Solving The "Affordable Housing Crisis" Through . . . Sphincter Control?!
By Walter Moore, Candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles, MooreIsBetter.comJust when I think City Hall cannot get any more ridiculous, it sinks to a new low.
The first boondoggle that caught my eye was the City's agreement to pay China $1 million to rent -- not to buy, but to rent -- three monkeys for 10 years, and to build a $2.3 million monkey house for their comfort.
More recently, and also zoo-related, was the decision to hire a feng shui "expert" to advise on construction of the elephant pen.
But today's L.A. includes a story on what I consider a new low. The City of L.A.'s Housing Department -- you know, the people who are supposed to house the homeless?-- is spending YOUR hard-earned tax money on a consultant who is teaching its employees . . . insert drum roll here . . . "sphincter control."
When you think about how Mayor Villaraigosa's administration is squandering your money, you're going to need a lesson in that art, aren't you?
To be fair, the training courses aren't entirely about sphincter control. No, the consultant who has received over $18,000 of your money, so far, inclues training on "playing with wooden sticks."
Your City Council, moreover, UNANIMOUSLY approved renewal of this "consultant's" contract. Thank you, City Council!
You could not make this stuff up. You couldn't. Kafka and Gogol -- the author, not the search engine -- could never come up with anything this absurd.
Here's a link to the story by Jessica Garrison: Zen and the Art of Managment. (The title, by the way, is a play on the name of a book I enjoyed as a teenager, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.")
Posted by Walter Moore @ 5/11/2007 06:56:00 AM
9 Comments:
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Maybe new management figures actual coverage of City Hall -- as opposed to "press release journalism" -- will sell more papers? If that's what they're thinking, they're right!
Why aren't the writers for Leno & Letterman reading this blog?
They would have no shortage of material for their monologues.
So maybe now somebody will look into the management "style" of the General Manager of LAHD, Mercedes Marquez. No one currently employed there will speak out due to fear of retaliation by Mercedes. In fact, it is rumored that LAHD mgmnt. won't even let their inspectors talk directly to prosecutors assigned to housing cases. Something doesn't smell right -- sphincter control indeed...
Yeah! I mean, this is both hilarious and outrageous at the same time! This should be big!
Think about it: how long does it take you to earn $15,000? That's some serious money. And it's being take from us and handed to this woman to "teach" the employees "how to breathe?!" Has that been a big problem-- employees forgetting to breathe and dying before they can do any work???!!!
If I were running this City, that would be a total firing offense. Actually, if I were running this City, I would hope to appoint people smart enough not to fritter away tax dollars on stuff like this in the first place. I think City Hall has no clue, and certainly no respect, for how HARD people work to make their money -- and how much we resent it when we see that money squandered.
Letterman and Leno don't turn to this blog for material because they know bad writing when they see it.
As for Zen, Walter could use a bit of it.
.....The mayor also said he’d already swept out the corruption and inefficiency that bedeviled the city’s housing operations. He wants to put the Proposition H housing bond back on the ballot as soon as next year. But the question remains whether this is really a program or just another of the mayor’s flashes of enthusiasm.
Reyes sees a rising crisis, with inner-city hopelessness building along with the housing drought. “I’m hearing the kind of desperation you heard in the early 1990s,” he says, recalling multiple families in small apartments, multiple people in single rooms, all in dangerous neighborhoods, in-filled to the point where every garage had a family living in it. As apartments are candied and gentrification advances into traditionally poor areas like Pico-Union, the growing number of impoverished and under-housed people is being forced back into smaller spaces,
GET RID OF ILLEGALS AND THERE WOULD BE PLENTY OF AVAILABLE APTS. FOR LEGAL RESIDENTS. ARROGANT ASS ANTONIO DOESN'T GET THE MESSAGE THE PEOPLE SPOKE AND VOTED NO ON HOUSING BOND. ASSHOLE!!
Correction: the article was about the HOUSING Department , not the Housing Authority
Walter,
Hey , you hit that one on the head...
I just got out of the hospital because I lost sphincter control....
We all think it is because of the shenanigan's that are going on at the HOusing Department ...... MY gut just gave me pains reading this....
Maybe we could all learn sphincter control.... we need it after reading this.
Now why would the LA Times print something like this knowing it was going to stir the pot?... exactly.
The mayor has been aggressively trimming the budgets of City departments, yet this kind of crap still gets funded!
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