LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky, the former vice president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, retired in 2001 from the Los Angeles Times after a career as a political writer, City-County Bureau chief, city editor and columnist. He lectures in journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and writes columns for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and Truthdig.com. He is the author of five books including California’s Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh, Power Politics and the Art of the Possible, recently published by University of California Press. He lives in Westwood. Email
Parents have won partial restoration of federal poverty funds for 23 schools in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside. Many of the schools are in middle class neighborhoods but have substantial numbers of poor students.
A big parental revolt is shaping up in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside as federal budget cuts reach deep into the Los Angeles Unified School District.
To some of us disillusioned alums of the weak and failing City Ethics Commission, mayoral candidate Austin Beutner is saying the right things.
Although Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky didn’t shed much light on whether he will run for mayor, he gave a scathing and knowledgeable critique of L.A. city hall and indicated what he might do if he ran the place.
Watching Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck deal with Occupy LA at the Bank of America plaza Thursday, I was struck by how much the police department has changed for the better.
Although Occupy LA looks like a disorganized mess, it is, in many respects, a training ground for those who will join the next generation of leaders
The closing of the Center for Governmental Studies is another setback to the dying cause of cleaning up elections and taking them out of the hands of big contributors.
Filmmakers, equipped with visual and story telling skills, are tackling the job of exploring the personalities, issues and politics that have made the State Capitol and Los Angeles City Hall so important to the state.
“So I ask myself,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, “how do you get out of this?”
The veteran Westside congressman was talking about how to avoid a battle in the San Fernando Valley between his friend Rep. Howard Berman and Rep, Brad Sherman.
Do Latinos tend to vote only for Latinos? Do non-Latinos generally vote against Hispanic political candidates? Those racially charged questions are behind the struggle over new Los Angeles County supervisorial districts.
At lunch at Langers, Tim Rutten and I discussed his layoff from the Los Angeles Times after four decades.I thought it was stupid, wrong and unfair, another sign of how the paper was destroying itself so fast that soon there would be little left. Rutten, of course, agreed.
Greg Nelson was chief aide to then City Councilman Joel Wachs, who stiffened the city’s back during negotiations over Staples Center in the mid 1990s and improved the deal. He has thoughts on the current stadium proposal
While Angelenos fretted about Carmageddon, some 200 construction workers labored on the Mulholland Drive bridge, just a small part of the roughly 18,000 employed on the entire 405 widening project.
So many questions, so little time. That just about describes the situation when the Los Angeles City Council meets June 29 to finally look behind the curtain of secrecy surrounding the downtown National Football League stadium proposal.
As the late broadcaster Chick Hearn used to say when the Lakers clinched a victory, ''You can put this one in the refrigerator. The door's closed, the light's out, the eggs are cooling, the butter's getting hard and the Jell-O is jiggling.''
The Ramirez Canyon saga, involving Barbra Streisand’s old Santa Monica Mountain estate, has entered a new phase.
I watched Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas use an imaginative Internet and telephone tool to build support for his vision of the Crenshaw light rail line. Is it good enough to beat Zev Yaroslavsky?
I moderated a 36th Congressional District candidate forum that shed light on the complexities of a leading domestic issue and on the politics of coastal California.
In a time when the smart money has written off the state, an excellent and timely documentary, “California State of Mind—the Legacy of Pat Brown,” recalls the prosperous past and gives us a bit of hope for the problems confronting the late governor’s son, Jerry Brown.
I visited what should now be called MLB Stadium at Chavez Ravine. The name on the ballpark is still Dodger Stadium, but a change is order after Major League Baseball took over the Dodgers from Frank McCourt.
The Los Angeles city public finance law is in trouble. If the U.S. Supreme Court, as is likely, overturns a key section of an Arizona law, L.A.'s would probably be thrown out, too.
The teachers at the UCLA Community School at the Robert F. Kennedy school complex got an unpleasant surprise the other day, as did teachers at 44 other L.A. Unified schools in poor areas.
Some of the city’s sharpest political organizers can be found at Hamilton High School. They used e-mail and Facebook over the weekend and got 600 students and Times columnist Steve Lopez to the campus Monday in a campaign against teacher layoffs. Many a paid political hack would sell his or her soul to the devil (again) for such a coup.
Not a trace of the Antonio Villaraigosa grin was to be seen when the mayor walked into the city hall news conference room Wednesday, trailed by a few suits, all of them solemn as sticks.
My breakfast meeting at the Homegirl Cafe was delayed for an hour. I decided to use the time for a walk through nearby Chinatown. As often happens with me, it was a walk through history—L.A’s and my own.
Luncheon with Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry showed just how well the downtown football stadium promoters have wired city hall.
When State Controller John Chiang sends his auditors into the unfathomable recesses of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, he hopes the city officials will not engage in their usual practice of hiding bad news.
If the city floats a $350 million bond issue for an NFL stadium, it could end up costing taxpayers millions a year in loan repayment and interest.
If redevelopment agencies were to be eliminated, as Governor Jerry Brown has proposed in his budget, California’s public schools would receive an extra $1 billion a year.
Among the good news coming out of Sacramento this week was the report that Gov. Jerry Brown wants to eliminate the hundreds of redevelopment agencies that suck money from the schools for the benefit of land developers.
As I watched Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich for the first time, he reminded me of Richard Riordan—more articulate but just as out of place in the city hall culture.
In the Los Angeles Times obituary on Paul Conrad, editor Russ Stanton said, “we have missed him since the day he retired.” But it wasn’t quite like that.
An important part of the dispute is whether the evaluations are accurate and whether the Times has done enough to make the readers aware of the limitations of value-added.
The Los Angeles Times has singled out two teachers as being bad at their jobs, basing the verdict on insufficient evidence. The same fate may be awaiting many more Los Angeles teachers..
Although Los Angeles was largely shaped by the automobile, mass transit is becoming the biggest force in building the future Los Angeles. That was one of the major themes Wednesday night at a planning forum held in the old Bullocks Wilshire building, an early symbol of auto-mad L.A.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s fight to clean up the air in the heavily polluted Los Angeles harbor—stymied in the courts---has shifted to Congress where his labor and environmental allies have more clout.
Victor Valle's valuable book "City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California" tells much about the two billionaires fighting each other for an NFL franchise--and their connection to that infamous San Gabriel Valley city.
With city hall news full of minor malfeasance, it is surprising to report that something positive is actually happening. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s 30/10 transit plan is moving toward Congressional approval even though progress is about as slow as a Wilshire bus during rush hour.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the mayor taking all those free tickets.
This puts me at odds with almost everyone I know, including blogger Ron Kaye, who wants the mayor jailed.
The Israeli attack on the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza has become an issue in the Los Angeles County coastal district congressional contest between Democratic Rep. Jane Harman and her more liberal challenger, Marcy Winograd.
The Mar Vista recreation center overflowed with political addicts for a candidates’ night for the 53rd Assembly district and the hottest Los Angeles congressional race, between Democratic Rep. Jane Harman and her primary challenger, Marcy Winograd.
Bill, Your blog... about the library's path to success for children of immigrants reminds me of my own experience with LAPL.... .I grew up in an orphanage, and, basically, lived at the local Palms branch...
After Independence Day, Los Angeles city libraries will drop a day from their schedules. “There will be 100 layoffs from the library and this will trigger a reduction from six days a week to five days a week,” Martin Gomez, the city librarian, told me.
When my wife Nancy and I wrote our book “Backroom Politics” in the 1970s, we explained the puzzling maze of boards and commissions that local politicians create to confuse their constituents. The Expo light rail line is a perfect example of what we wrote about.
Should low-paid truck drivers shoulder the cost of cleaning up pollution at Los Angeles harbor? That’s the question before a federal court this week in a case that is major test of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s harbor anti-pollution plan
Behind the big fight over power rates is the electrical workers union, determined to make sure it has command over the thousands of new jobs that will be created in the next decade in the solar-renewable energy industry.
Maybe Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made the reporters wait in the blazing hot Department of Water and Power plaza for a half hour Monday because he wanted to prove there is enough sunshine to make Los Angeles a solar powered city.
In proposing big increases in electrical bills, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seems to ignore the terrible hardships the Great Recession is imposing on the working people of Los Angeles. The increase is a highly regressive tax hike hurting those hit by the recession.
Amazingly, the city community building meeting room was filled with anti-spending cut protestors at the inconvenient hour of 6 p.m. Wednesday, and the stars of the evening were the students from Lincoln High School.
A Service Employees International Union local is trying to work out a partnership with Los Angeles County to assure good care for patients at the new Martin Luther King Jr. hospital when it opens.
Many injustices were challenged and overcome in court by Ramona Ripston, who is retiring as executive director of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, and the excellent legal team she assembled.
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.
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.
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.
Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz is pushing against an immovable object, the billboard lobby.
I spent humiliating years as an ethics commissioner watching the big spenders dominate city hall. So I was especially happy to see the spenders humiliated in the recent 2nd District City Council election.
One of the last of Doug Ring’s many good deeds was a visit to the Los Angeles Times editorial board with members of Housing LA, an organization advocating affordable housing for the thousands of residents being forced out of the city by high rents.
As newspapers and television pull back from investigative reporting, foundations and other organizations are beginning to fill the void. One of the most interesting is Accountable California, a project of Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union.
One of the many questions Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school plan leaves unanswered is whether all students will be allowed to attend their neighborhood schools.
With mariachis playing and children singing “This Land Is My Land,” the opening of the new school complex on the old Ambassador Hotel site was perfect except for one terrible mistake—the name.
The flames of the Station fire will be blamed for the floods that may follow in the denuded San Gabriel Mountains. But let’s place the blame where it belongs, on land development, acquiescent local officials, and a tax structure that subsidizes hillside building.
The enthusiastic gathering at Barnes & Noble’s Westside Pavilion store honored Norman Corwin, a Los Angeles literary treasure. In turn, he made the event a celebration of writers and writing.
School superintendent Ramon Cortines'̻ schedule for implementing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school reform plan is either a great way of getting parents involved or a classic example of bureaucratic delay.
I received some provocative e-mails from readers after my column urging Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to give a clear explanation of...
If Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants parents to support his plan to convert 250 Los Angeles schools into charter schools, he needs to explain why he thinks this would be an improvement.
In the small world of Westside politics, activists hold certain truths to be self-evident. 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.
A dispute over light rail cars is testing whether Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is up to the job of shepherding the federal recession recovery funds coming this way.
Despite all the questions, I think solar 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. It’s good that DWP union workers will install 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.
I get almost as much e-mail from David Hernandez as I do from the Obamas.
Peter Kaye's memoir, Contrarian, is both the story of his career as a political writer and the downward slide of the paper he worked for, the San Diego Union-Tribune
City Controller Laura Chick is absolutely correct when she insists on the power to examine the performance of other elected officials.
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.
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.
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.
Some sharp person running for office in Los Angeles next year ought to try Barack Obama’s style of grassroots politics, raising a lot of money and organizing supporters online.
Some USC journalism professors are raising questions about a proposal for the Annenberg School for Communication to sign a $3 million contract to help American University in Dubai create a journalism and communication school.
My report of two days and 320 miles of being a political reporter in Southern California
Collapsing banks and almost nonexistent credit did not daunt Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and more than 100 of his supporters at a rally for affordable housing.
A big test of Mayor Antonio’s commitment to liberal causes will be how hard he pushes for his plan to require developers to make room in their high- end projects for low and moderate income Los Angeles residents.
he big mystery in our Westside neighborhood is how the pre-dawn burglar, who has hit 15 houses, so unerringly finds the homes of his chosen victims-- older women living alone in single story homes.
Unless you own an international airline or perhaps ride on one, don’t expect much relief from the much-heralded Los Angeles International Airport modernization plan.
There was a story on page B-1 of the Los Angeles Times a while back which showed what great things the paper can still do, and what it will miss as it is being destroyed.
The unspoken question in the runoff between Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas is how much influence the winning candidate will allow the unions in negotiating the reopening of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center, which once served thousands of poor people.
The dream of home ownership has long been part of life on 92nd Street and similar South Los Angeles working class neighborhoods. But making the dream come true has never been easy-- not more than a half century ago when the area was mostly white and not today when it is African American and Latino.
Whether Bernard Parks or Mark Ridley-Thomas wins the Los Angeles County 2nd supervisorial district election June 3, one point is certain: The sleepy board may actually wake up.
Two events in the 2nd Supervisorial District pointed up some of the immense difficulties facing politics and government in Los Angeles County, such as reopening King hospital.
A march through downtown Los Angeles on Friday, April 25 was an excellent reminder of how L.A. is divided by race and class.
I found my friend Abner Lee dead in his West Los Angeles condo the other day. It looked as though he had died as he’d lived, alone.
Two recent pieces of writing from the bowels of the Los Angeles Times tell much about the state of the newspaper and Los Angeles journalism.
One of the best ways to cover city hall is to get out of city hall. Instead, wander through the many fund raising dinners where the real clout is on display.
How much more can be dished out to the beleaguered journalists of the Los Angeles Times?. It has to apologize for a story based on what appears to have been phony documents. Then, there are the musings and rantings of the owner, Sam Zell.
The City Council puts off a decision on a controversial proposal to require strict financial disclosure for neighborhood council members. The neighborhood councils and the City Ethics Commission didn't like the idea and the City Council listened.
One ethics commission issue involves neighborhood councils. The other is about enforcement of campaign contribution laws. Together, they constitute the great LA power battle.
At the USC conference on news and the criminal justice system, an Iranian asked me if journalists were jailed as political prisoners in the United States.
The day after news broke that the Los Angeles Times had fired its latest editor, the paper and the rest of the LA media took heavy criticism at a a USC conference on the criminal justice system.
Former commission president Ed Guthman is just the kind of person I wish elected officials would appoint to the ethics commission--independent, informed and deeply committed to the mission of this important regulatory agency.
The Los Angeles Police Department's plan to map where Muslims live poses a real dilemma for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
A USC symposium honoring the late Frank del Olmo, a highly respected Los Angeles Times journalist, produced some gloomy thoughts about Latino news coverage in his old paper and the rest of the news media.
The mayor and the council should think about the kind of Los Angeles we want. We don't want a city where the working class and middle class are forced out. If city hall is unconcerned, maybe Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who does care, can take his fight to the ballot, as he did several years ago with a successful measure that imposed development controls that the mayor and the council had refused.
A study commission notes how city hall was was supposed to provide support and encouragement to the volunteers on the neighborhood councils. Instead, the commission said, the staff spends its time on reviewing the councils' bylaws, untangling their election disputes and going over the neighborhood council finances in a bean counter fashion.That's city hall. You can't get in trouble by being a bean counter.
Your city hall correspondent is rejected by his ethics commission colleagues. Was it because of his commentaries for LA Observed or just his big mouth?
The imminent closing of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, one of the worst health disasters in Los Angeles County history, is a painful illustration of why we need national health insurance, Medicare for everybody.
Paul Weeks, a retired newspaperman who died recently at the age of 86, was an overlooked hero of Los Angeles’ traumatic civil rights struggle.
Our gag rule is a big reason why many people consider the ethics commission irrelevant. When allegations of ethical violations are splashed on the news and are being discussed from the harbor to the Valley, ethics commissioners should be able to say more than “no comment.”
Showing they are buddies—or conspirators—when it comes to something as dear to their hearts as campaign money, Democratic and Republican state legislators are sneaking through a bill that will gut laws in Los Angeles and other cities limiting campaign contributions.
Of all the stupidities committed by the new owners of the Los Angeles Times, the dumping of Al Martinez is one of worst.
Spare me from the “slippery slope,” one of the trickiest phrases in politics.I learned that the hard way at this month’s City Ethics Commission meeting when I came up with what I thought was a great way of handling the campaign contribution accusations our staff brought against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The city hall maneuvering over full public financing of Los Angeles elections is entering a new and muddy phase. Muddy to me, anyway, but what do I know? I’m just an ethics commissioner and we’re about as welcome in city hall backrooms as an advocate of democracy is in Putin’s Kremlin.
After spending a career asking questions, now I had to answer them--and be nice about it.
Writing regulations is pretty tedious. But victory goes to those with the patience to sit through the process—a good lesson for an ex- reporter still suffering from a journalist’s short attention span.
To keep faith with its readers, the Los Angeles Times needs to put all its resources into an investigation of what’s been going on in the Current section and the editorial pages, now tainted by the conduct of editor Andres Martinez.
When my flight was cancelled recently, I was immersed in the foul Los Angeles International Airport for four hours, sitting in the cramped terminal seats, eating tasteless tamales, struggling to buy papers in the small, crowded shop. Finally, I flew to the clean, bright and welcoming Southwest terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
Carol Baker Tharp is smart and well qualified but even her skills will be tested as she tries to bring order to Los Angeles’ neighborhood councils, the Wild West of city government.
The Los Angeles Times’ recent editorial on county government was earnest, unbearably long, condescending, pompous and just plain dumb.
We ethics commissioners finally disposed of the thing. At least I think so. The argument went way over my head. It was so nuanced, disputatious and legalistic, in fact, that I am sure I have missed important nuances in writing this report.
When I wrote about how much I disliked the subsidies and secrecy involved in three big L.A. development projects, a reader criticized me for liking them. I figured I’d better try again: I don’t like the taxpayer subsidies and the secrecy.
What the Grand Avenue, Staples Center-L.A. Live and the airport "development" zone have in common is that they demand enough government funding to permit the risk adverse private sector to take a chance. This is not the market economy. This is what the Chinese Communists are doing as they lure massive private investment to pretty up the place for the Olympics.
I don’t blame Thomas Mauk, Orange County’s chief executive, for changing his mind and refusing the job of chief administrative officer of Los Angeles County While the parking is good, the building is ugly and the bosses are terrible.
Nobody will be able to accuse Los Angeles Times reporters of being elitists. The paper's plans for a juiced- up web site will thrust them into blue collar life.
Valley Vote lives. The secessionists meet with an intensity and intelligence the city council should copy, always guided by their anti government populist views, loyal to the gospel of rebellion as preached by Ron Kaye, the take-no-crap editor of the Daily News.
Neighborhood councils are weak but they are all we have to defend ourselves against the power of city hall and...
I want the impossible, a Geffen, Broad or Burkle with the integrity and independence of Otis Chandler. “Shazam!” as Billy Batson used to say when he became Captain Marvel.
After spending two hours taking an on-line ethics course required of Los Angeles elected officials, city board members, and commissioners, I finished feeling triumphant but depressed.
We at the ethics commission have embarked on an impossible mission. We are formally sending our proposal for full public financing of city political campaigns to the city council and I don't think it has much of a chance.
The new Times guys in town celebrated the paper's 125th birthday at the Hollywood Roosevelt and the paper got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. The new publisher was too awed, too much the visitor to town trying hard to impress. He didn't understand that the star is not an Oscar or a place in the baseball Hall of Fame.
The trouble with settlement deals, like the one in Los Angeles firefighter Tennie Pierce's case, is that they permit city council members to discuss hot topics while being shielded from public scrutiny.
It's odd how things disappear into the City Hall abyss.That's true of many issues but one occurred to me while I was walking along Westwood Boulevard, toward Wilshire, early in the morning and observed some of the Westside's homeless rousing themselves for another day on the streets. Didn't I read that City Hall was going to do something about the homeless?
Asking the Los Angeles city attorney for advice is like a middle schooler asking her parents if she can go to Rosa Rita beach for the weekend with friends.The answer is No! No! Didn't your hear me? I said NO!
Full public financing of city campaigns is the best solution. Then we wouldn't have to worry about whether contributors are buying votes.
Give me a cynical old pol who at least keeps his or her word. Our ethics commission meeting Tuesday convinced me of that--if I didn't know it already.
I still can’t believe the League of Women Voters would lend its name to Prop. R, a measure that reached a new low in false advertising.
| How is it that until about a week ago I'd never heard of the surrealist photographer Francesca Woodman? We even went to the same school.
| Seventeen years after the Rams and Raiders left town, neither team is better off. Now both are threatening to move back.
Parents have won partial restoration of federal poverty funds for 23 schools in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside. Many of the schools are in middle class neighborhoods but have substantial numbers of poor students.
