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A public comment of my own

For the past several weeks, a lot has been said and written about my proposal to modify the amount of time each member of the public is allotted for comment during our weekly Board of Supervisors meetings.

Unfortunately, much of that discussion has lacked balance, context and, at times, accuracy, thus serving mostly to misinform people about what I’d hoped to achieve upon becoming the board’s chairman in December. As a result, the prevailing narrative has become this: we on the Board of Supervisors believe that when it comes to our meetings, the public should be neither seen nor heard.

The most recent example of this was a lengthy story in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times. Appearing on the front page, it flatly and wrongly asserted that I think “members of the public talk too much” and mischaracterized fundamental elements of the proposal. Inexplicably, I was never asked for my comment, even though the piece was aimed squarely at me. Had I been asked to do so, readers would have come away with a fuller understanding of the issue.

The truth is I wish we had more public engagement. Our huge hearing room is often empty, despite the breadth and enormity of matters the board confronts every week. In this regard, we are not alone. Visit City Hall and you’ll find much the same. Recent coverage would have you believe that we want to yank the microphone on a public that’s clamoring to be heard. This is not the case.

Most weeks, the same tiny cadre of individuals speak on a multitude of agenda items—sometimes dozens of them in a single meeting. Under the current practice, they’re allowed to talk for two minutes on each item and then can speak for an additional three minutes at the end of the meeting on non-agenda matters. One of these so-called gadflies admitted to a Daily News reporter recently that he had signed up to talk on every agenda item simply to “annoy the board.”

Of course, this is his right—as it is the right of another of our regular speakers to participate in this weekly spectacle by repeatedly delivering the same racially-tinged diatribe against undocumented immigrants and reciting the names and addresses of those she alleges, without evidence, of being “gangbangers.”

But under California’s Ralph M. Brown Act, it’s also the right of government bodies to impose reasonable limits on public comment as a way to ensure a healthy balance among all stakeholders in the meeting process. All our local legislative bodies have rules to this effect, including the Los Angeles City Council. In this spirit, and at the suggestion of our County Counsel, I proposed that our rules be modified to give speakers a three-minute block to discuss their agenda items—rather than two minutes for each one—and two minutes at the end of the meeting for general comment.

While this might be a tight squeeze for the small number of gadflies bent on testifying about virtually every matter before us each week, we considered it a fair policy for the vast majority of people who, in good faith, take time out of their days to travel downtown and speak on the one or two issues that directly affect their lives.

Now, we’ve put the proposed changes on hold so that our county attorneys have time to correct misperceptions and explain the board’s motivation to concerned stakeholders as we move forward.

For those of you who’ve followed my time in public life, you know that I’ve been a consistently strong advocate of government transparency—a record that includes, among other things, my successful push to make board meetings available to a wider audience by having them webcast, televised and posted online with transcripts. As some of you may also remember, I authored Los Angeles’ first freedom of information act while serving on the City Council.

So I encourage you to join me at a Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting and see for yourself what all the controversy is about. You be the judge. Take it from me, you can’t trust everything you read.

Posted 1/24/12

Affordable housing still matters

Redevelopment agencies may have begun with noble ideals. But all too often in recent years they have devolved into slush funds for insiders—not to mention a bureaucratic means of denying our schools, social service agencies and fire departments the resources they needed to make California a better place to live and work. Auditors throughout the state are now starting to open the books of these agencies. And I believe the public will be shocked by what they find—including huge sums wasted on frivolous projects or left to idle in agencies’ coffers while vital community needs were ignored.

So I applaud the California Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold state legislation that puts redevelopment agencies out of business starting February 1.

But that doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the funding stream that some of these redevelopment agencies—notwithstanding their glaring flaws—provided for desperately-needed low- and moderate-income housing, along with some other legitimate local development purposes.

So this week, we took the first steps toward making sure our current affordable housing programs transition smoothly to new management as our redevelopment agency dissolves, and receive the strong and appropriate levels of oversight mandated by the new state law. (Here is the motion I co-sponsored with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.) We also directed county staff to begin working on a new framework for how we will fund and manage affordable housing programs going forward. (My motion is here.)

There’s not a moment to waste.

At a time when federal housing resources are being slashed by nearly 50% each year, Los Angeles County must take the lead in quickly identifying ways to continue providing the means to build affordable housing for the most vulnerable among us.

Over the past few years, the need for such housing has skyrocketed as the resources have shrunk exponentially. A recent survey found there were nearly 200,000 people on the waiting list for Section 8 housing in Los Angeles County—and that the waiting period is now 10 years. It’s even worse in some cities within the county, including one, in our own 3^rd District, where the wait is an astronomical 399 years.

As Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions up and down the state adjust to the complexities of life after redevelopment agencies, we must not lose sight of all the human need behind those terrible statistics.

And we can’t let California’s decision to dismantle these agencies deter us from our responsibility to help people get access to housing they can afford.

Posted 1/18/12

Flames can’t match burning spirit

Every now and then, a crime spree spreads through our communities that it is particularly hard to fathom, so senseless and random that it catches us off guard, even in a region that, sadly, is no stranger to crime.

During four days over the New Year’s holiday, we were caught in one of those moments as the Westside, West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley were unnerved by an arsonist whose motives are still to be discerned. Dozens of residential buildings and many more dozens of cars were torched. Our communities were terrorized as the arsonist lit one fire after another under the cover of darkness.

I live in one of those communities. One fire occurred less than four blocks from my home. The steady drone of sirens in my neighborhood and beyond was evidence of the mayhem’s sweep.

Throughout the night, families took turns keeping watch. Others took to Twitter with updates. Some fought fires with garden hoses. As we so often do in times of trouble, neighbors took care of neighbors and strangers joined forces.

As we’ve come to expect, our public safety organizations once again rose to the occasion. In what felt like an eternity but was just four days, a suspect was apprehended, arrested and criminally charged—a testament to the collective work of agencies operating in “unified command.” The LAPD, the L.A. County Sheriff, the city and county Fire Departments and the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives unit checked their agency seals at the door and worked as one team.

Although several millions of dollars in property damage occurred, no one was killed or injured. Since the suspect’s arrest, the fires have stopped. And for that, we owe an especially big thanks to a grateful immigrant named Shervin Lalezary.

A reserve deputy for the Sheriff’s Department, Lalezary was on just his fourth shift as a $1-per-year volunteer. He was patrolling Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood when he spotted and pulled over a minivan that reportedly was being driven by the alleged arsonist, who’d soon be taken into custody.

Lalezary came here from Iran as a child after the Ayatullah Khomeini revolution in 1979. He studied hard, went to law school and is now a successful real estate attorney practicing in Los Angeles. But personal success was not enough for him. Lalezary says he was determined to give back to the community that welcomed him as an immigrant. Through the sheriff’s reserve program, Lalezary found his way to contribute. Today, we’re all beneficiaries of his courage and commitment.

Los Angeles has a lot for which to be thankful as we begin the new year. So let me wish you a happy, healthy and peaceful one, indeed.

Posted 1/3/12

 

Not the ticket for fair play

On New Year’s Day, California will begin offering a gift of sorts to motorists across the state who’ve failed to pay a cent on traffic ticket fines and penalties that were due on or before January 1, 2009. Now, under a new law, they’ll have six months to pay just half of what they owe.

In the legislature’s view, getting at least some money into the state’s depleted treasury is better than getting none. And for the offenders, well, the upside is obvious.

But not everyone catches a break under the amnesty program, thanks to some wrongheaded rules concocted by the statewide Administrative Office of the Court. The AOC has determined that only people who’ve paid nothing on their tickets during the past two years are eligible for the 50% discount. This means that if you’ve sent along any money at all since 2009, then you’re excluded from the deal. In L.A. County, some 75,000 people fall into this category.

If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: What? Why would we essentially penalize people who’ve made some good-faith efforts to pay their tickets while offering bargain rates to those who haven’t?

Actually, there’s no good reason.

The AOC is simply—and cynically—playing the odds. It apparently figures that anyone who’s made good on even a sliver of their debt is likely to keep paying. Conversely, those who’ve paid nothing will probably continue along that same course. This latter group, the thinking goes, needs special inducements.

But here’s the problem: it’s blatantly unfair. What’s more, there’s no place in the law that calls for this exclusion. In fact, the Los Angeles County Counsel and the counsel for the Los Angeles Superior Court have concluded that the AOC incorrectly incorporated an eligibility requirement not found within the four corners of the statute, SB 857.

Next Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors will consider a motion I’ve authored to reverse this inequity. I’ve asked my colleagues to join with me in sending a five-signature letter to the California Judicial Council, urging that the AOC be required to include in the amnesty program individuals who’ve made any payments towards fines incurred or due prior to January 1, 2009.

We need to send a clear message to court administrators that such fiscal gamesmanship—even in the service of a good cause—is unacceptable.

Posted 12/7/11

We’ve all got a stake in the jail

The Men’s Central Jail sits on the edge of downtown, a non-descript structure surrounded by a cottage industry of bail bondsmen. Built mostly during the Kennedy Administration, it’s a deeply depressing place, filled with 4,000 or more men crammed into dank cells.

A good number of them are short-timers—misdemeanor offenders serving just a fraction of their sentences because of the overcrowded conditions. But there are hundreds upon hundreds of others—accused murderers, rapists, drug kingpins and the like—who are incarcerated in the so-called MCJ while they await trial, a process that can sometimes consume years.

Unfortunately, it’s a place where some Sheriff’s Department deputies also have crossed lines of behavior demanded of them in a civil and constitutional society.

As you may have heard or read, Los Angeles County’s sprawling jail system, which includes the more modern Twin Towers Correctional Facility, is under investigation by the FBI because of alleged brutality by deputies who run the operation.

On Friday, a new investigative body, comprised of seven distinguished individuals, will begin its inquiry into excessive force behind the bars. The Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence was unanimously created by the Board of Supervisors through a motion by Mark Ridley-Thomas and me. The commission was infused with a no-holds-barred mandate to help us understand how a small minority of deputies could poison the culture of an entire institution.

In the hopes of better understanding the challenges ahead for the commission and the Sheriff’s Department, I visited the Men’s Central Jail this week with Sheriff Lee Baca and Captain Ralph Ornelas, who oversees the facility. (See the photo gallery below.) Day in and day out, I can’t imagine a tougher, more menacing workplace, especially for rookie deputies who spend their first 3 to 5 years assigned to the jails—a practice now rightfully being reexamined.

Ornelas, the Brooklyn-born son of a New York cop, was put in charge of MCJ in March. He says he’s determined to be a force for change, inspiring a fundamental shift in the way his charges approach their jobs. “It’s about brains, not brawn,” he tells the deputies. “Let’s be more cerebral, more sophisticated, more professional.”

He says that when deputies resort to force too quickly, they’re not only unnecessarily escalating situations but undermining their own effectiveness today and in the future when they’ll be in patrol cars. “You have to develop your people skills, think through problems. It’s about verbal tactics. This way, you become a more confident deputy, who can solve problems.”

“The deputy in the jail,” he preaches, “becomes the deputy on the streets.”

I wish Ornelas and the Citizens’ Commission much success in their parallel missions because the stakes could not be higher—not just for the inmates and deputies but for all of us.

In the months ahead, thousands of new inmates will be entering our jail system thanks to a monumental shift of responsibilities in California’s criminal justice system called realignment. As of October 1, inmates convicted of certain non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual crimes that used to get them a stay in one of California’s 33 prisons, are now being sentenced to county jails.

Virtually overnight, the management of our lockup has become immensely more complicated, requiring daily decisions about which inmates should be freed earlier to clear space for the arrivals. The implications for the safety of our neighborhoods are enormous.

So while it may be easy for some to dismiss the pain inflicted on inmates by their jailers, it’s important to remember that what happens inside that difficult place can affect each and every one of us. Every facet of the facility must be operated with precision and professionalism. The jail may be located on a small, obscure street named Bauchet, but this is one problem that’s in everyone’s backyard.

Photos by Henry Salazar/Los Angeles County

 

Posted 11/16/11

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