Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s affordable housing plan--a centerpiece of his administration—has been dealt near fatal blows by a court decision, the recession—and by his own planning director.

This is bad news for the mayor, who has just hired a new jobs czar. Creating construction jobs, including building apartment houses with affordable housing for working people, is crucial to Los Angeles’ recovery. And without such units, Los Angeles will continue to become a city of rich and poor, with little room for the working class or even the less affluent members of the middle class.

The court decision was handed down by a state appellate court. It wiped out a planned city requirement that Los Angeles developer Geoffrey Palmer set aside a portion of his new apartments for housing units affordable by working class tenants.
Such a requirement, to extend through the entire city, was a major part of Villaraigosa’s housing proposal. The Palmer decision nullifies the plan. Affordable housing advocates tell me that more than 28,000 affordable units could have been built over a decade if Los Angeles had forced developers to set aside 15 percent of the units in a new building for affordable housing.

Another blow serious blow to the mayor’s plan was delivered by the recession. With money scarce, hardly anybody is building apartments, either for the poor, the middle class or the rich.

Finally, Villaraigosa got a real stab in the back this week from his planning director, S. Gail Goldberg. She reported to a City Council committee on how the Planning Department would deal with the Palmer decision. Her answer: It can’t. She said, “Economic conditions over the past several years have caused the Mayor and City Council to take unprecedented actions to dramatically reduce the city's payroll. The Department of City Planning has been particularly hard hit,” Goldberg wrote. In other words, she’s too busy to work on a centerpiece of Villaraigosa’s program.

This is a classic bureaucratic blockade. “Gail’s memo is disingenuous and is a formula for inaction,” said Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College, a housing expert who arranged for the construction of many affordable apartment units while he was a Boston city official.

It will be tough to overcome the Palmer decision, requiring action by the builder-developer dominated state legislature and the City Council. But Villaraigosa’s planning director doesn’t even want to try. Whose side is she on, developers or working class tenants?

Villaraigosa should answer the same question. If he is serious about affordable housing, he ought to tell Goldberg to get with his program instead of obstructing it.

The talk inside and outside the Wilshire Grand’s Los Angeles room was about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new jobs czar, the city budget deficit and the collapse of the land development industry.

The occasion was a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon featuring Councilwoman Jan Perry, who gave a pessimistic report on the budget. The forum, run by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer, attracts a crowd of lawyers, lobbyists, engineering firm officials and other involved in big public and private projects.

A couple of years ago, with construction booming and Grand Avenue ready to become L.A.’s own Champs-Elysees, the mood at the forum luncheons was great. That was when the mayor actually proclaimed the construction crane as L.A.’s municipal bird.

Before Perry spoke, I talked to lawyers and engineering people about how they were scrambling for work. These aren’t the women and men in unemployment lines. But their tales of stalled and abandoned projects provided a real picture of how the economy is going down.

One of them had been at a meeting conducted by Austin Beutner, an equity investment guy and merchant banker who is the mayor’s new jobs czar. In this post, Beutner must try to boss the independent harbor, airport and water departments, as well as energize and organize the sleepy bureaucracies in planning, redevelopment, and other parts of city government that could help bring jobs to the city. The man I talked to, a veteran of dealing with the city, said the czar position sounded good but would work only if Villaraigosa remained focused on the task and had the guts and determination to fire commissioners and department heads who won’t go along. He also needs the toughness and patience to deal with 15 council members, each of whom thinks he or she is mayor. As the late Nicholas II of Russia learned when the revolutionaries deposed him, the powers of a czar are limited.

I’m pessimistic. The mayor has an incredibly short attention span, comparable to that of one of the men he consulted on Beutner’s hiring, the easily distracted former Mayor Richard Riordan.

Perry’s message was grim. The mounting budget deficit will force layoffs, and this clearly troubled a lawmaker who started in city hall as an aide during the prosperous days. Now she favors a halt to hiring police officers even though her downtown-through-South L.A. district includes crime heavy areas. She fears the threat of municipal bankruptcy. “I have to laugh when people say it isn’t real,” she said.

Interesting how she and Bernard Parks, who represents the adjoining district, are emerging as the council’s fiscal conservatives. They are African Americans, representing districts long suffering from crime and social problems. They are the ones trying to bring hardheaded reality to city hall.

As Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas sees it, the new Martin Luther King Jr. hospital will transform health care for the poor in South Los Angeles and maybe even for the nation.

I talked to the supervisor, who represents South L.A.,, where the hospital was built after the Watts Riot to serve the poor. It has been closed for three years because of its often fatal care of patients. Last year, the Board of Supervisors and the University of California signed an agreement to reopen the hospital under UC supervision.
Ridley-Thomas told me the new 120 -bed hospital, smaller than the old one, will be completed by the end of 2012, and open for patients at the beginning of the following year. A new health clinic is also under construction.

A great weakness of the old hospital was a poorly trained and indifferent staff, all but immune from discipline because of union contracts, county civil service rules and incompetent administrators. When anyone attempted to crack down, the unions would go whining to the Board of Supervisors. In addition, longtime leaders of the African American community felt they had a proprietary interest in the hospital and resisted any change. As the neighborhood became more Latino, L.A.’s racial politics got involved.

Ridley-Thomas noted that the new hospital would be run by a non-profit public -private organization headed by a seven person board, two members named by UC, two by the supervisors and three by both the university and the supervisors. UC would supervise doctors and residents. The hospital board would be in charge of the rest of the staff. The new board and its administrators would bargain with the unions. The supervisors would be out of the picture. Hopefully, this would shield the new enterprise from political pressure.

“They will be employees of the new entity, hired by this non profit entity. The doctors will be hired and overseen by UC, “ Ridley-Thomas said.

I asked what would happen if the unions think the non-profit board is too hard-line in labor negotiations complain to Ridley-Thomas “because you are the supervisor of the district and they supported you financially and in every way in your election campaign?” I wondered if he would tell them “ that’s the (hospital) board’s decision”.

“Exactly. By design,“ the supervisor said.

Ridley-Thomas said another transformative change will be the new hospital’s effort to attract private patients with health insurance. Previously patients had largely been the uninsured poor or Medicaid recipients.

“The success of this will be measured by the patient mix itself,” Ridley-Thomas said. “Those with private insurance will take advantage of this new facility; it will be that attractive. The county’s mandate is to care for the medically indigent but I think in this context you will see people who have the capacity to pay. This is a very, very significant development that will send a message far and wide and has implications for this being a model for the nation.”

Private, paying patients, he said, get better service, often because they have family and friends who constantly complain about bad food and care. “It will transform the culture of this environment. And that’s what I mean that it is transformative,” he said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz is pushing against an immovable object, the billboard lobby.

A judge late last year struck down a questionable settlement between two billboard companies and the city which gave the firms permission to convert up to 840 billboards from a traditional format to the bright, ever changing digital models. The Times reported 92 have been converted. Two of them are on Westwood Boulevard and one is nearby on Santa Monica Boulevard. This is in the heart of Koretz’ Westside 5th District.

You’d think a judge would have some power. Unfortunately, when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Terry A. Green threw out the deal, he left it up to the city to decide whether to revoke the permits held by the two companies, Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor. That was pretty much a guarantee that no signs would be changed back to non-digital.

Koretz introduced a motion calling for removal of all the digital billboards. “They’re a blight,” he told me, “particularly with the large number we have. They’re a distraction to drivers. I was driving past the one south of Wilshire, and I took my eye off the road briefly when it flashed and a jay walking pedestrian ran in front of my car and had a close call.”

But his measure is still in a committee. He wasn’t optimistic about getting much support on the 15 member council, although he’s hopeful that a few colleagues with billboard afflicted districts might help.

Homeowners in his district are stymied. The Westwood South of Santa Monica Homeowners Association (my wife Nancy and I are members) protested that the Building and Safety Department had erred in granting the permits for the three Westwood Boulevard signs. A city appeals officer agreed with them on two of the billboards. But the sign owners have appealed. The appellate machinery grinds slowly.

Billboard clout is legendary. The agreement that permitted all the digital billboards was negotiated by then City Rocky Delgadillo. In a story on another of the billboard legal tangles, Times reporter David Zahniser recalled how Clear Channel Outdoor and other sign companies spent $425,000 on billboards promoting Delgadillo’s successful candidacy five years before he negotiated the agreement.

This will be a big test for Koretz. His opponents will fight in the courts, in the city bureaucracy, in the council and, if necessary, in the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. It’s a multi front war. Go get them, councilman.

I spent humiliating years as an ethics commissioner watching the big spenders dominate city hall through loopholes in the law called independent expenditures. So I was especially happy to see the spenders humiliated in the recent 2nd District City Council election.

Los Angeles has a law limiting campaign contributions and expenditures. But as I saw on the City Ethics Commission, it is badly flawed. The biggest loophole permits businesses, unions or anyone to set up an independent expenditure committee, which can collect and spend money without limits. The word independent is misleading. The committees are as dedicated to the election of candidates as the candidates themselves and are as independent as East Germany was in Iron Curtain days. Such committees dominate city elections, and as an ethics commissioner, I couldn’t do anything about them.

In the 2nd District special election Tuesday, Assemblyman Paul Krekorian defeated Christine Essel , a former Paramount vice president. He got 57 per cent of the vote in the San Fernando Valley district even though she received more than $900,000 from the unprincipled coalition of unions and downtown business interests that formed several independent expenditure committees supporting her.

I say unprincipled because the philosophies of the business groups, mainly the Central Cities Association and the Greater Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, are opposed to that of their union allies. If they had principles, they’d be on different sides. What do they have in common? A desire to control city hall, compromising their differences in back rooms far from public view. Their mutual goal is unlimited development and a free hand for other job-creating businesses.

The Los Angeles Times’ Maeve Reston figured out that Essel and her independent expenditure backers spent about $156 for each of the 8,304 votes she received. Krekorian spent $28 per vote. This important story, by the way, was buried way back in the A section of the Times in another demonstration of how its format, limited space and diminished staff are hurting local coverage.

The list of independent expenditure committees that gave to Essel is a roster of the special interests that run city hall, including the Central City Association and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. The several unions included the painters, the carpenters, the Police Protective League and the biggest giver of all, Local 11 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents the well-paid workers of the Department of Water and Power.

What beat her in this low turnout election was a collection of neighborhood groups, some centered in neighborhood councils long despised by city hall. It’s an erratic movement, as sprawling as the city. What these grassroots people have in common is anger at city hall and the special interests that run it.

The question now is whether Krekorian will represent them or fall victim to toadies on his staff, shrewd lobbyists, accommodating bureaucrats and the various perks given to council members. Few are able to resist city hall’s pressure to go along.

Ron Kaye put it well in his blog, saying Krekorian ”owes his election to the grassroots activists from Sherman Oaks to Sunland-Tujunga who rallied behind him in the hope he would stand up for them and be the voice of the anger and frustration of people all over the city. Krekorian has a mandate to lead. If he betrays that trust and becomes just another hollow man in the go-along world of city hall, it will soon be clear enough and he will pay the price when he comes up for re-election in little more than a year. “