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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
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.
| Without referencing its recent layoff, the Ventura County Star's editor says the suburban LA paper is now "more streamlined and, in many ways, much more efficient."
| We stripped the Indians of their ponies, and now we're doing it to ourselves.
| When the sun looks like that, there's a big fire somewhere regardless of whether we see or smell smoke.
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.
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