Mayor Sam's Hotsheet for Thursday
The Department of Water and Power has residents in the Yucca Valley upset over plans to build electrical transmission lines from the Salton Sea through their communtiies to Los Angeles. Residents feel the Department is steamrolling through their community. At a recent community meeting, DWP General Manager H. David Nahai was booed by residents. KPCC has a story on the issue with audio of the residents booing Nahai.
A former Los Angeles City Planner is cashing in on his years of experience and connections to join one of LA's most highly placed political consulting firms. Robert Sutton who spent 36 years with the City is merging his small consulting firm with Berghoff/Englander and Associates. You may remember that BEA is the firm that controversial former city official Marcus Allen went to work for. One of the principals in the firm is longtime LA rainmaker Harvey Englander, uncle of Council Member Greig Smith's Chief of Staff Mitchell Englander and a lobbyist for many public contractors in Los Angeles.
The City has been generating more revenues than it has in years. Yet they can't seem to find the funds to fix the aging Reseda Park Pool and City officials say the favorite recreation facility may close permanently.
Labels: dwp, H. David Nahai, mayor antonio villaraigosa, mta, transit tax
Posted by Michael Higby @ 7/24/2008 04:00:00 AM
25 Comments:
Once again Higby, your ignorance astounds us all.
Please show how the MTA "Tax scam" doesn't benefit the SGV by allocationg billions of dollars for transit improvement?
Just because it allocates monies for the Expo and the Subway, doesn't mean it shorts any other parts of LA County. It just so happens that West LA is the most congested sections, as well as THE most underserved community in Los Angeles in terms of mass transit and transportation infrastructure.
Of course it would be a pool in the Valley that they don't have money for or that would have to close. If it were in South Central or elsewhere in LA, the money would be found quick enough. The Valley as usual contributes the most and gets the least from the City.
More to the point, how is this proposed tax, which the voters get to decide about, a "scam"? Or is the real truth that Mayor Sam Higby is one of those card-carrying members of the Grover Norquist Fan Club, who wants to starve government back to the 1830s so only rich people can have schools and paved roads?
Wake up, folks. All this anti-tax drumbeating is about that, and just that. This country was a two-bit backwater frontier village until people decided to join their efforts and money together to make something of it. It ain't any different now. Gridlock isn't going to magically disappear just because Higby calls taxes "a scam."
The San Gabriel Valley folks are fighting for their turf, and that's understandable. But the reality is that they got the first busway and HOV lane, they have Metrolink for commuters, they have the Gold Line (at least part way), while LA's westside has nothing but gridlock and a few Rapid Buses and a lot more slow buses.
Those IMBYs, as Steve Hymon calls them in today's LAT, are fighting the good fight as they see it, but the bottom line is that improving transit on the westside will help people from all over the region who have to drive for hours to get to their jobs west of Western Avenue.
The problem with the MTA Board...well, ONE of the problems with the MTA Board is that its members are elected officials who are not elected to provide transit to the County, they are elected to look out for parochial local interests in the districts or cities they represent. Then they're appointed to the Metro Board and they bring the parochialism, not the Countywide perspective, with them.
Villaraigosa's guilty of that too, but his city is so big that if anything good happens in it, everyone else feels the ripple effect. LA has been ripped off by transit parochialism in past decades.
The City of LA should close all of its public pools; they are a huge expense and almost no one uses them.
What?
No commentary on John Edwards and his girlfriend getting nailed at 2:30 A.M. in the basement of the Beverly Hilton Hotel??
Tsk, tsk.
Well, I guess if you want to talk about "Two Americas" you need two families to make the comparison.
Good luck on your VP quest, schmuck.
6:10: Boo=hoo, false again. The Valley gets back far more than the westside in terms of what it puts in, especially when your property values are less than half that. Stop whining.
It just shows what a fat bald phony Zine is: opposed the property tax for gang "intervention" because his area in the Valley wouldn't get enough, not out of priniple that it wasn't fair to honmeowners who have to carry all the burden for the whole city again. AND there are only some 300,000 properties this and the trash tax, etc. affect.
NOW Z-Man is trying to steal some of Hahn's gang intervention money in advance to fix the pool, because no one oversaw that its repair was properly done in the first place.
Another reason to oppose Hahn/ Tony Cardenas' gang prevention tax scam: as this blatant attempt shows (and the writers of the article are too stupid to follow it to its logical conclusion), ANYTHING can be called a "gang intervention/ prevention program" for purposes of scamming the homeowners for another property tax. Fixing a public pool because some would-be gangbangers may show up, is just one excuse.
Shows what a hypocrite Zine is: he spoke out against the MTA tax because the city's getting our gas tax for Transportation swiped by State again, probably, and that's "Bait and Switch," -- and how do we know it won't happen again, even if this MTA tax is approved?
THAT is a valid point - the public's tired of taxes being so loosely written that from the trash tax for cops to Prop S to even those voted with a 2/3 majority and supposedly ironclad like the gas tax 'FOR TRANSPORTATION" are still subject to being swiped into the city or state General Fund to make up for general mismanagement.
BUT Z-man here is attempting the biggest, most shameless, up-front Bait-and-Switch himself, getting the taxpayers in West LA to pay for HIS pool on the false pretexts by Janice Hahn and Cardenas that "this tax will end gang crime forever." (An imbecilic claim to make in Council to try to get support -- only the gangbangers' mamas on welfare will be dumb enough to vote for it on those grounds, knowing they never pay for anything anyway, stiff the little old lady in WLA.)
Z-Man is happy to have Hahn and Cardenas rip off the homeowners if he gets his share as some sort of open checkbook, though. (This, after he failed getting LAUSD to pay for his senior center.)
6:18: Don't try to argue for the MTA transit tax, with that kind of "logic" or you'll kill it for sure.
I happen to agree that the westside is the most underserved when it comes to mass transit, which is totally nonexistent: between the NIMBY's against it there, the old blue hairs, and the IMBYs elsewhere from the Eastside to the S G Valley, the area lost out for decades when it would have been so much easier, money was flowing. Now we see it happening again.
But when you get into our country's past as a "backwater" before mass transit and high taxes -- forget it. People used to substitute personal effort and ingenuity and independence for the nanny state -- the "wild west" and all that. And the scrappy east coast immigrants who rose out of their ghettos with no government help at all.
By contrast, today we have a small group of citizens and homeowners who are subsidizing the first-ever American city where more than half the residents are illegal, uneducated immigrants and their kids, while they make up 3/4 the youth in schools because of high birth rates. Almost all these kids are on poverty assistance which is 3/4 of the schools also (funny coincidence), and these immigrants have ruined our county health care clinics, necessitate more transit spending to get them out of their unlicensed cars they can't afford to drive these days (a silver lining there).
Your pushing the tax so we can fund a city crushed by illegal immigration from an underclass that Mexico and Central America's elite don't want, is hardly a persuasive argument for a tax.
Do you people really believe your own PR that all these impoverished illegals have been a positive, and our country was "a backwater" before we opened our borders (while closing them to the educated, skilled workers we need)? Do you really think that all these social networks crashing, while those who pay for them have gotten less and less for more and more, persuades anyone but the Entitlement Class themselves? This is the stuff that persuades people the Mayor hasn't got a clue and the city's going in the wrong direction. People are disgusted with the pile-on of taxes for the problems caused by these uneducated masses who shouldn't be here -- just so a few big businesses get cheap labor they don't pay for, but push the costs onto the middle class. Who don't need or want uneducated Latinos to "raise their kids," and find it's just harder to do it themselves, since now schools suck and there's no safety net for themselves.
You're playing right into the hands of Antonovich and the right wing, so just shut up, do yourself a favor.
Good morning ladies and gentlemen (removes hat and bows low):
Pirates were in attendance at a UCLA fundraiser last night where the ladies flowed in equal parts with elegant tequila, savvy? His Nibbs made a passage northwest while dipping his wick into another's honey pot, saavy?
You may wish to unroll the scrolls of my previous remarks, perhaps the Bard would be so kind to do so for you (motions to Bard, Bard hands the Captain what be the proper scroll). Recall the deal that His Nibbs will run the losing Lloyd against the bald plated pirate? Alas, now the bald plated pirate is ready to grab the wheel (makes large sweeping motion) from His Nibbs himself!
My lord Mayor, rest assured that all of this information can be found quite easily upon the internet. If a pirate can find it, anyone can find it. Savvy?
The Valley is not the only area suffering from neglect. Lincoln Heights, Downey Park Pool has been closed forever. Do nothing Councilman Doughboy Reyes has failed to open the pool while our kids suffer in these heat wave summers. He should get a couple of those developers that have him in their pocket fix the damn pool.
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen (removes hat and bows low with a flourish; tips hat to other Captain Jack Sparrow):
Given that there is someone else who has decided to wear my breeks while I'm away, I'll let the Bard speak on my behalf for the Bard, if you will, never plays second fiddle or shares the stage with the rest of us for he is rather brilliant in his own right.
(Walks around other Captain Jack, looking and wincing) Oh bugger. Looks like those pants are a little too tight in the seat. (Sigbs) Just don't soil them, savvy? Bard, are you about? (Bard steps up and begins to sing)
"When someone wears another's pants and takes on their persona...
Then someone must remember this; those pants they have an owner.
So treat them well and treat them good,
Just like your mum says you should.
For if you don't you take a chance that someone else's borrowed pants
will lead you on a merry dance
and you'll be branded as a poser...
for those pants they have an owner."
(Captain Jack steps back on stage; crew applauds Bard. Bard bows and exits stage) It should be noted that the sot who sought to wear my breeks might have uncovered something worth noting. (Looks at sot) Just don't soil the pants, savvy?
Jack Sparrow, you're just annoying. Why spend so much time composing stupid sonnets that make no sense? If you have something to say, say it.
To: 5:34 A.M.:
You don't speak for us ALL; you certainly don't speak for ME.
I am not astounded at all.
Mehtinks the feeling is warm and fuzzy basking in the knowledge that Capt. Jack monitors the blogosphere so closely, his vigilance is both noble and noteworthy.
http://www.anchoragepress.com/site/basicarticle.asp?ID=748
Gov. Palin is going down...now higby has no one to fawn over
Governor Palin is VERY attractive.
I can't believe she's had all of those kids, and still looks this good.
Bravo to good genes.
Aye, 12:35... methinks you wish upon thyself a most foul curse. Mayhap thou doth cast upon thyself a pox?
12:42:
That's because you're an idiot.
9-2-1 --- looks like LA County is going to be getting some more Mass Transit!
About the pool in Lincoln Heights: It's barely 4 feet deep, if that, and pretty small. Go to First St, El Sereno, Glassell Park or Lincoln Park for a pool. It's only used for 3 months out of the year anyway and there's a budget crunch due to these guys in City Hall (1.) spending too much already, (2.) spending on poor, wasteful choices, (3.)continuing to fund poor choice programs, (4.) spending without accountability throughout city hall, and (5.) not cutting back on programs favoring illegals over lawful residents (when they don't require proof of lawful residence for services, which bumps others who ARE legal residents.)
This tax is HOT GARBAGE. All it will fund is public transportation and will not fund general road issues. These idiot politicos have to be realistic. No one wants to ride a bus with stinky people, crazed loons and other undesirables. Public transportation will not solve LA's problems, because people will choose their cars, period and point blank. Its time to get rid of those ineffective carpool lanes, expand freeway capacity, such as extending the Marina freeway into the OC, etc.
"Jack Sparrow, you're just annoying. Why spend so much time composing stupid sonnets that make no sense? If you have something to say, say it."
If you had been educated somewhere other than LAUSD and CALSTATE, you would appreciate Jack Sparrow and understand what he is saying. A major in English (the mother tounge of this country)says it all.
Get educated or shut up.
Did you know that Todd Palin was ordered to discuss Trooper Mike Wooten with Monegan by the head of the Governor's security detail? How about the fact that schedules disprove Monegan's claim that he only met with Palin four times in seventeen months? It turns out that they had over two-dozen meetings during that time, including several visits by Monegan to the Governor's home and joint trips to remote parts of Alaska. The circus looks to be drawing to a close, with Palin coming out squeaky clean!
9:09 = Jack Sparrow or his boyfriend.
So, what DOES the pompous ass want to tell us with those pretentious sonnets? Since idiotic minds think alike, YOU clearly know so tell us or both of you (or you and your alterego) shut up.
Write haikus on Jack Hoff's thread.
The vagina is the opening that is located directly below the urethral opening (where you pee from). The opening is called an orifice, as are other openings in your body. Directly outside of the vaginal opening are the labia minor, the smooth inner lips of the vulva. Outside of the inner lips are the labia majora, the fleshier outer lips that are typically covered in hair. Females tend to know less about their genitals than males because they cannot see them as easily - fairly obvious. There is nothing wrong with using a mirror and taking a look at what is “down there”. It’s easy to see if you put a mirror between your legs and look, especially if you are trying to insert a tampon for the first time.
Ride with smelly, obnoxious people on the MTA? What an insult!!
Our very own Zuma Dogg rides the MTA, and...well, on second thought, you are right.
WHEN the MTA becomes more efficient and quicker than driving, as it is in NYC, Boston, DC and every city here and in Europe, non-smelly regular people will take it too, and it will be different from who rides the very limited subway lines today. So looking at current ridership patterns on various lines is pointless and gives the wrong conclusion.
Any of the yahoos opposing "westside subway" ever even ridden the Tube in London or Paris Metro? Even well-dressed people going to work take them, although late at night when the subways are less crowded and possibly more dangerous, and it's easier to get by in a car, in NYC anyway people tend to take more cabs or get their car parked for $1500/month out of the garage.
LA's metro being built today is more like Tokyo's, though -- in my opinion, the Red Line from Pershing Square through Hollywood to Universal was overbuilt in terms of design, but when the line is more extensive and people other than the odd tourist or Mexicans and punks who take it now notice, it will be the center of a system that can hold its head up for decades to come. When even Europe and NYC's ancient lines are still used to capacity most times, only a fool can argue that building lines where the traffic is, is a waste.
Don't worry, you critics: most of you will be gone before any of it gets built anyway, with the decades of delay and endless wrangling. Your grandkids won't thank you for your part in the delays, either.
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