If Villaraigosa fails to seize control of the district, a sprawling bureaucracy that covers Los Angeles and 26 other cities, he will experience his most public defeat since his loss to Hahn in 2001. If he wins, he just may create a wedge issue large enough to divide, or at least distract, the Democrats and the powerful CTA — political allies for a generation — just as they are supposed to be uniting to defeat Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

From 1952 to 1968, UCLA and the West L.A. Veterans Administration, now called the Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles Healthcare Center, used the land adjacent to and under the park to bury radioactive biomedical research waste. The wastes buried there, according to research records unearthed by CityBeat, include barrels of radioactive tritium and lab wastes, and animal carcasses from Atomic Age-experiments involving the toxic radionuclides carbon-14, zinc-65, strontium-85 and strontium-90, gold-198, iodine-125, cobalt-60, copper-67, manganese-54, xenon-133, indium-113, calcium-47, iron-59, and several others. A central dirt mound of plant-covered debris sits in the middle of the dump, emitting high ambient radiation readings. This reporter, using a nuclear radiation monitor, detected shards of radioactive glass that registered more than four times normal.