County Insider

Spot a pothole? Give it “The Works”

If you’ve ever wished you could zap a pothole or wipe out some graffiti, the county Department of Public Works has a message for you: the power’s in your hands.

Or, to be precise, on your iPhone.

The department’s new “The Works” app offers a point-and-shoot approach to cleaning up quality of life nuisances in county territory, including illegal dumping and street sweeping issues.

Once the free app is downloaded, you can use the camera on your iPhone to send Public Works an instant image of the problem, get a ticket number and keep tabs on how the issue is resolved. (It’s also possible to send a message about the problem without including a photo.) If the location is not within the county’s jurisdiction, the app detects that and directs the customer to the appropriate agency. Jesse Juarros, the department’s chief information officer, said the “end game” is eventually to get all cities within L.A.County to join up so that reports can be forwarded seamlessly to the right place.

Since it was launched Oct. 18, the app has been downloaded 700 times—with more than 330 service requests received, including referrals to other cities.

“Most of them are for potholes, as you’d expect,” Juarros said. “The other one that ranked up there was illegal dumping.”

The new app is “definitely” contributing to quicker graffiti removal, Juarros said, because notifications go directly to clean-up contractors, who can take action right away.

Droid or Blackberry users can take advantage of the same services through the department’s mobile site. And they’re available to all via the regular DPW website.

Posted 11/9/11

 

Sergeant to the stars calls it quits

The photo captions dub him the “unidentified man,” whether he’s escorting Lindsay Lohan through a blizzard of golden confetti or guiding Mel Gibson through a gauntlet of paparazzi.

But everybody who’s anybody in Los Angeles County courthouse and government circles knows that the tall, broad-shouldered figure in those pictures is Steve Wheatcroft.

The veteran county sheriff’s sergeant has long been an unsung but essential player on the front lines of L.A.’s celebrity-media circus, bringing decorum and safety to the courtroom comings and goings of America’s most photographed.

He’s been responsible for the security of judges like Lance Ito, who presided over O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. He’s made sure that defendants like Lohan, Gibson, Phil Spector and Dr. Conrad Murray made it through media scrums and into courtrooms with a minimum of chaos. And whenever a threat is made against a Los Angeles County judge or member of the Board of

Supervisors, Wheatcroft and his team have jumped into action.

But now, after more than two decades of rubbing shoulders with L.A.’s famous and infamous, Wheatcroft is ready for a little family time.

“As they always say at the Super Bowl, I’m going to Disneyland,” said Wheatcroft, 54, who will retire in the next few weeks after more than 32 years on the job.

Instead of heading up the sheriff’s Security Operations Unit—which assesses threats on public officials, helps manage high-profile trial logistics and provides protection to supervisors and judges—he’ll be hanging with his eight (soon to be nine) grandchildren and cruising around in his black ’59 Corvette.

Leaving the job is kind of like leaving the family business for Wheatcroft, whose brother and son also work for the sheriff’s department.

More than anything, he said, he’ll miss the camaraderie of the eight-member unit that he joined back when it was just a two-man operation run out of the county marshal’s office. When the marshal’s office merged with the Sheriff’s Department in 1994, Wheatcroft’s unit took over protective services for the supervisors as well as the judges. As part of the job, he has served as sergeant-at-arms for the Board of Supervisors’ meetings and helped with logistics for visiting dignitaries ranging from Muhammad Ali to Kirk Douglas.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, the supervisors gave Wheatcroft a big send-off.

“All I can say is this is the sweetest cop you will ever meet,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina. “But that doesn’t take away the kind of commanding presence that he has had here at the board.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky saluted his professionalism and ability to “defuse situations that could have gone the other way,” including threats made against the supervisor or his staff. “You put me and my family at ease during those moments,” Yaroslavsky told Wheatcroft.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich thanked Wheatcroft and also singled out his work in the courts. Ticking off a long list of celebrity defendants the sergeant has escorted, he noted: “You could see him in all the movie magazines.”

Which is true, actually, but doesn’t seem to have gone to his head.

Over the years, the “unidentified man” in all those photos has had the chance to observe a lot of famous people under difficult circumstances.

Lohan, Wheatcroft said, is “just kind of a confused girl” who told him she “likes to party.”

Nicest celeb? That would be Rod Stewart, whom Wheatcroft accompanied during a week-long civil proceeding at the courthouse. The British rocker was, in Wheatcroft’s words, “a humble, appreciative person.”

Close followers of the O.J. Simpson case may remember the time the jury, lawyers and judge in the so-called “trial of the century” took a field trip to Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate. Wheatcroft arranged it. He did the same with an excursion to Vitello’s restaurant during the Robert Blake case.

And—as if Los Angeles County didn’t have enough of its own well-known defendants—Wheatcroft has been called in to advise officials elsewhere in the U.S.and Canada on how to handle high-profile proceedings. He’s written on the subject in Officer magazine.

By his side throughout has been his high-school sweetheart and now-wife, Wanda. After the board send-off Tuesday, she said her husband had often shared tales from his star-studded work over the years.

“But only in an entertaining way,” she said, “never in a complaining way.”

Posted 11/30/11

Coroner cleans up at awards time

Los Angeles County appreciates efficiency, and the coroner has the evidence to prove it.

After DNA revolutionized forensic science, criminal cases that had been “cold” for years suddenly got warmer. Law enforcement agencies formed special units to take fresh looks at them, and coroner’s Evidence Control Unit, which keeps material from more than 60,000 homicides, found itself flooded with requests.

Before 2008, that evidence was stored warehouse-style, each piece catalogued numerically. Evidence from one homicide could be spread across several rooms within piles of other evidence, which made gathering it a time-consuming chore. Before the widespread use of DNA testing, the evidence unit received very few requests from police, so easy access wasn’t a priority. In most cases, law enforcement agencies didn’t even know the evidence was there.

Enter Michelle Sandberg. In 2008, Sandberg, who was working as a toxicologist, was chosen to bring the unit into the new era, to meet the new demand. Due to budget constraints she could not hire extra hands, so she enlisted volunteers from universities and the military to help her and two other staffers come up with a new way of doing business.

Their efforts paid off. On October 19, the evidence control unit makeover will be honored as one of the ten most innovative programs in the county at the 25^th Annual Productivity and Quality Awards luncheon. The top three programs among them will win Bronze, Silver and Gold Eagle awards. Winners can then submit applications for awards from the California State Association of Counties and the National Association of Counties.

This year’s other honorees range from a groundwater reclamation program that saves an estimated $236 million annually to a free-for-taxpayers high school STD prevention program that has health and educational benefits that aren’t easily monetized.

The awards are presented by the county’s Quality and Productivity Commission. Over the past 25 years, the programs it has recognized have saved taxpayers an estimated $3.6 billion. Winners are also highlighted in an annual multimedia report, which promotes “best practices” countywide. (See last year’s report here.)

Ruth Wong, executive director of the commission, said the goal is to inspire copycats. “What we are hoping is that all or part of these projects will be picked up by other departments. We want them to spread.”

Already, news of the evidence unit’s success is spreading. The National Institute of Justice sent a representative to have a look at Sandberg’s shop two weeks ago. Sandberg, now acting supervising criminalist, and the director of the coroner’s office, Anthony T. Hernandez, have been invited to Washington, D.C. this March to address the Working Group for Medicolegal Death Investigation, which establishes nationwide standards for evidence management.

She will explain how her team tackled the problem, organizing the evidence in “kits” for each case. Each was labeled with a case number and a list of contents, and added to a computer database shared by 145 agencies nationwide. The Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County Sheriff now work closely with the unit, lending staff and advice.

Sandberg’s system has become so efficient that she has started contacting law enforcement agencies herself so they can “come get their stuff.” Out of the 280,000 pieces of evidence her unit housed, only 30,000 remain. As a result of that effort, 41,000 cases have been processed in two years, and decades-old murders and rapes have been solved.

Recognition for her unit’s transformation is great, Sandberg said, but even more gratifying is the sense of contributing to those successful investigations. “It is rewarding because of the work the detectives have done on the cases, using the evidence,” she said. “There is justice for the victims’ families and for all the people who have worked so hard to get it.”

Posted 10/6/11

The greening of L.A.’s Civic Center

The giant yuccas haven’t moved in yet, and neither have the California Pepper, Japanese Pagoda or Strawberry Snowball trees.

But make no mistake, the downtown park project is definitely entering its green period.

The first trees are now taking root in the 12-acre expanse in the heart of the Civic Center—the first visible manifestation of the ambitious Grand Avenue Project intended to create a cultural and civic sense of place in downtown Los Angeles. Since July, 50 of 373 new trees have been planted, joining the 95 that were left in place on the site when work began in 2010. (Many of the new trees are varieties of palm, and there also are dozens of California sycamores and Tipuana tipu trees in the arboreal lineup, along with eight coast live oaks and a wide range of other varieties.) Landscaping on the project is expected to continue through next May.

The park, scheduled to open next summer, will represent a dramatic transformation of a once banal stretch of downtown public space, creating an “iconic” and “spectacular” gathering spot for diverse activities ranging from picnicking to big-screen musical simulcasts. Stretching in three sections from the Music Center to City Hall, the park’s ADA-accessible ramps will complement a series of stairs, terraces and lawns.

The tree planting has picked up pace lately. Newly-installed palm trees (some weighing 15,000 pounds each) and silvery-leafed olive trees are now ensconced near the park’s new Starbucks building (which adds its own blast of green to the landscape thanks to its bright chartreuse slanted roof.)

The Board of Supervisors this week approved an amended 10-year agreement with Starbucks increasing the company’s monthly rent to reflect the new, larger 1,195-square-foot space; it will go to $3,585, from $2,250. Since business is expected to increase once the new park is open, the county—which will receive 6% of the coffee concession’s annual gross sales above $717,000—anticipates that its take will go up as well. The total annual revenue for the county, including the rent, is projected to be about $70,800 a year, the report said

The current Starbucks, long a fixture of daily life for jurors and Civic Center employees, will be leveled when the new facility is ready for business.

Also coming down soon will be the wooden barricades and concrete “k-rail” barriers that have closed off the Grand Avenue end of the project for months. The Grand Avenue sidewalk, which also has been closed, will be reopened on Monday, November 14, along with a mid-block crosswalk that leads to the Music Center and the Grand Avenue ramps to the Hall of Administration parking lot.

Dawn McDivitt, who is overseeing the project for the county’s Chief Executive Office, said other signs of progress also are on the way. For example, she said, one of the park’s hallmark features, the restored Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, should be ready for testing around the first of the year.

“It is exciting to see many features of the park taking shape,” she said. Updated 11/10/11: See for yourself in the most recent construction photos from the site.

Posted 11/2/11

The last map standing

After weeks of robust debate that sparked thousands of letters, e-mails and public comments, Los Angeles County’s most contentious redistricting process in a generation came to a dramatic close Tuesday as supervisors voted 4-1 to approve new political boundaries that hew relatively closely to the current map.

The supervisors voted after hearing six hours of public testimony from 243 speakers who invoked the history of Latinos in L.A., the meaning of changing demographics and sharply divergent opinions on whether “racially polarized voting” still exists in the county to such an extent that it denies Latinos an equal opportunity to elect a person of their choosing. Others asked supervisors to preserve existing “communities of interest” so that neighborhood priorities such as protecting the environment and building health care networks would not be jeopardized.

In approving the redistricting map known as A3, supervisors rejected competing proposals by Supervisors Gloria Molina and Mark Ridley-Thomas that had sought to create a second supervisorial district in which Latinos make up a majority of the citizen voting age population.

In an initial round of voting toward the end of Tuesday’s meeting, it became clear that none of the proposed maps would receive the 4-1 “supermajority” vote needed to pass. So, after a brief closed session and some minor amendments to the A3 plan offered by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, Ridley-Thomas signaled he would change his vote.

“There is a rather obvious lack of consensus on a map here today,” Ridley-Thomas said. With a possible legal challenge from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund looming, he said he wanted to avoid a “potentially divisive delay” and to push the matter toward the “closure” of a federal court ruling on what the Voting Rights Act required.

While he said he still believed in the plans he and Molina had put forward, he said he wanted to avert “the unnecessary gamble of the uncertainty of an untested appeal process”—a reference to the special redistricting commission made up of the District Attorney, Assessor and Sheriff that would have stepped in to decide the matter if the five-member Board of Supervisors had been unable to muster four votes for any of the proposals. After Ridley-Thomas’ change of course, the board voted 4-1 in favor of the A3 plan, with Molina casting the dissenting vote.

Ridley-Thomas’ S2 map and Molina’s T1 proposal would have moved up to 3.5 million residents to new electoral homes and split the San Fernando Valley into three supervisorial districts instead of the current two. The plans drew strong reactions across the county, and were criticized as blatant gerrymandering by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and others.

Knabe, in remarks before the vote, said that his A3 plan was the best way to ensure all groups in the county are well-represented. More radical boundary changes, he said, weren’t legally necessary and don’t reflect modern-day electoral realities.

“We cannot hold onto the past when we see clear illustrations of change with the election of minority candidates at every level of government,” Knabe said. “Hanging onto the legal battles of 20 years ago does nothing to move us forward…At the end of the day our job, as elected officials, is to represent all ethnicities, all people in Los Angeles County.”

Molina, however, in a presentation before the vote, contended that creating a second “meaningful Latino opportunity district” was required under the federal Voting Rights Act because of current demographics and a long history of bias.

“The legacy of Latino political exclusion and discrimination in L.A. County is so pervasive,” she said, “that it has affected not only the way Latinos and Latino candidates are perceived by non-Latinos but the way Latinos perceive their own ability to participate in the political process.”

Map A3, she said, waters down the voting strength of Latinos by creating a large Latino majority only in her 1^st District while keeping their numbers to a third, or lower, in the other four districts. Latinos make up nearly 48% of the population countywide, and about a third of the county’s citizens of voting age.

Yaroslavsky kept his remarks brief, saying he had already written or said just about everything he needed to on the issue. But he thanked the community for what he called “this unprecedented turnout” and for the level of discourse throughout the process. “On the whole it was an elevated public testimony that we heard and it contributed to the public understanding … of what’s before us,” he said.

More than 900 people turned out for the meeting, arriving in the early morning, filling the board hearing room and spilling into three overflow rooms and a large white tent erected on the Hall of Administration lawn.

But by the time the final vote was taken just after 6 p.m., only a handful of spectators remained to witness the moment—the culmination of the once-every-decade process in which boundaries are redrawn to reflect U.S. Census data. (Click here for our story on the day-long civics lesson for hundreds of students who attended the meeting.)

The new district boundaries take effect in 30 days. Here are some of the changes in store forLos Angeles County under the plan:

More than 277,000 people will move to new districts, and several communities will get a new supervisor. Claremont, for instance, will move from the 5^th District to the 1^st. Santa Fe Springs will move from the 1^st to the 4^th.

Several other communities, now split between two supervisors, will be consolidated. The lake area of Silverlake will no longer be in the 3^rd District, for instance; instead, the whole community will be drawn into the 1^st District, as will all of Pico Rivera, Azusa and West Covina. Similarly, the 2^nd District will encompass all of Hawthorne and all of Florence/Firestone, and the 4^th District will include all of South Whittier and West Whittier/Nietos.

The San Fernando Valley will continue to make up more than 50% of the 3^rd District’s electorate, and the 3^rd District also will continue to represent the Westside, Hollywood and the Santa Monica Mountains. The 3^rd District will lose 15,468 people, creating a district that is 45.8% white, 37.9% Latino, 11.1% Asian/Pacific Islander and 4% African American.

The population of voting-aged Latino citizens will fall in the 1^st District from 63.3% of the electorate to 59.7%. In the 4^th District, it will rise slightly from 31.6% of the electorate to 32.8%.

Asian Pacific Islanders, who had expressed concerns that redistricting would dilute their representation, will continue to be concentrated in the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th Districts, with the highest concentration of voting-aged API citizens in the 1^st District at 19%.

Population also will be more evenly distributed among the districts under the plan adopted Tuesday. Prior to A3’s approval, the largest district, the 5^th, had 2,088,786 people, while the smallest, the 1^st, had 1,893,001. That deviation, about 10%, will be reduced under the new plan to 1.57%.

Posted 9/27/11

A hearing—and a civics lesson, too

Hilda Placencia got a lesson in the complexities of political representation. Jesse Almaraz learned that government isn’t necessarily dull. Christopher Trujillo discovered that, when it comes to civic engagement, it helps to be a morning person.

“We were the first ones into the building,” the 18-year-old El Monte student noted, planting himself in a choice seat in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration. “But we had to be ready to go at 5:45 a.m.”

Tuesday’s public hearing on redistricting was many things to many people—a referendum on social justice, a call for a geographic balance of power, a refresher course on Los Angeles County’s shifting demography.

But for hundreds of adolescents packed into the audience—some bused in by community organizers, some carpooled in with their high school teachers—the marathon meeting was a daylong civics lesson.

“My teacher explained it to us, but this is explaining it better,” said Placencia, a 16-year-old senior (“Class of 2012!”) who was part of a contingent from Schurr High School in Montebello. “I learned more today here at this meeting than I did all day yesterday.”

More than 900 people showed up in the early morning to applaud,  testify and otherwise weigh in on three rival plans for redrawing the county’s supervisorial boundaries. By the time the Board of Supervisors voted to adopt an amended version of plan A3, which mostly follows the current boundaries, it was dinner time.

But one of the most striking aspects of the crowd was its youth.

One section was packed with row upon row of students bused in from job training programs in Supervisor Don Knabe’s Fourth District. Another was filled with 50 blue-shirted teenagers and young adults who came from the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps in Supervisor Gloria Molina’s First District in a convoy of vans.

A classroom of students from Bell Gardens High School, escorted by Molina staff members, shuttled in and out, politely observing until mid-afternoon, when their school day ended; later, the supervisor—whose own Latino-majority district had been created as the result of a redistricting lawsuit—clambered onto a Roosevelt High School bus to thank still more young people for coming.

Teenagers being teenagers, of course, few could name their supervisors—a problem that afflicts some adults as well. But that didn’t dampen their interest. At one point, Placencia and a group of friends from Schurr High found themselves in a tutorial on how redistricting can affect environmental policies as well as ethnic power—a conversation that started when they found themselves seated next to Rosie Dagit, senior conservation biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains.

At Dagit’s suggestion, the students began examining wall maps delineating the proposals. Soon they were talking to Topanga environmentalist Ken Wheeland, who was sitting nearby. They listened attentively as Wheeland—his denim work shirt decorated with a small sage-green ribbon to demonstrate his concern for mountain preservation—explained that he feared the environment would take a backseat to commercial interests if the mountains were placed in the same district as the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

As their conversation wound down, Wheeland also shared some adult political perspective, saying that no matter what map won, “there’ll probably be a lawsuit and a judge will decide.”

The students then returned to their seats, periodically peppering Wheeland’s fellow environmentalist, Dagit, with questions as the surrounding crowd waved signs for the redistricting plan backed by Molina.

“I told them, ‘I’m not here to tell you what to think—you should make your own decisions, think about what’s important to you, look at the maps, listen to the testimony’,” Dagit reported. “About halfway through, three of them asked us for green ribbons.”

Elsewhere in the audience, 18-year-old art student Jesse Almaraz of Long Beach sketched as he listened to the proceedings. A student at Urban Arts Crew, a South Bay job training program supported by Knabe, Almaraz said he wanted his supervisor to remain the same.

“If our district were to change,” he said, “we might lose our funding. I’m all for equal representation or whatever, but I don’t feel that only Latinos can represent Latinos.”

What surprised him and his friends most, he said, was the vigor with which all the groups defended their positions.

“I thought this would be kind of a quiet thing but people keep making noise and shaking signs,” he marveled. “I wish we had some signs, man. That would be cool.”

Across the aisle,Trujillo and the Conservation Corps contingent stayed almost to the end of the proceedings.

“It’s a lot of information,” the teenager said. “But I’m learning a lot about what’s fair and what’s not fair. Some of it sounds right and some sound wrong, but I’m just gonna support Molina. I’m listening so I can prepare for the next time this comes around.”

And one bit of preparation he’d repeat, he said, was fortification for a long siege.

“Burritos and fruit snacks,” he recommended. “Stayin’ strong.”

Posted 9/27/11

Decision time for L.A. County

One way or another, history is likely to be made on Tuesday, September 27, at a momentous hearing to determine Los Angeles County’s political boundary lines for the decade to come.

Hundreds are expected to turn out for a final public airing of the competing redistricting plans that have sharply divided the Board of Supervisors in recent weeks. The plans known as T1 and S2 would radically redraw the boundary lines to create a district in which Latinos make up a majority of the citizen voting age population. The proposals would shift up to 3.5 million residents from their current electoral homes and split the San Fernando Valley into three districts instead of the present two. A third plan, A3, would keep current boundaries largely intact but still would reassign more than 277,000 people to new districts.

After the public has had its say during what is expected to be a spirited and long-running session Tuesday, it will be the supervisors’ turn to act. Their vote will represent a pivotal moment in the once-every-decade redistricting process in which supervisorial districts are rebalanced to incorporate population changes measured by the U.S. Census.

But it’s clear that this season of redistricting, aimed at evenly incorporating the 299,274 newcomers who arrived in Los Angeles County between 2000 and 2010, has been anything but a simple numbers exercise.

Board members must weigh an array of competing and compelling concerns—balancing issues of geography, community, ethnicity and race—and come together behind one of three proposed redistricting maps before October 1 in order to comply with the deadline established by the state Elections Code.

It’s a mark of the complexity of the debate that each of the three plans under consideration has a different supervisor behind it, with Gloria Molina backing T1, Mark Ridley-Thomas S2 and Don Knabe A3, while Zev Yaroslavsky has spoken out against T1 and S2 as a “bald-faced gerrymander” that needlessly breaks up communities. (Read his blog here.)

Because the County Charter requires the five-member board to pass a redistricting plan with at least four votes—not just a simple majority—the matter has the potential to veer off on an unprecedented course.

If four supervisors can’t agree on a plan by the deadline, then the decision would go before a special redistricting commission made up of District Attorney Steve Cooley, Assessor John Noguez and Sheriff Lee Baca. Although there have been hard-fought redistricting battles in the past, the “committee of three” apparently has never been called in to make the final call, said Martin Zimmerman, county assistant chief executive officer.

The state Elections Code specifies the composition of the panel and that the District Attorney serve as its chairman. In addition to the D.A., it mandates the participation of the assessor and a third elected official. Because Los Angeles County’s top elections official and school superintendent are appointed, the third slot here would fall to the sheriff, under the code.

Much of the redistricting debate has hinged on exactly what is required under the federal Voting Rights Act, and whether there is “racially polarized voting” in the county. Courts have ruled that “50% districts”—those in which one minority group makes up more than 50% of the voting age citizenry—are required only when voting is so racially polarized that non-minorities vote against minority-preferred candidates so consistently that those candidates are denied an opportunity to win. That’s not the case here, opponents of the T1 and S2 maps say, because Los Angeles voters of all races have shown time and again that they will elect Latino candidates, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca and Assessor Noguez.

Despite that, advocates for the T1 and S2 proposals contend that racially polarized voting does exist here and that the county must respond to it by creating a second district with at least 50% Latino citizens of voting age. Latinos now make up 48% of the county’s overall population and about one-third of its citizens of voting age.

Adding to the complexity of the debate are concerns voiced by some Asian-Pacific Islander leaders who say the T1 and S2 proposals could seriously undercut their communities’ voting clout.

Then there are those who point out that, by law, race and ethnicity cannot be the only considerations in redistricting decisions.

Many of them, from neighborhoods across the county, turned out for a public hearing earlier this month to urge the Board of Supervisors to keep together existing “communities of interest” under the A3 plan in order to handle pressing regional issues such as transportation and the environment.

The outpouring at that hearing came as part of a redistricting process in which the public, for the first time, was invited to design and submit its own maps using a new county website. In all, 19 plans were submitted by individuals and organizations—16 of them using the software on the county site. The site, which also features thousands of letters from the public and a wealth of links to data and documents, has drawn nearly 48,000 visits since it was launched in March.

And the public’s participation is not over yet. The Board of Supervisors’ meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 27, in Room 381 of the Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple St. Those who can’t make it in person can still make their views known by emailing commserv@bos.lacounty.gov or sending a letter to the Executive Office, Board of Supervisors, Room 383, Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles CA 90012.

Viewers also will be able to tune in to the meeting via live webcast.

Posted 9/21/11

Three maps, many voices

Officially, three maps—two of which would radically reshape L.A. County’s political landscape—were at the heart of the Board of Supervisors’ public hearing on redistricting Tuesday.

But the day really belonged to the people, hundreds of them, who came to the Hall of Administration from all corners of the county to take a personal stand on what has become a highly political redistricting fight.

They packed the 690-seat board hearing room and at least 200 more crowded into two overflow rooms during the lively but generally good-tempered meeting. In all, 207 speakers, each allotted a minute to make their point, ended up addressing the Board of Supervisors during the marathon session. Their comments offered a dispatch from the front lines of governance, touching on everything from literally street-level services like traffic-slowing rumble strips on canyon roads to the very nature of representative democracy itself.

And many speakers, from many parts of the county, seemed to feel the same way as Malibu City Councilmember Lou La Monte, who told the board: “We ain’t broken. Please don’t fix us.”

“Anyone who lives here knows that the North Bay and South Bay have different interests,” La Monte said. “Maintaining as closely as possible the existing 3rd District lines would continue the success we have achieved working with our natural neighbors…Our present 3rd District works very well the way it is.”

The public hearing represented an important moment in the county’s once-a-decade redistricting process, in which the five supervisorial districts are rebalanced to reflect population changes measured by the U.S. Census. On Tuesday, many speakers favored map A3, which makes only modest changes to the current district boundaries, and opposed maps S2 and T1, which would dramatically redraw the lines and reassign more than 3 million residents in an effort to create a second supervisorial district in which Latinos make up a majority of the citizen voting age population. Both S2, submitted by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, and T1, proposed by Supervisor Gloria Molina, would divvy up the San Fernando Valley among three supervisors, instead of the two who share it now.

“While I’m proud of my culture and my heritage, I am torn between two lovers today,” said Sylmar resident and community activist William “Blinky” Rodriguez, who said he’d decided to side with his current supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky, in the redistricting showdown. He credited Yaroslavsky and his staff with years of commitment to the northeast San Fernando Valley, with its large Latino population, and said: “I’m here to support not breaking up the San Fernando Valley, not breaking up the 3rd District.”

Yaroslavsky, who is in his final term as a county supervisor and thus not personally affected by the proposals, has strongly objected to the S2 and T1 plans as needlessly disruptive and damaging to communities throughout the county. (Read his blog here.)

Some 3rd District residents said they fear that the sweeping redistricting proposals would sweep away years of environmental progress.

“I haven’t heard enough here today about the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area,” said one speaker, Bruce Benson. “It’s the largest urban national park in America. T1 and S2 will slice and dice this national treasure. Without A3, the wealthiest and most influential among us will move in to develop the mountains. Without A3, the bulldozers are on their way.”

Supervisor Don Knabe, who is up for re-election next year in a district that would be profoundly transformed under either the S2 or T1 plan, came in for vocal praise from many of his constituents, who turned out to support his A3 plan and advocate for keeping the 4th District largely intact.

“He is our hero,” said one speaker, Robert Thome of Whittier, a patient at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey.

Some who showed up to support Knabe’s A3 plan wore black T-shirts from the Energy Pathway Program at the South Bay Center for Counseling. Others, from communities linked by the Santa Monica Mountains, wore green ribbons. Both factions stood and waved together when their favored plan was mentioned.

On the other side of the issue, supporters raised signs reading “Follow the numbers…Follow the law!” when speakers advocated the S2 and T1 plans. Some also praised Molina as a trailblazer whose presence on the board grew out of a redistricting battle two decades ago.

“Twenty years ago, it took a court case to create the district that we now have [represented by Supervisor] Gloria Molina,” said Andre Quintero, mayor of El Monte. “This is one of those last legacy issues where you can create a district that not only gives Latinos an opportunity for another position here on the Board of Supervisors, but will create a huge impact for the county.”

“I urge you not to turn back the clock. Support two Latino districts,” added Jesus Andrade, of the National Council of La Raza.

Latinos make up 48% of the county’s overall population,  and about one-third of its citizen voting age population. The federal Voting Rights Act requires equal opportunity for minority groups. However, courts have ruled that “50% districts”—those in which one minority group makes up more than 50% of the voting age citizenry—are required only when voting is so racially polarized that non-minorities vote against minority-preferred candidates so consistently that those candidates are denied an opportunity to win.

One speaker, George Brown, a Gibson Dunn attorney who served as voting counsel to the statewide Citizens’ Redistricting Commission, told the board that studies have found evidence of “racially polarized voting” among Latino and non-Latino voters in Los Angeles County.

But others argued that county voters have demonstrated they will vote for Latino and other minority candidates without the need for such dramatic boundary changes.

“To say that we need more Latino elected officials in our area is ridiculous,” said Alina Mendizabal, a community activist in Sylmar.

“Please. You don’t know our neighborhood. If you knew the San Fernando Valley, you’d know we already have tons of [Latino] elected officials.”

“We already have equality in our county,” added Mario Guerra, a city council member in Downey. “I’m insulted that anyone would suggest that in our particular city that we vote by the color of the skin or somebody’s surname…Let’s not move 3 million people around. Representation, not race.”

Other speakers expressed concerns that the Asian-Pacific Islander community would lose out under S2 and T1. “As we all know, L.A. County is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world, and the current 4^th District boundary is well-balanced with diverse people from the white, Latino, African America, Asian American and other minority groups,” said Kimthai Kuoch of the Cambodian Association of America.  ”Under plan S2 and T1, millions of people will be shifting and it will dilute our voting voice to almost nonexistent.”

Beyond questions of race and representation, the afternoon-into-evening session also offered a vivid look at how geography can be destiny—for better or worse.

People from communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountains, for example, worried that proposed boundary changes could have a negative effect on everything from land use to water quality to emergency preparedness.

And some feared the loss of long-running alliances.

“The city of Santa Monica currently has a number of regional issues, including homelessness, the environment, transportation, all of which are being addressed on a regional basis through our long-standing ability to work with our neighbors,” said Gleam Davis, mayor pro tem of Santa Monica, who said she was speaking as an individual citizen. “If our neighbors become very distant, such as in Long Beach, it will be much more difficult to find that community of interest and more difficult for us to meet the needs of our own constituents.”

Davis, a former trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, said she believes the board “can meet both the letter and spirit of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act by still maintaining the communities of interest that have been developed over the past few decades. It would be a shame to unravel the very important and powerful relationships that we have formed over the past decades by changing so many people and moving them around.”

The Board of Supervisors will hear a final round of public comments on the redistricting proposals on Sept. 27 and are expected to take a vote that day. If supervisors can’t pass one of the plans with a 4-1 margin, a special redistricting commission made up of District Attorney Steve Cooley, Sheriff Lee Baca and Assessor John Noguez will choose a plan.

Posted 9/7/11

From typist clerk to the top at DPSS

It’s funny how the little things can shape a working life.

Like that summer day in 1967 when Sheryl Spiller, fresh out of Centennial High School, went downtown to the county Hall of Administration with some girlfriends looking for summer jobs.

“I didn’t want to work for the county. But I didn’t want to wait outside either!” So Spiller went inside, aced the test and set off on a county career that has taken her from typist clerk to acting department head.

Spiller is taking the reins of the Department of Public Social Services from Philip Browning, recently named to temporarily head the troubled Department of Children and Family Services.

She’s not sure how long it will last, but it’s all happened so fast that “I don’t have time to fret over it,” she says.

Fretting doesn’t seem to be part of her make-up, in any case.

She’s built her career with a combination of  front-line work, strategic savvy and a commitment to helping those around her grow on the job. And with more than three decades of DPSS service under her belt, there’s not much she doesn’t know about the department she’s been chosen to temporarily head.

“Staff jokes about not being able to get stuff by me. I’ve been there, done that,” says Spiller, the agency’s chief deputy director until her temporary appointment this week. Except for 3½ years in the county’s Child Support Services Department, where she first worked with Browning, her entire career has been within DPSS.

Browning calls her “an amazing lady” who’s been generous with her deep knowledge of the department and its people. “I think it’s remarkable that an individual could remain within one organization and have that kind of a presence and an impact,” he says.

“She’s a true, genuine leader,” adds a former boss, Joseph Guerra, now retired as the department’s assistant director. He credits her with a number of innovative contributions, including a pioneering outreach campaign to enroll uninsured children in the Healthy Families program—part of a larger initiative she headed to sign up more than 100,000 kids for Medi-Cal.

Spiller doesn’t foresee any big change of course for DPSS on her watch.

But her own role will be turned inside out.

Accustomed to working behind the scenes, Spiller now will be a more visible presence—front-woman for an agency charged with serving millions of the county’s neediest residents with programs including CalFresh (formerly known as food stamps), in-home services for the elderly and disabled and general relief assistance.

“I’ve always been the person on the inside, always had a focus on our human resources. Philip’s always been the public face of the department…I am going to have to make that shift,” she says.

Ever-shifting career challenges have had a way of turning out well for Spiller. “I would volunteer for everything, wherever the jobs were. I took some of the worst assignments.”

That included a stint at a welfare office then known as the “Unattached Men’s Center” in downtown Los Angeles, where female employees were rare at the time and the district director’s office featured a collection of knives and guns confiscated from the clientele.

“It was a really rough area,” she says. But “I didn’t even think about being afraid.”

She fondly remembers her time working at the DPSS facility nicknamed “The Pink Palace” (the name, and the colorful paint job, have passed into history but the office is still there, at Adams and Grand.) After that, she ran a section charged with coming up with innovations, such as simple, illustrated customer comment cards, that are still in use today. “It gave me an opportunity to be creative,” she says.

Her toughest challenge—although ultimately one of her most rewarding assignments—was going into the Compton office as its district director in the early ‘90s. She had to clean house; among other things, several employees were arrested on drug charges after a sheriff’s surveillance operation. And then there were those bullet holes in her office window—the consequence of being in what was then an active border area for three gangs. Internal Services Division came to the rescue with bullet-resistant glass. “Sheryl, it’s not bullet-proof,” they told her. “But it’ll slow it down.”

Working within a large organization to get things done—like knowing who to call to get those windows fixed quickly—goes along with Spiller’s broader philosophy of networking, educating and mentoring.

Whether setting up an on-premises program for employees in Compton to get their associates’ degrees or working actively with the county’s Management Council to help other managers hone their skills, Spiller says her “personal goal is to leave the department with highly educated, well-trained, success-oriented, self-motivated and healthy employees.”

She’s aware that her own professional narrative is an asset. Her rise from the clerical corps to the top ranks of management reads like a textbook case study, and in fact, a step-by-step account of it appeared in a workforce development publication put out as part of a collaboration between the county and the SEIU local representing many of its workers.

Spiller, 61, still keeps in touch with her old high school principal, who had counseled her to jump on the county track and get her college degree while she worked. (She ended up getting three, including a master’s in human resources and organization development from the University of San Francisco.)

She recently got on the phone to share with him the news of her most recent career move, to acting head of the agency where she’d started as a typist clerk back in ‘67.

“You won’t believe this,” she said, “but remember that advice you gave me 40 years ago? Well, it paid off.”

Posted 8/17/11

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