Alarcon circle-jerks Sayre fire victims, Sylmar NC for votes.

Under the convenient cover of fire relief efforts, Richard 'Zorro Marxist' Alarcon will preside over the first joint City council committee-neighborhood council meeting today at 3pm.

Sad as it is to say, the high-profile Sayre Fire has come at a very convenient time for the old Zorro Marxist. Guillermo Huesca, philanthropist and popular Spanish-language television personality, is also running for CD-7. Huesca may be the first CD-7 candidate in ages who has enough face recognition to knock Zorro off.

Today's landmark meeting is ostensibly about fire recovery services for the people of Sylmar. A parade of citizens who've lost everything -- people from Sylmar -- will be trotted out to fill the room with empathy, while first responders will be trotted out to fill the room with pride. All with Chairman Alarcon presiding. 'How deeply must Richard Alarcon care for his constituents!' we think upon reading this. 'Vote Alarcon!'

...but how quickly we've forgotten.

Alarcon and his political offspring (Padilla) have been in command of CD-7 for an awfully long time. Complaints of water pressure issues, shoddy and plain old illegal construction, and fire code violations at and around mobile home parks and regular single-family homes have been coming into his office for decades while the quality of life for CD-7 residents has gone steadily downhill. The current slum lord conditions in CD-7 have all come to pass on Alarcon's watch.

Alarcon's let them eat cake attitude goes far deeper than this. In the past five years, mercenary developers have been victimizing mobile home park residents all over the state through immoral and cruel practices in the quest for build-able land. These practices include hiking space rental fees beyond the price of an average single-family home mortgage and charging utilities fees that are factors of ten higher than the actual utility bill. When the resident can no longer pay the fees, they're often forced to completely abandon their mobile or pre-manufactured home. Many, if not all of these residents are lower income and/or the elderly.

Three mobile home parks were seriously damaged between the Marek and Sayre fires. At least two of these parks have been under siege by the practices described above in the past five years. One of them, Blue Star, had many homes damaged in the Marek fire. Blue Star land lies half in the County of Los Angeles, half in CD-7 where some measure of City rent control has actually mitigated the owner's attempts to bankrupt and drive out those residents.

Alex Padilla may be the only City councilman to both take notice of the plight of these victims and actually take action. When Padilla left CD-7 for Sacramento, he had already spent a year working to protect all of Blue Star's weary residents by annexing the rest of land into Los Angeles City. All Richard Alarcon had to do upon taking office for a third time was to complete a few technical steps and the annexation of Blue Star would be complete. Residents would finally be free of the ongoing nightmare.

Yet today, Blue Star remains split between City and County. When asked why the annexation wasn't finished, Alarcon's response was: "... the property owner was against it."

The property owner was against it? Go figure.

Although CD-7 is composed mainly of Sylmar and Pacoima residents, half of Lake View Terrace, approximately 10,000 people, reside in CD-7 too. However, when the Marek Fire hit Lake View Terrace just a few weeks earlier, the council office was basically MIA. Alarcon didn't even phone it in, bypassing the major emergency relief information meetings organized by the State and County to hold his own emergency relief meetings for a selected few without any real outreach or even bothering to contact the neighborhood council in that area.

The Sayre Fire impacted portions of Lake View Terrace a second time. Alarcon's outreach to the NC whose boundaries include Lake View Terrace was to send his cousin and field deputy, John de la Rosa, to turn on the crocodile tears for almost 10 minutes of nothing at their last board meeting. 'How deeply Alarcon's cousin must care for the people,' they're supposed to think. 'Vote Alarcon!'

Reality-check. Alarcon -- who is the president of the council committee which oversees neighborhood councils and who should be their biggest ally -- has been historically antagonistic with the neighborhood council in that particular area. De la Rosa was the deputy who accused the NC board of racism and of purposefully pitting 'neighborhood against neighborhood' when the board protested Alarcon's theft of funds from an environmental center to pay for his union-backed truck driving academy. The academy will pave over 22 acres of the Lopez Canyon Landfill that is slated to become open space and park land per the landfill's approved closure plan.


Ladies and gentlemen of the voting public: CD-7 Kool-aid is being served at 3pm today. It's unfortunate that the Sylmar Neighborhood Council and fire victims find themselves first in line to partake.

Neighborhood Councils Shafted. (first run, repeat)

'Sleeping', 'walking around', and the ever-popular 'texting your honey’ during Public Comment aren’t enough demonstrated apathy for the City Clowncil any longer. The Clowncil has come up with yet another way to shun the unwashed masses in full public view – boilerplate Community Impact Statements.

Impact statements are how the various City advisory bodies give their input to the City Council. When a Council agenda is published, committee recommendations and the various impact statements are included so that the councilmember has a summary of all pertinent communications right in front of them. This includes Community Impact Statements filed by concerned neighborhood councils.

Neighborhood councils are official advisory entities in the City of Los Angeles. Despite this fact, the City Clerk has stopped including the text of the NCs' CISs on agendas. Instead, there is a boilerplate that brings the flow of pertinent information to an abrupt and ugly halt -- “*Please click on the above Council file No. hyperlink to view the whole text of the Community Impact Statement(s). Hard copies are available in the City Clerk's Office.”

Unless a City Clowncilmember is intimately or directly involved in any of the tens of motions that pass through a single Clowncil session, they will not put out any extra effort to get information on a particular item -- especially if it affects a different fiefdom than theirs. Thus the intended voice of the community in official City business is effectively cut off, just-like-that.

This new tactic goes beyond silencing the community to completely misrepresenting them in some cases. Let’s look at yesterday’s April 29th Clowncil agenda for example. In 48 different pieces of legislation up for a hearing or final vote, two of the 48 had a significant enough impact on the public for NCs to have debated them on their time and filed CISs: item 35, a CIS from the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council supporting the motion on a land use issue, and item 44, a CIS from the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council opposing this particular item – Council File 08-0481 (CD 7 – Alarcon, Cardenas) “Consideration of motion relative to fund authorizations and transfers in connection with the Training Opportunity Program at Lopez Canyon Landfill.”

CF 08-0481 might sound familiar. The “training opportunity” is the new Truck Driver Training Program at Lopez Canyon Landfill and the action is taking $100,000 from the Hansen Dam Environmental Awareness Fund to pay for this program. Zorro Marxist has pitched this one in Clowncil and in the press as a program to benefit unemployed minorities, mainly in CD 7. The agenda shows that the NC is opposed to this motion, but the text of the CIS is not there. To what is the NC opposed? The program itself, directed at unemployed minorities? The location of the program, a program directed at unemployed minorities? The amount of the payment, going to a program directed at unemployed minorities? The source of the payment, going to a program directed at unemployed minorities? Without the CIS text, the FTDNC looks like a group of NIMBY racists here.

In reality, the actual text of the CIS reveals that the NC is opposed to using Hansen Dam Environmental Awareness Center funds for a truck driver training program and makes no comment one way or the other about the program itself. Adding insult to injury, Alarcon has added recommendations that were not in the original motion but are now in the agenda. They not only instruct the BWP and City Attorney to change the Administrative Code that clearly describes the Hansen Dam Environmental Awareness Center Fund use, but they give Alarcon complete discretionary control of the fund. Q.E.D.

Ready NCs? Bend over. Get shafted. Now say “thank you”. Repeat.