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.

Hollywood Gets a Stern Lecture

Owen Wilson’s apparent suicide attempt prompts this burst of old-fashioned, snooty condescension from the U.K. Independent.  I find it quaintly reassuring.  Essentially, the anonymous writer’s position is, Owen Wilson is a minor talent who appears in films barely worth discussing.  But he makes other people a lot of money, and as a result, everyone in Hollywood is acting in a beastly fashion, focusing only on the business implications of his private tragedy.

The whole thing makes for a bracing read.  Here’s how it starts:

Anyone wanting to understand the sheer blood-sucking ghoulishness of today’s Hollywood star factory could do worse than look at what happened to Owen Wilson – the dishevelled, broken-nosed, 38-year-old luminary of such lowbrow comedies as Wedding Crashers and Zoolander – after he was taken to hospital at the weekend.

And here’s a little more of it, to whet your appetite for the high dudgeon on offer:

It wasn’t just the media whose behaviour veered towards the ghoulish, though. Hollywood itself quickly showed its true colours as it worried not about the well-being and recovery of Owen Wilson as a human being, but rather the future of various investments that production companies and studios had placed in him as the star of a flurry of completed and upcoming movies.

DreamWorks Pictures rapidly put out a statement assuring investors that filming on Tropic Thunder, a comedy co-starring Wilson and Jack Black and directed by Wilson’s longtime friend and partner Ben Stiller, would continue regardless. DreamWorks did not say whether Wilson’s part would be recast, although that is presumably an option if he cannot return to work relatively quickly.

Daily Variety, Hollywood’s paper of record, left little doubt about the industry’s bottom-line thinking on Wilson as it catalogued the various projects now left hanging. His incapacitation was “creating a conundrum” for Fox Searchlight pictures, which is putting together a marketing strategy for The Darjeeling Limited, directed by Wilson’s former college room-mate Wes Anderson and due out on American screens at the end of next month.

Paramount Pictures, Variety further reported, faces an even bigger problem with its Wilson-headlined film, Drillbit Taylor, due out next March, “because of the … film’s young male demographic”.

In short, nobody – or almost nobody – in this town appeared to give a crap about Wilson himself, only about his marketability and his capacity to make money for other people, be they reporters, photographers or film producers.

Indeed.

The one thing this writer misses is how difficult it’s going to be to cast Wilson in the roles for which he has almost become a stereotypical choice:  The hang-loose dude with a sleepy sense of humor and the facial expression that says, “It’s all good.”  Clearly, it isn’t, and now that we know of his torments, it’ll be a lot harder for him to fake it.   

Hal Fishman, R.I.P.

Hal Fishman, the anchor for KTLA’s News at 10 for decades, died today, just a few days after a collapse sent him to the hospital, and to a diagnosis of colon and liver cancer.

With his passing, another news voice with whom Los Angeles grew up vanishes. If you’re my age, you might remember he was the “sidekick” to George Putnam–the bombastic right-wing model for Ted Baxter–during Putnam’s two stints at KTLA. Next to Putnam’s theatrics, Fishman was the sober junior professor who seemed to share Putnam’s black-and-white view of the world, but was willing to let the facts speak, dryly, for themselves.

After Putnam left KTLA for good, Fishman stayed on and honed his straightforward, no-nonsense style. Putnam had a feature called “One Reporter’s Opinion,” and Fishman continued the tradition of commentaries that were, as I recall, right-leaning but lacking in the demagoguery of his former boss.

The Channel 5 broadcast reflected Fishman’s stodgy insistence on delivering news in a plain, brown wrapper. Fishman was a record-breaking pilot, and he treated the news like a pilot treats reports to air-traffic controllers: Matter-of-fact, but life-or-death. His co-anchors — Larry McCormick, Jann Carl, Marta Waller, Ed Arnold, Stu Nahan, to name but a few — adopted the same style: Eyes riveted to the camera, no detectable facial expression or vocal inflection, no glamour, no humor, just straight news reading. It was as if KTLA and Fishman had internalized former Vice President Spiro Agnew’s criticism of media bias, and were determined, at least on this one broadcast, to eradicate any trace of it, not even a raised eyebrow. Amid all the happy-talk sangria of its rivals, Fishman and his colleagues poured it straight and knocked it back.

KTLA got good ratings but eventually Fishman’s style must have struck someone as dated. KTLA’s Morning Show was meta-happy-talk, the news with a comic beat, with the anchors’ and reporters’ charm as the point of the show. A little bit of that feeling crept into the nightly broadcast over which Fishman continued to preside. And he did fine! He loosened up, smiling frequently, enjoying the teasing from his younger co-anchors. The underlying ethic was not changed significantly; his show was still the most serious and straightforward of all LA’s local news shows. He added just enough spice.

Fishman never seemed to age. Obviously, he was very sick at the end, but apparently didn’t know it and certainly didn’t show it. So I’m shocked at losing him, even though he was 75 and has been broadcasting continually since 1960. You could say he was the last of his breed, but it’s hard to think of anyone else who was so good at being unexciting.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse Gives Antonio Villaraigosa Another Chance

I haven’t yet heard or seen Mayor Villaraigosa go on TV to talk about all the things he is going to do to check the status of all the bridges and other elevated structures on which Los Angeles drivers depend, many of which are older than the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis yesterday.

That’s okay.  They are still pulling people out of the Mississippi River.  It might be unseemly to move too quickly. But this tragic disaster presents the mayor with an unearned but vital opportunity to make the last two years of his term meaningful, and possibly recoup his political momentum.

As Stephen Flynn’s column in Popular Mechanics points out, every city and state leader in America should look up on the dead and injured in the Mississippi River and realize it could have just as easily been our neighbors, and it might be us next time.

According to a report card released in 2005 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 160,570 bridges, or just over one-quarter of the nation’s 590,750-bridge inventory, were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. The nation’s bridges are being called upon to serve a population that has grown from 200 million to over 300 million since the time the first vehicles rolled across the I-35W bridge. Predictably that has translated into lots more cars. American commuters now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a cost to the economy of $63.2 billion a year.

It is not just roads and bridges that are being stressed to the breaking point. Two weeks ago New Yorkers were scrambling for cover after a giant plume of 200-plus-degree steam and debris shot out of the street and into the air. The mayhem was caused by the explosion of a steam pipe, installed underground in 1924 to heat office buildings near Grand Central station. In January 2007, Kentuckians and Tennesseans woke up to the news that the water level of the largest man-made reservoir east of the Mississippi would have to be dropped by 10 ft. as an emergency measure. The Army Corps of Engineers feared that if it didn’t immediately reduce the pressure on the 57-year-old Wolf Creek Dam, it might fail, sending a wall of water downstream that would inundate communities all along the Cumberland River, including downtown Nashville.

The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers and transmission lines—a system that has utility executives holding their collective breath on every hot day in July and August. We once had a transportation system that was the envy of the world. Now we are better known for our congested highways, second-rate ports, third-rate passenger trains and a primitive air traffic control system. Many of the great public works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels, aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at or beyond their designed life span. 

Politicians like Villaraigosa get advice from seasoned campaign operatives that talking about “infrastructure” is a losing political strategy.   Elections are won on emotion — elevating the candidate to mythic stature, and denigrating opponents as corrupt scum — not on the candidates’ plans to address the prosaic priorities of the government he or she wants to lead.  This dynamic has led to a critical underinvestment in the physical structure of our cities and states, especially in California.

It’s easier to tell people they need tax cuts, or to shovel more money to public employees.  Bridges, power plants and ports are not only unsexy, they become oddly controversial.  For an example, take LAX.  If you’re running for mayor or council, the quickest way to win applause in Westchester, El Segundo or Inglewood is to take the most irresponsible position possible with regard to upgrading that critical facility.  Safety? Security? Trade? Tourism?  Who cares!? The people around LAX don’t like it, and apparently figure that if nothing is done to fix it, it might go away.

The tragedy in Minnesota potentially could change the politics of infrastructure.   The desperate search for 20 or 30 missing people is anything but boring or unemotional.  The crumbling bridge puts the most important issue facing most cities and states at the top of the news — with a warning that it could happen here.  Villaraigosa, fighting to look like a serious leader again, could do himself and Los Angeles a lot of good by seizing this urgent moment to get the needed repairs on track.

Breezin’ Along with the Breeze

I have been trying to keep in mind Tony Soprano’s sixth-season admonition, “‘Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

I’m in my fifties now, I’ve seen a lot of things here in my little world, and I find history both pleasurable and important. But I also think change is good, new things excite me and as a father of an incoming high-school senior, the future is far more important to me now than the past. For me, too. It has to be. What I once thought of as my life has ended abruptly, twice, with no turning back. This is a condition of everyone’s existence. Sometimes this truth is hidden, but it’s there.

I remember floating on a water taxi in Venice early one foggy morning, seeing these ornate palaces emerge from the opaque dampness, one-by-one like a procession of ghosts. Whoever built these gilded homes never imagined that mighty Venice would ever lose its grip on the world of commerce. But it did. When the end came — in the form of Napoleon’s armies — Venice didn’t even put up a fight. They wanted to save the palaces to remind them and future generations of how rich and powerful and glorious they were, once. So, in exchange for no bombardment, Venetians handed over the keys to the invader. And now the whole place is sinking.

Someday they’ll say of Venice: “Remember when?”

Curiously, I thought of all that when I came across LA Observed’s link to a post on Life on the Edge, a San Pedro blog. The post is about the Daily Breeze, the supposed newspaper of record for my part of Los Angeles, the South Bay and Harbor areas. When longtime owner Copley News sold it to Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group a year or two ago, it was inevitable that we would read about the Breeze’s descent into the lower depths of journalism. LANG’s a cheapo-cheopo organization, proudly so. They buy up newspapers in a region, they consolidate as much of the operation as they can, and then they cut cut cut.

I Never Knew Theresa Duncan

I never knew Theresa Duncan, author of the blog The Wit of the Staircase among many other creative accomplishments. But I happened to get a note from an admirer of hers last week, asking if I could confirm her death.

Our connection was LA Observed. Kevin Roderick loved Duncan’s blog, and he says nice things about this one, too. Somehow, the e-mailer thought we might know each other, and hoped I might be able to dispel what was then just a rumor.

This thread led me on a search through the Internet to find out what had happened. The facts are unbelievably sad and frankly bewildering. Not only is Duncan gone, but so is her boyfriend of 12 years, the well-known artist Jeremy Blake, who apparently drowned himself a few days after finding Duncan’s body in their New York apartment.

The New York papers have all now weighed in. The most straightforward account appeared in Saturday’s New York Daily News:

Maria McKee: The Voice, Up Close, at McCabe’s

It’s a little room, smaller than the smallest theater in a suburban multi-plex, where Maria McKee performed Friday night.  Although every seat was filled, the crowd at McCabe’s Guitar Shop couldn’t have been more than 200 people.  It’s almost crazy: How could a performer with so much talent be presented, how could she be available, in such an intimate setting? 

Maria McKee is only 42 years old.  She is still in her prime, some 22 years after the hyped debut of Lone Justice, her original band.  She has an opera singer’s range and power.  She masters songs that are sometimes fiendishly complex, poetic and emotionally overwhelming.  She skillfully accompanies herself on piano or guitar.  She looks like she could do this for another 25 years.  There is still time for you to hear her.

Onstage, McKee is nervous and obsessive, but has a sense of humor about it, stumbling around trying to read her set list, find a water bottle or fix a broken strand of jet.  Then she starts up a song and… I can’t think of any apt comparison.  Aretha Franklin?  Bruce Springsteen? Patsy Cline? Elvis Presley? Janis Joplin?  Maria McKee is as good a singer as any of them, as good as anyone I’ve ever heard, including Beverly Sills and Renee Fleming. 

McKee called herself a “dilettante,” and joked that because of problems wrangling her instruments, her shows in Europe from night to night changed styles, from Broadway to folk to power-trio.   But what that really means is she can sing anything and make it authentic.  Some of that’s due to her musical pedigree, but mostly it’s because her voice and stylings are so compelling, she transcends any genre.

Back in 1984-5, I had no problem with the Lone Justice/Maria McKee hype.  I probably added to it, my enthusiasm the beat of a butterfly wing that swirled into a hurricane.  I stumbled across Lone Justice one night in that brief period when L.A. nightclubs were teeming with great bands that defied radio fashions.  Oh my God, who was that singer?  She was 19, spooky-pretty, and when she opened her mouth, it was the loudest thing I ever heard, louder even than Captain Beefheart, who was so loud my ears leaked.  Lone Justice was a “cowpunk“ band when it started — metal twang. The guitars were fierce but McKee had no problem being heard over them.  I figured I had discovered the next big singing star, the next great band. 

Lone Justice put out an album that had all the songs I’d learned from watching them a few times, but the album did not capture what I recalled hearing.   Then they put out another one that didn’t sound remotely like what I’d heard; in fact it sounded like the quintessential tinkly-synth crap I was trying to escape.   Then Lone Justice broke up, and Maria McKee disappeared for awhile.  

In the early 1990s, McKee started up a solo career. Her first couple of albums were better than the Lone Justice albums, but still didn’t give me what I was looking for.  How could all these different producers and record-company executives not understand her talent?  Or maybe she was someone you had to hear live and live only.  A lot of the other LA bands I loved also didn’t translate that well in the studio — the Blasters and X in particular.  I figured that was McKee’s problem, too. 

She says it’s because she didn’t really care enough about being a star to make herself into one.  But who are the big pop divas of the past 20 years?  Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Beyonce — all of them talented, but all of them using an overdramatized style heavily dependent on melisma, defined as “the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung,” but that you all know as the “woah-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-eee-ohhhh.“  It’s showy but totally unmusical. 

Maria McKee, by contrast, has a natural vibrato, perfect pitch and rhythm, and respect for the lyrics. She’s dramatic too, but authentically so.  She wrings emotion out of the words, not a roller-coaster ride.   Which means her style was out of fashion.  McKee was the ultimate flowering of the folk/rock/soul style — think Linda Ronstadt, but much better — and she arrived too late.  I think she would have been huge if her first album had come out in, say, 1969.

But for talent like McKee’s, it’s never too late.   She will eventually find an audience, and in the meantime, she is building a distinctive body of work for her future fans to obsess over.  Time is on her side. From all appearances, McKee has not lived a decadent life.  I doubt she smokes; her voice is too pure, her skin so smooth she bragged about it onstage, swearing she hadn’t had plastic surgery.  She takes care of her instrument.  The melisma style will eventually get old, and, with a little luck, McKee’s style will come back in fashion.

The concert was my wife’s Father’s Day gift to me.  I bow down to her!  We hadn’t been out together alone for awhile. We’ve been in a sort of bunker for the past few months awaiting the big news that turned out to be good news.  This was our first chance to be free, to be ourselves, to dress up a little and have fun, in a long time.  Well, Nicky looked pretty anyway.  I’m the guy who gets mistaken for Michael Moore.  Anyway.  What a performance to see on your coming-out party!  Nicky has been following Maria McKee’s career as long as I have, and is actually a more knowledgeable fan.  I only recognized about three songs, while she recognized about half of them.  On the way home, driving through the beach cities on a cool, soft night, we couldn’t stop talking about what we’d seen.  It still seems unbelievable.

The opening act, the Willard Grant Conspiracy, is worthy of another post that I’ll probably never write.  Or maybe I will after I hear their CD.  That’s how good they were: I didn’t just buy two McKee CDs on the way out, I bought the opening act’s too.  That alone is high enough praise.

Oh, and there was a celebrity sighting: Gary Shandling.  Exactly who I figured to run into!

P.S. Listening again, the Lone Justice albums and McKee’s solo records sound a lot better than I remember them.  I don’ t want to leave the impression you shouldn’t listen to them; you should.  I applied too high a standard to them when they came out.

P.P.S.  This article, a recent piece in Paste, describes McKee’s current artistic focus, and her successful collaboration with her husband Jim Akin, who accompanied her on bass.  She discloses she has “rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.”

P.P.P.S.  I just found this MySpace fan tribute page.  Some great video clips are collected here.   

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.

If Sheriff Baca is a Scientologist, Wouldn’t That Be News?

I drafted a long post over the weekend about the crazy Paris Hilton story, which I happen to think is real news. Maybe my (possibly) imminent incarceration is a factor in how I see this story — just like a pregnant woman suddenly notices babies everywhere, I notice people in handcuffs — but I don’t think so. To me, it’s a political story, about Sheriff Lee Baca.

To put things in perspective: Los Angeles County is the nation’s largest county, by a lot. It has more than 10 million people, which is at least 4 million more people than the second-largest county (Cook County, Illinois). Los Angeles County would be the ninth-biggest state in the U.S., coming in between #8 Michigan and #9 Georgia. More than three percent of all Americans live in Los Angeles County.

There are three county-wide elected positions: District Attorney, Assessor and Sheriff. The Assessor exerts little authority — Proposition 13 took care of that. But the DA and the Sheriff have to be counted as two of the most powerful elected officials in the United States. Sheriff Baca has more constituents than Rudy Guiliani had when he was mayor of New York City, more than Mitt Romney had when he was governor of Massachusetts, more than John McCain has as senator from Arizona, more than John Edwards had when he was senator from North Carolina. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is running for president, and his state less than one-fifth the size of LA County. Bill Clinton’s only relevant experience for being president was being governor of Arkansas, which is less than a third the size of Los Angeles County.

Am I making my point? Over-making it? Lee Baca is a big deal.

And yet, during the reporting of his decision to release Paris Hilton from jail, none of the mainstream media saw fit to report that he received a campaign contribution from Hilton’s grandfather until about two days after a “Pop Politics Scandal Style” site called Radar mentioned it. The LA Times’ coverage was very “oh by the way,” paragraph 13 of an update on Sunday focused mostly on Hilton’s decision not to appeal her sentence.

Not mentioned in any mainstream media as of Sunday was the suggestion that Sheriff Lee Baca is somehow affiliated with the Church of Scientology. I first saw this on a Scottish site called Monsters and Critics, which linked to the documentary evidence to support the claim, a photo of Baca riding the Scientology float (supposedly) in the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which ran on this site. Kevin Roderick put the photo up on LA Observed this afternoon. Here it is:

Has anyone asked Baca or his staff about this? I don’t know of any connection to the Hilton story — which is why I hesitated in publishing my post — but now that Kevin has put it out there, I wonder how long it will take before the LA Times gets around to asking him about his ties to Scientology, or investigating those ties.

Here’s the Google link to a news search under the terms “Baca” and “Scientology.” As of now, there are only three stories that match, the same three I saw on Saturday night. Two of them I’ve linked to above. The third is a British news story focused mainly on the theory that Paris Hilton is a claustrophobic. Here’s what Google shows using the same search terms to look through blogs. And here is what you find if you Google “Baca” and “Narconon,” which is the Scientology-sponsored drug treatment center.

From that last search, I came across this item from a blog by cult “expert” Rick Ross. It’s a year old.

This month Baca was featured within the magazine International Scientology News (Issue number 33) gushing about how wonderful the founder of Scientology was and his supposed precepts remain.

The following statement is seemingly attributed to Sheriff Baca complete with photo within the Scientology publication. A copy of the quote as it appears is posted a Web site administered by David Touretzsky, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and critic of Scientology.

“The story of L. Ron Hubbard can be found in the time to understand the information that he provides, the wisdom that it brings to dealing with life’s needs and therein the real story can be told. And the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, who have been exposed to what his ideas are — it’s all about goodness, it’s all about improving yourself, it’s all about finding a way to empower other human beings. It’s reverence for life. Those are important things.”

Can Baca be so ignorant and poorly read that he doesn’t know about the actual teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and only understands what Scientology’s public relations department churns out?

Does he think that Tom Cruise going “crazy” is proof of “improving yourself” through Scientology?

Or is it that the sheriff has somehow benefited through his association with the controversial church many call a “cult”?

Perhaps Scientology’s rich patrons have contributed to his political campaign fund?

Maybe the sheriff should do a little more reading about Scientology before he agrees again to stand up for its programs and lend his name and the weight of his elected office to its schemes.

Okay, so Rick Ross is himself controversial — to Scientologists especially.

Nonetheless, to me, this is more than enough smoke for the LA Times or one of the other major news outlets in Los Angeles to start trying to figure out what the Sheriff’s connection to this group and its affiliates amounts to.

More to the original point, the Hilton campaign contribution should have been mentioned on day one of the Hilton coverage, not day three, and it should have gotten our media curious about any other connections between Hilton’s legal and business advisers and the Sheriff’s campaigns and other endeavors.

Here’s one question I’ve yet to see addressed in any of the coverage of Hilton’s ill-fated release: Who asked for it? Did the Sheriff’s office just do this on their own after observing her breakdown, or did someone from Hilton’s camp request it? If so, who? Through whom?  They’ve implied it was the Sheriff’s decision without ever really saying so, exactly. Which makes me think what they’re implying is the opposite of what happened. It usually works that way.

All weekend long I got to hear the media bemoaning the state of…uh, itself…for covering Paris Hilton rather than Iraq or other weighty matters. Paris herself played into the media’s shame with her statement Saturday.

“I must also say that I was shocked to see all of the attention devoted to the amount of time I would spend in jail for what I had done by the media, public and city officials. I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things, like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world.”

How she plays the mainstream press like a fiddle — she or her well-manicured flack.  But there is a potentially huge political story hiding in plain sight in the middle of this celebrity gossip fiesta, and I don’t know why it’s being ignored.

I pray I’m wrong, and that the remnants of the LA Times‘ investigative team are on this story right now. If so, don’t make us wait six months for you to write a giant Pulitzer turd. Just give us the answers when you find them: Is the Sheriff of the biggest county in the United States a Scientologist? And what was his involvement in getting Paris Hilton released from jail?

P.S. There is a history of entertainment figures exerting sway over the business of Los Angeles County government. Anyone remember Dr. Thomas Noguchi? “Coroner to the Stars?” Actually, the stars feared him. After he told the public about how alcohol contributed to the deaths of actors William Holden and Natalie Wood, Hollywood’s establishment put pressure on the Board of Supervisors in 1982 to dump him. Because he retained civil service status, the Board couldn’t fire him, so they demoted him. He fought for his job in what must be the most widely covered civil service hearing in history. He eventually lost. As a reporter, I covered the appeal, which was run like a trial.

Checking in on CNG: Accidents Will Happen

According to the Daily Breeze, the owner-driver of a SuperShuttle van was killed while refueling at a CNG (compressed natural gas) station in Carson yesterday. Bob Mancuso, 61, was thrown 30 feet by the powerful explosion. There’s no photo to illustrate the story, but the writer describes the back of the van as “twisted out of shape” and the fueling station as littered with “shards of metal and plastic.” It sounds lucky that more people weren’t killed or hurt.

Why did this happen?

Sheriff’s investigators do not know the cause of the 10 a.m. incident, but Mancuso’s wife, Dianne, said her husband had been rear-ended by a drunken driver earlier in the month and had just gotten the vehicle back from the repair shop the night before.

“He got the van back last night and was told everything was OK,” she said.

“It’s not something anybody would ever expect,” she said a few hours after the blast.

Gulp.

Digging around the web for information on CNG, I was a little surprised at the circumstances of this accident. The potential for a deadly accident if a CNG tank is punctured is well-known. I’d be curious what procedures SuperShuttle follows after one of its franchisees is rear-ended to ensure that the fuel tank is not compromised. Does SuperShuttle have an authorized repair shop? Since the franchisee owns and operates his or her vehicle, there’s no revenue coming in if the van’s in the shop. Does that create a perverse incentive to turn around repairs too rapidly?

In the story, Mancuso does not come off as a careless man.

Although a smoker, Mancuso would never hold a lit cigarette while filling the tank, his wife said.

“He had the highest respect for that fuel,” she said. “My husband is stubborn, but he had a lot of respect. That is something you don’t play around with.”

CNG is one of the alternative fuels that began to gain acceptance in the late 1980s as a cleaner alternative to gasoline and diesel. I seem to recall SuperShuttle making a lot of noise about its switch to CNG here locally, but the company’s current website makes no environmental boasts.

The firm was purchased by Veolia Transportation in a deal announced last October. Veolia, which was previously known at Connex, also runs the Metrolink rail service in LA. It’s a subsidiary of the France-based Veolia Environment, which itself was a spin-off from Vivendi. Veolia Environment’s tagline is “The Industry of the Environment.” They’re involved in a number of environmental concerns around the world, but I couldn’t find any specific reference to CNG.

I did look up “CNG accidents” however, and found this horrific story from India, where many of the buses run on CNG:

Ahmedabad, May 15 (PTI): The number of dead in yesterday’s collision between a CNG-run state transport bus and a chemical tanker in Anand district rose to 29 today, police said here.

A total of 29 bodies have been recovered so far and police have been able to identify six of them. They include four women and drivers of the bus and the tanker.

Fourteen people were injured in the accident.

Most of the victims were charred beyond recognition, police said.

The mishap occurred when the bus which was headed towards Vadodara on national highway number eight in Anand district hit the chemical tanker while trying to overtake.

This might be a good time for whatever companies market CNG, CNG fuel tanks, and CNG-powered vehicles to take a look at whether they’re doing all they can to safeguard the public. Are the operators of CNG vehicles properly educated for safety? Are the repair requirements sufficiently stringent? Are the tanks as safe as they can be, given the catastrophic result if they are breached?

CNG is a cleaner-burning, domestically available fuel that will probably get renewed attention as all the presidential candidates campaign for U.S. energy independence and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. When the spotlight hits, the CNG business might want to be ready for questions.

The Smartest Person in Los Angeles

It’s been almost 20 years since I met the smartest person in Los Angeles, Cecilia Estolano. She was on the staff of Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, I was on Mayor Bradley’s staff. We were having one of the typical meetings you have in government — too many people who had nothing better to do, clogging up what should have been a smaller, shorter meeting with an excess of posturing. I don’t remember the subject, unfortunately, but it was something to do with the environment.

Suddenly, this voice piped in from the end of the table — a young woman’s. She spoke rapid-fire, impatiently, like a college student in a hot debate. In a few seconds, she summed up everything we needed to think about, framing the issue in macro terms while paying due respect to the many devilish details. For my purposes, at that point the meeting was over. There was nothing left to say.

Who are you? I remember asking her after the meeting was over since, characteristically, she had spoken her name and affiliation too fast for me to process it. She introduced herself with a firm handshake. She was new to Galanter’s staff. Friendly, but intensely focused. She really didn’t fit in at City Hall. It takes forever to get anything done, and most of the people there are unfriendly and unfocused. I figured the slow pace would cause her to spontaneously combust. But it didn’t. When I left the mayor’s office to begin my illustrious PR career, I recommended Cecilia to replace me.

Since then, Estolano has worked for the U.S. EPA, the city attorney’s office, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Now she’s CEO of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. This week’s Downtown News has an interview with her. It’s the first one I’ve seen since she took the job about a year ago. Why the thoughts and plans of this dynamic new leader aren’t of more interest to the city’s more prominent media, I couldn’t tell you.

Two things are interesting about this interview: What it reveals about her management style, and the issues to which she’s directing her attention. Here are a couple of excerpts that illustrate what I mean, (with the key statements in bold letters):

Q: With a name like Community Redevelopment Agency, you would imagine that community building would have been the founding principle from the start. Why hasn’t it and how will you ensure it does?

A: I think in times past, the agency has looked at catalytic projects one by one, project by project, and we really are trying to look at, from a planning perspective, what are all of the different components that make a healthy community? Instead of just doing a one-off deal, we’re also looking at how does the fabric of the community work? Is it a healthy place for families to live, shop and work? What I wanted to do coming on board was set a very clear sense of what the mission of the agency was and communicate that consistently and repeatedly throughout and drive down those goals through every rank of the agency. And I think I’ve been somewhat successful at that. Our budget this year is aimed at reflecting those goals, so that means we’re adding capacity on workforce development, on local hiring, on affordable housing, on green urbanism. We really do want to reflect those values in our budgeting, in the way we measure our performance, in the way that we communicate with the community.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to taking the agency where you want to take it?

A: I don’t really see a lot of obstacles, to be honest with you. I think it’s a matter of getting people the resources they need. We have an incredibly motivated staff here. It has to be one of the strongest mission-driven workforces I’ve ever been a part of. I compare it to when I worked at the EPA where people were very mission-driven about protecting the environment. I haven’t seen that level of commitment until this job. It’s really impressive. So, I don’t think of it as a challenge so much as an opportunity. The other thing we really want to look at is trying to track more private sector investment. We’re looking at a time when there is more private capital chasing urban in-fill deals than ever in history. And we have to find a way to pull that money into our project areas.

Q: Is your background as an environmental lawyer new for someone in your position? And how does it inform your decisions?

A: I think it’s an unusual package for a redevelopment executive director and it informs everything I do. It’s wonderful to be working for a board and a mayor and council members who see the value of sustainable urbanism. But when I came here I wanted to make sure that was a core value of the agency and so in every speech I gave, and every time I talked to staff members, I made it clear that I expected us to move into sustainable urbanism, that we would find a way to reform the agency’s internal practices as well as our relationship with developers to encourage that kind of activity.

And:

Q: Do you see red flags in Downtown’s boom and do those concerns play into your decision-making?

A: We have to try to maintain a balance of incomes in Downtown. We also have to be mindful of all the people living in the single room occupancy hotels and how precious that resource is as a reservoir of scarce housing. We have to deal with Skid Row; we have to deal with the homelessness problem. That is an enormous challenge that is going to take an extraordinary level of cooperation with the county. You asked me what the biggest challenge is; to me that is probably the single biggest challenge we face as a city – not just for Downtown but as a city – grappling with the homelessness problem and our inter-jurisdictional conflicts.

Q: How would you rate Downtown in terms of being a mixed-economic, mixed-income area?

A: Well, it’s funny you ask that question when we’ve just seen the survey come out from [the Downtown Center Business Improvement District] about the new residents and how they have a much higher median income than the rest of the city. I think it’s a challenge to keep it of a diverse economic background. Right now, we pretty much have a bipolar Downtown residential population. We have the homeless and the SRO dwellers and we have the folks that live in the lofts and there is a big gulf in between. That’s not a healthy community. We need to have more workforce housing; we need to have people who are the administrative assistants who live Downtown as well as the associates of law firms. We’re just happy to see that there is a residential development boom occurring in Downtown – we don’t want to put the skids to that – but we do want to make sure that we have more of an income mix.

The politics are thick and greasy downtown — especially now that so many more developers are making so much more money than before — but Cecilia’s intelligence, clarity and experience will hopefully act as a solvent. I like how she describes her leadership style — no wasted energy, focused on the big picture.

The story repeats a rumor that Estolano is considering a race for a westside City Council seat, a rumor she dismisses. It’s so tempting for intelligent people in public service to go that route, but I hope she doesn’t. It’s been proven over many decades that you don’t really need to be that smart to be a successful councilmember. But downtown LA needs a leader, and the timing of Cecilia’s emergence in this role is perfect.

(Hat tip: LA Observed.)

How To Get To Dodger Stadium, 2007*

and here’s how to get out:

I’m so lucky that the people with whom I attended today’s game insisted on getting there almost two hours early. The traffic was apocalyptically bad. A relatively small crowd of us saw all this pomp and circumstance. Many more only heard explosions and flyovers from their cars. There were still plenty of empty seats as late as the fourth inning, and traumatized fans started heading for the exits in the seventh, in hopes of avoiding a worse ride home.

The McCourts should

a) apologize;

b) completely ditch the new traffic scheme, which negates the institutional knowledge Dodger fans have developed from dealing with the quirky parking patterns at Chavez Ravine since 1962, without offering any improvement;

c) tell the parking lot attendants who were just standing around, watching this mess passively that, if they can’t think of what to do about it, at least pretend to care.

The owners’ dream of 4 million in attendance will not be achieved this season. In fact, I predict that even if this pretty good Dodger team reaches the playoffs, attendance will take a big step back, because no one will be willing to put up with this nightmare.

The Dodgers lost, 6-3, but the game was okay, the weather was great, and it was fun to see our new ace pitcher, Jason Schmidt, hit a home run. Bowing to advanced age and wisdom, I only drank cold water, but in that sun, it was good as beer. I had a good time, and am grateful I got to go.

But the day will be remembered as the day the McCourts’ incompetence, which is effectively obscured when the team plays well, finally became impossible to ignore. They are in a jam. There is no PR solution to it. They need to admit their grievous error, and fix it fast.

*Update, 4/10/07:  A formerly regular Dodger Thoughts comment poster, Tommy Naccarato, articulates what I was trying to say, except more eloquently. 

This is not just a bunch of sports fans whining about parking.  This is a story out of social anthropology; what happens when outsiders try to fix something that only looked broken, and in doing so, changing what was once a challenging but live-giving experience into something confusing and oppressive: 

You see Dodger Stadium used to be a sanctuary for me. I could escape my life and completely forget about the problems going on. I could think about roster moves; what pitcher should be in the bullpen warming up; Who should be pinch hitting and which mustard was best on my once affordable Dodger Dog. I thought of just how good I had it, right then at that very precise moment.

But that’s all changed now.

Today I experienced something at the Stadium I never fully felt before–I was being controlled from the very moment I entered up until 2 1/2 hours after the Game, when we finally got out of the newly named, “Sunset Lot” through a broken down fence–and fought the traffic out the Academy Gate, down to Stadium Way.

If we would have waited for the Sunset crowd to leave, it would have taken 3/4’s of a tank of gas waiting for it to clear and maybe at least 45 minutes more. Even one of the attendants chided with us of how ridiculous the new system was, knowing that the implementation of the old system would probably mean the end of his job there!

The system that was designed 45 years ago for Walter O’Malley’s dream ballpark had it’s quirks and turns, but knowledge of the ballpark; the ability to get out of the right gate the fastest way in relation to the size of the crowd–well you learned. I know I might be a bit resistant to change and that change is good, but honestly, and I say this knowing that your being released into traffic at rush hour–even at night, this is going to be a disaster, and frankly it’s not something I’m looking forward to for the rest of the year. At least not when you can stay at home, watch the game on T.V. and save money.

I guess it all amounts to this: What was so wrong with the old system? Even during sell outs, like last year’s season ending loss to the Mets, I was out of there quicker then I got in.

But most, it’s presents an even more alarming thought of what is left to come.  

If you want to read the whole thing, it’s comment #157 to this post.  

P.S. Welcome, LA Observed readers, and thank you Kevin Roderick for pointing to this post.

P.P.S. And welcome also to Dodger Thoughts readers.  I’m proud I could make Jon Weisman laugh.

Fast-Moving Storm in LA

I was driving downtown, north on the Harbor Freeway around mid-day yesterday, and the traffic was backing up.  There was a lot of wind.  I called who I was meeting with, who told me about a big rainstorm downtown.  I could believe it, because here’s what I was driving into:

But by the time I got downtown, here’s what it looked like:

Within a couple of hours, I was back in the South Bay, driving through Redondo Beach, about to hit the Esplanade from Avenue I.  Looking toward Malibu:

If I ever left LA, I think I would miss the winter/spring the most!

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.

Hang ‘Em All, Says Mickey Kaus…and Other Thoughts About the LA Times

The LA Times’ implosion over the “how dare you think my PR person girlfriend influenced my decision to give her client some great PR” scandal (I can’t think of a shorter shorthand for it) has led Mickey Kaus to call for… well, I’ll let him say it:

Conclusion that’s now clearer than ever: Blogger John Gabree notes that you need a strong local paper to have a strong local political culture. Los Angeles has neither. The Times was making progress under Dean Baquet. But the best thing it could do for the city now is to simply disappear, instantaneously if possible, and open up space for decent alternatives to operate without the legacy cost of 900 tantrum-prone staffers of variable abilities. …

Well, there’s such a thing as “brand equity” at stake if the paper simply disappeared.  Sam Zell isn’t buying a printing press and a bunch of delivery trucks. He’s buying the newspaper’s reputation for….

Okay, now I see what Kaus means.

(But can the blogosphere stand having 900 new blogs about the good old days of Los Angeles journalism all at once?  Better let the folks at WordPress know about this.)

Curiously, I haven’t seen much on the mainstream PR blogs about this episode. 

It is evident to pretty much every blogger who writes about the news media that Martinez created a massive conflict of interest by engaging Brian Grazer to edit his section of the Times when he knew his girlfriend was a PR rep to Grazer and his company.  He apparently wants to go down in flames saying there was no actual conflict, that his girlfriend actually had no influence on his decision, it was sheerly a coincidence that the first person he thought of to name as “guest editor” was his girlfriend’s client.  Mr. Martinez:  That’s why they call it “conflict of interest.” The words mean exactly what they say.   You don’t need proof of a quid pro quo to establish a conflict of interest.  You only need to demonstrate that, in this case, Martinez had two conflicting roles in the affair:  Editing the LA Times opinion pages, and being the boyfriend of Glazer’s PR rep.  

If there is any doubt that Martinez’ position is absurd, substitute “money” for sex in this equation.  If Andres Martinez was receiving regular payments from Kelly Mullens or her firm, even for a legitimate purpose, he wouldn’t have had the luxury of quitting.  He’d have been fired, instantly.

But what about Ms. Mullens and her company?  Are the ethical standards in the PR business now so low that her company’s role isn’t worth noting in all this?  Again, substitute money for sex.  If a PR agency was paying an editor, and the editor bestowed a favor upon a client, that would clearly be wrongful behavior by the PR agency, wouldn’t it?

Taking a step back, I’m willing to concede we don’t know what Martinez and Mullens discussed in their private time together.   For all anyone knows, the first time Martinez mentioned the Grazer’s name to Mullens as guest-editor, she might have said, “Glory be!  Did you know he’s been a client of mine? In fact, we’re trying to sign him up again.  Land sakes!”

But in the next breath, Mullens should have realized that her company’s role with Glazer was fatally compromised.  She should have called her boss and said, “We can’t represent Glazer in anything he does with the LA Times.” A law firm or an accounting firm would have reacted that way.  It’s unethical to be on either side of what could be construed as a corrupt bargain.  But I have yet to see any PR industry spokesperson or any of the high-profile PR-boosting bloggers say that, or even mention the episode.    

If I’m wrong, please leave a comment with the URL and I’ll be sure to give it prominent play.  

P.S.  I know about this. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s very worthwhile reading, and his facts about the LA Times and an extremely serious, still-yet-to-be-disclosed conflict are on the money.  Strumpette’s comments section is always interesting, but I’ll be paying special attention this time.  (More news media folks should be reading Strumpette.)  

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

What the #$*! Does SCAG Know!?*

When the Southern California Association of Governments puts out its annual State of the Region report, it’s usually a one-day story in the L.A.-area local media, and no story at all in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., where one could argue SCAG’s findings are really aimed — at the custodians of the mythical treasure chests where money to build all the roads, commuter rail lines, housing and schools we need is supposed to come from.  

SCAG’s report would get even less attention if it weren’t for the easy PR hook of a “report card.”  The report card itself is unpleasant reading, as the headlines reflect: “Quality of Life is Dim.” “State of Region Report is Bleak.” “Traffic Negatively Affects Life in SoCal…Duh.” The LA Times didn’t bother with it, instead choosing to focus on how the Inland Empire used to be affordable, but not so much anymore.  

The percentage of households able to afford a median-priced home in Riverside and San Bernardino counties dropped from 48% in 2001 to 18% last year, as the median price for an Inland Empire home increased from $157,000 to $374,000 during the same period, the study found.

Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge is also a SCAG board member and was in charge of this report.  As he assesses the explosive growth in his area, he makes the point that has always annoyed me about SCAG:

Loveridge compared his region’s growth to the boom that hit Orange County and the San Fernando Valley years ago. “You try to learn lessons,” he said, “but there are clearly market forces and social forces that help shape what takes place.”

New residents are moving to Riverside and San Bernardino counties from elsewhere in the United States, the study showed, bucking a larger regional migration trend.

Last year, 24,000 more people left Southern California to live and work in other parts of the United States than moved here, according to SCAG statistics.

Regional officials suggested that that turnaround could reflect Southern California’s cost of living, including high housing prices. The region last year registered a near-record-low mark in housing affordability, the report found. Still, it has not dampened the region’s housing construction boom.

In other words, nothing SCAG does or says matters.  If you’ve been around public affairs in LA long enough, you know that by now, SCAG could phone in these reports from a shack in Wyoming.  The numbers they crunch and package for public consumption are meant to spur action to change the region’s negative trends, but they can’t even stop history from repeating itself. Against “market forces and social forces,” SCAG and the region-wide consensus of elected officials who all endorse its agenda are impotent.  

The clue to SCAG’s weakness?  The report card, with all its C’s and D’s and F’s, is a policy-wonk view that doesn’t fit with what real people think.   According to SCAG’s own survey, more than half of Southern Californians think things are going “very well” or “somewhat well,” while less than 10 percent think things are going very badly.  Only about 20 percent of Southern Californians think transportation is the region’s top problem — and the survey shows there is no consensus about what the top problem really is. Crime, environment, economic concerns, education and immigration are each named by about 10-15 percent of the region’s residents as the top problem. 

SCAG, which is chartered as a regional planning entity, claims authority “to promote economic growth, personal well-being, and livable communities for all Southern Californians,” but has few tools with which to fulfill this grandiose promise.  This is why the agency is so relentless in telling us that traffic, the environment and affordable housing are bad and getting worse.  Its leaders perpetually wait for a call from the people of Southern California to come to their rescue.  

We’ve got myriad problems in Southern California, but the ones SCAG focuses on aren’t especially unique.  The environment is now perceived as a global issue.  Where you stand on housing affordability depends on whether you are currently an owner or a renter.  Most Southern California owners have an investment that appreciates faster than most other ventures. 

Traffic congestion is part of living in an urban area; it improves only when the economy weakens, and no one wants that.  People in Southern California figure that part of living and working includes traffic jams, crowded buses and trains, parking hassles, etc.  They don’t think it’s much different in other cities, where you can also get stuck in traffic — and freeze your butt off in December.  They don’t think anyone has the answers to problems like this — least of all an obscure public agency that seems obsessed with telling them what they already know. 

*Edited, 12/17

Let Me Tell You a Story About A Little Town Called Los Angeles…*

Harold Meyerson’s Los Angeles magazine column is not on its website yet, so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s pathetic.   Called “Topsy Turvy,” it is the kickoff to a series of features under the umbrella “The Power Issue.”  I’d call Meyerson’s piece propaganda — and Meyerson more pamphleteer than journalist — except I think he believes every word of it himself.  

In the spirit of Christmas I suppose, the story Meyerson wants to tell is like the Gospel verses that purport to show the birth of Christ and his divinity were foreshadowed by the Old Testament prophets.  In Meyerson’s cathechism, the whole history of Los Angeles has been leading up to this magical moment — the ascension of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor.  The story’s John the Baptist is the late Miguel Contreras, the man who had the vision of a “labor-Latino-liberal alliance,” and then brought it into the world — dressed I suppose in swaddling clothes.

Do I dispute the fact that Latinos, labor and liberals today dominate City Hall?  Of course not.  But how new is it?  Not very.  The trend lines bringing each of these factions into power weren’t the vision of anyone in particular, and they were clearly visible long before Contreras became head of the LA County Labor Federation in 1996.  And for all the benefits empowerment accrues to these groups, it has not shown itself to be a coalition that’s strong enough to overcome Los Angeles’ profound problems.

Meyerson has to tweak history to make it fit his mythology.  His tale includes, but minimizes and misinterprets the 20-year mayoralty of Tom Bradley, attributing his rise solely to a coalition of Jews, African-Americans and liberals.  As I understand the history, those factions got Bradley into a runoff in 1969, where he was defeated by a racist reactionary assault by incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty.  It took additional help from labor and some of the business community to get Bradley elected in 1973. 

Labor played an enormous role throughout Bradley’s reign — as strong or stronger than it does today.  Bradley’s mightiest achievement, the rebuilding of downtown, came about because of labor leaders like Bill Robertson and Jim Wood, who saw the potential for thousands of good jobs in the construction of office towers and, later, the Metro Rail.

In comparison with Los Angeles’ reputation before World War II as an anti-labor city, Meyerson makes it seem like a phenomenon of the Villaraigosa era that unions play a dominant role in choosing who sits on “more than half the seats” on the City Council.  In fact, that level of influence took hold in the 1970s.  Bill Robertson was about as big a power broker as this city has seen in the past 50 years.  The carpenters, machinists, transportation workers and several others were serious power players that at least half the council and all other elected officials had to take seriously.  The players today are different and the agendas are different, but the labor movement’s decisive strength goes back decades.

It goes almost without saying that liberals have dominated Los Angeles politics at least since Bradley’s emergence in the late 60s — back when liberals didn’t hide their philosophy behind anodyne words like “progressive,” back when liberals were much more left-wing than today’s breed.  Three of the four mayors who have served since 1973 were liberal Democrats, and the fourth, Republican Richard Riordan, was only electable in 1993 because Los Angeles was in both a deep recession and a social malaise in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. 

Riordan, however, was the embodiment of the RINO, the Republican In Name Only — a liberal in GOP drag, who only adopts a handful of conservative ideas to maintain his party identity.  A former Bradley appointee himself, Riordan’s staff was populated by Democrats. In fact Riordan and Villaraigosa had the same chief of staff.  Riordan posed no threat to the liberal achievements of Bradley’s era.  His conservatism on law enforcement and the economy mirrored the shift in many liberals’ thinking on those subjects at the time of his election.

True, Riordan took on the unions sometimes — but so did Bradley, and so has Villaraigosa.  If you want to see a mayor who was truly obedient to labor, the only example in my lifetime was Villaraigosa’s predecessor, Jim Hahn, whose defeat was celebrated by Meyerson.

Latinos are also not new to political power in Los Angeles.  Meyerson neglects a significant success of the Latino-labor coalition:  The uphill fight to elect Edward Roybal to the City Council in 1949, a seat he held until 1962.  True, after Roybal left City Hall, Latinos couldn’t win another seat on the council until Richard Alatorre in 1985, but that was more due to the devious political genius of a Spanish-speaking Irishman, Art Snyder, whose pork-barrel politics kept him popular in East LA for two decades.  But Latinos were a part of Bradley’s grand coalition. Throughout his tenure, Bradley never had more than two deputy mayors at a time.  One of the two was always a Latino.  

What really boosted Latino political fortunes in LA was the U.S. Justice Department. In the early 90s, the department sued to force the city to redraw its council district boundaries to maximize the potential for Latinos to win two more seats, for a total of three.  There are still three Latino council members today.  There probably should be four, but for the consensus desire to avoid conflict between the fast-growing Latino population and the shrinking black population.  The 2010 census will likely cost one African-American seat, and perhaps bring about two more Latino seats.  But this is demographic destiny combined with federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — not anyone’s grand strategy. 

In Meyerson’s mythology, Los Angeles was dominated by business leaders for most of its history until very recently.  In fact, at least since I was old enough to vote, business has had to form or join coalitions in order to have much political influence at all.   Even developers have to adopt the protective coloration of others’ agendas to win votes for their projects.  During Bradley’s era, business joined with labor and with the African-American and Latino communities on pro-growth policies that eventually led to a backlash among affluent suburbanites pining for preservation of Brady Bunch-style neighborhoods.  The homeowner groups — who Meyerson pretty much ignores in his fable — continue to exert strong influence on councilmembers representing parts of the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

Meyerson is correct in observing that, beginning in the 1980s, “slowly but inexorably, all of the city’s signature big businesses–its banks, oil companies, aerospace conglomerates and department stores…were sold to or enveloped by new owners who moved their headquarters out of town.”  But why did things move in that direction — out of town?  Why weren’t LA-based corporations strong enough to be the nucleus of many corporate mergers?  

That saga is where the real story is, but it’s not one Meyerson wants to tell.  The fact is, Los Angeles has an extremely hostile business climate.  It’s heavily regulated, it’s expensive, and its public services are in tatters.  The young, eager and talented coming out of the nation’s colleges don’t think of LA as a cool place to start their careers.  Married employees with kids don’t want to deal with the bad schools, the traffic or the smog. Los Angeles is also afflicted with California’s poor business climate — a double whammy. 

I was just talking to someone in Phoenix today — the growth there is phenomenal.  Las Vegas, Reno, Portland, and other cities from Boise to Dallas are growing at LA’s expense, because they offer business lower costs, lower taxes, better services and a better lifestyle for the workforce.  Businesses want to ship their good through LAX and the Ports of LA and Long Beach.  They want to sell to the region’s huge population.  But they don’t want to have their headquarters here, and they want as little of their operations here as they can get away with. It’s just too costly and too much of a hassle.

Much of the blame for LA’s anti-business image, and California’s, falls at the feet of the portion of organized labor representing public employees.  To whatever extent labor’s political clout grew in the 90s and 00s, it was due to public sector workers taking over the labor movement.  The labor leaders in Bradley’s time, like Bill Robertson, were pro-business, because business meant jobs.  The labor leaders of the Contreras era are pro-high taxes, because high taxes pay for public sector jobs and perks.

Far from being the fulfillment of an historic evolution, the current political dynamic is in fact quite volatile and unsustainable.  Eventually, high taxes depress business activity so much that raising them brings in little additional funds.  Public services suffer as more and more of the public revenues go toward salaries and extremely generous pensions — and eventually, even the most liberal voters who give government the most benefit of the doubt will notice that despite massive resources going into the government, services aren’t improving.  Those who can afford to leave, leave.  Those who can’t leave are also those who don’t have much to give the taxman — or who can hire accountants to keep the taxman at bay. 

If there is any manifest destiny in Villaraigosa’s emergence, I think it comes from qualities unique to the man himself — his energy and enthusiasm, his charisma.  He obviously makes some people feel hopeful about Los Angeles.  He also has a great network; and better relationships with the state government, the governor and the legislature, than Bradley, Riordan or Hahn had.  That helps.

But the diminishing presence of business in Los Angeles is not a good sign, and it is not good news for liberals, labor leaders or Latinos.  In the first half of the 20th century, as Meyerson points out, business had too much power, and they abused that power to suppress organized labor and minorities.  After Bradley was elected, there was a balancing of influence between business and labor, leading to a period of growth from which all communities and factions saw benefit through working together.  The equilibrium was lost in the early 1990s, and since then, Los Angeles has been in decline.  Meyerson’s pseudo-socialist ideology blinds him to the fact that his beloved labor-liberal-Latino coalition is primarily in charge of handing out ever-smaller pieces of a shrinking pie.  It’s not clear if they know how to grow it. It’s not clear whether anyone does.

*Edited 12/2/06

Los Angeles County Lite?

Probably I’m one of only about 238 people who think this is a big deal, but trust me, it’s a big deal! From Rick Orlov’s Daily News column today:

Prodded by City Councilwoman Jan Perry, a review has been quietly started to look at what it would take to have the city become its own county — similar to San Francisco — in an effort to get more federal and state funding.

Perry said she asked for a preliminary review by the Chief Legislative Analyst s Office because of the homelessness situation and the belief that Los Angeles County may dole out money to address the crisis based on politics rather than need.

It will take months before anything really surfaces, and it would be a complicated breakup. Remember how long it took to get the San Fernando Valley secession process vetted and on the ballot?

The difference is, the special interests who would favor a breakup probably have equal or greater ability to make this happen than the San Fernando Valley interests did.   Combined with Mayor Villaraigosa’s successful effort to obtain partial control of the previously independent LA Unified School District, this has the looks of a trend — the City of Los Angeles wanting to be accountable for all major governmental services within its boundaries. 

Who does what is a major source of confusion for many LA residents.  Right now, the City of LA is responsible for: law enforcement, firefighting, sanitation (trash from single-family homes and all sewage), libraries, street maintenance, street lighting, animal regulation, zoning, some parks, regulating cable TV and pipelines, and other less-visible services.  In addition, the city owns a public utility that sells water and electricity, and a port and several airports that very profitably lease space to shipping-related companies and airlines. 

The County is responsible for health services, welfare, children’s services, management of the criminal and civil courts and other criminal justice services like public defenders and probation, and flood control for the entire county, including all the cities.  It also provides law enforcement, firefighting; and other municipal services in the unincorporated areas, and, on a contract basis, to some cities.  For example, Beverly Hills has its own police department, but neighboring West Hollywood contracts with the County Sheriffs.   The county also has control over a number of cultural institutions: the Music Center, the Hollywood Bowl, LACMA.  The city has a cultural affairs department too, but its assets aren’t quite as notable.  Don’t even get me started on who does mosquito abatement.

Obviously, what’s at play here are the big-ticket items — health and welfare, both of which administer huge programs that receive huge allocations from the state and federal governments.  Undoubtedly the County would keep running the courts and continue to be responsible for dams and flood channels. I doubt the City Council wants to set up a new coroner’s office.  

This is not about decentralization.  It’s also not about “respect,” which was the driving force in the Valley secession movement.  A power struggle?  Yes.   But it’s also about the relationship between the government and the governed, and the mediating role of elected officials at the different levels.   There are only five county supervisors.  Their districts are bigger than most cities and some states.  They tend to be invisible.  There are not enough of them to go around, to cover the needs of 10 million people.  In the city, there are fifteen council members, which means the ratio of constituents to elected officials is somewhat smaller. 

One of the first things that will happen if the city effects this secession will be a reality check on the way the city governs itself.  The question of how much power the mayor should have relative to the council members, and how many council members there should be — all that will be reopened.  Which is fine.  Even without this expansion of its role, I believe the city needs more councilmembers.

Maybe this idea will die a quiet death.  But I don’t think so.  Accountability is an idea with the wind at its back.

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.