In the small world of Westside politics, activists hold certain truths to be self-evident. Jack Weiss is a sellout. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is a sellout and a goof-off. Development is bad because it increases traffic. Billboards are bad because they’re…billboards.

And Proposition B, the solar initiative on the March 3 ballot, is so awful that there are no words to describe it, not even the powerful words of Ron Kaye. He’s the former Daily News editor who is now an angry populist blogger and community activist.

Aware of these deeply held, but not necessarily rational, beliefs, I drove a mile or so from my Westside house to Webster Middle School to hear Kaye and others debate Proposition B. The measure would authorize the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to install solar panels on commercial, industrial and other buildings and in parking lots. The power would flow into the DPW system, I like Proposition B but I thought the debate might give me some reason to vote against it.

Nobody beat up on Weiss, the city councilman who is running for city attorney. Any criticism of the mayor was mild. Nobody took on the Expo line although a couple of people blasted the flashing electronic billboards illuminating buildings and intersections. A couple of people from Venice complained about permit parking around their houses. The subject had nothing to do with Proposition B. But self -involved Los Angeles Venetians have their own agenda, no matter where the rest of the world is going.

There were some mild fireworks. Nick Patsouras, a former DWP commissioner now running for city controller, read from detailed reports he felt showed the DWP in a bad light. Patsouras opposes Proposition B. Sneering at Patsouras’ insistence in reading the reports, Brian D'Arcy, the union business manager and an author of Proposition B, said, “Can I get the phone book and read it?” When Kaye renewed his attack on B, D’Arcy said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, as usual.”

Kaye made a strong case for the “no” side He noted that all the work on the proposition was done far from public scrutiny, in the union hall and Mayor Villaraigosa’s office. Kaye hates secret government and the clique of lawmakers, business people and union leaders who run L.A. He said the proposal should have been the subject of extensive council hearings and discussion by the neighborhood councils as well as detailed and public examination by experts.

He and other opponents also objected to the fact that DWP union workers will do the solar panel installations. “Union power grabbing,” he said, drawing cheers from many in the crowd but not from the union members who were there.

I agree with Kaye that the process stinks, although I doubt if the city council would have been capable of holding intelligent hearings on the matter. But that isn’t a reason to vote against Proposition B. Solar panels on building roofs and vacant land are a good idea. We need solar. And what’s wrong with union labor, anyway. My wages up when we organized the American Newspaper Guild at the Oakland Tribune years ago.

Most of the crowd stuck around until the end. With a hot primary race for the Westside Fifth Council District seat, and Weiss running for city attorney, this area may have a comparatively high turnout for a low turnout city election. The activist, fussy Westside is tough territory for the Proposition B campaigners but they may have to carry it to win the election.

A dispute over light rail cars is testing whether Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is up to the job of shepherding the federal recession relief coming this way.

I know that it is widely believed that the mayor doesn’t have power, except to show up at events and smile. But he has plenty of power especially when it comes to distributing the money from Washington, and he should be held accountable for the way he does it.

As reported by the Times' Steve Hymon in the L.A. Now blog Feb. 10, a light rail manufacturing firm, AnsaldoBreda, has offered to move manufacturing facilities here from Pittsburg, Calif. and Italy if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority buys 300 rail cars at a cost of more than $300 million. The company said the plant and company headquarters would “generate approximately 5,000 jobs.”

Sounds like a good deal in an area where unemployment is rising above 10 per cent. But here comes the MTA bureaucracy. The MTA has reopened bidding on the cars rather than giving AnsaldoBreda the go ahead. The MTA staff said the AnsaldoBreda cars didn’t meet specifications, and the company was late in delivering a previous order of cars due by May 2007. Mike Cannell, MTA general manager for rail, said train doors opened too soon. Others complained the seats are too narrow.

Fabio Ficano, AnsaldoBreda’s director of government affairs, told the New York Times that Cannell’s attitude was influenced by the fact that his son works for Siemens, which is competing for the car contract. Nonsense, replied Cannell, who said his son works for a Siemens Energy, unconnected to the light rail car division.

The mayor is head of the MTA board and appoints a few other members. He’ll have a lot of clout when it comes to deciding which company wins, and he knows there are a lot of jobs at stake. Richard Katz, a Villaraigosa appointee to the MTA board, told me the mayor’s office is now trying to determine whether “the (car manufacturing) jobs are real or permanent and can the company fulfill its obligations.”

A total of $8.5 billion in the recovery bill has been allocated to mass transit around the country and a good-sized portion should be coming here. Combined with funds from the passage of the half-cent sales tax increase last year, mass transit should be getting a boost for improving service and creating jobs.

This is Villaraigosa’s first big chance to show whether he’s tough and skillful enough to cut through the bureaucracy and put the recovery money to work quickly on the light rail cars and the many other projects to come.

Don’t explain. Don’t ask permission. And don’t apologize.

Following those simple precepts, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and its powerful employees union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have rolled over generations of politicians and anyone else in their way.

Now, according to critics of Proposition B on the March 3 ballot, the killer DWP-IBEW team is at it again. The measure would authorize the department to install solar panels on commercial, industrial and other buildings and in parking lots. The power would flow into the DPW system, where it would supplement power from fossil fuel plants and a nuclear facility. IBEW workers would install the panels and the many new employees needed for the installations would boost the union membership. The panels would generate 400 megawatts of power by 2014. A megawatt is a million watts. If that’s hard to visualize, think of a 100-watt light bulb and multiply.

In the green world we’re seeking, wouldn’t it be a good idea to light all these bulbs with solar power? Proposition B’s critics don’t think so. They claim the IBEW bullied the Los Angeles City Council into putting Proposition B on the ballot without study or in- depth hearings. Solar may be good, say the critics, but the process stinks. Proposition B, they say, made it to the ballot through secret government and a complaisant council. They also say Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is a puppet manipulated by Brian D’Arcy, the president of IBEW Local 34.

Although I don’t share the critics’ fevered emotions—or even their opposition to the plan—I am interested in the dispute. So I arranged with Sarah Leonard, a Proposition B media person, to meet with S. David Freeman, former Department of Water general manager, now president of the Board of Harbor Commissioners and one of the big supporters of Proposition B.

I asked him where the idea behind the proposition originated. “It was Chapter 11 of my book ‘Energy Independence and Public Power,’ he said. “I sold it to Brian and I put it in the heads of people in the mayor’s office.”
How would it work? The department would put out bids for the solar equipment. The solar panels would have to be assembled in Los Angeles, although components could be made other countries. “Manufacturing of electrical equipment is done all over the world,” he said. “We don’t make the turbines for the coal and gas fired plants in Los Angeles.”

Among the sites to be picked for solar installation, he explained, would be areas where the power network is weak, ”where they have the most trouble.” What about rate increases? He said he didn’t think the solar measure itself “will have any impact on what the average Angeleno pays for electricity.” But there could be rate increases in any case because the city would still rely heavily on fossil fuel for its power plants. Of course he doesn’t really know. As the Times said in an editorial, nobody knows if rates will rise if Proposition B passes: “There are too many variables—just as there are too many variables to let voters know how much rates will rise without Proposition B.” The uncertainty over the financing was pointed up last week when Rick Orlov reported in the Daily News that a draft DWP audit said installation of the panels could cost more than double of the current estimate of $1.5 billion.

As far as the process that put Proposition B on the ballot, Freeman thinks there’s been enough public airing of the measure, especially compared to what DWP has done in the past. “They stole all the God damn water from the Owens Valley and nobody knew about it,” he said.

Despite all the questions, I think Proposition B is a good plan. Solar is perfect for sunny L.A. Green industry is the wave of the future. It’s smart to have our public power utility do the work instead of a variety of private contractors. It’s good that DWP union workers will do the installations. We need more union jobs, which strengthen the economy by expanding the middle class.

The double afflictions of foreclosure and job loss drew a crowd filling the San Fernando High School auditorium Sunday for a rally put on by One LA, a grassroots group with activists from churches and synagogues throughout the city.

Their goal was to persuade and pressure local elected officials to support legislation and programs to help those losing homes through foreclosure and to get local schools to do more in job training for the unemployed. One LA aims to do this by bringing large enough crowds so that politicians, bureaucrats, educators and business people have to listen. I felt good seeing so many people together on a Sunday afternoon doing something positive. It was a great antidote to the usual stories of L.A., city of strife, as well as those portraying L.A. as too airheaded to care about politics.

One LA is part of the Industrial Areas Foundation grassroots organization founded in Chicago in the 1930s by the late Saul Alinsky. The I.A.F. has spawned organizations around the country and has been here for years. Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in a Chicago program influenced by Alinsky. In 1990, while a Harvard law student, Obama wrote an excellent description of such organizing in a chapter of a book, “After Alinsky Community Organizing in Chicago”:

Community organizing, he wrote, “means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.”

The One LA meeting followed the Obama—actually Alinsky—game plan. The One LA organizers had brought together women and men from Roman Catholic parishes, other churches and synagogues around the city. Elected officials were on the podium. Rep. Howard Berman, whose district includes the northeast Valley, pledged to fight during negotiations over the Obama recovery package for funds to strengthen job training. ‘I want to commit to be a partner of One LA,” Berman said. Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon said he would introduce an ordinance for the Community Redevelopment Agency to use its financial resources to help foreclosure threatened homeowners.

I hope to see more of this kind of thing. It’s just what Alinsky and Obama had in mind.

I get almost as much e-mail from David Hernandez as I do from the Obamas.

Hernandez is one of nine candidates running against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in the March 3 Los Angeles election. The word underdog does not adequately describe the unlikelihood of any of them winning. But they deserve credit for bringing at least limited democracy to the mayoral election. In addition to Hernandez they are Carlos Alvarez, Gordon Tanner, Walter Moore, Phil Jennerjahn, James Harris, Bruce Darian, David “Zuma Dogg” Saltzburg and Craig X. Rubin.

I like Hernandez, who spent 25 years as an insurance adjuster and has been a community leader/gadfly for a long time. He is president of the Los Angeles Public Access Coalition, which is fighting the state law that relieved cable companies of the requirement to provide studios and channels for public access.

One reason I like him is that he was one of the few people who saw through the City Council’s successful effort a couple of years ago to extend term limits—Proposition R—by disguising it as a political reform measure. It actually made it much harder for the City Ethics Commission to enforce ethics laws. I was on the ethics commission at the time and met Hernandez when we were both visiting neighborhood councils criticizing the maneuver. We both liked to point out that the law, while sponsored by the League of Women Voters, was written by the lobbyists who have since benefited from it. Hernandez is still fighting the law in court.

I also like the way he’s campaigning, adopting the Obama technique of compiling an e-mail list and flooding the recipients with his views on issues. Some of the other candidates are doing this, but not as much as Hernandez. And his e -mails and web site are heavily issue oriented. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. I think the Wilshire Subway is a great idea. But he’s getting the debate out there, at least to those on his list. Other candidates for the offices on the March 3 ballot should do more of the same.

It’s a great way of publicizing the issues now that the newspapers are too strapped to cover the campaign adequately, and the television stations, as always, ignore local politics. Maybe during this campaign candidates like Hernandez will show how irrelevant the old media is becoming to L.A. elections.

If Sam Zell actually wants to buy the San Diego Union-Tribune—these bankrupts are big dreamers—he should read Peter Kaye’s excellent new memoir, Contrarian.

That’s assuming, of course, that Zell is actually interested in the cities in which he owns papers and television stations—an assumption that many of Sam’s critics would say is absolutely wrong. Sam the grave dancer doesn’t give a damn about where his media properties are buried.

Zell, owner of the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the Tribune Company, came to mind as I was reading Kaye’s book. I’d just come across a report in the Times that Zell is considering buying the Union-Tribune and the Orange County Register to consolidate the Southern California print and on line advertising market. Kaye was a longtime editor, columnist and political writer for the Union-Tribune, and his account of the once fat paper’s economic decline is a case study of how heirs can destroy a news empire.

This is just part of the book. Kaye has had a great and varied career. In addition to his time as a journalist, he was press secretary for a number of famous Republicans, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, the late Houston Flournoy, and Pete Wilson. Journalistic ethicists may frown at this type of revolving door. But we Kaye friends know that he is so contrary—hence the title of the book—that he was pretty much impervious to influence by the politicians he worked for.

As a political writer, Kaye covered the legislature in the glory days of the ‘60s, when I met him, and presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. He became a Washington correspondent for public television and covered the Watergate hearings. His memoir is an interesting look at the early days of public television, before it became a cautious bureaucracy. In all, Kaye tells an enlightening story of the politics of the last century. The book deserves a place in collections of important California literature.

Personally, I was most interested in what Kaye had to say about his old paper, the Union-Tribune. Kaye returned to the paper after political campaigns and public television as a top- ranked editor. When he started years before, it was an awful paper, but it had improved over the years, but not greatly. The publisher was Helen Copley, the widow of James Copley, who had headed the Copley newspaper chain. She took over when he died. At her death, her son David Copley assumed command.

“Circulation was dropping, advertising revenues were off,” Kaye wrote. “We held meetings…our human relations department supplied a gaggle of gurus to guide us…an authority in diversity training said we should treat our employees more gently. A labor lawyer from Nashville told us how to smash the Newspaper Guild. One expert advised more features and lifestyle stories; another said we should emphasize hard news.”

Times are tough for newspapers and the Union-Tribune would have been hurt no matter how smart the owners. But except for rare periods, the paper was a mouthpiece for the conservative business interests, which ran San Diego, and for the most conservative elements of the Republican Party. San Diego was changing from that hidebound model, but the paper didn’t change with it.

After having to hire a lawyer to battle for retirement money owed him (“the company and I settled for 50 cents on the dollar which came to $100,000") Kaye retired in 1993, walking away from the remains of a once-prosperous enterprise. Hopefully, the process of keeping it alive will frighten away Zell and the survivors on the paper will be spared from seeing it reduced and dismantled by him.

The book is available on Amazon and www.booksurge.com

City Controller Laura Chick is absolutely correct when she insists on the power to examine the performance of other elected officials.

Granted, I’m a former member of the Chick team. She appointed me to a five- year term on the Ethics Commission, which I finished earlier this year. Her instructions to me were along the lines of raise hell, kick ass or something like that. I don’t remember the exact words, but you get the idea.

That’s what city hall needs and that’s why Chick should be applauded for insisting that she has the power to inspect how City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo’s office has handled city employee worker compensation claims. Delgadillo replied that Chick didn’t have the authority to audit the performance of his workers. Chick fired back by issuing subpoenas to six of them. He sued Chick.

The dispute is now in the hands of the City Council, which clearly doesn’t want to give Chick the power. It delayed a decision on her request for $100,000 to hire a lawyer who would defend her against the Delgadillo suit.

The last thing the council or the other elected officials want is an independent controller examining how they do their jobs. They don’t want anyone independent in city hall. When I was on the ethics commission, the council consistently dumped our initiatives. It’s the same with anyone in city government who violates the spoken and unspoken rules of the city hall establishment.

The city attorney is an important part of that establishment. The council uses the city attorney to stop any rebelliousness. “No,” is the motto of that office. It’s always been that way. When the ethics commission was formed almost two decades ago, the council refused to give it a lawyer of its own, preferring the naysayers in the city attorney’s office to be available at all times to keep the commissioners in line.

Chick has the authority. In an e-mail to her supporters, she cited a City Charter section that clearly says that the controller is empowered authorized to conduct performance audits of all departments.

Chick has used that power effectively to reveal failures at the harbor, the airport, water and power and other important city departments. That’s her job and the council should let her do it.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will have much of the responsibility for carrying out President-elect Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan in Los Angeles and even beyond the city limits.

To make this happen, Villaraigosa will have to hammer the bureaucracy, keeping his focus on fast tracking projects that will put people to work quickly. The buck stops with him. He can’t be distracted by fools’ errands, such as when his mouthpiece of a school board president recently dashed down a Union Station platform on a failed mission to pull a board member off the San Diego train for a vote against the school superintendent. A great scene for an old movie but not for the mayor of a city in trouble.

The aid funds will be funneled through state houses, county buildings and city halls around the country. Congress will appropriate the money. But the actual spending will be in the hands of local politicians. Villaraigosa is the most powerful and the best-known local pol around here, not only in the city of Los Angeles but in the region. For example, he sits on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and appoints four of its members. The MTA will be a prime spender of Obama recovery funds for projects such as the Wilshire Subway, the Gold Line and the Exposition Line.

This week, Villaraigosa was in Washington where, according to the Wall Street Journal, he would ask that aid funds be distributed directly to the cities, rather than going through state governments.

Last week, I went to city hall to talk to two people who will have much to say about spending money for transit, local highways and streets. One was Jaime de la Vega, the deputy mayor for transportation. The other was Richard Katz, a transportation consultant and veteran politician who is advising the mayor.

They said a lot of street and highway projects were ready to go, putting people to work as soon as the money arrives. But I could see that Villaraigosa’s biggest job will be to speed up local bureaucrats who favor a safe, go slow approach to big public works, following the tried and true rule of city hall—that saying no never gets you in trouble.

For example, the MTA said it will take 18 to 24 months to do an environmental impact report before digging the subway to Westwood. I was amazed. Developers can get an EIR done overnight if money is on the line. It wouldn’t take Çasden 24 months. Katz and de la Vega indicated the new money would be put on a fast track, “We’re trying to create an attitude shift in the MTA,” Katz said. The mayor is the only one with enough clout to do that.

There’s also a job here for the news media, monitoring all the contracts, digging up slowdowns, rip offs and screw-ups. That will take a few reporters. Too bad this comes as Sam Zell was taking the Times and the rest of the Tribune company into bankruptcy court.

Here’s a way city hall can strong arm the Dodgers into paying at least part of the cost of providing public transportation to the stadium during baseball season.

The free tram to Dodger Stadium proved very popular during a test run during the last portion of the season. Councilman Bill Rosendahl told the Times' Steve Hymon that city officials claim it would cost $350,000 to run the tram during the 2009 season. As Hymon put it, “ Rosendahl was ticked because the Dodgers wouldn't pick up any of the cost this year, saying that baseball teams shouldn't have to pay for mass transit. That's government's job, the team said. ‘The city isn't going to pay for it if I have my way’, Rosendahl said.”

This is the same Dodger team that raised the prices for parking in its huge stadium lot to $15. It is the team that is charging $90 a ticket for prime seating at its new spring training stadium in Arizona.

City hall has a lot going for it in this dispute. The Dodgers need the council and the mayor to vote for the environmental impact report and possibly other permits required for the fancy mall and new entrance planned for the stadium.

More important, the Dodgers really need city hall for the big zoning and other regulatory changes required if Frank and Jamie McCourt, the team’s owners, ever go ahead with a big residential and commercial development on the fringes of the 300 acres of Chavez Ravine that the team owns. McCourt always downplays his interest in such a development, but he’s a real estate guy. And from where I sit in the stadium, looking over the parking lot, I can just visualize where the condos, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs would go. They’d call it Dodger City or Stadium Heights and it would be huge money making development when the recession ends and building resumes. And the new residents could use a tram to get downtown.

City hall folks are entertained well by the Dodgers. Council members hang out in the McCourt luxury box. The mayor is welcomed in the McCourts’ front-row seats. During one of those baseball interludes, the mayor and the council members should tell the McCourts: “You want that zoning? You want the EIR approved? Then put some money in for the tram.”

Everyone else in the city has to grease the way, usually with campaign contributions, for big zoning and EIR votes. Let the McCourts grease the way, too.

Lee Abrams, Tribune Company’s chief innovation officer, doesn’t seem too impressed with the Los Angeles Times.

That’s the feeling I got when he appeared at the Los Angeles Press Club Thursday night on a panel with Ron Kaye, the former editor of the Daily News and club vice president Ezra Palmer.

Abrams is a round-faced, curly headed man. His attire was casual —jeans and a zippered blue sweater. His manner was pleasant; his voice surprisingly soft He doesn’t speak in the capital letters he uses in his memos.

But he does talk in the clichés of the media world. He wants stories that reflect the city, told with emotion, displayed with flair. Heart- tugging stories. Laugh-making stories. Or, as I used to think when I headed to the city desk each morning, give them “a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

The Times obviously wasn’t giving him all of what he wanted. Abrams, fresh from a visit to Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and editor Russ Stanton, said the Times has “ a lot of baggage and a lot of friction and they will get through it.” The paper, he said at another point, is “not there” but “will get there.”

“In a year, it will be a pretty hot newspaper,” he said. The Times crew is “working at it but it is hard.” They must “make it happen but it’s going to happen slower” than he would like.

He likes the Sunday Times. “If they could do 365 days a year what they did on the last two Sundays, it would be great,” he said. He didn’t mention what Sunday stories or displays caught his fancy.

And, he doesn’t seem to think the Times shows its wares very well. As an example, he said entertainment business news is scattered around the paper. “Compartmentalize it, put it in one place,” he said

“I think they have the talent,” he said. “It is just how it is packaged and put together. It is called noticeability. It is just not noticeable.”

And finally he believes you can do a better job with a smaller staff. “I don’t think the L.A. Times has gotten there yet,” he said. The Chicago Tribune, on the other hand, “learned how to be better with a smaller staff.” He said Tribune staff members are so enthusiastic over the changes that “people are high fiving.”

After hearing Abrams, my advice to the remaining Times staff is to read the Chicago Tribune every day, dig out the last two Sunday editions of the Times and try to figure out what exactly he’s talking about. And let’s have more of those high fives.