest hornets’ nest at City Hall, but it certainly is the angriest: the one around which all the animal activists buzz.And sting.We are talking about the city Department of Animal Services, which has the largest...
Giving In to Cops
With Gray Davis warning us about possible terrorist attacks, and the heightened consciousness about security in general, it seems a bit preposterous for the LAPD to keep talking about a compressed workweek. Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, the councilman from the inner-city 8th District...
Distant Port
Watts, San Pedro, Wilmington and Harbor City are the southernmost communities in Los Angeles. Together they form the 15th Council District -- the most isolated in the city.The latter three communities live by (in both senses) the city’s huge port. Watts, on the other hand, has symboli...
Kiddie Diesel
Can the typically smog-belching diesel engine actually help launder the state’s fouled air? The South Coast Air Quality Management District will deal with that question this week. The issue at hand is whether, as the AQMD proposes, regional school districts must go with the cleanest a...
Old-School Star
John Ferraro had many friends. This was his strength and his weakness. He stuck up for people he liked, even when it turned out they did not have the city’s best interests at heart. In his more than 35 years on the City Council, however, it‘s fair to say Ferraro did more to keep Los A...
Naked in Quebec
John Ferraro had many friends. This was his strength and his weakness. He stuck up for people he liked, even when it turned out they did not have the city’s best interests at heart. In his more than 35 years on the City Council, however, it‘s fair to say Ferraro did more to keep Los A...
Richard’s Bracelet
It may not be rough, but it is justice. Richard Alatorre has been sentenced to serve eight months in the Eagle Rock home his lies bought, and for the sake of whose mortgage he falsified a property lease on his previous dwelling. A longtime crony had re-roofed the house with $13,200 wo...
The Great Library Robbery
Let‘s face it: Pretense aside, the proposal from the Library Commission to name the Central Library after Mayor Dick Riordan was about as spontaneous as the Chinese Communist Party’s terming Mao the Great Helmsman.It is also completely unjust. After the old library was gutted by arson...
Alatorre’s Cat
Richard Alatorre, the notorious former assemblyman and Los Angeles city councilman, is about to pay his debt to society in the form of an eight-month home detention. But his politics live on, and some contend that he’s actually grooming a new political heir in a May 15 special electio...
Barking for Change
Hardly anyone ever notices that the fourth largest city in the nation’s most populous county is Torrance. This is probably because the larger cities — such as L.A. and Long Beach — are so much more interesting.So are many smaller ones. Even Torrance’s motto, “A balanced city — commerc...
Killer Bob
Who would have thought the confession — media-wise as the debut of a new luxury SUV — by former Senator Bob Kerrey that he was responsible for the massacre of at least 14 Vietnamese women and children would evoke so much sympathy?Well, there’s ol’ Killer Bob himself, for one. Whose gr...
Fathers and Sons
Gil Garcetti was hard put to make the right choice for his son, Eric. “Do you think this one would be quite right?” he asked a fellow customer at a Westside Trader Joe’s last Sunday. The other allowed that for $2.99 a bottle, that particular chardonnay wasn’t actually bad. “Then it wi...
Antonio’s Line
It was probably as much Dick Riordan’s paternalism as his lingering aversion to City Attorney Jim Hahn that birthed the ultimate endorsement of the 2001 Los Angeles mayor’s race. Distant as they might be on pure ideology, and as contrastingly beguiling and unbeguiling personally, Anto...
The New Alignment
Much has happened in the 35 years since young Mexican-Americans first marched to demand social justice and economic opportunity. As the conflict gradually moved off the streets and into the voting booths, the city councils, the state legislatures and Congress, the issues and personali...
The World Senator
Alan Cranston may not have been the only retired congressman who wanted to save the world. But he was the only one I ever met who spent his last years trying to do it. Born at the beginning of World War I, he died on the literal eve of the new millennium for which, he said when I last...
Power to the People
I haven‘t heard back from the mayor yet about whether he’s going to fire David Freeman, the head of L.A.‘s Department of Water and Power (DWP) and the man most responsible for Los Angeles’ preposterously fortunate position during the California electrical debacle. But I read and hear ...
Cross of Gold
TwitteremailPrint ArticleAASACRAMENTO -- It was good guys vs. bad guys, heroes vs. villains and gold standard vs. silver at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) last week, but I‘m still not sure who won. The arguments were technical, but the cognitive conflict at the 11-hour-mara...
Role Call
The little gray man in the red tie came to the LAPD Rampart Station to bury Police Commission President Gerry Chaleff, but he didn’t have the guts to tell us that on Friday. Instead he talked about a new pension plan, a higher LAPD entry salary (already in excess of what LAUSD teacher...
1 Person, 0 Vote
The Los Angeles City Council voted against both the letter and the spirit of the new city charter last week. The issue was whether to appoint a temporary 13th District City Council replacement, as the charter requires.By their vote, council members declared the vacancy to be no big de...
Pacoima Reality Check
Wrong but Romantic; Right but Repulsive. This is the way we were taught, in the border state of Missouri, to view the respectively Southern and Northern sides in the Civil War. Back before we realized that the conflict had more to do with the future of African-Americans in this nation...
The Hollywood 10-plus
This, the most varied Los Angeles City Council district, has predictably attracted one of the most diverse collections of council candidates ever to run. Yes, there are 13 distinct contenders in the 13th District, which includes not only the Hollywood entertainment capital, but just a...
Willie Williams Rerun?
It is hard to remember a local reputation fading as rapidly as LAPD Chief Bernard Parks’.For more than a year, Parks‘ aloof pride -- or was it hubris? -- insulated him from the Rampart scandal and the ensuing municipal crisis. Parks stood apart from the apparent double failure of the ...
Take Me to the River
It is not yet a done deal. But if Governor Gray Davis authorizes a hard-sought $30 million state-parks grant, downtown Los Angeles will soon have its first serious new green space since the City Hall lawn opened in 1928.We are talking of the Chinatown Yard Settlement agreement here, r...
The Yes Man & the No Man
Joel Wachs likes to say no. For instance, while discussing the Belmont Learning Complex with the Weekly’s editorial board, he grants a glimpse into how his mind sometimes works toward the negative. He’s just said that he’d strongly oppose using the costly, controversial L.A. Unified s...
It’s Weird Out There
It was the kind of week when you thought that if you bumped into just one more political candidate, you’d run away and barricade yourself in your home. It always gets that way during election time. You realize that you have not heard an original public utterance since sometime last ye...
L.A. Lawyer
It’s the end of an epoch in the Los Angeles City Attorney‘s Office.James Hahn, having held that office for what could be a record four terms, must now leave. And now it’s someone else‘s turn to be elected city lawyer.But whose? While it’s the second-highest city elective office, its l...
Fairness Dictates
Without putting the county‘s finances even slightly out of joint, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week managed to raise by 50 cents the $6.25 hourly salaries of its 74,000 home health-care workers. This came despite the state’s refusal to pay what county officials say...
Coming Alive
By winning the face-off with Los Angeles‘ mayor and police chief last week, the Los Angeles City Council finally did something in this millennium to justify its existence. Better still, what it did might, after a generation of failed tries, create an LAPD that reflects the city’s 21st...
The Code of Cordoba
The subtle entity known as Cordoba Corporation used to thrive on bad publicity. Cordoba has bid for contracts as diverse as building demolition and subway construction, though lately it has been doing computer-programming work. Formerly located solely in Los Angeles, it now also lists...
The Part-Time Machine
NOW PLAYINGTrump Administration Sued By Several US States Over 3-D GunsSessions defends Rosenstein in impeachment moveFederal Judge Rejects Trump, Lawsuit ContinuesVladimir Putin Does Not Plan To Reject The US DollarThe EU Reportedly Simplified Their Talk With Cue Cards For Donald Tru...
Battle for Prosperity
By October’s second weekend, it was clear to everyone in town that an end to labor strife was somewhere in the unseeable distance.The MTA outage was in its fourth week. Daylong, rolling strikes closed King-Drew, the county‘s third busiest public hospital, and curtailed services at Har...
The Bereaved
With coffee, cookies and a sorrow appropriate to the removal of a brain-dead relative‘s life support, the city attorney, five City Council members, Police Commission president, chief deputy mayor, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Bill Lann Lee and two unnamed others celebrated the sign...
Where Money Didn’t Talk
All over America, in the months before this millennial election, campaign-spending records fell like grain under the harvester’s scythe. Some big spenders were big winners. The nation’s champ spender, of course, was Democrat Jon Corzine, who, according to the Associated Press, spent m...
Upheaval Update
In all its ocean-linerly majesty, the Los Angeles Times veered a few degrees from its usual course last week better to scrutinize the ongoing crisis in Los Angeles’ ramshackle Department of Health Services. The story, which could have appeared at any time over the past year, spoke of ...
Fame, etc.
It was one of those rare Monday mornings when people wanted news coverage all over City Hall. The mayor‘s folk and Councilman Mike Feuer hunted media fame in the precincts of the Third Floor press room. Controller Rick Tuttle had launched his own informal presentation on the 12th Floo...
Doing the Medici
Hating downtown Los Angeles isn‘t new. My old friend Father Malcolm Boyd -- who served in Hollywood’s bureaucracy before his ordination -- remembers people hating it nearly 50 years ago, at least in the screen community.Back then, you had to go downtown for your income-tax refund. As ...
King/Drew’s Renewal
I am rebuked in this issue [see Letters page] for my recent column on Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center by an old acquaintance, Director Mark Finucane of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS). Actually, Finucane, while defending his operations, takes issu...
Year-end Scorecard
Some historians insist that the odd thing about century changes is how few really cosmic events seem to happen in years ending in double-zeros — like 1700, 1800 or even 1900. In modern times, they say, such years are notably bereft of comets, plagues, invasions, revolutions. What with...
Hang On
So I’m westbound on Pico at this red light somewhere past Robertson, and this dude in a vast new chromey SUV trundlebug pulls up. He blips his 300-hp engine, the street ahead is clear as far as I can see, and in an instant, nearly 40 years shred off my middle-aged frame: for the first...
Parks in Charge
When Police Chief Bernard Parks told the City Council two weeks ago about how the aftermath of the big Lakers win became a vest-pocket riot, he showed little apparent concern. Parks and most of the council members discussed the disruption as though little more was at stake than the de...
Creary Steps Down
In December, we last looked in on Dr. Ludlow B. Creary, then one of the most senior -- not to say best-paid -- staffers at the county’s unquiet Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center.The 60-ish Creary was a powerful and controversial character on the Lynwood health campus, who drove a ...
Mayor of Mayors?
One thing that’s never been really popular in pop-prone Southern California is popular upheaval. At least not in local government. Remember city-charter reform? (You ought to, because it‘s just kicked in.) It finally happened -- after generations of stalling -- but not because people ...
What Reactionaries
A moderate-size demonstration of Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union members was in progress outside the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel last week when the Santa Monica police showed up in full protective gear -- helmets, face shields and all. The SaMo HERE crowd...
Free To Protest
There was one big scramble downtown last week after U.S. District Judge Gary Feess told the DNC organizers, the Secret Service and the LAPD that the First Amendment still applied to the coming Democratic National Convention.”Protecting the safety of all people present in the Staples C...
Dock City
From below, the Vincent Thomas Bridge is green and fresh, the paint glossy-bright on all the bolts and screws, wires and girders, all the way to the tops of its towers.I’ve looked up at many big bridges in my time; even lived under one once. But I‘ve never seen one so, well, shiny and...
Steal This Hoffman
The long-haired radical kid from the Pennsylvania backcountry had just returned from the 1968 Democratic Convention, battered and without a speck of love left in her heart for Abbie Hoffman. “He sat off someplace and let us all get beat,” she said, also implicating two other activist ...
About That Money
As some of you may have already heard, there was a political convention in town the other week. And while it sometimes seemed unduly unruly, one thing the 2000 Democratic National Convention did not appear was poor. There was that $10 million cost of the basics, of course -- the venue...
The Grapes of L.A.
The broadcast media had a ball with this month‘s little story that Los Angeles County was about, once again, to allow people to make their own wine in marketable quantities. It was such a condign idea that the Board of Supervisors is expected to pass the ordinance next month, albeit p...
You Got Me, Babe
Bowling Alone isn’t really about bowling alone. As sociologist Robert Putnam allows on page 113, a better designation might be Bowling in Small Groups; admittedly, this wouldn‘t be the catch phrase for modern alienation his title became when it first topped a 1995 article. His key obs...
The First Step Back
The lore has been out there practically since first I learned to read: It’s the legend of the totally out-of-control, self-and-everyone-else-destructive junkie. First, I think, came Frankie Machine, counterhero of Nelson Algren‘s classic, 1949 The Man With the Golden Arm. Then there w...
Flip a Coin
Got a call from Mayor Riordan the other day, or so he said. The Great Stone Voice identified himself: ”Hi, I‘m Mayor Richard Riordan,“ and then told me to vote for Assemblyman Wally Knox for state senator in the 23rd District.I immediately replied, ”Mayor Riordan, I gotta tell you one...
Hiding behind Badges
It was very simple, as Chief Bernard Parks explained it last week. The Los Angeles Police Department is undermined by mediocrity, slipshod performance, bad management, and insidious and inappropriate cultures. These problems led to the Rampart scandal.Accordingly, this mediocrity-ridd...
Bernie Dresses Down
The night Bernard Parks should have apologized to the district attorney for trying to derail the state constitution, he left his uniform hanging in the closet.The police chief wore his civvies when he made his evening appearance outside Rampart station — where he’s been rather scarce ...
Gas Attack
Trying to get into the minds of the current majority of Los Angeles Unified School District board members is often like trying to crawl into an impossibly small, dark, unventilated space.Particularly when it comes to the fate of the accursed $200 million Belmont Learning Complex. It‘s...
Blight of Other Days
One thing kept the single most ridiculous police operation in the history of Los Angeles and Ventura counties from also being the funniest: An innocent man was killed. Now comes the final somber punch line to the Trail‘s End Ranch case: a bill to taxpayers for $5 million.You’ve heard ...
Bad Conduct
It‘s a miserable LAPD practice that antedates Jack Webb and Dragnet, and it’s at least as antiquated: sending cops in civvies to entrap and entice men who like other men by posing as like-minded persons.But the Los Angeles Police Department -- perpetually proclaiming itself short of l...
God, the Mayor and Bernard Parks
The mayor once told us to thank ”dear God“ for Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks; as I recall, however, he forgot at the time to tell us why.But most of us realize that it isn‘t God we really have to thank for Bernie Parks. It’s Dick Riordan himself.So it was certainly appropriat...
The Last Stand
The plaintiffs opposing Playa Vista this time around are called the Grassroots Coalition, Earthways Foundation and Spirit of the Sage Council. The last is, according to the filing, unincorporated. The Coalition, Foundation and Council‘s action, termed in its press release a “lawsuit,”...
Daily Drips
”Tapping Toilet Water“ was the Hearst-like headline in the Daily News. It was both an attention grabber and a blatant falsehood in terms of what the story was about, which was something called the East Valley Water Recycling Project. This is our Department of Water and Power‘s planned...
Frittering Away
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 a...
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 w...
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 on...
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...
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 ...
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 sugge...
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 Allia...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Doctor’s Appeal
A Sri Lanka–born physician at King-Drew Medical Center has won his appeal in a long-fought legal case in which he argued that he was denied a promotion for 16 years simply because he was not African-American.Last week’s decision by the Second District State Court of Appeal reinstated ...
Wanted: Backbone
So, in the end, the Eastside community was right about Ruben Zacarias and I was wrong. All I can say now is that I‘m sorry.Last year, it seemed time for Zacarias to quit. The last of the old-guard Los Angeles Unified School District supers, he made a career of hearing nothing he didn’...
Mean and Cheap
When last we wrote of local home health-care workers, there was hope in the air. As you may recall, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors asked the state for some health-care benefits for primary health-care givers. Those workers -- 73,000 of whom have registered with the county...
Personality Politics
When 13th District L.A. City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg talks about her major accomplishments in 16 years of public office, she likes to talk about Hollywood -- and you like to listen. That’s because it‘s a good story. Anyone who’s spent some years in the world-famous, 4-square-mile...
Things as They Were
The two apostles of things as they were sat in the Los Angeles City Council last week and flaunted their lack of vision.Our police chief and our mayor were trying to explain their responses to the Rampart police scandal that keeps spreading like an ink stain on a white pile carpet.By ...
The Grateful Web
One thing noteworthy about the recent county gun-show debates was the vital role the Internet played on both sides of the dialogue.Staffers in the offices of the liberal county supervisors -- who opposed the continuation of the shows on county property -- bolstered their arguments off...
Money for a Whistle Blower
A $300,000 settlement has been reached in the federal suit of a former official who said the MTA fired him because he objected to a $65 million subway-construction contract that, he said, was linked to an MTA board member‘s kickback.Last month’s out-of-court settlement between Leroy H...
Parks’ Department
I had forgotten the nature of British daily papers until I was forced to depend on them during my recent vacation. Critics usually distinguish between the sexy, broad-circulation English tabloids and the prestigious, large-format versions. The first present stuff like "Horror! Frenchm...
Beats Chocolate
No matter how they shake the box, the pieces just won’t fall together. At least not in any way that suggests that Tedjitou Dessalegn, a senior assistant to departed county children’s-services department head Pete Digre, actually colluded with the man who gave her $25,000 to buy a new ...
Acting Out
Any decision is better than no decision. The Los Angeles Unified board, calmed for a decisionless decade in its cultural Sargasso Sea, finally got decisive two weeks ago when it voted to unseat Superintendent Ruben Zacarias.So did its appointed special commission on the oft-imprecated...
Dialogue of Slurs
Rhetoric has no taste. Once you’re down with the great cause, assailing malfeasant demons, in or out of public office, why hold back? Why throttle your invective short of what libel rulings allow?What‘s newly remarkable about this abusive verbal assault, however, isn’t so much how tho...
Departmentally Disturbed
Why can‘t the LAPD be more like the Sheriff’s Department? By which I mean, why is it so resistant to meritorious criticism, and prone to cloak its operations as if it were some arcane sect?Put it another way. Why can‘t Los Angeles junk its demonstrably futile system of police governan...
Leave the Woman Alone
The most pathetic continuing character in mystery fiction was created by the late, great Georges Simenon. She was Mme. Maigret, the virtually invisible wife of the great Parisian sleuth, Inspector Maigret of the French gendarmerie.And she was always getting those late phone calls from...
Leave the Woman Alone
The most pathetic continuing character in mystery fiction was created by the late, great Georges Simenon. She was Mme. Maigret, the virtually invisible wife of the great Parisian sleuth, Inspector Maigret of the French gendarmerie.And she was always getting those late phone calls from...
Never Too Early To Run
Let‘s see, last time we had us a real mayor’s election in Los Angeles it was 1993. Indeed, the eventual winner didn‘t enter the race, officially, until the fall of 1992.Certainly, you could not say the last mayor’s race began in 1991. By then, we‘d just started wondering whether the g...
Big John’s Mouth
Nearly three years ago, a city ordinance was proposed that would have limited what people could say to the City Council. This bill ran into so much opposition that it withered away.What did pass was a rule that restrained public comment to five minutes per side for a given agenda item...
The Real World Organization
Something important was missing from the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations. Oh yes, there were, in some proportion, all the just causes I’d ever marched for in the past: balanced ecology, fair wages, equal representation; everything, it seemed, but Vietnam. To pre-boomer sometime activi...
Health Care for Saints
Now the state must find money to pay for health plans for people who care for the elderly and disabledRichard Devylder knows firsthand the importance of home health-care workers: They feed, bathe, dress, change catheters and take people to the doctor.All the embarrassing little detail...
Farewell but Not Good Riddance
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovAll last week they said goodbye to the Richard Alatorre who should have been. Pioneer political role model to the Latinos, lover of family and children. Feminist and forerunner, benefactor of the worker. And, in Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s words, “the people’s ...
Role Reversal
The last time I looked in, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission was functioning rather well as the city government’s traffic officer. Not its highway patrolman nor its robbery-homicide detective: It’s not there to handle wild chases or major felony cases. That’s what the D.A.’s Offi...
Pity Poor San Pedro
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Once you get past the refineries, San Pedro looks like many port cities whose generations have lived near the sea. Little homes crowd the hilly, treeless streets that climb the sweep of landscape from the docks to the Palos Verdes heights. The maritime air s...
Beginning at the Beginning
There’s finally some good news about the future of the downtown park known as the Pueblo of Los Angeles.Since the 1960s, most of the Pueblo, one of the most striking historical sites in California, languished under the very noses of federal, state, city and county government. Yet this...
Wetlands and the Well-Ordered Society
Philosopher John Rawls calls it "overlapping consensus." What I understand the author of A Theory of Justice to mean here is that even among the most embattled opponents, there can be agreement on certain fundamental issues.Of course, even Taliban clerics can concur with militant femi...
Where the Man Began
You notice the "Award-Winning Karaoke" parlor here, the smiling teens waving "Free Carwash for Jesus" placards there. But there’s no sign of Dick Nixon — usually termed our nation’s "most controversial president" — whose most flattering biographer to date concluded: "It is sometimes d...
The Guns of Autumn
The summer is slowly ebbing away. In another time and place, the leaves would already be turning amber and our thoughts would be turning to hunting. This was the great American pastime centuries before Abner Doubleday ever pitched a ball. And now, many decades after I last participate...
It’s Chinatown, Jake
A tiny City News Service item in Friday’s Los Angeles Times business section told the tale. Or at least part of it: “A blighted, 32-acre railroad property northeast of downtown Los Angeles will be redeveloped into an industrial park with the help of $11.75 million in grants from the f...
Big-Spender Mike
Firearms fans who came downtown to support continued gun sales at the County Fairplex’s gun shows put on a pretty good show of their own this week. Twenty people — some repeats from last time, but a few new faces — showed up to protest the supervisors’ decision to ban the show.It turn...
Breaking Away
If only they had a choice, the people who work at the El Sereno Youth Center would like to forget there ever was a Los Angeles city councilman named Richard Alatorre. Failing that, they’d rather the world knew there’s no current association between the center and the man."I used to re...
County Living
Los Angeles’ organized-labor cadres seemed to be all over the metropolis on Tuesday in their quest for the living wage. Workers and union officials attended a meeting of the city’s Board of Airports to lobby for better pay at LAX, made a strong presentation to the City Council the sam...
The Anti-Reform Movement
These days it seems that most Angelenos don’t like how their city works. You stumble on this perception in the least likely places. When interviewed recently on the future of Los Angeles, for instance, some Chicano-studies academics said they saw the city splitting, others saw it stay...
The Martinet Mandate
Compare New York’s beleaguered City Hall with L.A.’s and be glad you live here. The last time I looked, Mad Rudy Giuliani’s charming Georgian headquarters was sealed off by cops and barricades. Protesters now get arrested and held overnight under the authority of Gotham’s power-madden...
The Charter End Game
Maybe I’ve just been lucky. But I never before have been compelled to consider who’s the dumbest Los Angeles City Council member. It’s not as important as knowing who’s the smartest, or most venal. Or least honest.As the fiscal year wanes, however, I think we do need a tentative negat...
After the Fall
So what happens now? The Los Angeles City Council’s firm majority stood firm to the last against the passage of the new city charter. Now the members of that same majority get to be the ones who implement it. What a great idea.
But nothing here is quite that simple — except, perhaps...
Cruel Britannia
IF YOU READ ONLY ONE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I IN YOUR life, make sure Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War isn't it. For starters, the book isn't really a history, or even a systemic commentary on what, to much of Europe, remains the major event of the 20th century. Ferguson defines his tas...
The Living-on-the-Edge Ordinance
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A Long-Unsought Benefit
Maybe it’s because the rest of this fair state doesn’t always have its largest city’s interests at heart. But almost any time the Legislature proposes a law exclusively affecting Los Angeles, it’s a rotten deal.Two years ago, for instance, Sacramento proposed to ease the law on the br...
The Mayor Blinked
After two years during which the Los Angeles city-charter-reform process had all the exhilaration of the America’s Cup race, the game suddenly turned into tournament pingpong last Friday, with what seemed like a new serve every moment. Most of the action involved our mercurial mayor, ...
Adieu to Alatorre
It was freezing in the Los Angeles City Council Chamber last Friday afternoon. "They must have turned off the heat," another reporter said. Though it was 70 degrees outside, it felt like 40 indoors; I sneezed as I zipped up my jacket and put on my hat. You always get these portents wh...
Chartered Out
The absentee landlord of this placewhere I used to live had his own way of settling disputes among us tenants. He’d listen very carefully to you asserting your right to keep a bicycle on your shared veranda. Then he’d tell you he’d think about it. A day or two later, you and the other...
Let the Sunshine In
About 25 years ago came a quietrevolution in local politics. Previously, governing agencies had tended to hold decisive get-togethers out of the public eye. Many deeds were decided upon and done that might not have been done at all had anyone out of the power loop been observing the p...
Parade’s End
I love a parade. And that is exactly what marched through the Los Angeles City Council last Wednesday. It was the Unified Charter Parade, and everyone else who was there seemed to love it too.If the parade lacked brass bands and fire engines, it had speeches and celebrations: There wa...
Out and No Wonder
The City Hall system worked last month. That itself is news. Events showed that the city’s substandard general managers can actually be ushered out the door without undue resort to violence.This certainly runs against the dogma according to Mayor Richard Riordan, who has long been sno...
The Eastside’s Prague Spring
All that’s changed now; there’s been a local Velvet Revolution. The posters are for Victor Griego, Armando Hernandez, Cathy T. Molina, Juan Marcos Tirado, Alvin Parra, Juan J. Gutierrez. Who are all these people? And while we’re at it, where have all the Richard Alatorre posters gone?...
The Grand Finale?
Comrie had an interesting role in the charter endgame. City CAO since the early ’80s, he had been disempowered by the Riordan administration when, early on, it grabbed most of his budgetary responsibilities. Over the past year, Comrie appeared to be clinging to his increasingly symbol...
Credibility Chasm
It is the normal policy of this newspaper that its contributors not respond at length to critical letters to the editor. In the case of a letter from a taxpayer-salaried top city official denying his own demonstrated incompetence, however, such response is seriously warranted.J. Paul ...
The Wreck of the Business Tax
That was the last time I’d seen such disaster-torn earnestness — until last Friday at City Hall, after the legislative train wreck in the Council Chamber that left the mayor’s long-planned city-business-tax proposal lying on its side with its wheels spinning. It seemed a tremendous de...
The Short List
MARTIN AMIS IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S BEST-KNOWN writers. Martin Amis' work sometimes mimics classic science fiction. That the first fact is better known than the second gives Amis a bit more reputation for originality than he deserves.Imitation science-fantasy makes up nearly half of the...
The Arroyo Special
Six p.m. on the northbound Pasadena Freeway and nothing is moving but time. Red taillights as far as you can see, with hundreds more feeding into the narrowing traffic stream near the four-level. This is high-tech travel at three miles per hour.This is also a prolonged, interactive co...
Nine Out of Ten Doctors
So just the idea of a doctors union was worth a laugh. Yet it was probably the elevated prestige and prevailing remuneration levels that eventually helped to chip away at the American physician’s social and economic pedestal. Craving wealth and prestige, hordes of young people trained...
CRA, Change Your Way
What’s left to say about the CRA? Downtown Los Angeles is the graveyard of its mistakes. Over its 50-year history, the Community Redevelopment Agency became the favored scapegoat of anti-government critics from left to right. Now, sapped by its obligations for its many failed projects...
Top Dog Politics
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 H...
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 end...
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 ...
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 Englis...
Enviros Can Kill Marsh, but not Playa...
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 buil...
Jail Time! – Or how to get high...
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...
Enviro groups lose it at Playa Vista ...
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 decisio...
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 g...
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 ecologica...
How Los Angeles transformed – a...
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 coun...
Autumn of the Ethnocrats
Two demises on last Wednesday's front page. One death was literal: Tom Bradley's, at 80 years of age. The other was political: 14th District Councilman Richard Alatorre's, at 55.What a contrast.Bradley died at 80 after over 50 years of public life: He came closer to representing most ...
Dome of Renown
What, after all, do we mean when we say Hollywood? The rest of America speaks of a film capital, a land of cinematic dreams and commercial mythologies, of chancy but infinite opportunity. But we locals know this idealized zone really isn't located anywhere. The real geography of movie...
Sheriff’s Tariff
What kind of political race puts the challenger on the defensive? Exactly the kind of contest you had until recently for the highest-paid law-enforcement job in the county. In the battle for the almost $250,000-a-year post of sheriff, the hound - insurgent Lee Baca - seemed to be runn...
Taco Bowl
When you think Carson, you think car dealer Don Kott long before you think wheeler-dealer Michael Ovitz. Carson is a residential city that socially and geographically bridges the distance between Compton and Torrance. It's got Nissan Motors' U.S. headquarters, a Cal State campus, Kott...
Remember Him?
Even if you knew Lawry's California Center during the years when it flourished, it was kind of hard to explain it to out-of-town friends. But you had to explain, because you so often ended up taking them there.Why? Because it was so inexplicable. There on Avenue 26 off the I-5, hard b...
Next Up for Mader
The recent ejection of Inspector General Katherine Mader by the minions of LAPD Chief Bernard Parks was perhaps the department’s most retrograde move since the beating of Rodney King. I say this even though I never thought Mader showed extraordinary aptitude in the job she acquired tw...
Playa Vista Revisionism
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All Juiced Up and No Place To Go
Last August, the overcrowded City Hall East garage lost a row of parking spaces. Each of those spaces now has an "Electrical Vehicle Only" sign and a battery charger the size of a wall furnace. Since the row’s revamping, I’ve seen exactly one electric car parked there.As it happens, t...
Jersey West
Another tale of terror from the front page of the Daily News: Guess what? Those rascals downtown at City Hall have launched a sneak attack — by low-income apartments — upon the sorely-tried San Fernando Valley. Appropriately, the article appeared on Pearl Harbor Day."Much of the growt...
Shaw’s Ghost
He’s not on the membership lists, and, possibly because he’s dead, he’s been a no-show at meetings. Yet by now it is fairly obvious that the shade of former Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw is one of the determining forces on both of the current Los Angeles charter-reform commissions.Shaw...
Barrio Logic
It was Mike Davis who came up with the concept of Fortress Los Angeles, in his book City of Quartz: a Southern California city-state where, as the population diversifies, exclusion replaces inclusion.Davis’ grim reverie flew in the face of Mayor Tom Bradley’s multicultural dream and p...
McKinley Assassinated
The McKinley Building doesn’t jut over the horizon. It’s not the city’s tallest, oldest or most significant architectural landmark, but it once was a building that assured you — after you walked into its soothing, European-style courtyard — that the world was a better place than it ha...
The Statewide Dick
Here's a question for you: How could Richard Riordan neglect Los Angeles even more than he already does? The answer: become governor.For that matter, could anything do more to revive the Northern California secession movement? Or at least leave the state - and, with it, our city - tee...
Riordan’s Back
Dick Riordan did the right thing by California last week - counter to the urgings of rich business friends and certain ranking egos at the Los Angeles Times, he declined to run for governor.You could follow his reasoning. Competing against Jane Harman and Al Checchi, Republican Riorda...
AIDS Panic at the County
By the arcane calculus of county politics, Peter Kerndt's National Institutes of Health grant caused a lot more than $1.5 million-per-annum's worth of trouble. That's why, though it promised to facilitate research to cure the world's most widespread deadly disease, the County Board of...
Mayor Overboard
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 - en...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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, t...
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 ...
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 ...
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 pas...
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...
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...
They’re Off!
So. For the first time in 84 years, we've got a real Los Angeles County sheriff's race. Chief Lee Baca, with 32 percent of the votes cast, will face Sherman Block, whose 36 percent was probably the worst showing at the polls by an incumbent sheriff this century.The only problem is, th...
Rev. Callaghan runs wild | L.A. Weekly
It's gone forever now, but once there was a residential complex as close to paradise as such a place could ever be. Not far from the ocean and adjoining undeveloped hillsides, it had great views, cheap rents, funky old wooden units, lots of trees and shrubs, and a cooperative spirit i...
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Y...
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling h...
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Y...
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling h...
Stein-Hubbell affair
Big lies are perfect for people who can't handle the facts. Since they appeal to the lazy mind, big lies can go far. How easy it is to say that Steven Spielberg wants to build DreamWorks on endangered wetlands - it's not true, but it carries the validity of myth.Big lies are usually b...
No Mercy
Homeless activist Bob Erlenbusch's usual eloquence ebbed slightly during his last attempt to get the Board of Supervisors to stay this month's General Relief termination, which would drop 7,000 people from the rolls. You saw him wondering just how many times he had to say, "They'll re...
Jail Time! – Or how to get high...
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...
Fulfillment
Words were more real than the world. I'd been an avid, sheltered reader since age 6, long on facts and fancies and short on ideas. So in 1965, when it came time to make a living, I thought words. As in the business of books. Back then, publishing was still a gentile - make that gentle...
Waiting for the World
LAST WEEKEND, WHILE THE OP-ED BATTLE DRUMS beat ever louder, George W. Bush finally called the United Nations chicken for not endorsing his war plans against Iraq. Naturally, I took refuge among the World Federalists, whose local chapter was meeting at the local center of the Ba'hai faith -- itse...
The Otani Affair
Here‘s a friendly hint for LAPD-chief candidates John Timoney and Bill Bratton. Assuming you really do want the highest-paying job in Los Angeles, it’s bad taste to be caught staying at the state‘s most notorious anti-union hotel. Let alone being followed there and interviewed by L.A. Times repor...
Grand Illusion
Bill Simon looks the camera square in the eye and walks right toward you. He‘s wearing a beautiful shirt the color of the Ionian Sea. He’s trying to smile. He says: ”Do you know me?“ Then he explains who he is: an honest, humble Republican candidate for governor, defamed and marginalized by th...
Take Heed, Chief
LAPD Chief-Apparent Bill Bratton talked a lot and talked tough last week, and he seemed to be saying what everyone wanted to hear. He said his new department was slack and inefficient. He told LAPD consent-decree dissidents, who not long ago were extremely vocal, to get out. He said he could redu...
A Stretch for Garcetti
FOR A WHILE LAST YEAR, I SEEMED TO RUN into former District Attorney Gil Garcetti every week. He was hyperactive in his son Eric's successful campaign for the City Council, and wherever Eric, a dogged campaigner, turned up, so did Gil, his top adviser. On one of those occasions, I asked the el...
A Stormy Port
President George W. Bush’s court order opening the shuttered West Coast ports was either a good or bad thing, depending on whether you talked to the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) or the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The order ended the management lockout of 10,500 dockw...
Plato on the Beat
Every police-chief confirmation I’ve seen in this city has been a ceremony of anticipation. Last Friday‘s was something more: It also evoked the failed hopes in three past police chiefs -- Daryl Gates, Willie Williams and Bernie Parks -- and threw them onto the willing shoulders of 54-year-old Wi...