Getting King functioning again is the most important issue in the race for the 2nd Supervisorial District seat. The hospital in South Los Angeles County has been closed for 10 months after it failed federal inspections. It’s criminal that it remains closed, but that’s what happens in the do-nothing behemoth, Los Angeles County government.

The unions representing county workers, including those from the shuttered hospital, are supporting Ridley -Thomas. They have donated at least $4 million to an independent expenditure committee campaigning for him. A total of $980,000 of it came in during the last two weeks of the primary campaign, which ended with Ridley-Thomas finishing ahead of Parks but short the majority needed for victory. The runoff will be held in November, on the same day as the presidential election.

Both have pledged to restore the hospital. But no matter who wins, the unions will be the real power in shaping the contracts and civil service rules that will govern the nurses and other medical personnel at a reopened King and the other county hospitals.

Union reps, county bureaucrats and supervisors and their aides will resolve these matters in secret, as is the custom for big issues in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, even though they involve major questions of public policy. In this instance, the county imposes secrecy because of its lawyers’ broad interpretation of an exemption from the state open meeting law for anything dealing with personnel. The way the county sees it, that could be most anything.

Nobody wants to talk much about this aspect of the King issue, not even someone unconnected to the county, like Robert K. Ross, president and chief executive of the California Endowment, a private foundation interested in improving access to health care.

Last month, Garrett Therolf reported in the Los Angeles Times that when Ross contacted county officials to help find an institution to take over King, his letter “did not address another issue that many said was a stumbling block [to opening King]: whether an operator would be required to employ members of the county’s public employee unions and be bound by county personnel rules that make it difficult to discipline or transfer workers who harm patients.”

Of course the unions will insist on such a requirement, and make their feelings known in the closed-door meetings with supervisors, supervisorial aides and bureaucrats.

Ridley-Thomas and Parks proposed solutions that shed no light on how they will handle the union issue. Parks wants King and the other hospitals run by a new authority “sufficiently insulated from political vagaries.” Ridley-Thomas wants the hospital to be run by “an administrator and governance structure that operates outside L.A. County’s political authority and its health services bureaucracy.”
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is not up for re-election, said in a Times op-ed piece that he wants the hospital turned over to the University of California, which would be “unencumbered by the county’s human resources and hiring rules.” He did not address the union issue.

In bringing up the unions and civil service rules in his story, Times reporter Therolf raised an important question. It deserves to be answered in the campaign, especially by Ridley-Thomas, the recipient of union financial support.

The dream was the topic Saturday May 30 when ACORN, the community activist organization, held a press conference-demonstration in front of a small house at 755 East 92nd Street, a home headed for foreclosure, its owner one of the many casualties of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The street is broad with bungalows on either side. It was quiet at midday, with most of the activity occurring at the bungalow owned by Millicent (Mama) Hill, who was an English teacher at Crenshaw High School before she retired in 2000 and set up a program in her home to help young women and men avoid the gang life and crime. ACORN volunteers, most of them older men and women, gathered in Mama Hill’s front yard, all of them wearing the organization’s bright red t-shirts.

Mama Hill has been operating the program on her pension, small donations and with the help of friends and supporters who assist her with tutoring, mentoring, anger management and other services needed in a neighborhood that is pretty thick with gang action despite its peaceful appearance on a Saturday.

With expenses exceeding income, and house prices rising fast, Hill refinanced her house. “I needed a loan quickly,” she said. She was promised one at 7.5 percent interest but before she signed the final papers, she was told the interest would be 10 percent “but they promised it could be renegotiated.” When she obtained the loan, the house was appraised at $405,000 but has since dropped far below that. She fell behind in her payments, and the mortgage holder is now foreclosing.

One of her supporters, Cedric R. Brown, president of Youth Incentive Programs Inc said Hill got the loan at a time when housing prices were exploding, even in this modest neighborhood, and mortgage brokers flooded the area with tempting refinance offers. “The predatory lenders took advantage,” he said. Some of borrowers were hard-pressed, like Hill. Others were tempted by the chance to pay off debts and improve their living conditions. Houses once valued at $450,000 recently dropped to $385,000 to $360,000.

Hill spoke to supporters and the two or three journalists who showed up. Then the ACORN volunteers walked the neighborhood, going door to door to urge support for Isadore Hill, a Compton city councilman running for Assembly in the area and for others who support bills pending in Sacramento designed to crack down on predatory lenders. Given the power of the financial business in the Capitol, I’d say those bills face a rough future.

Afterward, I drove a few blocks east to 1233 East 92nd Street, a brown stucco home with a tile roof and an excellently tended front yard. It is an unmarked monument to working class L.A.’s dream of home ownership.

In 1942, an African American family, the Laws, bought this very house. The neighborhood was then predominantly white. But the house deed included a restrictive covenant banning a sale to a racial minority. Such covenants were common in those days. Henry Laws and his family were African Americans, The Laws family fought the covenant. Charlotta Bass, the fiery editor of the California Eagle, espoused their cause. A judge ordered Mr. and Mrs. Laws and daughter jailed. Their sons returned from service to find their parents and sister in jail. The Laws eventually prevailed and courts began overturning the covenants.

The saga of the Laws family is a great inspiration to ACORN and its volunteers as they fight predatory lenders who, in their own way, are as vicious as the segregationists of 60 years ago

Years ago, I used to cover the supervisors. In recent times, I have been spared that duty. All I know is what I read in the papers and what I am told by various reporters who have been sent to the county building to report on the five enigmatic supervisors.
From those observations, I surmise that the supervisors go through their paces every Tuesday, voting on matters that have been previously approved by their staffs in sessions held somewhere out of the public’s eyes. The meetings are pretty boring unless Gloria Molina yells at an unfortunate department head. The board’s main accomplishment this year is keeping Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital closed, denying hospital care to Los Angeles’ poorest and sickest residents.

Neither Parks, a Los Angeles city councilman, nor Ridley-Thomas, a state senator, are get-along, go-along types who will blend into the present board’s way of doing things.

Ridley-Thomas is a challenge to reporters and colleagues. He likes to argue. He always thinks he is right. And he’s rough on those who disagree with him.

When he was pushing the Staples arena project through the City Council, I was writing columns demanding public disclosure of the lease. He didn’t like those columns. At the height of it, he came up to me and said I was just trying to revive my failing career. Later on, after I was promoted to city editor, I sought him out. “It worked,” I said.

When Parks was police chief, he’d go after any reporter who crossed him. In his mind, trying to dig out a story amounted to crossing him. We had long arguments, once in public , another time in his office. He’d never conceded he was wrong. In his mind, he never was.

I enjoyed arguing with both Ridley-Thomas and Parks. They never backed down and neither did I. That was OK. They had a right to complain. I had an obligation to listen, and the right to reply in kind.

From my experience, neither is cursed with the supervisorial state of mind—a peaceful somnolence more suited to a retirement home than the governance of LA County. I hope the winner never adopts it and retains his testy, argumentative ways. And I truly hope the new supervisor figures out how to re-open Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital..

The district, where Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks and State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas are competing to replace retiring Supervisor Yvonne Burke, reaches from upper middle class, predominantly white stretches of West Los Angeles across Los Angeles County to the struggling Latino and African American working class neighborhoods, such as Watts Willowbrook. The candidates, both African American, are competing for an electorate that is strongly black

One of these events occurred roughly in the middle of the district. It was at the University of Southern California, where one of the indomitable forces in California political life, Carmen Warschaw, announced her gift of $3 million to endow the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw chair in practical politics. A search is now on for a professor to fill the chair.

The other occurred a day later, at a smaller school, Beethoven elementary, several miles west of USC in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Mar Vista. At Beethoven, Ridley-Thomas and Parks debated over the kind of practical political problems that the new Warschaw professor will try to teach students to solve.

Carmen and her late husband, Lou, helped shape the California Democratic party and the careers of many of its leaders. They were teenage sweethearts, attended USC together and immersed themselves in politics as volunteers, donors and in leadership positions. Carmen has played politics tough and hard. She is unforgiving to enemies, generous to friends and has always tried to fill political offices with the women and men she thought would do the best job.

In announcing the award, she said she didn’t believe much in political theory, no doubt chilling the academics in the large audience of faculty, her friends and family. She believes in the nuts and bolts of politics, from lawn signs in her early days to today’s computerized methods of identifying voters, and from shaking hands at campaign fund raisers to providing constituent services while in office.

She talked about the pre-term limit days and wished they were back. Never a fan of political reformers, she put in a good word for lobbyists. And, she spoke of the difficulties facing the winner of the supervisorial race. “How do you represent a district of two million people,” she asked.

That’s the question Parks and Ridley Thomas tried to answer at their debate at Beethoven school.
There are a lot of issues in this campaign but the most important is how to reopen the badly needed public hospital in Watts Willowbrook, once known as King Drew, then King Harbor and now closed after the poorly trained and incompetent staff failed to pass federal inspections. A huge area, home of L.A. County’s poorest, has been left without a hospital.

Neither Parks nor Ridley Thomas offered satisfactory solutions. Parks blamed cuts in federal and state funding for medical aid to the poor, and he said he wanted to get the University of California medical system involved. That’s a great idea. Maybe someone from the UCLA hospital will teach the King people how to sell confidential information to the tabloids. It also makes no sense with USC located in the district. Ridley-Thomas proposed convening a group of high-level officials to talk about how to re-open the place. Perfect. Another committee.

Neither talked about the real failure at the hospital. It was for years a job-creating machine for the African American community around it. The largely African American staff and African American political and community leaders were a powerful force in protecting the hospital and its workers. The 2nd District supervisor, Burke, who is African American, did little. Her four colleagues, who left the mess to her, are just as guilty.

USC, a few miles north of the old hospital, should be part of the solution. For generations, USC has produced some of our area’s best political leaders and government experts. Now, with the creation of the Warschaw professorship for practical politics, it is in a better position to tackle failures, even those as extreme as King hospital. The new professor can’t do it alone. But there are many other resources at SC in the schools of medicine, public policy, law, social welfare, gerontology and athletics, where football coach Pete Carroll has repeatedly shown his commitment to South LA. The Warschaw professor can be a real leader in the effort.

I joined between 700 and 1,000 marchers, who were mostly janitors and renters of slum apartments in Westlake, just west of downtown. Many of the marchers fit into both categories. They were low paid janitors who lived in the packed old apartments. They wanted better pay and protection for tenants like themselves, who are being forced out by landlords and developers determined to upscale the area.

The idea of two L.A.s, one affluent the other struggling, is not new. Long before Sen. John Edwards built a presidential campaign on the concept of “Two Americas,” LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick proposed a series for the Los Angeles Times on Two L.A.s, one affluent the other poor.

Roderick was a reporter in the Times City-County Bureau in the ‘80s when he came up with the project. I, the bureau chief, thought it was a great idea. Roderick did preliminary interviews and other research and wrote a detailed memo laying out the concept. The City-County Bureau reporters, who had been digging into the social, economic and racial forces that were dividing Los Angeles, would collaborate on the project.

Our bosses quickly rejected Roderick’s idea. In fact, I was urged to shift our coverage to issues affecting the middle class. Such bad decisions should be noted by those mourning the long passed “great old days” at the Times. A lot of those days were not so great.

Life went on. The city was ripped apart by the 1992 riot, and we finally got around to reporting on Two L.A.s

I thought of that as I joined the marchers gathering at the headquarters of Service Employees Local 1877, which is organizing the Justice for Janitors campaign for better wages and working conditions. Other groups were involved, including the ACORN organization, the Los Angeles Housing Partnership, the LA Alliance for a New Economy. and UNITE HERE, Local 11. Together, they comprise the progressive activist wing of Los Angeles politics, fighting to make themselves heard in a city hall dominated by land developers and downtown business interests.

The janitors wore purple and gold (Lakers colors) and red and black t-shirts. We walked west on Seventh Street toward downtown. We stopped at the forbidding glass and concrete fortress of a city building, headquarters for the city housing department. Officials had refused an invitation to speak to the marchers and the appearance of the building conveyed a simple message: Keep Out. Security guards reinforced the message.

We crossed the bridge above the Harbor Freeway, the highway that permits people to travel from downtown to the harbor without noticing the poor South L.A. neighborhoods on either side. We passed the Wilshire Grand hotel, passed Roy’s the hot restaurant famous for small but delicately prepared dishes at high prices. We passed shops and went through an underground mall, with more stores. Office and store workers on their lunch hours watched the marchers. Perhaps they realized they had more in common with the marching men and women than they did with their bosses in the executive suites.

The rich own the buildings and run the law firms, accounting companies and other enterprises in them. Affluent property owners who, in some cases, have been given valuable exemptions from city building laws are developing new apartment houses and tearing down older ones.

In addition to better wages for janitors, the marchers asked that every apartment unit torn down be replaced by an equally affordable unit. They also want stepped up enforcement of laws against illegal eviction and an increase in the number of building inspectors in the Westlake MacArthur Park area. Finally, they’re asking that the city, state and federal governments make more money available to build affordable housing.

Next time you walk or drive through the area and see the apartments or consider the working conditions of janitors at your market or in your building, you’ll have to agree this agenda makes a lot of sense.