Mayors officially Announce "Mayors for Marriage" campaign
Last week I mentioned that Jerry Sanders and Antonio Villaraigosa had teamed up with other mayors across the nation to launch an effort to back marriage equality. Freedom to marry has now officially launched the video from that US Conference of Mayors meeting last week:
You can see the full list of mayors that signed up for the campaign include many California mayors, from some of our biggest cities, LA, SD, Oakland and SF and a whole of assortment of interesting names (Redondo Beach, Chico, and San Luis Obispo).
The two biggest cities not on the list are also headed by Democrats as well. San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is opposed to marriage equality, though he didn't publicly endorse Prop 8. Sacramento's Kevin Johnson who publicly opposed Prop 8, also, at least at last check, was playing the Obama game of not supporting constitutional amendments but opposing marriage equality.
Since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa opted out of the 2010 Governor's race, he has been fairly quite on state level politics. However, he stepped right up, and at the Sacramento Press Club, took on Prop 13:
He implored politicians to muster the courage to stop shying away from the third rails in California politics, including Prop. 13′s property tax on businesses and the constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote on taxes.
And he framed it as direct challenge to Gov. Jerry Brown:
"To Governor Brown, I say, we need to have the courage to test the voltage in some of these so-called third-rail issues, beginning with Proposition 13," Villaraigosa said. "We need to strengthen Proposition 13 and get it back to the original idea of protecting homeowners." (Political Blotter)
Of course, these are traditional issues of import to California progressives, and critical to reestablishing democracy in California. Even if Democrats are able to get 2/3 in the Legislature, changing the tax rules still matter. Look at it this way, if we are working with majority rules, we can afford to lose some conservative Democratic votes. But with the supermajority rules, the right-leaning lobbies have far more sway over a 2/3 Democratic majority as they can pick off members of the "Mod Squad."
It is good to see Villaraigosa take on Prop 13, as the more conversation the better. Whether anything comes of this is another question.
As many of you already know, a recent Field Poll survey was released showing Senator Dianne Feinstein slipping in her approval rating. 43% of California voters surveyed approve of Sen. Feinstein, while 39% disapprove-- the highest disapproval rating she's had since first being elected to office in 1992. While these numbers don't necessarily spell trouble for California's senior senator, they do indicate that people are starting to think of a changing of the guards in the Golden State. It most certainly has crossed her mind as well.
There are always politicians and prominent Californians waiting in the wings for political jockeying. With Feinstein reaching 80 years of age soon, more and more elected officials are prepping their resumes and spending extra time coddling donors in preparation for the inevitable.
So it begs the speculative question, who would be ready and able to run a statewide campaign for the United States Senate in the event of Senator Dianne Feinstein's retirement? Who would make a great Senator? Who should make for a great race? Who would be an abysmal choice? In this "fantasy draft" diary, I've narrowed it down to the 13 most probable potential candidates who are at least thinking about a potential run from the Democratic side. All the apparent pros and cons will be listed, and your suggestions/comments are always welcome. And by all means, if you know of any Republicans that would seem likely, include those as well!
In the continuing fight between the City Council, the Department of Water and Power, and Mayor Villaraigosa, the latest salvo is a big one from the Mayor:
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for shutting down non-essential agencies two days a week Tuesday as he and City Council members remained locked in a standoff over the intertwined issues of electricity rates and the city's worsening budget shortfall.
Villaraigosa's action topped another day of threats and name-calling at City Hall.
During a morning news conference, the mayor said the council had caused the latest financial crisis by engaging in the "politics of 'no' " and accused it of "the kind of demagoguery you see in the Congress." (LA Times)
Ok, to boil this down as much as possible, the DWP wanted to increase electricity rates by about .6 cents/kWh. It looks small, but during the summer, that can end up costing some real money to operate A/c in the Valley. The Council rejected the increase, saying that it was too much money. In response, DWP moved to stop an expected payment of $73.5 million to the City. And if the City doesn't get that money, well, they can't pay the bills for the rest of the fiscal year. In other words, Sacramento style brinksmanship trickles down...
The political feud between Villaraigosa and the council -- and the threat to shut down services and stop paying employees -- flabbergasted some officials. Councilman Paul Koretz called the mayor's threat "bizarre" and warned that Villaraigosa and the council were engaging in "a crazier and crazier game of chicken."
"It's absolutely a manhood contest. That's what it's been from the very beginning," said Koretz, who represents much of the Westside.(LA Times)
The Mayor instructed his staff to prepare closures of parks, libraries, and other general fund agencies, keeping open public safety agencies. Seeing as this is brinskmanship, one of the parties is going to blink at some point. DWP could come to some sort of settlement for an amount less than the $73.5 million but enough to keep most services open. The Council could agree to some rate hike. The Mayor is jamming them together like something you'd expect at a particle collider. (sorry...i'm a nerd.)
Anyway, I'd expect to see some sort of movement from both sides over the coming week or two, the Mayor has forced both of their hands here. It's a bit extreme, and labor certainly won't appreciate their being tossed into the middle of a fight that is basically out of most of their control. (Save Brian D'Arcy and the IBEW local that represents the DWP employees.)
To take a quick detour into the politics of public power, it should be pointed out that if this were PG&E, the money wouldn't be going back to the ratepayers via the city. Instead, the money would end up in the pockets of Wall Street types. Ok, end detour.
One of the most important transportation projects in California, aside from my beloved high speed rail project of course, is the Subway to the Sea. A long-planned effort to build passenger rail to Santa Monica via the Wilshire corridor, it has become a primary goal of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Few areas in North America are as congested as LA's Westside, and a subway through this region would be a godsend, creating thousands of jobs and reducing dependence on oil while untangling the traffic mess.
But LA County also has several other passenger rail projects they're considering, and with the passage of Measure R (a tax approved by 2/3rds of voters in the state's most populous county last November) along with a transit-friendly White House, Metro can actually reasonably expect them to get built.
The question is what gets built and when - and with what federal funds. As with most other transportation projects around the country, Metro's projects will need federal "new starts" funding. Villaraigosa wants Metro's board to prioritize the Subway to the Sea and another related project, the "Downtown Connector" (finally linking the Blue and Gold lines, as originally intended).
Villaraigosa's plans are getting some pushback from local members of Congress. 14 members of Congress, including Adam Schiff, Jane Harman, David Dreier, and Maxine Waters, wrote a letter telling the Metro board that if they follow Villaraigosa's plan, they risk losing out on federal funding:
The 14 members of Congress who signed a letter released Tuesday said those two programs [Subway to the Sea and Downtown Connector] don't have a good shot at immediate federal funding.
Further, they said the county risks not getting much from the federal New Starts program for several years unless it adds other regional transit proposals to the application, including the Gold Line extension east from Pasadena, a rail line down Crenshaw Boulevard and the Gold Line Eastside extension Phase 2 from East L.A. to South El Monte or Whittier.
"We are very concerned that Los Angeles County is not positioning itself well to receive its fair share of New Starts funding in the near- and long-term," the delegation wrote.
The background is that there are three other projects that some Metro board members and legislators want funded: a light rail line down Crenshaw, connecting the Red and Purple lines to the Expo and Green lines; and two extensions of the Gold Line into the suburban San Gabriel Valley.
The battle reflects typical political debates in LA County, with the Subway to the Sea and the Downtown Connector seen as benefiting the wealthy Westside at the expense of the less prosperous and more diverse South LA and San Gabriel Valley communities. And as the legislators' letter makes clear, it's inconceivable that Metro could get new starts funding for all 5 projects.
Of course, the US Congress isn't a place where such sensible considerations rule the day. David Dreier, whose district includes the I-210 corridor along which one of the Gold Line extensions would run, has been particularly adamant about ensuring that project gets support from the Metro board. And South LA representatives understandably want to ensure that their communities get served by transit - as residents there have the greatest dependence on transit, their case is strong.
If it were up to me, I'd back the Subway to the Sea, the Downtown Connector, and the Crenshaw line and tell Dreier to shove it. As the LA Subway Blog notes, the Subway to the Sea will have enormous regional benefits. Just because it is located on the Westside doesn't mean that's the only place it will assist - just as the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach doesn't just benefit people living in San Pedro and Wilmington.
But the real issue here isn't picking which of the 5 worthy projects gets supported and which doesn't. Metro would be in better shape if the state of California wasn't in the process of abandoning its support for mass transit. The state ought to be able to help fund construction of one or two of these projects, leaving the feds more able to support the other three. For example, the state should be able to help start the Crenshaw line and one of the Gold Line extensions, enabling the feds to fund the Subway to the Sea, the Downtown Connector, and the other Gold Line extension.
Southern California was the poster child for the 20th century sprawlconomy, and is now suffering greatly for having clung to that model for too long. Voters there now recognize it is time to change, and have put their money behind the kind of mass transit solutions the region desperately needs. It's up to the state and federal governments to deliver their share. We'll see what happens at today's Metro board meeting.
Over at CNN, Antonio has declined to jump in the Governor primary for 2010, leaving only SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General, and former Governor, Jerry Brown. There is still almost a year until the primary, so there could be an additional entrant, but no names have surfaced.
As far as I can tell, Mayor Villaraigosa is using the ol' "I want to do my job" line with a tint of "I want to spend time with my family."
Interestingly, the Mayor goes after the majority vote, but then throws in support for the Open Primary.
UPDATE: Turns out that it's 4PM Eastern, so tune into CNN at 1PM in California.
The twittershpere is abuzz with the news that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will announce whether he is going to run today. Politico lets us know that Mayor V will be appearing on Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room today at 4 PM to talk about the governor's race.
To which I say: Wolf Blitzer? Situation Room? It's hardly The Tonight Show. Or Rachel Maddow even.
I've been saying for quite a while that I thought Mayor Villaraigosa was not going to run for Governor. His relationship history, which all in all really isn't that bad, and some strange timing just leads this observer to think that he has other plans. And, the Bee's observation about the Mayor's new gig at the Conference of Mayors meaning that he probably wouldn't run have some validity as well.
At any rate, if you are so inclined, tune to CNN's the Situation Room at 4 to hear the big news, or lack thereof.
California's economy can't really stabilize until the foreclosure crisis is resolved.
Yesterday I was honored to be on a call with America's leading mayors and the US Conference of Mayors to talk about a huge problem affecting cities from coast to coast: the foreclosure crisis.
I've been talking about how a family is losing their home every 13 seconds for awhile now and the recent failure by Congress to enact bankruptcy reform to protect homeowners because of industry pressure was a real blow to stopping that clock.
But the failure in Washington isn't going to stand in the way of ACORN's push to address the crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and teaming up with some of the leading mayors in the United States is a major way we're moving forward to help families stay in their homes.
For some reason, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has a column on the Right-leaning Fox and Hounds Daily:
When all is said and done, we must recognize that there is no perfect solution to this perfect economic storm. But we can begin by turning our sights away from a short-sighted vision of government as it is - of leadership without direction; of elected officials accepting an unworkable status quo - and start thinking about government as it should be: A place that serves the best interests of every resident; that makes the common good its top priority; that charts a new course toward innovative ideas and sensible solutions; and that acts on the belief that its first responsibility is to the citizens and families it represents. (Fox & Hounds 6/10/09)
There aren't a lot of specifics here, but this does read like something from a guy who is about to run for Governor. But, who knows with Antonio? At any rate, you would assume that if he wants to run, he'd need to say something fairly soon.
• More news from eMeg: She wants to axe the initiative system. But Poizner disagrees, because, you know, "The people in California make better decisions than the Legislature." Right, because Athenian direct democracy has been a real boon here.
• An accounting error may allow Arnold to cut even more from education without threatening stimulus funds. Yay!
• Whoops, you win some, you lose some. Next time, perhaps CalPERS will think twice before investing with Lennar.
• What's LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's deal with local news personalities? He's now dating KTLA's Lu Parker, after his marriage broke up with the news of his affair with a Telemundo anchor.
• All that Twitter usage from Mayor Newsom has manifested itself into a citywide 311 system on CoTweet. Sounds like a great idea, actually.
• Speaking of gubernatorial hopefuls, San Diego unions sure are pissed at Jerry Brown for speaking at a fundraising lunch for the far-right Lincoln Club. Jeez...
• Vallejo's bankruptcy is becoming a bigger mess than previously expected. Apparently, the fight has now become a question of the limits of bankruptcy law, specifically with the question of whether labor agreements can be broken.
• The California Supreme Court, moving away from social issues and on to corporate ass-covering, overturned a billion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Bank of America, now allowing banks to use Social Security and government assistance checks to claw back overdraft fees from the indigent. I won't speak to the legal issues, but how about a lawsuit against the usurious bank fees in general? Exactly how are these poor customers racking up these fees? There are a lot of issues that the Supremes preferred to ignore.
UPDATE by Brian: Just wanted to remind everybody about two useful mobile tools for following our coverage of the CDP Convention. First there is the Calitics mobile site at http://wap.calitics.com. That allows you to read all front-paged diaries and comment in a mobile phone friendly website.
Headed out the door for a nice, leisurely six-hour drive through the Central Valley to Sacramento for another California Democratic Party Convention. Calitics will have full coverage, of course - many of our writers will be on hand, both as delegates and as plain old media. There's a lot to cover, from party elections to endorsements on the May 19 election to the resolution to impeach Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit to the unofficial opening of the 2010 election.
The early pre-convention news is that Antonio Villaraigosa won't be making the trip with me (although there's still room in the car, so you never know). It's a confusing development, considering all the high-profile events other gubernatorial hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown are holding (Jerry's got a kegger at the old Governor's Mansion, while Gavin is part of an outdoor block party featuring Wyclef Jean). But that may be the reason, as Villaraigosa wasn't able to compete.
Villaraigosa's press office sent out a release announcing: "Mayor Villaraigosa today announced that he will convene emergency weekend meetings with union leaders to tackle the city's budget crisis.
"Talks will focus on ways to close a $530 million budget deficit through shared sacrifice and shared responsibility. The Mayor will begin meetings in City Hall with labor leaders on Friday evening and will continue through the weekend." [...]
Calbuzz asked Tony V spokesman Sean Clegg if the emergency budget session was "just a lame, bullshit excuse" to skip the convention. "It's exactly the opposite of that," Clegg said. "The city of Los Angeles and most cities across California are facing an unprecedented economic crisis and jobs come first."
Clegg said Villaraigosa is putting the needs of his city before his personal political fortunes by trying to pull together an agreement that would require labor unions to give back some hard-earned gains in order to save jobs and services in Los Angeles.
"This is a leadership moment. Antonio Villaraigosa is not going to Twitter while Rome burns," Clegg said -- a clear shot at the other mayor who would be governor: San Francisco's Gavin Newsom.
At the same time, a Tulchin Research/Acosta|Salazar pre-convention poll (which is three weeks out, but released on convention eve) shows Villaraigosa slipping. The poll had Garamendi in the race at the time.
Obviously, that top-line support is soft, with 1 in 5 undecided. But I'm frankly surprised how quickly this is turning into a two-horse race, which could actually open the door for a progressive movement candidate, if one existed. But alas...
Anyway, those are just a couple of the issues we'll see unfold. Stay with us throughout the weekend.
(I've teed up a few posts while I'm on the ride, but it'll be a light post day until late afternoon)
We've had less than glowing reviews of the public comments of potential gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, but there has been somewhat less talk about the other leading potential candidate, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. His re-election performance was uninspired and listless, but that's not a description of his policies.
I have said in the past that the enduring image of Villaraigosa's leadership is a crane in front of a half-finished building. Now we are seeing him tested in a time of crisis. Los Angeles has a close to $1 billion dollar deficit, and he is trying to balance cuts with continued support for labor, and the results have not been pretty. While Villaraigosa led the effort to add a penny to the sales tax for public transit, he has vowed not to raise local taxes to cover the deficit, and as a result, the mayor will cut salaries for city workers almost across the board by 10%, and LA Unified will lay off 5,000 teachers this year.
Los Angeles school district officials moved forward Tuesday with plans to lay off more than 5,000 teachers, counselors, custodians, clerks and other employees, but the battle over funding will rage on for weeks -- affecting who goes, who stays and what schools and classrooms will look like for students next year.
The Board of Education's 4-3 vote, after more than four hours of pleading and debate, closed most of a $596.1-million deficit for next year in the nation's second-largest school system.
"Anger is appropriate and outrage is appropriate," said school board President Monica Garcia, who voted with the majority. "Nobody wants to do these layoffs."
In his State of the City speech last week, Villaraigosa denounced Sacramento lawmakers, yet he supports the same failed propositions that will not address the structural problems with state government, and he did nothing, of course, to move forward on any of those while Speaker of the Assembly. However, he did spend a lot of time in his speech talking about his innovative environmental policies in Los Angeles, which have had an impact.
Villaraigosa denounced the "politics of no" as he called for a green technology hub along the west side of the Los Angeles River to attract new jobs and start-up companies.
"We need to build a future in which clean technology is as synonymous with Los Angeles as motion pictures or aerospace," said the mayor, appearing at the Harbor City factory of Balqon Corp., which manufactures electric big-rigs for use at the city's ports [...]
As a centerpiece of his speech, Villaraigosa reintroduced his plan for a "green" industry corridor just east of downtown that would serve as a spawning ground for environmentally conscious businesses. The speech echoed Villaraigosa's message during his recent reelection campaign, when he promised to make Los Angeles "the greenest big city in America."
Over the last four years, Villaraigosa has pushed the Port of Los Angeles to replace up to 17,000 diesel trucks with cleaner-burning models. And at the Department of Water and Power, he has pressed officials to expand the utility's reliance on renewable sources of energy -- primarily wind, solar and geothermal power.
And that agenda could be scaled up to offer a new economic future for California. Villaraigosa selected longtime green activist David Freeman as his environmental deputy, and as a result you'll probably see some form of solar initiative along the lines of Measure B, which was defeated in March, come into law.
So there are glimmers here. But I will personally never forget Villaraigosa leaving town in 2006 for an 18-day Asian trip in the middle of the Schwarzenegger-Angelides race, and neglecting to even endorse Angelides until late in the campaign (and even then, not in Los Angeles). The Mayor has a few good ideas, has been less successful with the follow-through, and on the big structural issues has offered no vision of reform.
The establishment in both parties continue to close ranks around the May 19 special election, even as the grassroots continues to reject it. Today Antonio Villaraigosa endorsed all six ballot measures, asserting that they will "bring stability back to California's budget system," like any artificial spending cap that forces spending $16-$20 billion dollars below initial baseline estimates during an economic crisis where state spending is needed urgently tends to do. Without question, Villaraigosa, a potential candidate for Governor, sees that giant pot of CTA money being tossed around in support of the measures and figures one of the candidates could draft off of that nicely in the primaries.
At the local level, more and more Democratic clubs are opposing the ballot measures, because unlike the establishment, they have read them and calculated that they would put the state in an objectively worse situation, and they are unmoved by the idle threats of Armageddon casually tossed out by the Governor and his minions. The dichotomy is both interesting and revealing.
Meanwhile, in maybe the lamest online initiative effort since the invention of Compuserve, Abel Maldonado's tears have created "Reform For Change," a site dedicated to the petty, self-righteous, useless Prop. 1F measure that would eliminate raises for lawmakers and staff during an economic downturn. In the silly video accompanying the site, Maldonado's tears tell us that "we can fundamentally reform California and change it forever," through apparently passing a .0001% change in funding for state lawmakers that is dealt with through an independent commission and not "the legislators themselves" (one of many lies on this site).
Sigh.
UPDATE: Apparently Antonio said this today - "If we don't pass these initiatives CA will go into bankruptcy." That's just ignorant fearmongering. These people should be ashamed of themselves.
(Dave here. I wrote this. There isn't someone named "Open Thread" who writes the open threads. The conspiracy of the "guy who forgets to log out of one account and into another" solved!)
Two polls were actually released today on the 2010 California Governor's race. The Field Poll did an extensive poll of the race, including favorability ratings, and Lake Research, a Democratic firm, did their own poll which included some head-to-head matchups.
Field's poll included Dianne Feinstein and I don't think the results were all that great for her. In the primary she polls well under 50%, compared to earlier polls which had her closer to that number.
Dianne Feinstein: 38%
Jerry Brown: 16%
Antonio Villaraigosa: 16%
Gavin Newsom: 10%
John Garamendi: 4%
Steve Westly: 2%
Bill Lockyer: 1%
Jack O'Connell: 1%
Undecided: 12%
Considering she's the most well-known figure in California politics, and that there won't be that many competitors in the final field, that's not a runaway at all. Plus, her net favorables with the electorate (+23) are less than Jerry Brown's (+25), despite her being more well-known (Among just Democrats, her unfavs are slightly higher than Brown's but so are her faves). If anything, this shows that she would have a tough race, maybe too tough for her to want to try it rather than luxuriate in her position whitewashing Bush's war crimes on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Without DiFi in the race, it's a packed field. Here's Field's poll:
Jerry Brown: 26%
Antonio Villaraigosa: 22%
Gavin Newsom: 16%
John Garamendi: 8%
Steve Westly: 2%
Bill Lockyer: 2%
Jack O'Connell: 2%
Undecided: 22%
DiFi's votes are, then, basically evenly distributed. Lake's primary poll (they didn't poll with DiFi) was similar:
Jerry Brown: 27%
Antonio Villaraigosa: 20%
Gavin Newsom: 14%
John Garamendi: 8%
Steve Westly: 3%
Jack O'Connell: 1%
Undecided: 27%
Big undecideds there, and obviously Villaraigosa is benefiting from being the only SoCal candidate in the field, although given his re-election performance he may have some work to do with his southern base. As for everyone else, there's time, but they're all pretty far back.
The Republican primary? Nobody's heard of any of the candidates, and the undecideds are off the charts, but it's early.
Meg Whitman: 21%
Tom Campbell: 18%
Steve Poizner: 7%
Undecided: 54%
Surprised to see Campbell that close, but it's probably just name ID; he's run statewide before. At least 63% of all voters, and at least 67% of Republicans, have no impression whatsoever of any of these candidates. Their favorables are miniscule. Given that, Poizner and Whitman will have to spend a lot of their millions just to introduce themselves to the public.
Finally, Lake Research did some (selected) head-to-heads.
Brown: 41%
Poizner: 30%
Undecided: 29%
Brown: 43%
Whitman: 27%
Undecided: 30%
Newsom: 38%
Poizner: 29%
Undecided: 33%
Newsom: 40%
Whitman: 25%
Undecided: 35%
Long story short, DiFi wouldn't have a cakewalk, Villaraigosa appears to have strength based on geographic isolation, Brown looks well-positioned, nobody knows the Republicans, and any Democrat can win.
First of all, the turnout was indeed 15%, down from 28% for the primary just four years ago. That's mainly due to the top of the ticket, which was competitive last time around and featured just Antonio Villaraigosa and a bunch of tomato cans this time. But I don't think Villaraigosa should be celebrating about his performance. Despite 4 years of work as the Mayor, despite a field of underfunded nobodies, he actually got LESS votes in 2009 than he did in 2005. His support has diminished and not increased. And the seas are about to get a lot choppier.
Flanked onstage by Weiss, sometime-rival City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, Villaraigosa turned to the mounting challenges ahead from the city's looming $1 billion deficit to the possibility of widespread layoffs.
"I know these are troubled times for many of our families -- you see I've traveled around the city for the past few months and I witnessed the anxiety rising," Villaraigosa said. "I have a simple message for Los Angeles tonight, we're going to rebound out of this economic crisis and we will emerge stronger than ever."
The guy who is less likely to emerge stronger than ever is Villaraigosa. He ended up with just 56% of the vote after running a dismissive non-campaign where he refused to debate and spent almost no time in the city. One of his top lieutenants, Jack Weiss, is now in a runoff for city attorney despite spending millions on his campaign. And Measure B, the solar power initiative which the mayor backed, is too close to call at this hour, as provisionals and late absentees are tabulated.
That's an objectively terrible performance. And it should stop the Mayor from thinking about his next campaign so quickly. The enduring image of the Villaraigosa tenure is a crane alongside a half-built skyscraper. He is full of good ideas that never get the follow-through they deserve. That's what this election was like - he was already thinking about the Governor's race before finishing his re-election campaign. This may now be a fatal blow, but it doesn't look good for him. The Mayor of Los Angeles is a challenging, maddeningly complex position. It would be nice if the current occupant paid more attention to it.
Today is Election Day in LA City, and given the turnouts we've seen in other off-year elections, as well as the fact that the mayoral race, the biggest ticket on the ballot, is basically a coronation, turnout is likely to be very small, save for the wide-open 5th District City Council race, which is really anybody's to win (very unusual in LA politics). The expectation is about 15%. Despite the fact that Los Angeles actually has a fairly rich culture of political activism, from the Latino student sit-ins to recent Prop. 8 actions and hundreds more, the recent history is that city elections do not draw much of a crowd. That's a shame in a city that's larger than the total populations of many states, and it reduces accountability on the elected officials.
I don't live in Los Angeles, but I work here, and I have a conflicted view about the way the city runs. I think if every resident were forced to watch The Garden, the Oscar-nominated documentary about South Los Angeles residents being forcibly evicted from a community garden, nobody would vote for anyone currently on the City Council, least of all Mayor Villaraigosa. The film, almost a real-life version of The Wire, revealed a city government of backroom deals and power-brokers able to make their voices heard well beyond the needs of the community. You can add to that the rare bit of journalism from the LA Weekly about the City Council, and you could be convinced that the lack of accountability from the electoral process has bred a toxic atmosphere at City Hall. The likely consolidation of power that would result from Villaraigosa allies in the city attorney and city controller offices would lead you even closer to that conclusion.
Yet among the morass, there are some very earnest public servants trying to manage a very unwieldy city, with a host of unique problems and challenges that would vex any lawmaking body on Earth. Set aside this year's $1 billion dollar budget; the problems of immigration, gang violence, income inequality, traffic, health care, air pollution, education, and much, much more all converge in this city. From 10,000 feet these problems look intractable, and yet there are gradual, slow steps toward mitigation, and even areas where Los Angeles is a national model. The sales tax receipts from Measure R may finally bring sustainable transit infrastructure to fruition for more than a handful of the city's residents. The Green Trucks Program is an innovative, first-in-the-nation effort to bring labor and environmental groups together to reduce pollution, create living wage jobs and help save the planet. And the city's Green Jobs Training program is seen as so potentially game-changing that it was used as a model in a White House staff report from their Middle Class Task Force:
The City of Los Angeles has undertaken or is in the midst of undertaking several initiatives that, together, begin to constitute a model for how cities can maximize the benefits of "going green" for working families. As is often the case, necessity was the mother of policy innovation. A few years ago, the city faced a number of stark challenges including: a state renewable energy mandate (a statewide "portfolio standard" requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017) and a state cap on greenhouse gas emissions; an impending shortage of skilled construction workers; entrenched poverty and joblessness in many low-income neighborhoods; and toxic levels of diesel pollution that were imposing huge health costs and blocking the growth of the nation's largest port complex.
In the past year, Los Angeles has adopted a comprehensive approach to redevelopment which will ensure that city-subsidized development projects are built green and serve as vehicles for moving low-income residents into middle-class construction careers. The Port of Los Angeles has also begun to implement a comprehensive solution to freight-related air pollution that will increase efficiency, enhance security, and improve work conditions and living standards for port truck drivers. Most important is the fact that these initiatives are being undertaken on a large scale: the city's construction policy is expected to impact 15,000 jobs over five years while the Clean Trucks Program (discussed below) could affect as many as 16,000 port truck drivers.
In 2008, the City of Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) adopted a landmark policy designed to protect the environment, safeguard the interests of taxpayers, and ensure that city-supported projects create good construction jobs and career pathways for city residents. The Construction Careers and Project Stabilization Policy establishes minimum labor standards and a process for avoiding labor disruptions by means of a master agreement between the CRA and local building trades unions. The policy requires participating contractors and unions to make construction job opportunities available to local residents, including individuals who face barriers to employment such as a criminal record or a limited education.
The policy is being implemented alongside a requirement that large subsidized projects meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. In this way, city leaders have begun to lay the foundations for building a green-collar construction workforce in Los Angeles. The UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education projects that the policy will make at least 5,000 apprentice-level construction jobs available to residents of neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment over the next five years. At least 1,500 jobs are expected to go to individuals who might otherwise remain homeless, unemployed, dependent on welfare programs, or caught up in the criminal justice system. But the most important result of the Construction Careers policy will be to leverage public investments in economic development to turn short-term jobs into long-term careers in the construction industry.
I wish there was more structural accountability in Los Angeles, from the Mayor on down. I wish the city wasn't so dominated by big-city machine politics and red-letter projects that often fail to follow through on their promise. And where criticism is warranted, I'm sure to be first in line. But Los Angeles is a very complex and hard-to-pigeonhole place, and that is true of its politics as well.
• Antonio Villaraigosa has been an outspoken supporter of Israel, and during the current mess in Gaza he's being called on it. We are at least seeing cracks in the one-way, "thou shalt never criticize Israel" policy that has thus far ruled our discourse.
• Meg Whitman is so tech-savvy that she can't even get her domain names for her gubernatorial run away from a cyber-squatter. This is someone I want managing a 21st-century economy!
• Marc Cooper, who is occasionally grating, gives his post-mortem on finally leaving the LA Weekly. It wasn't so long ago that the Weekly had a stable of great writers doing local, national and even international stories of significance, and then the New Times bought up the independent weekly and turned it into a pile of sour mash. This is another journalistic casualty, but the culprit here is excessive consolidation. I don't even pick up the Weekly anymore.
• A big blogospheric welcome to California Budget Bites, the new blog of the California Budget Project. Bookmark this one, folks, it'll come in very handy over the next several weeks. The CBP does some great work and I'm glad to see them enter the fray.
The rest of kind of a harrowing day for those of us using Soapblox:
• My favorite Meg Whitman profile of the week. Money quote: "I'm not saying everything Meg Whitman touches turns to slave labor, I'm just not saying it doesn't." I've taken the news about Whitman's effort for public office in stride, because there's just so much ammunition like this it's not worth worrying about.
• Antonio Villaraigosa wants a faster timetable for the Subway to the Sea. So do I, have you seen the traffic on the 10 lately?
• Two rematches kicked off today in the California Assembly. Gary Jeandron will challenge Democrat Manuel Perez again in AD-80, and Democrat John Eisenhut will again take on Bill Berryhill in AD-26. The latter is good news - Eisenhut can win that seat.
• A California company may get the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, which staged a sit-down strike late last year, back on the job.
• If you want to know more about today's Soapblox disturbance, and support efforts to make sure it doesn't happen again in the future, check out this post by Chris Bowers.
Last night I had the pleasure of attending the 15th Anniversary Awards Dinner for LAANE (The Los Angeles Alliance For A New Economy), which brought 1,000 people to the Beverly Hilton (including Mayor Villaraigosa, Sean Penn, and more) and raised $500,000 for their cause. I know I get depressed reading about endless budget fights and cutbacks to schools and health care, so it's important to take comfort (and some valuable lessons) in those doing important work - and fighting some of the most powerful and entrenched interests in the city and the country - and winning.
LAANE is a group dedicated to fighting for economic and environmental justice by building coalitions and waging campaigns to improve the lives of people in underserved and at-risk communities. Their success stories include some of the most astonishing victories of the last decade - the living-wage campaign in Los Angeles, the (eventually) successful grocery worker's strike, the campaign to keep Wal-Mart out of Inglewood in 2004, the fight for justice for hotel workers near LAX. More recently, they achieved success with a landmark blue-green alliance of nearly 40 environmental groups, community organizers and labor organizations like the Teamsters, to clean up the Port of Los Angeles, which resulted in a huge victory for clean air and clean water which will also provide good-paying sustainable jobs for truck drivers. The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports is a model for the nation, to combine economic security and respect for the environment at the ports, and Chuck Mack & Jim Santangelo from the Teamsters were honored last night (sporting leis flown in by a Teamster rep from Hawaii).
Another of their campaigns is the "Construction Career Policy," dedicated to providing local residents in low-income communities the opportunity to get middle-class, union construction jobs on projects happening in their area. This has resulted in thousands of jobs for at-risk and underserved communities of color, and the goal is for 15,000 jobs over the next 5 years. Mayor Villaraigosa presented Cora Davis, a construction business owner and leading advocate for the program, with an award.
Finally, in the wake of the movie "Milk," many are remembering the work of Cleve Jones, an activist in San Francisco during the era and the leader of the AIDS Quilt Project. Today, Jones is a community organizer working for UNITE HERE, and he has worked with LAANE on their campaigns to create living-wage jobs and improve working conditions for the 3,500 hotel workers around LAX Airport. Sean Penn, who became friendly with Jones over the last year working on "Milk," presented him with an award for his service. In his speech, Jones talked about these noble working-class people, many of them immigrants, "the ones who are serving you dinner tonight," and he paid tribute to their struggle and dignity. He also had a few words to say about the passage of Prop. 8, which left him heartbroken and drew eerie parallels to the Prop. 6 campaign he worked on with Harvey Milk in 1978. But, Jones said, the real parallel moment is 1964, a time when civil rights for African-Americans in the Deep South appeared remote. "Now is the time for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to sign a new Civil Rights Act restoring fundamental rights for every American in this country." It's not the tactic you hear from the leading gay rights organizations, but Cleve doesn't hold much of a brief for them either:
The new (gay rights) activists have impressed some gay rights veterans.
"They've shown a clear ability to turn out large numbers of people," said Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights advocate and labor organizer. "It's also clear that they are skeptical of the established L.G.B.T. organizations. And I would say they have reason to be."
Overall, it was inspiring to see a community-based organization so dedicated to restoring fairness, justice, dignity and respect to a part of a population that frequently doesn't have a voice in political affairs, and more important, to see them get results. LAANE is doing some great work.
The fairly spectacular flameout of LAUSD superintendent Adm. David Brewer, hailed as a savior for the district just two years ago and now on the verge of being fired by the school board, could perhaps provide a valuable lesson to progressives about education policy. Too often the focus is solely on finances - protecting education funding, fighting fee hikes at colleges and universities, spending X amount per classroom. These are noble and important goals, but Brewer's tenure shows the pitfalls of this focus at the expense of proper management and development, which is simply a disaster in Los Angeles, the state's largest school district and one of the largest in the nation. A lot of it has to do with internal politics. Antonio Villaraigosa spent millions to put his acolytes on the school board, and Brewer was seen as a legacy of the past. There was a Solomonic gesture to make everyone happy, and it made things worse.
Eventually, Brewer's accumulated missteps -- and his dismaying lack of prowess -- led to an arrangement in which he ceded much of his authority while preserving the illusion of his leadership, a revision of his job description that avoided roiling the city's ever-tenuous racial politics. Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was hired in April to oversee academic matters for the district, while Brewer continued to preside over administrative matters such as payroll and construction; Brewer also acts as a public figurehead and attends the protracted board meetings. This is classic Los Angeles politics: Administrative and racial comity is achieved by paying two superintendent-level salaries for one complete superintendent-level package. It also typifies all that is wrong with L.A. Unified. The district protects administrators who fail rather than students whose futures depend on a solid education.
For his part, Brewer was overconfident about his ability to navigate the political shoals that lay ahead. Shortly after starting his job, he was confronted with an enormous payroll snafu, as a new computer system put in place by his predecessor repeatedly spat out inaccurate checks -- for months, some teachers were overpaid, some paid not at all. Though Brewer tackled the problem competently, he also compounded it, first by trying to blame district employees for the mess and then by hiring expensive and ineffectual public relations consultants to spin a new image for the district.
On Which Way, LA last night, one guest reported that the Administrative newsletter had to be scaled back to a 10th-grade reading level because it was causing difficulties for the TEACHERS. And there were a lot of horror stories about the composition of the district political architecture itself. These are not all questions of finance, and many positive steps could be achieved for students without an appreciable amount of funding, or cutting back on needless public relations spending. This CAP report about teacher tenure and high-poverty schools might be a good place to start.
I think we need to have a broader conversation about education policy than "protect our school money," is all I'm saying.
