LA Ignored the Warnings

You could use the title for almost any story about reverses affecting Los Angeles’ economy, but this one happens to be about LAX.  According to LA Biz Observed blogger Mark Lacter, and the Daily Breeze, LAX is facing losses in its lucrative overseas business, business that has a largely unseen positive effect on the Los Angeles economy.  It’s so unseen that City Hall has utterly mismanaged the needed upgrades at LAX for the past 15 years, preferring to listen to NIMBY-minded voters than the economists, labor leaders and airline executives who kept telling them LAX’s huge advantage in international flights was not God-given, and that the airport needed some major fixes or the airlines would go elsewhere.

Sure, Air India’s decision to stop flying out of Los Angeles could be blamed on high fuel prices.  That alibi was already claimed by the Department of World Airports chief executive. But Air India still flies out of San Francisco, and fuel costs just as much up there.

The fact that you could reach dozens of cities overseas via nonstop flights from LAX gave this region an enormous edge economically.  But the locals didn’t care much about that and it was easy and more beneficial to make LAX and its stewards a target for political posturing.  And eventually, much easier for those stewards to tell the city council whatever nonsense it wants to hear.  It’s not their airport.  It’s Los Angeles’.

This is the problem with term limits.  The idea was to force the politicians to focus on their responsibilities as elected officials and not on their electoral fortunes.  This part of term limits has failed. The politicians are much less connected to the city they serve than they were in the days of John Ferraro and Gilbert Lindsey.  In Los Angeles, you now have a political culture built around tearing down city assets rather than protecting them, because having a few notches in your belt positions you for the next campaign.  So what if a critical institution like LAX is weakened?  That’s a trivial concern to the city’s political leadership now.

P.S. Bill Boyarsky has a post explaining what council members really think about when they think about LAX.

Gentlemen, Start Your Lobbyists

I’m sure the City Council is sincere about wanting to improve the diets and health of the residents of South Los Angeles. But they also have to know what will come of the proposal to impose a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in that area of the city: A gig for every major lobbyist in town.

McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Jack-in-the-Box and all their franchisee organizations will all want to strangle this idea in the cradle. They will pay whatever it takes. From a legal standpoint, I don’t know how you distinguish a fast-food chain restaurant from an ordinary restaurant, or what careful balance between unhealthy and healthy menu items would qualify a restaurant for the moratorium, but they will be talking about it at City Hall for months if not years. For the lobbyists, all that talk will be billable.

When was the last time the Council tried to take on so many international corporations at one time? Start looking for a new rush of donations from franchise operators’ associations and restaurant-industry PACs.

Amid worries of an obesity epidemic and its related illnesses, including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, Los Angeles officials, among others around the country, are proposing to limit new fast-food restaurants — a tactic that could be called health zoning.

The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference.

“The people don’t want them, but when they don’t have any other options, they may gravitate to what’s there,” said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan.

In just one-quarter of a mile near USC on Figueroa Street, from Adams Boulevard and south, there are about 20 fast-food outlets.

That particular cluster probably has much more to do with USC kids’ late-night study/beer munchies than with any other part of the neighborhood. They might want to choose another area to make an example of.

“While limiting fast-food restaurants isn’t a solution in itself, it’s an important piece of the puzzle,” said Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College.

This is “bringing health policy and environmental policy together with land-use planning,” he said. “I think that’s smart, and it’s the wave of the future.”

I think he’s right about the future. I’ve noticed lately the increasing link environmentalists are making between food choices and the health of the planet. I know I read recently something to the effect that one cannot consider themselves an environmentalist and still eat meat. Global warming is as much cow- as car-driven.

The dietary paternalism inherent in this proposal — the claim that City officials know what you should eat — hasn’t registered yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe we all see ourselves as the sheer victims of corporations, and believe it is corporations that are limiting our choices, not government. I’d be curious to see the results of an approval poll comparing the Los Angeles City Council with McDonald’s.

Perhaps the council would win. Maybe all the popularity that fast-food brands have paid so dearly for over the past 40 years will now crash around their deep fryers. But they will not go down without a fight, and in Los Angeles, that means writing a lot of checks.

Gossip Counts the Most*

In the previous post about Live Earth, I tried to weave in a mindblowing article from the Sunday NY Times Magazine, “The Gregarious Brain.” The article is about Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder. Among its symptoms is extreme friendliness and aggressive conversational gregariousness, which shows up at an early age.

But while the victims of this syndrome are charming in small doses, they often find themselves socially isolated because their lack of social fear leads to a lack of “social savvy.”

Most of us know when our conversation partners have had enough of us. Williams sufferers do not. In studying how the Williams syndrome brain differs from a normal human brain, some neurological scientists believe the development of social skills, in particular the ability to get information about our peers via conversation, was a key to both individual survival and, ultimately, our species’ dominance.

The people with Williams syndrome bring the nature of those social skills into sharper relief.  It’s a tightrope walk between getting what we need out of our association with a group, and managing our (rational) fears about the group members on whom we must depend.

To get across this tightrope, we depend on our ability to suss people out. Our brains are very attuned to getting information about the people in our group. We figure out who to trust by what others say about them. We’re not like Williams syndrome people, friendly to one and all. We are careful, even among people we’ve known and worked with for a long time.

We get the signals we need from gossip.  If we didn’t have access to gossip, our social fabric would fall apart.  An enormous percentage of our mental energies are devoted to gathering and processing gossip, and our brains have evolved accordingly.

We bring the same wary habits to our public acts, as voters and consumers. We are all part of a global “group” now, processing information not just about our local cohorts, but about our cultural, economic and political leaders from what we learn about them in the media.

When the media puts up artificial filters, they say they do it for our own good. But we don’t feel protected. We feel trapped, and we look for a way out. In totalitarian societies, people are willing to risk imprisonment or death to obtain gossip about their governments.  The controls over information in American society are looser, but they undeniably exist.  When the mainstream media sits on information because they don’t think it’s appropriate to answer its consumers’ questions, we now can turn to the internet, the id of mass communication, to get the gossip we need.

Consider the case of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the past week or so, we have learned first from blogs, then from the mainstream press, that his wife is divorcing him, because he has been unfaithful to her with a reporter who covers him for Telemundo. There are unconfirmed reports about other affairs; the reporter might or might not be his current girlfriend. All these shenanigans played out during the past year, a difficult year for Villaraigosa politically. His signature issue, school reform, crashed and burned in part because of the mayor’s mistaken judgments and temporary loss of political mastery.

To LA Times columnist Tim Rutten, all this is none of our business, so shame on us for our interest in Villaraigosa’s private life and shame on the bloggers who dug it out.

Hang onto something solid, Rutten bloviates up a stiff wind here:

When it comes to reporting on politics and elected officials, distinguishing between what is properly private and what is necessarily public becomes more difficult all the time.

It’s easy to blame the news media for this — for all the obvious reasons. They include an increasing number of editors willing to take their cue from journalism’s lowest common denominator, the gossip sheets, whether online or on slick paper, that continue to proliferate like informational vermin. By its very nature, gossip does not respect the distinction between public and private because it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a dichotomy. In fact, part of gossip’s guilty appeal comes from thumbing its nose at such niceties. The insatiable maw of the 24-hour news cycle also is a factor, as is the generalized collapse of confidence by newspapers engendered by print journalism’s passage through an economically wrenching transformation.

He goes on to point out that prior LA mayors had affairs that weren’t reported “because, even if City Hall reporters had been inclined to pursue the story, it would have been virtually impossible to make it conform to the standards their editors enforced.”

Were those editors — who also covered up the misdeeds of national politicians — more virtuous than today’s? Or were they depriving us of information we could’ve used and were entitled to?

Luckily, an even more senior LA Times‘ columnist gets it intuitively. George Skelton writes today:

Those who claim this is nobody’s business except for the people directly involved ignore the fact that many Angelenos voted for Villaraigosa believing he’d be an inspirational mayor and someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model. This infidelity is these voters’ business too. The first Latino mayor of modern L.A. has soiled his image and spoiled their dreams.

Some voters insist that they don’t care about a politician’s dalliances. Fine, they can click the remote or turn the page. Others do care. They’ll factor it into their attitudes about the man.

Outside the Los Angeles Basin, Villaraigosa has been little known. Now, he’s being introduced statewide as a serial philanderer who dumped on his wife years ago, sweet-talked her back into the house, used her as a political prop and returned to the pattern of womanizing. The family breakup is especially disturbing because the mayor and his wife have two teen children.

Later Skelton points out the crucial difference between Villaraigosa and other philandering politicians like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Villaraigosa’s wife has demanded a divorce. Corrina is not “standing by her man.” That’s an important detail. Another crucial difference? Villaraigosa wants more from us. He wants to put the genie back in the bottle, become again “someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model,” and run for governor.

Rutten ultimately joins Skelton in condemning Villaraigosa, but for the most weightless of reasons: Because his lover is a journalist!

Villaraigosa’s personal connection with Salinas is a private issue that legitimately concerns only the two of them and their families. No one else has a moral or rhetorical right to an opinion on that aspect of their conduct. However, the fact that Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion is a public issue.

(snip)

Villaraigosa knows perfectly well that an intimate relationship with a reporter is bound to raise questions about whether he granted her special access. Worse, it also raises profound conflict-of-interest questions for Telemundo. Has the network’s reporting on his tenure been manicured by a reporter in love with her subject? Has that subject used his mutual affection with the reporter to manipulate coverage of his agenda?

Those aren’t particularly pleasant questions, but Salinas and Villaraigosa have behaved recklessly in an environment that, for better or worse, has become unforgiving.

Yeah, Rutten. That’s probably the first question Mrs. Villaraigosa asked. “Did you grant her…special access??” And then the flying plates.

Rutten is a smart man, but writing like this makes him seem almost as disconnected from reality as the Williams’ syndrome people. The ethics of journalism aren’t the only ethics that matter. In fact they won’t matter, if and when Antonio presents himself to the voters again. We’ll be talking about his affair and whether or not he has found the way back to being seen as trustworthy. We’ll be talking about whether he got his act together and saved his mayoralty. We’ll be talking about whether he’s a good person — or not.

We’ll look for clues to the real Antonio, and if we have to search for them on those dreaded “online media” sites — because the LA Times loves its “standards” more than its readers — that’s where we’ll go. It’ s not because we’ve succumbed to “informational vermin.” It’s because that’s how we’re wired as humans.

*Edited, 7/10/07

Silent Ethics in City Hall

City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s various breaches of the public trust prompted an amusing blog post by City Ethics Commissioner Bill Boyarsky, who was the best reporter and editor the LA Times ever had covering City Hall.

He writes about the “gag rule” that prevents him from saying anything about Delgadillo’s use of staff as go-fers and babysitters, his protracted violation of state law that requires all drivers to have car insurance, his lack of honesty regarding how his city-issued vehicle was damaged, which allowed him initially to charge taxpayers to get it fixed.

It’s apparent Boyarsky the retired journalist is chomping at the bit to say what he thinks about the city attorney’s overweening sense of entitlement. But the gag rule is more than just an inconvenience for a bigmouth. The way Boyarsky describes it, the gag rule is like a contract among insiders not to acknowledge the obvious:

I interpret it this way: Suppose a city official drove a city car to a Sunday baseball game, got drunk and smashed into an MTA bus. More than 250 people witnessed the crash, including 50 on the bus and it was a huge story on TV and in the papers. Then suppose I was asked if I thought the official violated ethics rules governing the use of city cars. Under the rule, I could not comment, no matter how many people saw the crash, no matter how big a story it was. I could not say a thing, even if I had been on the bus, and a reporter tracked me down to the hospital where I was being treated for my injuries.

Who is served by this? Not the public. Not the victims of any alleged violations. No, this system, purportedly designed to enforce unethical behavior by high city officials in fact facilitates it by almost immediately muting public outrage, redirecting it into an airless dark realm, where deals get cut far from public view.

More Boyarsky:

The gag rule is not only stupid, but it’s against the public interest. The chance of a commissioner being disqualified by a comment is remote. Most ethics violations reach us for a vote after attorneys for the accused and the ethics commission staff have settled them behind closed doors. We commissioners are presented with a settlement agreement that has few details. We generally approve the settlement. Usually, discussion is limited.

The gag rule is a big reason why many people consider the ethics commission irrelevant. When allegations of ethical violations are splashed on the news and are being discussed from the harbor to the Valley, ethics commissioners should be able to say more than “no comment.”

So true. In about six months, there will be announcement: The City Attorney and the Ethics Commission have agreed on a settlement. He’s going to pay a fine! Your invitation to the fundraiser to defray the cost of the fine is in the mail. The usual arm-twisting of city contractors and the city’s legal community will then ensue.

In the meantime, none of Delgadillo’s colleagues will have to say anything in response to the public. “It’s in the hands of the ethics commission. Until they act, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment,” will be the refrain.

Look…I’m the last guy who would want to see anyone railroaded. It’s good to have a process that permits a dispassionate look at the facts. But Boyarsky describes a process that frustrates any attempt to hold high city officials accountable to the public’s standards of common sense. People are irate about what Delgadillo has already admitted to. Why does he deserve protection from the public’s wrath?

More to Boyarsky’s point: He was nominated to the Ethics Commission because of his experience with the byways of Los Angeles’ government. What is the point of bringing him into the process of policing City Hall ethics, and then putting a muzzle on him?

(In the same post, Boyarsky is funny in describing his battle of wits with a couple of Times reporters who used techniques Boyarsky should have recognized to get him to say more than he should have. Read the whole thing.)

Delgadillo Agonistes*

I’m sure it feels really unfair right now to be City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo.

I mean, like, there’s no proof that his wife with a suspended license drove his city-owned Yukon, no proof that she had an accident, no proof that the repair bill wasn’t appropriately paid by taxpayers.

Like noted civil libertarian Bart Simpson always says,

I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.

But people are jumping to conclusions anyway.

And he must be wondering, why does it have to be now that the LA Times starts imitating the Daily News, with its “Rocky Watch” gimmick? (Although he should be relieved. It’s only on the editorial page. More people watched the Tony Awards than read the LA Times editorial page.)

Just to give Rocky a momentary respite from the gloom that can befall an unfairly accused man, I’ll call up a story from the years when I drove one of those E-plated government cars.

It wasn’t a Yukon. It was a Linda Blair-vomit green Dodge four-door sedan. I used it during part of my time in the office of LA County Supervisor Ed Edelman. It was assigned to me after I’d worked there about two years.

I was living in an old apartment building at the edge of Hancock Park, a block off La Brea, behind a bank. Even though we weren’t supposed to, I parked it at night in the bank’s parking lot, because street parking was rarely available and, well, I had an “E” plate, and the lore back in the early 80s was that you could park an “E” plated car wherever you wanted. Whenever one of my colleagues took me to lunch in those days, they’d always park in the red zone,right in front of the restaurant. When I was new and naive, I’d ask, Aren’t you going to get a ticket? “Nah,” they answered. “I got an E plate.”

So, now, every night and all weekend, there was this ugly green Dart parked in the area of the bank parking lot that was used by all the tenants in this building.

The building was owned by an older woman, who had an adult grandson living with her. This grandson was a serious weed addict. The landlady’s apartment was next to mine. She didn’t know what her grandson liked to do, so he’d usually sit outside on the stoop when he wanted to light up, usually after she went to bed. If my living room window was open, his smoke came blowing in.

One day, I slept in — maybe I was sick. I got in my car to go to work around noon. Grandson was taking out the trash and noticed me opening the door.

“Hey man…that’s your car?”

“Yeah. The County gave it to me to use for business.”

“Aw man….” He shook his head and laughed. “I was sure it was a narc driving that car. I haven’t smoked in weeks ‘cuz I didn’t know who drove that car. I’ve been going crazy.”

I hadn’t really noticed that he’d stopped his nightly al fresco jaybird, but I did notice the smell was back the very night of the day of our conversation.

So, Mr. Delgadillo, I offer my story as the beginning of your cover story. The Mrs. wasn’t driving the Yukon for her convenience. Oh no. It was a drug prevention thing. She’d heard there were a bunch of people smoking pot … er, crack, yeah, that’s the ticket…and she realized they’d stop if she pulled up in a city car. Why, there had been reports of drug use at … um … hairdressers, nail salons, grocery stores …

*Update:  In an awkward press conference late today, Delgadillo admitted he let his wife drive the city-owned Yukon, and that she was the one who crashed it. He went the full apology route.

After avoiding reporters for more than a week, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo on Monday accepted responsibility by repaying the city for repairs for a 2004 accident in which his wife crashed his city-issued GMC Yukon into a pole.

Delgadillo said he issued a check Monday to the city to pay for the $1,222 repair bill, which was initially completed at taxpayer expense.”

I’m saddened that my wife’s life has become a public issue,” Delgadillo said during a late afternoon news conference at his City Hall office.

“I mishandled the situation, and I apologize,” he said. “Again, I’m sorry and I take full responsibility.”

Delgadillo admitted that he allowed his wife, Michelle, to use the city-owned GMC Yukon “on rare occasions.”

How did the city attorney think he could avoid this outcome?   It’s a fair surmise that his one-week delay in having this press conference entailed a search for Plan B.  What else could he have thought would work to get him out of this jam?

This comment suggests he didn’t think it was any of the public’s business:

“Like any husband, I love my family and I have tried to keep them out of the public eye,” Delgadillo said. “But as an elected official, I am accountable to the public, and I realize that I should have spoken up earlier. That was a mistake.”

Well…we’re certainly on our way to the creation of a political aristocracy, insulated from the consequences of any of their decisions.  The evidence is everywhere.  Perhaps Delgadillo thought he was there already.

Seeing the Real You At Last: Antonio and the Times

It’s striking how the Los Angeles Times has reacted to the demise of Mayor Villaraigosa’s marriage. Its writers and editors seem genuinely shocked, like they’re seeing something about the mayor they had overlooked and now regret their past affection for him.

On Thursday, Steve Lopez literally tore him apart in a column that, if it had been written about President Clinton during the Lewinsky mess, would have earned him a good scolding from MoveOn.Org. The conventional wisdom during that episode was that Clinton’s extramarital dalliance had no connection to his presidential virtues. He erred, but only in his “private life.” But Lopez cut Villaraigosa no slack:

Unless he has had an affair with someone who reports on City Hall, or he otherwise compromised the office of mayor, it probably is none of our business. But Villaraigosa said nothing to dispel the raging rumors, and Corina Villaraigosa filed for divorce the next day, citing irreconcilable differences.

I wouldn’t bet on it, but maybe when it all sinks in, the mayor will wake up and realize it’s time to tame his incorrigible, teenage ways and do at least one job right. The 15-hour days haven’t done us, him or his family any good. He’s spread so thin, all his major goals are unmet.

With a long trail of close friends and supporters who feel Villaraigosa betrayed them to advance his own cause, let’s hope this latest failure, as he calls it, could finally bring the humility he so badly needs.

Today, it’s reporter Duke Helfand’s turn. In a story that relies on anonymous denunciations to a degree I find shocking, Helfand basically depicts the collapse of Villaraigosa’s marriage as evidence of a character flaw that could upend his political career.

The fallout from Villaraigosa’s separation has eroded some of his support.

“I think it removes some of the sheen that I’ve had for him,” said one prominent state leader who has known Villaraigosa and his wife for years but would not be quoted by name for fear of embarrassing them. “You can’t fool the people with a big smile. This is the playground of men in politics.”

Part of Villaraigosa’s problem in the current predicament, many say, arises from past behavior.

He has two adult daughters born out of wedlock, and he publicly acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife in the 1990s. That episode led to an extended separation and alienated for a time many ardent supporters, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who declined to comment for this report.

If, as expected, Villaraigosa runs eventually for governor, he can be sure that reporters and bloggers will scrutinize him in minute detail.

“In these kinds of situations, you can always expect a certain amount of prurient interest about what actually caused the split,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist who ran former Gov. Gray Davis’ 1998 and 2002 campaigns. “But to someone with a high political profile like the mayor, the more telling thing is what comes afterward, in the long run.”

Few in Villaraigosa’s inner circle would speak on the record about his marital woes. But at least one person who has helped guide some of the mayor’s most important public policies said he had lost enthusiasm for him.

“You’re not as motivated,” said the friend. “You don’t do the extra thing that you used to do before. Everybody is holding their breath to find out what’s next.”

Don’t you love that anonymous source who asks Helfand to withheld his or her name for fear of embarrassing the mayor? Really? You think leaving your name off such a harsh comment makes it less embarrassing to him? I also love Helfand’s aside that Supervisor Gloria Molina would not comment. If he hadn’t thrown that in, most readers would have presumed all the negative anonymous quotes were from her.

This passage also made me laugh:

Other political leaders whose personal failings have made front-page news have emerged with their careers largely intact, or enhanced, even if their behavior cost them political points in the short run.

The list of such cases reads like a Who’s Who of modern American politics: — former President Clinton, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart.

Now let’s run through that list of political leaders again, slowly.

Clinton? He has gone down in history as the only president impeached in the 20th century. Nearly two years of his presidency were consumed by the Lewinsky scandal. His second term was basically a waste. Yes, he remained popular, but he lost so much time, and that will permanently affect how history views him.

Gingrich? He never got out from under the reputation of being a guy who asked for a divorce so he could be with a younger woman while his wife was in a hospital with cancer.

Hart? How old is Helfand? His extramarital affair destroyed his campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination — a campaign in which he had been an early front-runner.

Guiliani is the only politician Helfand mentions who seems to have survived his scandalous behavior — so far. It remains an open question whether the Republican party’s Bible-belt faction will give him a pass.

I don’t think Villaraigosa wants to be in the company of these men.

A former LA Times reporter, Mona Gable, added more fuel to the fire in Huffington Post. In a blog post, she pleads with Hillary Clinton to “dump Antonio” from her presidential campaign.

(A)s anyone who’s lived in LA for 15 minutes knows, Antonio isn’t very popular around here these days. He’s not all that great a mayor. He couldn’t get his school reform bill through giving him power over LAUSD, even though he had several buddies in Sacramento carrying his water. The notorious May Day melee where the LAPD was caught beating up immigrants occurred on his watch. He acted like LA had the Olympics in the bag–then when it didn’t come through, pouted like a two-year-old.

For that matter he isn’t very nice to waiters either.

Hillary is under the illusion that she’s getting a rising political star–a future governor of California! But she might want to do some old-fashioned reporting. Antonio isn’t much liked even among LA’s Latino political elite. He burned a lot of bridges in his relentless quest to become mayor.

And now we have the split from his wife Corina over an alleged affair. Ah, me. When Antonio was Assembly Speaker, I covered him for a brief time in Sacramento. You could hardly walk down a Capitol hallway without hearing titters about his philandering. So when the mayor’s office issued a press release last week announcing the breakup with his wife, it was hardly earth shattering.
And that’s where Antonio should have left it: with a nice dignified press release. But no. He had to hold a press conference, he had to bring in the cameras. He loves the cameras. And he had to trot out two daughters from previous relationships to stand beside him.

This was the most cynical of posturing. Was this supposed to convey what a great dad he is since his two kids with Corina were nowhere in sight?
Naturally reporters thought they had been summoned to ask questions about the end of the mayor’s marriage. Or some such craziness. But Antonio refused to answer any. He refused to say if an affair had led to the split and asked for “privacy” for his family.

So why the press conference? Was it because he knew that the very next day Corina was filing for divorce? Or is there some other scandal?

Hillary, do yourself a favor if you want to win California: dump Antonio.

So much has changed.

When Antonio Villaraigosa ran for mayor the first time, in 2001, the Times‘ yearning for his victory was palpable. When James Hahn used a negative (but true) campaign ad to beat Villaraigosa, the Times and other local media were outraged. Hahn was treated by the LA Times almost as if he was illegitimate — a pretender to the throne. At the time, I joked that Times reporters and editors were like fanboy teenagers with pin-ups of Villaraigosa in their bedrooms. It was so obvious. Antonio could do no wrong, Hahn could do nothing right. In perhaps its final kingmaking performance, the Times put everything it had on ensuring Hahn could not be re-elected, and that Antonio would replace him.

I never thought the Times would turn on Antonio so sharply. Okay, some of it is performance related. Villaraigosa has squandered his mandate mostly through political bumbling, and the Times, to its credit, has not shied away from calling him on it. But most of those stories expressed a certain optimism that he could turn things around.

Surprisingly, it is the marital separation that seems to have pushed the Times over the edge.

All of its stories allude to “swirling” rumors of an affair. That might be the clue. Not the fact of Antonio having an affair — that’s almost always a factor in a marriage’s demise. But the new woman’s identity, perhaps, or something else about the manner of his dalliance — maybe the Times knows something it can’t run with yet, something stomach-churning. And career-threatening.

Thoughts on Downtown Growth and Traffic

As of this writing L.A.’s mayor and council continue to negotiate over whether to allow the city to sell “air rights” over the Convention Center to developers to “further downtown’s residential boom” by allowing taller residential projects than the zoning code currently allows.

This is quintessential “smart growth” as it is has been defined over the past 15 years in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan centers.  Because downtown isn’t the Westside or the San Fernando Valley, this particular smart growth initiative has blossomed in ways that others have not.  There are no homeowner groups eyeballing these new downtown projects from the competing philosophical perspective that growth is growth and growth is bad. 

One of the biggest assumptions behind the downtown residential boom is that these new people won’t use their cars as much.  Could be, although the parking situation downtown is a far cry from Manhattan’s.  In Manhattan and a few other urban centers with lots of residents, owning a car is a costly nuisance.  Urban planners in Los Angeles and elsewhere evidently hope this will eventually become the case in cities all over the country.  

This scenario is hard for me to imagine, I must admit.  Sure, there are lots of jobs downtown, but there are a lot more jobs not downtown.  Will every couple moving into one of these new downtown digs want to confine themselves to both working downtown in perpetuity?  Unlikely.  If a better gig opens up in Burbank or Santa Monica, then they just become another traffic-clogging commuter.   If their downtown employer subsidizes parking, isn’t it likely a downtown dweller would take advantage of it just the same way a commuter from Temecula would? 

Downtown is a lot cooler than it was, and in theory LA Live will make it cooler still.  But not cool enough to stay their all the time.  When I lived in New Jersey and drove into Manhattan to visit my carless friends, I don’t know who they were happier to see:  Me or my car.  My car meant they could catch up on their grocery shopping…or go to Connecticut to smell clean air and see real trees.

The expansion of residential options by building housing downtown is a fine justification for it.  L.A. has a housing shortage, and if downtown is where the homeowner-group-afflicted political system will tolerate new housing, then downtown is where it should go.  But beyond that, I don’t think policymakers should hope for much else to change.  Traffic congestion in Los Angeles is still awaiting a solution.

These thoughts are prompted by a new treatise in this month’s Reason, just posted online, whose title tells you what the writers, Sam Staley and Ted Balaker, think about city planners: “How Traffic Jams are Made in City Hall.”  The specific cases they discuss are in Minneapolis and Atlanta, but there are lots of correspondences with L.A.  The whole thing is worth reading, assuming you don’t get too upset when received wisdom is challenged.  An excerpt:

In 2005 the Urban Transportation Monitor, a biweekly industry newsletter, surveyed more than 600 transportation professionals to find out their thoughts on traffic congestion. About 19 percent responded. Of those, 45 percent thought the profession was “doing all it can do” to stop congestion. Half thought congestion was the result of too many people using their cars, and 45 percent attributed it primarily to the desire to live in low-density suburbs.

The preferred solutions were predictable: 51 percent thought mass transit should be improved or expanded, and 50 percent thought the government should manage demand better by getting people to telecommute or carpool. Only 29 percent believed increased highway capacity could be a cost-effective way to reduce congestion significantly. (The survey did not ask whether new capacity should be provided if it were privately funded.)

Many believed the problem is simply too many cars. Fifty-one percent said one of “the main reasons for the high level of congestion in many metropolitan areas” is the desire “of many to use cars for all their trips.” Indeed, of the 11 options offered by the survey, that was the biggest vote getter. For traffic engineers, planners, and other transportation professionals, the solution to traffic jam is to keep us from using our automobiles.

The planning profession clings tenaciously to its foundational myths. Even as overwhelming evidence to the contrary piles up, planners keep claiming that cars are inefficient and socially destructive; that expanding road capacity isn’t practical; and, most fundamentally, that the government can determine how we choose to travel by planning where and how we live.

That last assumption is the logical conclusion of a rather sophisticated (if largely incorrect) way of looking at human behavior. It’s rooted in a common-sense observation: How we live influences how we travel. If we live on a farm, we are going to travel by car. Buses simply don’t go out to farms to pick people up and take them into town for work or to buy groceries. Trains don’t either. A neighbor might, but she would probably be driving a car and doing this as a service because you don’t have a car. School buses are the exception that proves the rule. They pick up a large number of kids, but only because they’re being delivered to one destination, the school building.

The flip side is the experience of the Manhattanite. If someone lives in the densest neighborhood of an American city, cars are costly, frustrating, and inefficient. Most Manhattan residents can get to their destination far more efficiently using the subway, taking a bus, or walking. Because parking is so costly, they also can get around fairly efficiently using taxis.

So people in dense urban areas have more choices, and personal automobiles are inefficient ways to get around town. Congestion, in fact, leads people to use alternative modes of transportation. Many regional planners, like those in Atlanta, conclude that the way a region develops dictates how people are likely to travel and what transportation strategies are most feasible. And the way to influence development patterns, they believe, is to carefully plan where and how much to invest in the transportation system. But proximity to work is only one of many factors people consider when finding a home; other criteria, such as price, neighborhood safety, and proximity to good schools, are often deemed more important than living close to the office.

Of course, Atlanta is not Manhattan. In fact, it’s virtually the opposite. At 1,783 people per square mile, Atlanta is the poster child for low-density residential development. The New York metropolitan area is three times as dense, with 5,309 people per square mile. Manhattan’s density is even higher: more than 50,000 people per square mile.

According to the Atlanta commission, “Land use is an important determinant of how people choose to travel. No other variable impacts [mobility] to a greater extent. The Regional Development Plan policies help shape future growth and protect existing stable areas by encouraging appropriate land use, transportation, and environmental decisions.”

To say this is an exaggeration would be charitable. While land use can influence travel behavior in small and crude ways, to claim that it is the biggest factor distorts the mainstream research on the subject. A 2004 study sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) cautioned against the tendency to “overemphasize vertically mixed uses such as ground-floor retail and upper-level residential.” In particular, it noted that “outside of dense urban locations, building mixed-use products in today’s marketplace can be a complex and risky proposition; few believe that being near a train station fundamentally changes this market reality.”

This isn’t to say that these developments can’t generate more transit riders. The FTA study found that those living near rail stations were five to six times more likely to commute using transit than other residents. While those seem like dramatic effects, the majority of commuters near transit stations (often two-thirds or more) still use cars to get to work. Moreover, many of the people living in these transit areas were transit users already. They just moved so they could be closer to transit.

Put differently, if 5 percent of a region commutes using transit-about the national average-then 25 or 30 percent of those living in a transit-oriented development will commute using transit. This is consistent with case studies of transit use in San Francisco and Chicago. (Incidentally, those results invariably come from studies of predominantly heavy rail commuter systems, such as subways. Light rail and buses are more fashionable in planning circles these days, but they’re also slower and carry fewer riders.)

To get such high use rates, densities have to be very high. The traditional American home with a private yard doesn’t fit this model. The typical new house in the United States is built on about one-fifth of an acre. A study in San Francisco found that doubling densities from 10 units per acre to 20 units per acre would increase transit’s commute share from 20 percent to 24 percent.

In short, even cramming four times more people into the typical U.S. subdivision of 4-5 units per acre would produce only a modest uptick in transit use. And it isn’t an uptick for the region. It’s an uptick for the neighborhood-those living within a quarter mile of a transit stop. There is virtually no effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the transit stop, regardless of density.

At these densities, Americans would literally have to give up any hope of having a decent-sized yard and most would have to live in townhouses. The land use pattern would have to fundamentally change, resembling the landscape more common in the carless 19th century than in the highly mobile and adaptable 21st century.

Forget, at least for the moment, whether the government should effect such a sweeping change. It almost certainly can’t. In a forthcoming report, Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine) and Randal O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute examine data from the National Personal Transportation Survey and find that doubling an urban area’s density would, at most, reduce the total number of car trips by 10 percent to 20 percent. No U.S. urban area has managed to double its density or to reduce car travel by such magnitudes.

The LA Times Goes Tut-Tut-Tut*

Oh, give me a break, Christopher Hawthorne!

What would a wireless Los Angeles look like?

In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.

A more likely effect, frankly, is a noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens. And given the sort of Angelenos who are most obsessed with being always connected, wireless access might fall far short of creating a new kind of social interaction or a revamped notion of communal space in the city. Ultimately, it might do little more than let a thousand PowerPoint presentations bloom in the open air.

The only thing worse than a religious scold is a secular one.

I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop right now, a Starbucks in Rolling Hills Estates.  I’ve visited every Starbucks in the South Bay and San Pedro, and quite a few in LA, including one in Little Tokyo where I waited for the jury, but this one is the most convenient, the biggest and equipped with the most electrical outlets.   Lately I’ve been working at home more, but this environment is almost as cozy.  I talk to people all the time  — brief conversations to be sure, but occasionally more.  I also run into people here, including friends and relatives of my wife and son.  I’ve arranged to meet people — “I’ll be working, you’ll see me, come whenever” — including my mother.

At any given point in the day, I might be the only wi-fi guy, or one of a dozen.  When I used to park here for entire days, I’d note cycles of activity:  Young Moms with their pramfuls of baby in the mornings, ladies taking a break from shopping at mid-day, realtors searching the listings, salespeople doing deals, day-traders, high school kids after 2 (they seem to prefer the noisy frozen blended drinks — so no phone calls then) madly flirting and flopping their skinny bodies on the cushiony seats six to a chair, and the friendly baristas taking their cigarette breaks at the outdoor tables.  I’ve overheard conversations in Spanish, Mandarin, various Arabic dialects, Japanese, Farsi and our native tongue down here, surfer-ese, which of late has taken on some hip-hop overtones. 

I love the idea that I could go almost anywhere in LA, open my laptop and rejoin the blogosphere, and/or do my work.  It completely opens up the day.  How many social and cultural engagements do we avoid because we think we’ll be on the road for too much of the day, out of touch from work?  In wi-fi LA, your life becomes more flexible.  If you know you could, say go to LACMA for an hour at lunch, then stop off somewhere nearby to see if you’ve missed any e-mails from your clients rather than waiting an additional hour to get through the traffic, you’re more likely to go to LACMA, no?  So what if we are “packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens….”  At least we’re out and about. The possibility of connection is immeasurably increased.

I don’t get what Mr. Hawthorne thinks we did before wi-fi.  Certainly, the length of the average stay at wi-fi enabled cafes was a lot shorter; and we probably did a lot more drive-through.  Very few of us have the social skills required to have a personal adventure in a coffee shop every day, or the time, unless we have another reason for being there — our work.   You will see much more use of public spaces — isn’t that a good thing? 

No, nothing’s good enough for the reflexive “if they’re enjoying it, there must be something wrong with it” mindset.  To ensure we all feel good and chastened, Hawthorne throws Mayor Villaraigosa’s ”digital divide” rhetoric in his face.

But free wireless service doesn’t mean a whole lot if you can’t afford a laptop. And the structure of the plans that have been taking shape in other cities suggests that ours may not match the populism of the press-conference talking points. The service in Houston may cost as much as $21.95 per month (with possible discounts for low-income residents). San Francisco may offer parallel services, a subscription plan from EarthLink and a slower, free alternative from Google loaded with targeted advertising.

That sounds quite a bit like the digital equivalent of a highway system split between private toll roads and sluggish public freeways. And it raises the question of how precisely to measure civic progress as nearly every corner of city life undergoes commercialization. If you put a drinking fountain on every corner but allow a private company to charge for each sip, even if it’s only a few pennies, can you really make a case that you’re improving access to clean water?

Actually, I think you can easily make that case.

In that sense, what rings most hollow is the claim from the mayor and his allies that universal wireless is designed primarily to help the city’s electronic have-nots. If that’s the goal, why not take full advantage of the fact that L.A. owns its utility poles, turn this into a wholly public project and make access universal and free? The answer, of course, is that cities feel they can’t manage even a moderately ambitious initiative these days without the capital and marketing muscle the private sector can provide.

Strike the words “these days” from his last sentence, and take away the negative connotation from what is, in fact, a rational awareness of government’s limits.  Even the most liberal mayors and governors realized about 20 years ago that the public sector is unable to compete with the private sector, especially when the private market for a good or service is already well-established.  Where does Hawthorne think the cliche “reinventing the wheel” came from? If the point of Villaraigosa’s wi-fi plan is to deliver wi-fi to as many people as inexpensively as possible, of course the city should tap the wi-fi industry!  It shows great common sense! Does that mean the contractor gets to make some money?  Yes!  Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

What moral nannies like Hawthorne should focus on is the city’s procurement process. Who is going to get these contracts and by what process?  How can we avoid the “two shades of blue lights on the Vincent Thomas Bridge” effect?  (The result of a lobbyist-brokered compromise to allow two firms to get the lighting business, resulting in the lights on the span being a slightly different shade of blue than the lights on the towers.)  Granted, Hawthorne might not have the opportunity to opine on the Decline of the West, but it’s the details of this project – the marriage of the public and private sector — where you need to be focused.  

*Edited slightly, 3/12/07

Bob Hattoy, R.I.P.

Bob Hattoy was a grand human being.  

He is one of the handful of people who educated me about the environment when Mayor Bradley appointed me as his deputy for environmental issues despite my minimal experience with the issue.  This was in 1987, at the cusp of a period of environmental progress that I was fortunate enough to participate in.  He helped me, even though he was allied with Bradley’s rival at the time, then-Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. He was naturally generous.

Bob was sort of the Robin Williams of the environmental movement — outrageous, lightening-quick, hilarious.  As with any activist movement, some environmentalists are irony-challenged.  Not Bob.  He knew what the other side would say, and he was already making fun of it, simultaneously making fun of himself and all of us.  He came out of politics, and he was a good exponent of the “don’t believe your own press releases” maxim.  He worked hard and passionately, but wore his burdens lightly.  His humor was never cutting, cheap or mean.  It was always apparent he cared about people. Not people in the abstract.  People in the room. People in his life.

In the LA Times obituary, Elaine Woo describes how Bob’s irreverence got him in trouble with President Clinton on the issue of gays in the military:

He told that newspaper in March 1993 that he “almost started to cry” when he heard Clinton say at a news conference that he would consider limiting the assignments of gay soldiers. Such a move, Hattoy said, would be akin to “restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers” in civilian life.

By the next year, he was reassigned to the post of White House liaison on environmental matters at the Interior Department, where administration officials thought he would be less likely to be consulted about issues affecting gays and lesbians.

Of course, it was Bill Clinton who made Bob famous when he invited him to address the 1992 Democratic Convention about AIDS.  After mischeviously thanking ”Aretha and God” in that order, Bob mesmerized the crowd and the TV audience, delivering this speech, proving he could be intensely serious when the occasion called for it.  Here is a piece of it, but the whole thing is at the link and deserves your time.

We need a President who will take action, a President strong enough to take on the insurance companies that drop people with the HIV virus, a President courageous enough to take on the drug companies who drive AIDS patients into poverty and deny them lifesaving medicine. And we need a President who isn’t terrified of the word “condom.” (Applause)

Every single person with AIDS is someone worthy of caring for. After all, we are your sons and daughters, fathers and mothers. We are doctors and lawyers, folks in the military, ministers and priests and rabbis. We are Democrats, and yes, Mr. President, Republicans. We are part of the American family and, Mr. President, your family has AIDS and we’re dying and you’re doing nothing about it. (Applause)

Listen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live in an America where the President sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease, but not because of politics.

I was so fortunate to see Bob for what turned out to be the last time at a beautiful outdoor wedding of a mutual friend last fall.  He was the same guy, funny, sweet, extremely gracious to my wife, hungry for political gossip.  He looked positively vigorous.  But he told me that he veered from good health to bad, and wasn’t always so robust. Things could change quickly.

According to the Times, he moved to Sacramento in January, perhaps to facilitate his service as chairman of the Fish and Game Commission, where he had served since 2002.  He died last weekend from complications of his disease.  I owe Bob a lot, and I’m going to miss him. 

Whose “Agenda?” Who’s “Agenda-driven?”*

For the third time in 10 days, I’m going to mention Jill Stewart, having blogged 11 months without mentioning her once! It’s purely coincidental that the first two mentions came only days before she was appointed local news editor of the LA Weekly. I must have sniffed it out in the ether.

Actually, it was David Zahniser’s recent reporting at the Weekly that reminded me of Jill. His piece on the local government’s questionable handling of Miguel Contreras’ death was the kind of story the Weekly used to spike, but that Jill would’ve run with during her years at New Times LA. And then her name came up in Harold Meyerson’s parting blast at the Weekly, inspired by his disgust at Zahniser’s story. To argue that his beloved progressive LA Weekly was dead, Meyerson made connections among the Contreras story, the Weekly’s new ownership (the former publishers of New Times LA, which bought the Weekly’s parent company and appropriated its name, Village Voice Media), and his recollections of Stewart, who was the alternative to the alternative media during the height of the Weekly’s progressive era.

Like some others, I have been struck by the words used in various reports on Jill Stewart’s hiring — words like “ideological” and “agenda-driven,” which Kevin Roderick used in LA Observed. The syntax of these citations makes it unclear whether Roderick was airing his personal opinion, or taking the temperature of the LA journalistic/political world. There’s no question that’s what a lot of people say about her. You might think I’m being disingenuous, but I am baffled by it, in the same way I was baffled by the negative reaction to Zahniser’s journalism.

What has always made Jill Stewart stand out to me — going back to when I first met her as an LA Times reporter — was her lack of an agenda. Yes, Jill Stewart had a distinct temperament — part populist firebrand, part smirking brat — that comes out in her writing. But there is no political movement or philosophy that she’s so attached to that she would shade her reporting to suit it. That’s more than you can say about her critics.

Los Angeles has many “agenda-driven” reporters and publications. Harold Meyerson’s LA Weekly was openly so, as he acknowledged repeatedly in the few weeks’ trip down Memory Lane. The Daily News has a distinct agenda — to demonstrate how the San Fernando Valley is getting screwed over by the “out-of-touch downtown interests.”

The Los Angeles Times is widely accused of having a standard-issue “liberal” agenda — to the right of the Weekly, but still left-of-center.  But its agenda goes deeper than that.  It’s local news coverage is so inconsistent, and the choices of what it decides to cover and what it decides to ignore arouse suspicions of agendas that are more like personal vendettas.  Over the years, readers have detected a kind of poster-boy favoritism toward certain political figures (Tom Bradley in the 70s, Gloria Molina, Antonio Villraigosa, to name a few), and knives out for others (Tom Bradley in the 80s, Richard Alatorre, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Hahn), based on criteria that seem to mix the political with the personal.

I remember having an argument with a Times reporter about a situation where political rivals Molina and Alatorre both tried some fishy tactics to steer lucrative contracts to their respective allies. The Times was selective in their outrage, deciding that Alatorre’s hardball was news but Molina’s was not.  They had settled on that storyline before the fracas started, and made it clear to me (we represented a client in the Alatorre mix) that no facts that disrupted that storyline would be published–using the airy, dismissive, “We don’t think it’s news.”

On and on it goes. I’m sure people closer to the entertainment industry see agendas in what Variety and the Hollywood Reporter choose to cover. The Times’ sports columnist Bill Plaschke went on an all-out campaign in 2005 to discredit the former Dodgers’ GM Paul DePodesta, leading directly to his unexpected firing. In Los Angeles, agenda-driven reporting is the rule, not the exception.

So why is Jill Stewart called out?

Her most famous journalistic accomplishment was her work in the 1990s focusing on the Los Angeles Unified School District. Alone among reporters in Los Angeles, Stewart refused to buy into the political consensus that the poor scholastic performance of LAUSD’s students was due to factors beyond the school board’s control. For at least a decade as LA’s schools declined, the conventional wisdom was LAUSD problems were all due to overcrowding and low teacher salaries, and that those problems could not be solved unless Proposition 13 was overturned, allowing the necessary taxes to be raised. The political community clearly hoped that at some point, the awfulness of LAUSD would cause an uprising against the tax-limiting measure — so they didn’t do much about it.

Blaming LAUSD’s problems on Proposition 13 was, at best, an incomplete diagnosis. Stewart shined the light on other factors that were more responsible — like the strict, inpenetrable labor rules that made it almost impossible to fire teachers and principals who weren’t merely incompetent, but who refused to do their jobs. She took on a major sacred cow, bilingual education, and shared with readers the objective studies that demonstrated the failure of this once idealistic concept — as well as the heartbreaking and often absurd anecdotal experiences of parents that made one’s blood boil.

Going just from memory, I recall reading Jill Stewart stories about Hispanic parents who were begging to have their children released from bilingual classes, to no avail. She — alone — reported that the larger the bilingual population, the more money went into LAUSD coffers and individual teachers’ paychecks. This conflict of interest, and the tragic consequences for thousands of students whose parents wanted them to learn in English, was never reported by the LA Times, the LA Weekly or the Daily News until long after Stewart had established the facts — if then.   To “progressives,” any information that undermined bilingual education was racist, and any information that made the education unions look bad was “anti-worker.”  LA’s press corps was afraid to cross these invisible lines — except for Stewart.

Which strikes you as more “agenda-driven?”  Reporting the facts about these things, or suppressing the facts? Would you rather have an education reporter who starts from the premise that the mission of the schools is to provide the best possible education for its students, and focuses on stories of how the system fails to meet this goal? Or a press corps that pretends to do that while sweeping problems under the rug because of the possible political fallout?

I don’t think Jill Stewart’s education reporting was driven by any particular ideology. Her stuff was refreshing because it was simply about what’s working and what’s not working, and if it’s not working, why not … and then to follow the story wherever it took her. She ended up on the wrong side of the education unions and the political defenders of bilingual ed — that was how the cookie crumbled. She didn’t start out from an anti-union position. But the rest of the press corps, and especially the Weekly, started every story from a pro-union, or a leave-the-unions-out-of-this, stance.

The mindset on education in Los Angeles has changed in the past 15 years. The city’s power elite used to be shockingly complacent about the decline in education. After all, they could afford to send their kids to private school, or could afford to live in San Marino, Palos Verdes or Beverly Hills — while working “productively” with the labor leaders who benefited from the status quo.

Stewart’s reporting contributed to a dramatic change in that mindset. Reformers from Dick Riordan to Eli Broad to Antonio Villaraigosa have been inspired — perhaps without even knowing it or wanting to admit it — by what Stewart uncovered. The education unions, while still incredibly powerful, are viewed by the press corps more skeptically. Mayor Villaraigosa’s efforts to assert city control over the school system were portrayed in the media as a “battle” with the education unions — and the unions were not portrayed in these stories favorably. That narrative would have been unimaginable without Stewart’s reporting in the 90s.

They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Los Angeles frequently rewrites that cliche: It is the land of the willfully blind. And the one-eyed man is “agenda-driven.”

I don’t envy Jill. When you’re in her position, if you make any mistakes, foes will pounce. I respect Parke Skelton. In one of the letters to LA Observed, he accuses her of sloppy reporting on a story that involved him directly. Naturally, I’m not in a position to know what happened, but he’s generally credible. As it happens, his campaign firm almost exclusively represents progressive candidates. It is understandable he would draw the inference that her alleged mistake was ideological. Just as it is understandable that every time the New York Times or CBS News makes a mistake, conservatives think it’s ideological.

But no one’s perfect, least of all reporters. They take snippets of reality and (sometimes) disguised spin and try to tell a story that will enlighten and divert their readers. If they make a career out of reporting or commenting, they write tens of thousands of words and dozens of stories every year — and will sometimes get things wrong. Jill and her reporters now are on the firing line more than most. They will produce stories that make highly regarded, powerful people unhappy. In retaliation or in an effort to exonerate themselves, the targets will look for errors and occasionally find them.

You might be tempted to join the outraged brigade. It will feel … so right-on … to be in line with the cool people who can hand out jobs, contracts and other emoluments.

If that ever describes you, just stop for a second and think. Where would LAUSD be now, if not for Jill’s daring break with the conventional wisdom? You’ll never get the establishment in Los Angeles to admit it, but she is one of their most valued sources of information. She deserves the benefit of the doubt. And she deserves to be read.

*(Copy-edited, 11/5/06)

On the LA Weekly, David Zahniser and the Progressive Movement

Over on LA Observed, you have probably been following a dramatic series of developments involving the LA Weekly: Harold Myerson’s departure as political columnist and cheerleader for the local labor organizations, David Zahniser’s cover story this week about the circumstances surrounding the untimely 2005 death of LA labor chief Miguel Contreras, and the way in which LA’s progressive community, including Myerson himself, views both events through the lens of how the Weekly’s new ownership has betrayed the paper’s past role in progressive movements.

Well, in all your clicking, don’t miss the series of posts in the LA Observed “We Get Email” section concerning this matter. The last note, from Larry Kaplan, makes the most crucial point about Zahniser’s scoop that all the “whither the Weekly” eulogies ignore:

…I think the crux of the story is the way Contreras’ death was handled by the coroner, the cops and the bigwigs who showed up at the hospital that day.

The story should NOT be where Contreras was and what he was doing when he died, and perhaps the critique of the Weekly story is that it did not make that clear enough.

Exactly.

David Zahniser is what this city hasn’t had for a long time: A government watchdog. His City Hall coverage at the Daily Breeze always had two things most of his competitors’ coverage did not — depth and style. In the face of generations of local news editors who alternately viewed LA’s municipal government as a morality play or a boring backwater, Zahniser actually found things out, and could turn them into interesting stories.  He writes stories that serve nobody’s interests but the readers’.

Zahniser’s accomplishments merited attention because, unlike the Times and to a lesser extent the Daily News, nobody in their right mind would strategically leak a story to any reporter for the almost unread Breeze. When I read an exclusive story in the LA Times, I can almost always guess who served it up it to them. That’s the advantage of being a reporter for the biggest daily in town. You don’t have to dig for stories, the stories dig for you. A Times reporter can be very lazy, and still look good to their editors.

Zahniser’s brought his talent to the Weekly, and now has a bigger stage on which to perform. The stakes are higher. As Kaplan points out, he or his editors might have erred in emphasizing the first half of the story, the tawdry death scene, rather than the second half of the story, the fervent efforts by high officials allegedly to cover it up by blocking an autopsy.

Normally, if a 52-year-old man dies in a store like the botanica where Contreras died, that would be considered an unusual death. Leaving aside the fact that the locale was later determined by police to house prostitutes, even the ostensible product, herbal remedies, would raise red flags. Whatever you think of the benefits of herbal medicine, some of the remedies in that category are, in fact, powerful chemical agents that are not regulated as drugs. If for no other reason than to protect public health, an autopsy should have been done. Public officials allegedly put pressure on hospital officials to ensure an autopsy was not done, for the sake of Contreras’ reputation and legacy. Folks, that’s a story.  There is a long history in Los Angeles of political interference in the County Coroner’s performance of his duties; of autopsy findings being buried, changed, leaked or otherwise abused by people in power to guard the private interests of the living and the dead.

The progressive community sees Zahniser’s article as a watershed. The old, progressive LA Weekly would not have published Zahniser’s story, Myerson basically asserts. Occidental College professor Peter Drier articulates the left’s rage in an email sent around the progressive community and published by LA Observed:

The article is irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value. It is difficult to understand why the paper published this crude story — and put in on the cover, no less — except to sell newspapers and/or to lend support to those who wish to harm LA’s progressive labor movement. Miguel and his family, who are still mourning his death, deserve better than this cheap hit. They will survive this crude piece of gutter journalism. They, and his many friends and allies, know that Miguel’s life as a warrior for justice, was his real legacy and his gift to us.

(snip)

The loss of the LA Weekly as a progressive voice is a tragedy. When we organized the Progressive LA conference at Occidental College in October 1998, the Weekly was one of its cosponsors, featured it on its cover, and published several stories in the September 30, 1998 issue about the past, current, and future of progressive politics in LA: link and link. This reflected the Weekly’s view of itself at the time as a watchdog and as an instrument for change. On politics, culture, and other matters, the LA Weekly has helped give voice to those forces who might otherwise be shut out of the public debate. It has reported on the people and organizations — unions, community groups, environmentalists, women’s rights and gay rights groups, immigrant rights activists, school reformers, fair trade advocates, living wage crusaders, and ordinary folks trying to cope with life in this diverse and sprawling city — who’ve been on the front lines of the struggles for social and economic justice.

(snip)

But how do we hold the new LA Weekly accountable? Outraged by this week’s cover story, some folks floated the idea of organizing a boycott against the Weekly. But how can you organize a boycott against a newspaper that is distributed for free? And how can you put pressure on its advertisers when its ad pages are dominated by penis enlargement ads, breast augmentation ads, and dating services?

The fear, which Myerson articulates too, is that the Weekly will become a muckraking journal that splatters muck on progressives, not just their enemies. Myerson cites Jill Stewart, the iconoclastic writer for the defunct New Times LA (whose owners now control the Weekly) as the kind of journalistic example he fears will take over the Weekly. Stewart enraged many at City Hall because her investigations and commentary evinced deep disillusionment with the left’s hypocrisy. She was tough on leaders like Jackie Goldberg, to whom LA’s left is devoted. And her writing was juicy and irresistable, so her scoops got attention. Back then and today, I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of Jill Stewart. And I’m a fan of David Zahniser (which is not to say he’s similar to Stewart — it was Myerson who made that leap).

Far be it from me to challenge Myerson and Drier on what’s good for the progressive movement — they work in it every day, and I don’t. But my opinion is, they’re wrong about the kind of journalism that helps those “who’ve been on the front lines of social and economic justice.” The news should not be ideological. It should not be afraid to hit hard at hypocrisy and double-dealing on the part of progressive icons.

Going back to the 1920s, there is an unfortunate history of socialist journalism, or journalism by socialists, that turned out to be propaganda, concocted to mask failure, corruption, even atrocities. Today’s progressives should want to take pains to disassociate their movement from such unethical and ultimately self-defeating reportage; to demonstrate that unlike the left-wing of the past, they are not afraid of the truth because their ideas have value quite apart from the flawed mortals who advocate them.

And let’s face it: the good-ol’ LA Weekly that Myerson and Drier could depend on as an ally and publicist was also funded by ads for plastic surgery, tanning salons, massage parlors and escort services. What does that suggest? That most Weekly readers, then as now, skipped over the political content to read the movie and nightclub listings, and were more interested in dancing than demonstrations. The Weekly could be edited by William F. Buckley and probably make the same profit if Buckley were willing to accept such advertising.

The left is not entitled to the news columns of the LA Weekly by divine right. But if the left can help scrupulous reporters like Zahniser find powerful stories to illustrate the need for their brand of politics, their presentation in a more balanced setting will give them greater credibility. In this era of nakedly partisan journalism and blogs, it is too often forgotten that most of us read journalism for stories, not political instruction. We can come to political conclusions on our own.

See You in 2089

A child is born today in Los Angeles.  Let’s say this is a very fortunate child in terms of health, although not very adventurous.  He or she resides in the same house their entire lifetime, which lasts 90+ years.  That house is also in Los Angeles.

As the child’s mother brings her baby home from the hospital, she trips on a little crack in the sidewalk, almost dropping the baby.

She places her child in the bassinette, and makes an angry call to the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services to complain about the sidewalk.

According to this article, by the time the sidewalk is fixed, that child could be 83 years old.

When I worked in City Hall, I was told by one of the staff that the street-tree maintenance cycle was 17 years.  “Boy, that’s a long time,” I said.  I guess I was spoiled.

“The Yuppies and the Junkies Can Have It.”

While watching the Mets beat the Dodgers’ brains in, I checked out a few of the blogs on my blogroll that I hadn’t read in awhile. On the San Pedro-based group blog “Life on the Edge,” the most recent entry is a terribly sad tale that suggests the latest efforts to revive the beautiful but unsettled village overlooking LA Harbor are falling short.

The author is an artist named Marshall Astor, whose nom du blog is “Calamari.” Astor announces that he won’t be posting much on the site for awhile, in part because “I don’t really feel like writing about Pedro at the moment.” The post explains why. To sum it up, Astor ran the Walled City Gallery in downtown San Pedro until closing it in August. (He also has a position at Angels Gate Cultural Center.) Astor had a good rent on the space, so he decided to retool it as studio space for himself and two other artists.

At about the same time we began to transition the space from a gallery to a working studio, I got some new neighbors in my building. The illegal live work, sublet that was a bit of an irritation became at first a hassle and then later, a crisis. I had been speaking with my landlord for half a year about the issue with the sublet next door, and for half a year, he claimed that he was going to evict the tenants. No eviction took place, and in August, more people started living next door, most notably a couple that engaged in on and off, 24 hour a day domestic violence. It was soon obvious that everybody next door was using methamphetamine, and by the beginning of September it had become obvious from the amount of in and out traffic at both the front door and the alley entrance that the place had become a major drug den.

By the beginning of September, it had become impossible to use the backyard, as there was either constantly a semi/non-operational vehicle parked in my half of the yard, or just piles of new and mysterious junk had been dumped on my side. The lock on the back gate was changed. Lumber and paint started disappearing when I would leave it outside. So many people were now living/crashing/hanging out/getting loaded/buying drugs at the space that I didn’t even know who to blame or talk to. When I did manage to bring it up to anyone, it was a non-productive conversation with a doped up, out of it, loser.

The landlord promised to evict the tenants, but never started the process. In the meantime, the building was sold. The new landlord told Astor he would evict the tenants and wanted him to stay — at a significant rent increase. Astor stresses that the rent hike was fair and in keeping with the market, but he wasn’t interested in paying that much. He decided to stay until December 15, and began slowly to move his belongings out. However, he didn’t move quickly enough:

Edith (one of his studio-mates) had arrived at the studio, found the back door wide open. I immediately directed her to the dusty silhouette where my laptop had been before some tweaked out, low life had made off with it. Every box, container or package in the building had been opened and searched, for what, I do not know. My talles was strewn across my desk, defiled and manhandled, and during the high holy days, no less. The remanents of my father’s coin collection was gone, one of my backpacks was gone, presumably to carry off my belongings in. Edith’s stuff was searched, but nothing taken. Someone had spent a lot of time in my place, making a mess, rifling through my personal business, and otherwise subjecting me and my mates to a disturbing and frustrating violation.

They posted a guard until they could return to the studio to move everything out, and turned in their key.

So I’m out of downtown, and due to the level of gentrification, combined with the general decline in the quality of life downtown (I’ve spoken with a lot of police in the past week, they all have heard or experienced that San Pedro has become a mecca for drug activity and more of a “dumping ground” than usual), I’m not likely to have either a studio, or a gallery there in the future. The yuppies and the junkies can have it.

I’ve lived in LA, and mostly in the South Bay/Harbor area, since the late 60s. All that time, San Pedro has been a town on the verge. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think it’s one of the most beautiful spots in the Los Angeles. Some blame the Port of LA, but I should think having such a vital economic force as a neighbor could only help. Besides, container cranes are kind of interesting to look at. They don’t blight the landscape — they’re just more colors and shapes for the morning and evening sun to illuminate.

Why can’t all the powers-that-be line up to keep this gem safe from becoming a “mecca for drug activity?” What a waste if they let San Pedro’s downtown slide into the kind of chaos from which decent, community-spirited people like Astor have to flee.

(photo credits: “Warner Grand, San Pedro,” by My Life as a Haint, “Downtown San Pedro” by Lyan Zurke)

Urban Politics After the Bubble Pops

I just caught up with Joel Kotkin’s column of 8/27, which has bad news for cities that have spent, rather than hoarded, the spike in real estate tax receipts.  The softening of the real estate market is disproportionately hitting what he calls “high-priced, overhyped urban areas.”

Many of these markets are heavily influenced by speculators, who own as much as one-third of the condos for sale in downtown San Diego and more than four-fifths in Miami. These “flippers” are most likely to unload properties once they see the prospect of declining prices.

Many other big city condo buyers are nonresidents for whom their city apartment constitutes, if not pure speculation, a second or third residence. One New York real estate developer places the percentage of second homes in his buildings as high as 80 percent. Since the 1990s, the number of Manhattan residences serving as second homes has grown as much as threefold. Unlike year-round residents, many with families, this group seems unlikely to stick around to see a sharp reversal of fortunes.

There is simply less substance to the current urban “boom” than meets the eye. Over the past five years, job growth in many cities with the greatest home price inflation — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco — has remained well below the national average. True, there has been a substantial growth in income among the highest end professionals and those who benefit from rising asset prices, but earnings for everyone else have been flat at best. Instead of the real estate tide lifting most boats, it is helping elevate only a few yachts.

The weakening of condominium prices — prices could fall 9 percent this year, Kotkin says – will also leave a lot of developers who committed to “smart growth” downtown projects out of luck.  Were those projects a trend, as it seemed for awhile, or just a fad?  The developers I knew about were more than happy to talk about transit-oriented development, bringing employees closer to their work and reviving urban street life–so long as they could expect $1 million bids for the luxury condos they were building.

Ironically, Kotkin says,

a significant correction in real estate prices — albeit painful for some, including speculators, developers and promoters — could contribute to a reorientation of urban priorities. Lower rents — partly supplied by developers who give up on selling — would provide incentives for middle- and working-class families to remain in the city. It could also allow artists, young professionals and others now being priced out of San Francisco a chance to re-enter the market.   

But is it really true that cities with underfunded pension obligations didn’t shore them up when the getting was good? Who do they think is going to bail them out?  

So what happens to cities once the property boom ends? One immediate effect will be to undermine the fiscal health of these cities, which are so dependent on real estate taxes.

Many cities may rue the day that they failed to address pressing city wage and pension issues when they had the chance. Unfortunately, mayors like San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Bloomberg — temporarily flush with unexpected property taxes — saw fit to grant hefty raises to city workers and refused to address the looming crisis posed by their enormous pension fund liabilities. In New York City, these amount to more than $50 billion.

Think about the California political impact if Kotkin’s prophecies bear out — long-term.  Newsom and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are presumed to be the two top contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010 (since no one thinks there will be an incumbent named Angelides readying for re-election that year).  Both are mayors of cities that have benefited fiscally from the housing bubble.  By 2010, which mayor will have the bigger fiscal mess on his hands, and who is most likely to come out of it looking good?   It’ll be interesting to see who is more willing to accept some short-term grumbling by labor unions and clients for city services in order to better position themselves, and their cities, for the longer-term.

The whole column’s worth reading, particularly for Kotkin’s scathing descriptions of the kinds of cities real estate wealth creates.  

I’m Guessing He Doesn’t Like Term Limits

There appears to be so much cool political intrigue in the City Hall term limits story, but a disdain for term limits seems to have caused Times reporter Steve Hymon to avert his eyes from it all.  Here’s some of the story that ran this morning about the proposed term limits/ethics “reform” measure being pulled off the ballot* for violating the “single-subject” rule:

Because council members could be viewed as acting in their own self-interest, the civic organizations that wrote the ballot measure attempted to sweeten the term limits proposal with broader ethics reforms, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition.

(snip)

The ballot measure was written by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters Los Angeles. At their request, the council voted 14 to 0 to put it on the ballot, sidestepping advice from Delgadillo to break it into two measures.

In these early paragraphs, Hymon makes it sound like this was a good-government reform requested by organizations outside City Hall.  But at the end of the story, he writes:

The court ruling could have political ramifications for council President Eric Garcetti, who has been pressured by his colleagues to get term limits eased or face possible loss of the presidency.

So which is it? A high-road attempt at government reform, or a complex political deal engineered by Garcetti to save his presidency?  Hymon leaves us hanging, just when the story starts to get interesting.  I want to know:  Which councilmembers threatened Garcetti?  How was this threat conveyed?  Is there any connection between the threat-makers and the civic organizations?

Hymon seems more interested in making term limits look pernicious.  His on-the-one-hand/on-the-other struck me as unbalanced:

Proponents of term limits credit them with ensuring fresh faces in government. Critics, however, say they deny voters the chance to vote for qualified incumbents and discourage lawmakers from tackling politically difficult issues.

Actually, the argument for term limits goes beyond the need for “fresh faces.”  Given the way the district lines for state and local officials are drawn, and given the way campaigns are financed, incumbents become nearly impossible to dislodge absent a severe scandal or a major political sea-change. Which means incumbents could govern pretty much however they wanted, for as long as they wanted, with little to fear from the electorate.  That’s why term limits became popular; and other than term limits, nothing else has changed that would ease voters’ concern about abandoning or relaxing them. 

Term limits are imperfect, a blunt instrument, and I can think of lots of areas where it has altered the council’s approach toward the city’s long-term assets. But the political class hasn’t given voters anything else with which to curb the power of incumbency, so the voters will tend to hang onto term limits.   

Hymon also demonstrates a bit of the Stockholm Syndrome on the question of whether it is term limits that “discourage lawmakers from tackling politically difficult issues.”  That’s what the political leaders say, but is it really true? Isn’t it just as credible to assume that a politician who will no longer face the voters after their last term could be encouraged to deal with difficult issues, while a politician who is always looking toward the next re-election would be discouraged? 

The “politically difficult issues” issue strikes me as more of an alibi; or maybe a ransom demand:  Let me keep my office or else I’ll vote like a coward. 

A poll commissioned earlier this year by the chamber and the voters league found that a proposal to ease term limits stood a better chance of passing if it were combined with other reforms. That poll was widely circulated in City Hall.

I would have liked more information on that poll.  Which “other reforms?”  Anything that smelled kinda like reform?  It might be interesting to find out how specific the poll was about the “other reforms,” to compare them against the “other reform” the council actually put on the ballot.  If Hymon was curious enough to ask.

The motives of the measure’s opponents are scrutinized for political self-interest much more skeptically than its proponents’:

Controller Laura Chick and Delgadillo were unhappy that the proposal to ease term limits didn’t include their offices, while ethics commissioners were upset they didn’t get to vet the lobbying reforms.

The Chick/Delgadillo complaints are always mentioned in these stories. But Hymon makes no mention of his own coverage a few days earlier of the Council’s attempt to trick voters by describing the measure in its ballot title as a “change” in term limits, avoiding language that would suggest the change was to lengthen them. Garcetti’s explanation for why he preferred the vague word “change” was funny, I thought:.

In a legal opinion last month, City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo warned the council that the ballot title could provoke a legal challenge and recommended that it use “lengthen” in the title while also saying that “change” was legally sufficient.

At the time, council President Eric Garcetti said that using words such as “lengthen” or “extend” were politically loaded terms and that “change” was more neutral.

Sure is!  I can see it now. Don’t call it a tax increase, call it a tax “change.”  A power plant wants to emit more pollutants? Don’t say it that way!  Call it an environmental “change.”  “Officer, I wasn’t going too fast.  I prefer the more neutral ‘changing speeds!’”

*By the way: This afternoon, the 2nd District Court of Appeals directed the county registrar to put the measure back on the City ballot.  This doesn’t mean the matter’s settled, but it does mean that if the measure survives after a hearing, October 3rd, the voters will be able to vote on it Nov. 7th, rather than waiting until next year. The decision is more a recognition of the need to start printing ballots and allow for the possibility of the measure’s survival than it is a determination of whether the city violated the “single subject” rule.

Thank You, Del Biagi, Wherever You Are

If you are an environmentally-minded kind of person, this is a thrilling story, and an unbelievable accomplishment.

State officials announced Thursday that California has finally achieved its goal of reducing landfill waste by 50%, thanks to diligent recycling by residents and businesses.

The milestone culminates a 16-year campaign by the state to persuade people to separate recyclables out of the trash.
The state passed a landmark law in 1989 mandating that communities establish waste-management plans for residents and businesses that would ultimately divert at least 50% of all recyclable trash from landfills. California was supposed to reach the goal in 2000, but preliminary data released Thursday show that the goal wasn’t reached until last year.

A total of 88 million tons of solid waste was recycled in 2005 for a 52% recycling rate, said Jon Myers, a spokesman for the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board. In 2004, 76 million tons were recycled, or 48%.

Though some cities still lag behind, other communities that are now diverting 60% or more of their waste to recycling centers made up the difference.

That 1989 law would never have passed unless, a year earlier, my boss, the late Mayor Tom Bradley hadn’t publicly commmited the City of Los Angeles to recycling (or “beneficially reusing”) at least 50 percent of its trash. And Mayor Bradley wouldn’t have had the nerve to make what seemed like an outrageously ambitious commitment if his Bureau of Sanitation director Del Biagi hadn’t said to me, and then later to the mayor, “What the hell, why don’t we just tell everybody we’re going to recycle half our trash?”

Up til then, Biagi had been a reluctant supporter of recycling. A few short months before these conversations started, Biagi was still trying to talk me out of telling the mayor he should abandon the trash-burning LANCER project. Biagi was running a small pilot recycling program on the Westside. To appease me, he said he’d be willing to expand it. “Into every council district?” I asked, since I knew none of them wanted to be left out. “Grrr,” said Biagi. We used to have these bantering conversations in the awful food court in City Hall Mall, eating baked potato and salad from Leon’s.

I wish I could take the credit for talking Biagi into his new position, but I think it was his staff — the sharpest bunch of garbagemen you’ll ever meet. Or maybe it was Biagi’s refined sense of which way the political winds were blowing. Biagi was, to me, the quintessential city department manager in Los Angeles — a Zen surfer on shifting currents. In real life, he was a surfer, and I think he found peace in imagining himself shooting the curl whenever a councilmember was berating him in public, which happened frequently.

Whatever happened, over yet another baked potato, Biagi pulled the 50 percent rabbit out of his hat. Within a few weeks, Bradley and several members of the Council announced the goal. It led to the development of a citywide curbside recycling program to be phased in over, I think, about seven years. When it was done, it was the largest municipal curbside recycling program in the country, and due to LA’s size, it probably still is.

I don’t know if the state of California would’ve had the courage to propose such an ambitious goal if the biggest city in the state hadn’t gone first. And I don’t think I would have had the balls to tell Mayor Bradley to announce a 50 percent goal if Biagi hadn’t sprung it on me first. It was like Babe Ruth calling his home run in the 1932 World Series. The chances of failure were a lot higher than the chances of success, but Biagi knew his team could make it happen.

So if you are into recycling and are happy that California’s stopped filling canyons with our trash, tip your post-consumer chapeau in the direction of Del Biagi, the reluctant environmentalist, now retired, and hopefully enjoying some tasty waves in a secluded cove somewhere off of Orange County.

(Meanwhile, after my vacation, I’ll try to find out the fate of Councilman Greig Smith’s pledge to divert 100 percent of our waste and his new ideas on trash-burning, which I wrote about here.)

It’s For…the Children! (and other bad PR practices)

There are some PR tactics that are still widely used even though they are counter-productive.

One of them was on display in today’s LA Times story about attempts by former LA Mayor Richard Riordan — among others — to amend the legislation that would allow current Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to have more of a say in the operations of the LA Unified School District.

Riordan’s endorsement and support are crucial to Villaraigosa. He’s the mayor’s wingman on the right, and his link to Gov. Schwarzenegger. Also, Riordan has a long record of involvement in education and LAUSD specifically, whereas Villaraigosa’s involvement is of more recent vintage. The change Riordan wants is technical, but significant.

But Villaraigosa, for reasons the Times doesn’t satisfactorily examine, opposes Riordan’s change. (My guess is that it’s part of the deal he cut with the teachers’ union.) But the mayor doesn’t want to confront the ex-mayor directly. So he sidesteps him, sending forth his spokeswoman to say this:

“We have not accepted that amendment,” mayoral spokeswoman Janelle Erickson said.

“We need to shift the focus away from legislative maneuvering and put it back to the classroom,” she added. “This is really the best chance at reforming the schools that Los Angeles has seen in decades, and we must not lose sight of that.”

Gag me!

Does the mayor’s office really think that all rational discussion ends if you invoke “the classroom?” Do they really think Riordan will slap his palm to his head and say, “Damn it, you’re right, Antonio. What was I thinking? All those big fancy words in that legislation — they’re unimportant! What’s important is the classroom. Thank you for setting me straight.”

If you’re a PR person, know this: When you resort to a weepy invocation of “the children” in a serious policy discussion, it makes me think you’re trying to distract me from something you don’t want me to find out.

(Now, if only reporters would start thinking the same way.)

Off To A Flying Start, LA-style

I guess this must be my day to pick holes in half-baked electoral strategies.

On the Los Angeles city ballot this fall will be the measure to change term limits by allowing incumbents to run for re-election not once, but twice. I wrote about the movement to let councilmembers stay in office four years longer a couple of months ago. Since then, the measure has gotten onto the ballot, despite the fact that it excluded the City Attorney, City Controller and the Mayor from being able to serve three terms, which appalled City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and created suspense over whether Mayor Villaraigosa would allow the vote. (He finally did.)

Besides feeling left out, Delgadillo told the council that their measure would not survive a legal challenge because it contained two subjects: Extending term limits and some changes to the ethics laws for lobbyists that councilmembers say will “toughen” them.

This is a classic strategy. Whatever the public policy merits of relaxed term limits, the council figured the voters would see their ballot measure as purely self-serving. So they threw in some sugar to allow advocates to campaign for the measure as an ethics reform and downplay the part about councilmembers staying in office longer.

Except they forgot about the city’s Ethics Commission, which was never given a chance to review the ethics changes. Now, according to the Daily News (hat tip to LA Observed), when finally given a chance to review the measure yesterday, the commissioners were told they couldn’t say anything about it that might be construed as a judgment on its merits.

Vice President Bill Boyarsky kicked off the discussion by asking how the ethics reform measure on the Nov. 7 ballot would affect the city’s existing rules.

“So instead of strengthening the lobby control laws as the proponents of this measure have claimed, could it be said that it actually weakens it?” Boyarsky asked after staffers advised him that some lobbyists might be exempted from registering under the new rules.

But Deputy City Attorney Renee Stadel interrupted him to warn that, because the ethics package has already been placed on the ballot, city employees or public resources cannot be used to support or oppose it.

And that includes using “valuative adjectives” during an Ethics Commission hearing.

“I am concerned that by using words such as `strengthen’ or `weaken,’ it becomes an advocacy on either side of the issue,” Stadel said.

Effectively, if the councilmembers campaiging for the measure say it strengthens ethical standards, the Ethics Commission can’t contradict them–even if councilmembers are misrepresenting its provisions. I’m not sure how far this rule goes. I guess they can say what they want on their own time, but I don’t know if they can identify themselves as city ethics commissioners.

Seems like a clever plan, except did you notice the point Boyarsky was making? The “tougher” lobbying rules aren’t “tougher.” The sweetener designed to bait the voters turns out to be a bitter pill, if Boyarsky is correct. So LA voters get two reasons to dislike the new measure, instead of just one. Three, if you count the “silencing” of the commission, which is sure to rile the media.
Brilliant!

How Not To Handle a Mildly Embarassing Story: The Mayor’s Rock Star Memo

I would love it, frankly, if I had a staff of people who showed up everywhere I was going 30 minutes in advance to make sure I would be served lean chicken or fish, no starches or sweets, and green tea (hold the four packages of Splenda, thanks), who made sure my breath smelled minty, secured me a parking spot and a place to sit and always, always remained in my line of sight in case I wanted to shoot them a meaningful look, a look that says, “I need you. I want you. Bring a Sharpie.”

Apparently Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa feels just the same way I do. So much so that he had someone memorialize his wish list in a memo. Good idea. Since it’s so easily available on the web, I just might copy it for my own use. In case I get a staff, so I’ll be all set.

What I wouldn’t do, if I were the mayor, is tell my staff to deny what anyone can see with their own two eyes.

Deputy Communications Director Joe Ramallo downplayed the significance of the instructions, calling them “suggested guidelines” that carried over from the mayor’s two years on the City Council.

“Give me a break,” Ramallo said. “This is a mayor who is more engaged and active around the city than any other in L.A.’s history. By the standards of most officeholders who have much larger staffs, he is not tightly choreographed. You’ve seen him in action.”

Villaraigosa’s exacting attention to detail can include impatience at those who foul him up. He grew visibly frustrated last week when a translation system failed to work adequately during a town hall meeting in South Los Angeles. “Fix it,” he barked.

Not only are the mayor’s specifications spelled out in the kind of detail usually reserved for Martha Stewart’s recipes or plans to build a stealth bomber, but the reporter provides examples of Villaraigosa losing his temper if his needs aren’t met. The outbursts happened right in front of him.

So why, why, would Ramallo try to sell the idea that the mayor’s instructions are just “suggested guidelines?”

He wasn’t going to stop the story. It was too good to pass up, and if Times reporter Duke Helfand didn’t run with it, someone else would. As he wrote, the memo was reminiscent of those icky memos from rock stars that show up on websites like The Smoking Gun:

Some date the current wave of celebrity pampering to a mischievous act by a hard-rock band.

The group Van Halen once placed a clause in its contract requiring bowls of M&M candy, with the brown ones plucked out. The Rolling Stones responded a year later by demanding candy bowls filled only with brown M&Ms. From there, the practice took hold — Britney Spears, for one, demanded full-length mirrors and Pop Tarts in her dressing room — and has eventually crept into politics as well.

Vice President Dick Cheney asks that his hotel room TVs be tuned to Fox News, while Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) crafted similarly picayune requests of hosts during his presidential campaign — right down to his preference for noncarbonated bottled water.

Hey, it could have been worse. He could have compared Villaraigosa’s list to Jennifer Lopez’ demand that her extra-large trailer be filled with white flowers, white candles and white sofas.

So why is Ramallo so defensive? What is the point of denying what is plainly true? The mayor is particular. He’s busy, and he’s on the move all day. He doesn’t like surprises. He needs a certain comfort level in order to govern the second biggest, second most-complicated city in America. The city is paying his staff to take care of details so he can do his job, which doesn’t include tracking down Sharpies. What would be so damaging about just saying that?

You make any story worse, from a PR perspective, if you act like the truth is Kryptonite. You’re better off explaining the truth in ways people will understand. Villaraigosa is not the part-time mayor of a small township in Rhode Island. But by trying to re-cast his staffing specs as “guidelines,” Ramallo is telling us, via subtext, that the mayor wants to be seen as something he’s not. That ends up leaving a more troubling impression than the mayor’s passion for Listerine strips.

Reconsider Term Limits–but Get Rid of Gerrymandering*

When I worked in City Hall, my boss, Mayor Tom Bradley got snared into a rather convoluted scandal involving his membership on a bank’s board of directors, and his alleged efforts in 1989 to steer some of the city’s short-term cash deposits to that bank.

I admire Tom Bradley, and took his explanation on face value — that the president of the bank called him and said something like, “The city has all this money to deposit, and it only deposits with traditional banks. Newer banks like mine, that are owned by minorities, aren’t getting any of the action.” To Tom Bradley, discrimination like this was what he was in office to fix, so he referred the matter to the people who made these decisions.

Bradley was wrong not to notice the potential conflict of interest in his request, and was wrong not to realize that a request like this from “Da Mayor” would be interpreted by city staff as either a regal command, or an improper one, or both. He should have couched his request as a “for instance.” Undoubtedly, the president of his bank had a point about the city’s cash deposit policies. But Bradley should’ve realized he wasn’t the guy to address it on behalf of a bank that paid him to be on its board. I’m certain Bradley had no untoward intent, and federal investigators eventually agreed.

All this is prelude to today’s story about a movement among Los Angeles business and civic leaders to stretch term limits for the City Council and, possibly, the mayor and other citywide officials from two terms to three.

Term limits on councilmembers was one of the consequences of Bradley’s banking scandal, which prompted a City Hall ethics reform wave. Back in 1990, City Hall types talked about it all the time. People took principled positions:

• Term limit opponents saw it as a denial of democratic rights. If you like your councilmember enough to keep them in office for 20 years, you shouldn’t be deprived of the right to re-elect them.

• Supporters saw it as a way to break up powerful fiefdoms. Once these councilmembers got entrenched in office, it was impossible to defeat them, because they could use their incumbency to extract campaign contributions, and to starve any foes from getting any. Only a total incompetent or a crook could be ousted from office, the theory went. And even then, incumbency gave an incumbent a big advantage.

My position was that the city should try a “pilot program” — so we could get rid of the current crop of incumbents, but not change the democratic system. I was sort of joking, probably because term limits seemed so beside the point.

The problem with the city council, as well as the state legislature, is non-competitive elections. Nobody deserved to win elective office without a serious challenge that would force a discussion of the issues. If they could survive serious challenges for 20 or 30 years, God bless their good fortune and talent.

But throughout California, the system is rigged to give virtually all incumbents, and many of their anointed successors, a free ride. Careerist politicians are still careerist politicians; they just move around more to outrun term-limited unemployment, forming convenient alliances with other politicians to permit job recycling, and promoting friends and former aides to replace them.

How is this possible? The public is not happy with their government, including the City of Los Angeles. Turnout is ridiculously, shamefully low in elections, with even civic-minded folk gradually falling off because the results are usually foregone conclusions for legislative seats.

In my opinion, the rigging begins every ten years when new district lines are drawn. These district lines not only look funny, they are designed to frustrate the democratic process. It’s not just that gerrymandered districts help scoop up like-minded or culturally similar voters, which is what everyone knows about the practice. It’s that they carve communities up that might otherwise organize and fight for power.

When I lived in Park La Brea, you could climb up the roof of one of those towers and look out on four council districts. Obviously, those four members didn’t want everyone in the Miracle Mile/Fairfax area to have enough power to unite behind a local leader. They wanted us to be as confused and disorganized as possible, and make it tough for any newcomer to command enough attention from a geographically contiguous area to mount a challenge to an entrenched incumbent.

Term limits didn’t fix this problem, and weren’t designed to. Combining gerrymandered districts with term limits guaranteed that local and legislative politics would be as insider-y as possible.

I do agree with this point from today’s story:

“Whether it is the airport or the ports or the Wilshire Corridor, the difficulty of getting things done requires a good deal of time and a sustained commitment to a vision,” said George Kieffer, a partner at the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm and a key player in the Civic Alliance. “That’s more and more difficult to do with people looking at short-term horizons and other offices.”

In City Hall, things move so slowly, you can’t expect to see anything through in just eight years, especially if you spend the first two learning your job, your next two running for re-election, and your last two running for a new office, assuming you stay that long.

The City itself, a shambling, inefficient but vital operation, needs a kind of unconditional tough-love and vigilant attention from its Council and mayor. The current crop of elected officials act more like tourists, marvelling at some things, jumping in fright at others, but never really settling in long enough to understand all its dimensions.

So if someone wants to consider dumping or modifying term limits, I think that’s good. But before committing to that single tactic, I suggest some goals clarification questions to the Civic Alliance (which apparently doesn’t have a website, by the way):

Is the only thing you want longer terms? Don’t you really want better governance? How is better governance achieved? How can we increase voter involvement and turnout? How can we make elections more competitive? How can we ensure our elected officials are more responsive, responsible and vested in the city’s success?

*revised 6/26/06 evening.

The L.A. Syndrome Strikes Again

The U.S. Constitution, the governing document of the most powerful country in the history of the world, can be printed readably in a book not much bigger than your fancy new Razor phone. The Los Angeles City Charter can be printed readably in a book you could fit in the trunk of your car as long as you didn't have too much other stuff in there. To figure out who does what is a matter for arcane speculation — and usually requires an expensive lobbyist.

But that's the L.A. syndrome. Real accountability is to be avoided. We share power because everyone wants a share of the power. We diffuse power because that creates more fiefdoms, more trolls at the bridge to collect tribute, and more places to point fingers.

I was shocked that Antonio Villaraigosa was willing to take on the teacher's unions and the educational bureaucracy by telling voters during last year's mayoral election he would work to get the massive Los Angeles Unified School District under his control. The idea didn't seem typical of Villaraigosa, because — like most elected Democrats in California — he obeys the unions, and the unions enjoy a big slice of the power to run LAUSD.

Giving the mayor control of the schools sounded like an idea that a poll-taker brought to Villaraigosa as a magic bullet to win his campaign for mayor. But that's why we have elections. It's the one time when those in power have to address what's really on our minds, rather than what benefits them.

After Villaraigosa took office, his first step was in a reverse direction. He seemed to want to lower expectations, and find a way to redefine the status quo as reform. This was what cynics expected. But then the mayor surprised me, and shifted back into forward gear. He seemed genuinely committed to making a major change.

I envisioned a titanic struggle that would consume most of Villaraigosa's first term, because the interests favoring the status quo, or worse, at LAUSD are not trifling. I figured the mayor would have to hold hearings all over the city to document the failure of the current system of education governance. He would probably put a respected education expert on his City Hall staff, create a powerful coalition of stakeholders that would include business leaders, community leaders, civil rights leaders, parents, and use his considerable charisma and PR skills to unite the city behind him for this 15-round fight with the entrenched special interests who control LAUSD.

But no. The mayor wanted something approved this year. A consummate Sacramento player, Villaraigosa looked at the the reform process as just another legislative deal. And so that's what we've got. Not reform. Not accountability. Just more diffusion of power in a hasty compromise that looked good in a windowless conference room in the state capitol building, but will be hellish in practice. The Los Angeles Times' editorial today is eloquent in describing the mess the mayor and his negotiating partners have created:

Under the proposed bill, details of which are not yet public, the school board would be in charge of student achievement — or at least parts of it — while the mayor would control about three dozen poorly performing schools. Both would have a role in hiring the superintendent. Schools would be in charge of their curriculums. Instead of creating a clean line of accountability — the chief advantage of having a mayor run the schools — this deal divides responsibility so confusingly that even the main players would have trouble figuring out who's in charge of what.

The school board would be a "broad policymaking body," the mayor says, "not a management body." Yet decisions about curriculum would be made at the local school level. The superintendent, meanwhile, would be charged with carrying out the policy set by the board — but he or she could be fired by the mayor. The superintendent would have power to sign contracts — except the biggest contract, with the teachers union, which would be negotiated by the board.

Most schools would be under the authority of the elected board, but a few dozen would be essentially run by the mayor. The mayor says that if these schools improve, the Legislature may be more willing to give a future mayor more direct control. Maybe so. But the rest of the plan would so damage the district that this experiment hardly seems worth it.

"Fragmentation is failing our kids," the mayor explained in his State of the City address in April. "Voters need to be able to hire and fire one person accountable to parents, teachers and taxpayers. A leader who is ultimately responsible for systemwide performance." Under this plan, fragmentation is increased, accountability diminished. Who's in charge of the schools? Any answer that requires more than one subject and one verb is no answer at all.

Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn's LA Times-sponsored education blog, School Me, has an even pithier take on some of the plan's details:

It's good that teachers will gain more control over cirriculum–unless the bad ones protected by union aversion to firing use their freedom to dodge responsibility. And who's going to step in? The board? LA's mayor? Superintendent-in-waiting Jackie Goldberg?

Another thing: The mayor wants responsibility for shaping up three "failing" schools. If that means yanking good teachers from good schools, what will parents whose kids get the lemons say? And to whom do they complain? The mayor of South Gate?

But that's how it goes in L.A. Who's in charge of air pollution? Who's in charge of economic development? Who's in charge of transportation? Who's in charge of airports? Who's in charge of energy? Who's in charge of public safety? Who will respond if Avian Bird Flu becomes a crisis? Answer: Everyone and no one.

Mike Qualls, R.I.P.

My editor during part of my tenure at City News Service, Mike Qualls, died Sunday at his home in West Covina. Both the Daily News and the Times remembered him with obituaries today. From the Daily News:

Mike Qualls, a former newspaper editor and Vietnam veteran who served as communications director for former City Attorney James Hahn, died Sunday of an apparent brain hemorrhage. He was 63.

Qualls, who also had worked as political editor for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and as managing editor of City News Service, was discovered by his wife, Debra, when she returned from work to their West Covina home.

Qualls was remembered Monday for his professionalism in all his jobs as well as his easygoing manner and wry humor.

"He was a man of depth, quiet but a hard worker," said Public Works Commissioner Valerie Lynn Shaw.

Qualls was a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and worked more than 20 years as a newsman in Los Angeles.

When the Herald-Examiner closed, Qualls went to work for Hahn, heading up his communications office for 16 years. After Hahn was elected mayor, Qualls moved over to the Board of Public Works where he oversaw its public information office.

Actually, that last paragraph is inaccurate. Qualls left the Her-Ex to manage City News at least seven years before that fabled newspaper folded in 1989. I don't recall when Mike joined City Attorney Hahn's staff; my impression was that he came in with Hahn's election to the post in 1985, but maybe it was later.

At the Her-Ex, Qualls and Joe Scott often shared the byline on a three-dot style political column that downtown City/County types like me pounced on each Monday morning in the early 80s. I was excited when he became my boss at CNS, and enjoyed working for him. When most of the journalistic priesthood tried to talk me out of moving out of reporting and into a flack post with Supervisor Ed Edelman in 1983, Mike was supportive. We ran into each other frequently at City Hall, but didn't really stay in touch. He seemed contented with his shift to "the other side," but to me, the journalistic profession lost a classic, old-style newshound when he left it. Qualls was tough, terse, funny and wise.

Qualls covered campaigns, and the one story I remember him telling was from the campaign trail. He was assigned to Jerry Brown in either 1976 or 1980. He was somewhere in Wisconsin, asleep in a motel room. He woke up in the middle of the night in a disoriented panic, and called his editor in Los Angeles to ask, "Where am I??" Since it was the middle of the night, the editor wasn't sure, so they stayed on the phone talking until they figured it out.

Out With the Old, In With the New

In the coverage I saw about the Los Angeles’ new deal with BFI’s Sunshine Canyon and Councilman Greig Smith’s plan to guide the city to “zero waste,” in part through converting trash to energy, one word I missed was: LANCER. Am I the only person in LA who remembers LANCER?

When I joined Mayor Bradley’s office in 1986, the City Council was in the process of authorizing the project, a plant at 41st and Alameda that would burn trash at high temperatures and convert it into electricity. Bradley’s appointees to Public Works were championing the project, the late Councilman Gil Lindsey wanted it in his district, and it seemed as if the mayor was behind it, too. (Although, at a later point, he reminded me that he’d hadn’t taken a position on it yet. He was canny that way.)

When I got reassigned in early 1987 from his press office to the position of Senior Advisor for environmental policy, LANCER was one of the issues I had to figure out. The mayor was coming off a landslide defeat in his second try for governor, and some of George Deukmejian’s surrogates had made hay with the city’s leaky wastewater system spilling raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay. This not only hurt Bradley’s chances to rally the Democratic troops against the incumbent, but it also created an opening for Bradley to be challenged in 1989 from the left, by a candidate who would promise a more environmental administration. That candidate looked to be then-Councilman, now-Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

My new assignment led to a Charlie Brown moment. I was playing softball at Will Rogers Park with a group that included a bunch of local Democratic operatives and activists. I didn’t know all of them. When a friend introduced me as “the guy whose job is to make Tom Bradley look like a good environmentalist,” the team’s reaction was: Haaa-haaaa-haaaa-haaaa!

That can get a guy motivated. After the game, I went home and started reading EIRs. What is this environment thing? How does it work? And, I delved deeply into LANCER. The mainstream environmental groups were quiet about it. The Sierra Club, more influential locally then than now, was officially neutral. But one outlier group, Citizens for a Better Environment (now Communities for a Better Environment) and a then-new group, Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles, had gotten organized and were starting to raise the issue of how a trash-burning plant in South-Central would affect the health of nearby residents. They pointed out that no one was talking about building a plant like this in West LA or the Valley. Why should South-Central take anyone’s word that LANCER was safe if the rest of the city didn’t want it in their backyard?

The fight against LANCER was one of the first “environmental justice” campaigns. Concerned Citizens was an outstanding example of grassroots organizing. It was led by three of the most dynamic people I met during my City Hall years: Juanita Tate, and the Cannon sisters, Robin and Sheila. Juanita Tate passed away in July 2004, too young at 66, having developed Concerned Citizens into a powerful force not only for activism, but economic development. I loved meeting with Juanita. She was fierce but never angry, and she greeted everyone like a friend, even her foes. She reminded me of Tip O’Neill, except with longer fingernails.

It was so long ago, I can’t remember the precise sequence of events — the loud protests, the quiet meetings, the disasterous public hearings — but in the end, my conclusion was the Mayor should oppose LANCER and in its place call for a citywide recycling program. At that time, the only curbside recycling going on in LA was a pilot program in Pacific Palisades that seemed designed to prove only that recycling was expensive. Until Los Angeles was recycling as much as it could, I believed the public would halt every other waste disposal idea — whether it was waste-to-energy or new landfills. I also didn’t see how the city would be able to follow through on the plan of building a dozen waste-to-energy plants because of the cumulative air emissions. But building only one didn’t make sense, because its impact on trash diversion would be so minimal.

Bradley did not want to simply kill the LANCER project without announcing recycling as an alternative, so I needed to get the Bureau of Sanitation to agree that a citywide recycling program was feasible, or at least to agree not to shoot it down. At first they resisted, and tried to “educate” me out of citywide recycling. But to give credit where it’s due, after they realized recycling was their future, they embraced it, and over the next few years established the largest municipal curbside recycling program in the nation. It was Del Biagi, the bureau’s director, who said, “Why don’t we commit to recycling 50 percent of our waste?” And that became our goal. AB 939, the state law that mandated 50 percent recycling statewide, came later, its authors clearly empowered by Los Angeles’ ambitious target.

Things have moved quickly. Councilman’s Smith’s RENEW LA plan sets a goal of 100 percent recycling — zero waste. But it also talks about “harnessing the energy potential of ‘waste’ by utilizing new technology to convert the material directly into green fuel, gas and/or electricity.” Of course, that was the fine idea behind LANCER.

Don’t get me wrong. That was then, and this is now. I’ve read over some of Councilman Smith’s plan and it is clearly about as comprehensive as one could hope for. Greig Smith got elected knowing the Sunshine Canyon landfill was his albatross, so he made himself an expert on all the recycling and reuse options out there. And he’s right on the money when he compares the costs of recycling and reuse with the anticipated future cost of the only other option — hauling the trash hundreds of miles away to distant mega-landfills via train or truck. However much waste the City can divert from that expensive, polluting parade, all to the good.

I don’t know anything about the state-of-the-art in waste-to-energy nowadays, but even in 1987, we were told that someday, this technology would come back. The fun will start when they try to decide on the first site.

LAX’s New Constituency: Empowered by Blogs

Since the City of Los Angeles started working on the LAX Master Plan in the early 1990s, the constituencies to whom the decision-makers paid attention to were: The airlines, the communities surrounding LAX who were concerned about traffic and noise, and the labor unions whose members would obtain high-paying jobs to perform the massive construction job.

Given the two stakeholders favoring the upgrade and possible expansion were motivated by the prospect of pecuniary gain (although the airlines were conflicted, because they were also on the hook for paying for it), and the constituency who opposed it could credibly portray themselves as victims, the paradigm of “the people against the powerful” got attached to this issue, and still is.

I was part of the PR campaign for the LAX Master Plan for three years, from 1995-8. I and others tried to figure out how to get the real stakeholders to weigh in — the millions of Angelenos who use the airport every year. The point of upgrading LAX was, after all, to make the increasingly overcrowded airport more efficient, convenient and safer.

But there were limits on what a city-funded campaign could legally do. We could educate the public about the environmental review process, but we could not advocate for a particular solution without increasing the city’s vulnerability to lawsuits attacking the whole EIR process. Some labor leaders joined with a few business-community advocates to try to create an independent, non-profit advocacy group, but there was not enough interest in it to get a visible campaign funded. We had a well-attended, widely covered event sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce that seemed to galvanize the business community, but in the end, other issues mattered to them more, and they didn’t relish taking on the project’s foes. (This was about when I learned that the organized “business community” was not the same thing as the business sector, which generally was too busy with its own matters to participate in groups.)

And so, over the past decade, through the administrations of mayors Riordan and Hahn, the dance between the Los Angeles World Airports department and the surrounding communities has continued to a standoff. Two mayors have gotten elected in part by attacking the LAX Master Plan and promising a new plan. Two mayors have left office with their preferred plans left for dead.

The chimerical “regional approach,” in which airline traffic that wants access to LAX could be reassigned to other Southern California airports confuses things further because it injects an element of unreality in the debate. It takes a very complicated problem and makes it sounds simple. The Meanwhile, LAX just keeps getting older, more crowded, and less safe.

Our new mayor is poised to tackle the problem again. But while the roles are now played by different actors, it has been hard for me to see what’s going to make this go-round any more successful.

Until I read The Advice Goddess. That’s right, Amy Alkon, the LA-based syndicated columnist who also writes a blog. Here’s what the Goddess had to say about LAX:

I’m sitting in the Westin Hotel at the Northwest Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport. I flew in for the weekend to be with my boyfriend, who’s in town for his work — but I’d fly to Detroit just to stay at this hotel and never leave the airport.

The new Northwest terminal here is great — airy, with high ceilings, and filled with light, with cool stores, and giant TV screens playing CNN while you’re waiting for your flight. Contrast that with LAX, where I waited for my flight in a dark, smelly, cave-like gate area, littered with candy wrappers and newspapers, with too few of the dismal brown vinyl seats to accomodate all the passengers. Ellis Island with wings!

In Detroit, there are lots of places to sit throughout the airport — in all the places it would seem like a person might want to sit down. After a recent flight to LAX, I was nauseated and needed to sit down, but there was not a bench to be seen in baggage claim. I was forced to pile my stuff on the floor and lean on it while my boyfriend waited for my bags. Again dismal and totally inhospitable. And LA’s supposed to be a vacation spot?

Oh yeah, and in Detroit there’s Wifi available throughout the terminal. I got off my plane in the morning, opened my computer, logged into my T-Mobile account, posted three blog items, and toddled off to baggage claim. Zilcho at LAX, although there are a few uncomfortable, usually-broken connect-to-the Internet phones here and there.

I don’t have time to go to a bunch of meetings, and Detroit does a lot of stuff stupidly, but the new terminal here is just great — and worth copying inch for inch, as much as possible.

This is exactly the kind of thing we never heard at the public hearings I attended in the mid-1990s. It is the kind of perspective the local newspapers and other media never presents. The case for upgrading LAX was always made by airport officials and the FAA, as if they somehow were the beneficiaries. The presentations were dry and relied mostly on numbers and trend charts. Counterposed with angry homeowners armed with anecdotes about sleep-deprivation and ruined birthday parties, it was no contest, and no wonder that elected officials always lined up against whatever the reigning Master Plan idea was at the time.

The fact is, LAX needs to be fixed because it has become a civic embarassment from the perspective of every Angeleno who travels. Here’s one of the comments Amy got to her post:

My biggest complaint about LAX (aside from the crappy and seat-deficient waiting areas) is how long it takes to get checked luggage. On a return trip from Denver last month, we waited almost an hour for our luggage! Compare that to JFK (an airport that certainly has it’s share of problems), where every single time my luggage is circling the carousel when I get there.

Not to say flyers are callous about the homeowners who have to hear the jets fly over them. But common sense says this problem can be dealt with through compromise, so long as neither side gets too greedy. Common sense also says there is no connection between jet noise and the issues that bug travelers. It’s not a win-lose situation.

Alkon’s thoughts were initially conveyed to Westchester/Venice-area Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who, she says, asked for input from constituents. I can’t find this request on his councilmanic website, but I’ll take Amy’s word for it. If you want to write the councilman, his e-mail address is councilman.rosendahl@lacity.org. Rosendahl, of course, campaigned for his council seat on a promise to find a “regional solution.” I wish him good luck with that, but I hope he will be honest about the fact that it won’t be easy to do and will take decades; and acknowledge that changes to LAX must be allowed to proceed while the regional solution is negotiated.

What I find most exciting about reading Alkon’s writings is that it demonstrates how blogs can potentially change a political dynamic that his been stuck in the mud for too long. LA bloggers should all write about LAX. Moreover, the problems at LAX are one good reason to start your own blog. In the near future, smart politicians will search for blogs originating from their districts, or covering issues they are associated with, to discern public opinion, instead of relying on “spokesmen” for special interests. If enough people blog about LAX’s problems, I suspect the political dynamics of this issue will change.

In politics and PR, there is an expression — the “bigger megaphone.” The elected officials, the business organizations, media personalities, and well-organized groups — they had the bigger megaphone, so they had a disproportionate effect on the debate on any issue. Maybe they still have the bigger megaphone, but the unorganized who don’t have access to the media or their names on a group’s letterhead — now you have a voice, too.

“More, faster, better, now.”

Seth Godin thinks signs are everywhere that we are becoming a “culture of dissatisfaction.” No matter how much you like your current (fill in the blank), someone will tell you that you can, should and deserve to get something better — now.

We’re using electronic media to spread this benchmarking message far and wide. Because there’s always a company offering a better or cheaper or faster product, or a person who’s more clever than Oprah or cuter than Tyra, it’s easy to shop around, to demand more, to be constantly dissatisfied.

Every day I get angry email (not angry with me, fortunately, but angry nonetheless) from consumers of all kinds complaining about perceived slights in customer service. Looked at with a clear eye, most of these complaints don’t make a lot of sense. Yes, the correspondence could have been a lot more thoughtful, but these are organizations that are largely doing a great job, at a great price. Doesn’t matter. Someone else is often more, faster, better, now.

The problem with this emerging culture, aside from the fact that we’re unhappy all the time, is that it doesn’t give marketers a chance to build products for the long haul, to invest in the processes and products and even operating systems that pay off over time. The problem is that when brands fizz out so fast, it’s hard to invest in anything except building the next hot brand.

Godin’s post ends up with advice to marketers — build relationships with your customers for the long-term. But I’m not ready to skip to the answer yet, if there is one. I think he’s onto something with broader implications for our politics and social relationships, and we need to ponder it.

Yes, it is in the American grain to be cynical about politics, and impatient with government. What’s different is the velocity. If political leaders can’t make a quick score, they give up and move onto something else, because they assume the public won’t stick with a long-term plan. They believe this because of what you, as voters, as constituents, tell them. But, I suspect, you’re still not getting what you want.

Zahniser will be Missed in the South Bay

For the past few years, regular readers of the Daily Breeze (who are mostly residents of the South Bay and Harbor areas) have had the pleasure of reading Los Angeles City Hall coverage provided by David Zahniser, an aggressive and intelligent young reporter who was also blessed with a highly readable writing style. According to LA Observed, Zahniser has just been hired by the LA Weekly.

That’s a good hire for the Weekly, at a time when ownership changes will have readers looking carefully at whether the paper keeps its edge. David set a high standard for whoever replaces him. The Breeze is Los Angeles’ “third” newspaper, but once Zahniser came into his own, he provided the most interesting and stylish coverage of City Hall to be found in any daily.

THIS is What’s Wrong with the LA Times

I disagree with Hugh Hewitt, Patterico, Michelle Malkin and other conservative bloggers who say the Los Angeles Times would recover from its circulation woes if its editors took it in a less liberal direction. I don’t think adding more conservatives on the op-ed page or instructing news editors to be friendlier to George W. Bush would add a single subscriber, and might alienate liberals who already believe the news media is over-correcting its past liberal bias to their detriment.

However, I do think the Times needs to stop running articles about industries that its writers obviously know nothing about. Subject-matter ignorance alienates far more readers than political bias, in my opinion.

Today’s example is a story about Mayor Villaraigosa’s press conference at LAX, where he discussed the need for a “regional solution” to the expected doubling of air passenger traffic in Southern California by 2030:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday outlined his vision for the region’s air traffic system, calling for airlines to concentrate international flights at LAX while shifting some new domestic travel, particularly short-haul flights, to other airports.

Los Angeles faces many obstacles in clearing its air traffic jams, however. Efforts at regionalizing air transportation already have failed three times in recent years.

Airlines prefer big-city airports, and airport directors cannot force carriers to redistribute flights to airports far from the population concentration in and around Los Angeles.

But at the news Tuesday that a record number of international passengers used Los Angeles International Airport in 2005, Villaraigosa said other airports in Southern California must begin handling some of the increasing demand for air travel.

So far, so good. The Times’s reporters (Jennifer Oldham and Patrick McGreevy) tell us what the mayor is asking for has been asked for before, without success. As a matter of history, Villaraigosa’s two predecessors expended tremendous political capital on losing battles to reconfigure airline traffic at LAX and other airports in just the way Villaraigosa is talking about.

“LAX is the international facility for this region,” Lydia Kennard, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, said Tuesday. “And we are very positive about expanding international service here. But what we are really clear about is that does not mean growth, and we are not promoting growth, in the domestic arena.”

The role of LAX as a hub of international travel was confirmed Tuesday when the city released its passenger counts for 2005 showing record international volume at LAX.

“That’s exactly what we see for our future at LAX — to be the dominant international facility — and other airports need to take up domestic short- and long-haul service,” Kennard said.

This is Ms. Kennard’s second stint at the head of Los Angeles World Airports. She along with all her predecessors and successors since at least the mid-1990s have stood next to Los Angeles elected officials and repeated this strategy.

The story also quotes Westchester-area Councilman Bill Rosendahl, Mark Pisano, long-time executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and Alan Rothenberg, the president of the city’s Airport Commission, who all endorse the mayor’s regional strategy.

Aren’t you kind of curious by now? If this is such a great idea, and everybody in charge of LAX is behind it, why hasn’t it happened already?

The story gives one, unattributed line to answer this question:

Aviation experts say the city can expect roadblocks ahead, including carriers’ preference for using big-city airports that are patronized by corporate clients.

That’s it? Why might this be? There are corporate offices all over Southern California, only a few of which are near LAX. Are corporate executives all masochists? They like to drive on the 405 and the 10 during peak traffic hours?

The airline/corporation nexus is not the problem, which is why the Times couldn’t find anyone from the airline industry to go on the record saying so.

I’m no “aviation expert” but like almost every other PR person in Los Angeles, I put my time into working for LAX on its Master Plan, and learned a few tidbits. The most relevant piece of information is this: The airlines don’t think you can separate international long-haul flights from short-haul domestic flights — which is the essence of what the mayor wants to do.

As Mayor Villaraigosa says, LAX is an “international hub.” Think about the meaning of those words. A “hub” is an airport where passengers are fed into one location to catch a connecting flight. Not everyone who flies United out of Chicago comes from Chicago. Likewise, not everyone who flies an international carrier out of LAX is from the LA area. They are also from other cities that don’t have the volume of international flights that LAX, uniquely, has.

How do these passengers get to LAX? Via a short-haul or domestic flight. From San Francisco, say. Or Arizona. Maybe even Kansas City or Newark. If you want to go to South Korea, Japan, Australia or Chile from anywhere in North America, there’s a high likelihood you’ll get there via LAX.

The international carriers don’t think they can make money if a significant portion of their market can’t fly into LAX. They believe their passengers won’t like the idea of flying into Ontario or Palmdale, and then taking a shuttle bus to LAX to catch the international flight. They’d have to get their baggage, take a ride that would last two hours easy, and then recheck baggage. No thanks.

Losing that increment of unwilling two-hour shuttle-bus riders can be the difference between a profitable flight and an unprofitable one. The commercial airline business runs on thin margins as it is.

That’s not the only problem. The most popular alternative airports to LAX — Burbank, Long Beach and John Wayne — are all politically constrained by local governments from growing to what their markets would bear. Ontario serves a growing Inland Empire market, but Palmdale has been a bust because it’s too far away, too hard to get too and too hot much of the year (another factor the airlines don’t like.) So if the mayor wants to distribute some of LAX’s demand elsewhere, his choices are extremely limited.

However the mayor shapes the future of LAX — both through policy and its unintended consequences — will make a big difference in the future of Southern California’s economy, which is highly dependent on trade and tourism.

It seems important enough to me that, if I ran the Times, I wouldn’t assign City Hall beat reporters who are more comfortable talking about politics to cover this story. I’d hire someone who’d made a serious study of the airline business.

It would help the mayor — who can’t be expected to know the airline industry along with everything else he needs to know — if the region’s one big newspaper could do better than just adding colorful detail to his own press releases. The Times could add value by enlightening the mayor, other policymakers and voters about these complicated issues. That way, the Times could become a “must-read,” rather than the source of annoyance it is too often today.

It’s not about bias. It’s about facts. The Times doesn’t run enough of them. If it did, more people would buy it, no matter how liberal its editorials are.

UPDATE 2/1/06: On the general subject of the financial health of newspapers, this post on Powerline is worth reading. It links to stories in USA Today and the Financial Times on how newspapers are fighting back. Experimention, but also forcing content aggregators like Google to pay. Hmm.

Old Friend

The LA Times op-ed page might be getting well. 

Over the past 5-10 years, under different editors, that page had become a combination of the predictable and the irrelevant; so much so that I’d started skipping it for the first time since I was a teenager.  More than any other section, op-ed had become the symbol of the great newspaper’s putrefaction.

Today, I opened it with the usual low expectations, and instead found:

• New columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan’s eloquent disappointment in today’s African-American political leadership, embodied in newly-elected Councilman Herb Wesson, who she says is “Not Enough, and Not Enough has evolved into a transgression all by itself, a corruption of heart and will.” 
• Marc Cooper’s thoughtful salute to newly-elected Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, and his hopes that she will make more “concrete policy changes” than her fellow-Socialist predecessor, while dealing with “Chile’s ossified social structures.”
• Regular columnist Max Boot’s pointed refutation of those who contend the Bush Administration’s monitoring of communications between known terrorists abroad and their contacts in the U.S. is impeachable, especially in light of the “real abuses” of wartime civil liberties by presidents Nixon, Roosevelt, Wilson, Lincoln and Adams.
• Nation literary editor Adam Shatz’s attack against author and Holocaust surivivor Elie Wiesel — and against Oprah Winfrey for promoting Wiesel’s classic “Night” despite what Shatz claims are Wiesel’s “problems with credibility.”

Some of the arguments made by the above authors border on the outrageous. Conservatives with at least four fingers will surely note that two of these columns are by avowed leftists, while only one is by an avowed rightist. The City Hall family will wrap a circle of love around Councilman Wesson today and claim Kaplan’s being unfair. The literary critics in full cry against Oprah for defending James Frey’s made-up memoir will be puzzled at Shatz’s attempt to bootstrap his fury at Israeli government policies into the middle of this debate about a memoirist’s responsibilities toward the truth. Bush-haters will see an evil corporate plot in the Times’ publication of Boot’s apologia.

But what I noticed is: Not one of these columns was boring. No empty rhetoric. No party-line talking point regurgitation. Instead, lots of passion. Each of these pieces come from the intermingling of heart and mind, facts and imagination that make an essay memorable.  They make a valuable contribution to a discussion of these topics, all of which matter.

Just like the LA Times op-ed pages I grew up with.  

One swallow does not a spring make, but a revived LA Times op-ed page bodes well for a revived civic discourse in Los Angeles — and for the Times itself.

Ernani Bernardi, RIP

For a notorious scold, Ernani Bernardi was such a nice, cheerful guy. Former Supervisor Ed Edelman and I were waiting to tape an editorial rebuttal at KNXT. Bernardi was there for the same reason; he was a walking rebuttal. Anyway, while Ed was getting made up, Bernardi regaled me with stories of playing with the big bands on the same soundstage, and using the same makeup rooms. I did not realize until today how distinguished was his jazz career. He arranged “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” for Tommy Dorsey? That’s a classic recording.

He was such a contrarian, opportunities to work with him were rare. I wonder how many people in City Hall really got to know him. He was feared. Anyone in City Hall who wanted to spend money on a project, however worthy, hoped Bernardi would not notice. If he noticed, he might call it as a special. And if he called it as a special, he could kill it.

In today’s Times obituary, Bernardi is quoted as saying:

“I think I can take credit for the council questioning things,” he once said. “When I joined the council in 1961, things were pretty routine. Council meetings lasted for only about 20 minutes. Things passed without question.”

All true, but that didn’t entirely thrill his fellow councilmembers. They impatiently endured the hectoring from every-meeting gadflies like Leonard Shapiro. Bernardi would hang out with them, call on them, and got some of his ideas from them. As the discussion on a matter proceeded at great length, the late City Council President John Ferraro would look around the horseshoe, hoping no one else wanted to talk. On would go Bernardi’s light. I can still hear Ferraro’s doomed sigh: “Mister Bernardi…”

When the National Football League finally comes to realize LA won’t put a dime of taxpayers’ money into building a stadium for one of their fatcat owners, Ernani Bernardi will smile, wherever he is.

Let’s Agree to Agree

Do all cities run this way? 

Eleven years ago, both of Los Angeles’ NFL teams moved away.  The Raiders abandoned the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, while the Rams, having ditched the Coliseum some 20 years prior, abandoned their Anaheim home.  Both teams went to places that, on the face of it, shouldn’t be stealing teams from such a big market. St. Louis? A city of little distinction, size or importance.  Oakland?  Interesting city, totally in the shadow of its glamorous neighbor across the Bay. 

Since these historic defections, what’s happened?  LA’s political community has all agreed: The NFL will come back.  It has to.  Without the Los Angeles market, the National Football League is not truly “national.”  A generation of sports fans in this gigantic market will grow up without an interest in pro football. The league will be hurt! And once the pain becomes intolerable, just watch, they’ll come crawling back, on our terms.

And what are our terms?  That the next Los Angeles NFL franchise will play in the Coliseum.

It’s an Orwellian thoughtcrime to think any other site even deserves consideration.  If you don’t think so, ask Michael Ovitz.  Or Peter O’Malley.  Or Tim Leiweke, Philip Anschutz and Casey Wasserman. Or, today, Dodger owner Frank McCourt:

The City Council, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger all have publicly endorsed the Coliseum.

“I’ve got to believe he [McCourt] didn’t understand the depth and the extent of the community consensus behind the Coliseum as the site for an NFL team in Los Angeles,” Villaraigosa said.

(Supervisor Zev) Yaroslavsky said the Dodgers had “broken ranks with what has been a united community — the business, sports, political and environmental communities, all of them behind the Coliseum project.”

Councilman Ed Reyes, whose district includes Dodger Stadium, said he would not support a football stadium there and noted that McCourt had promised to keep elected officials and community leaders informed of any potential development on the site. Reyes said McCourt had not spoken with him about an NFL stadium.

“If he’s making these overtures, it’s a big blow to the folks who are building a level of trust with him,” Reyes said. “That’s important when you’re dealing with issues of that scale.”

This “community consensus” is more accurately described as “the party line.” Deviance from it is not tolerated–despite the fact that the NFL’s made it clear in ways both direct and subtle that it doesn’t want to bring another team to this stadium.

Yes, I’m aware that just last month, local news outlets were able to shout in headlines that the NFL had reached a “preliminary agreement” to install a team in the Coliseum.  These headlines followed a meeting between NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Mayor Villaraigosa. But what did they really agree on?  According to the AP story:

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue emerged from a closed-door meeting with the mayor, stood on the steps of City Hall and announced that a preliminary agreement had been reached to finally return a team to Los Angeles.

After answering reporters’ questions for 15 minutes, even he couldn’t gauge the significance of his announcement Thursday.

“I’d rather not try,” Tagliabue said as he was guided into the back seat of a limousine and whisked away.

Even Mayor Villaraigosa’s own press release is a sticky mess of rhetoric that leads in no particular direction:

“Mr. Tagliabue and I had a very productive meeting and great exchange. There is both tremendous enthusiasm and spirited consensus in our community about the Coliseum as the preeminent venue for professional football. Leaders from the city, county and state have all come together to prepare the groundwork here. It’s time for professional football to come home to the Coliseum after 13 years — to become part of our community, to generate jobs and economic vitality, and to create new moments of football history.”

I think the agreement between the NFL and the city/county/state comes down to this.  From the NFL:  We’ll tell our owners to stop saying that renovating the Coliseum is like “trying to put a new dress on an old hooker.”  From LA: We’ll continue to pretend it matters if the NFL ever comes back.

Meanwhile, McCourt is in the doghouse for pursuing one of the various alternatives that actually makes sense–putting an NFL stadium on the Dodgers’ land.  Because McCourt is widely disliked, his political and PR gaffe is generating much schadenfreude.  (The PR people around McCourt knew full well the impact this would have; it’s surprising they let this happen.) But it reminds me of the sad hash former Mayor Riordan made when he first asked Peter O’Malley to look into the same idea and then–after O’Malley burned through about a million dollars and a year and a half of his life on preliminary studies–Riordan withdrew his support, and demanded O’Malley withdraw.

It’s been reported in many places that this embarassing chain-jerking was the final straw for O’Malley. He would have continued as owner of the Dodgers if he’d had the chance to also own an NFL franchise. The two together would have made a profit for him. But when Riordan pulled the rug out from under him, O’Malley was forced to realize he couldn’t afford to keep the Dodgers.  And so they were sold to Fox, and then by Fox to McCourt. Understandably, Dodger fans continue to wish there was such a thing as time travel so all that could have been averted.