To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
It’s time to retire the old adage that Los Angeles has a love affair
with cars. That vision of L.A. is so tired. Really, how could anyone
maintain a fondness for driving after experiencing rush hour on the 101,
405 or 10 freeways? Or getting stuck in a traffic jam on a weekend? Or
paying $4.30 a gallon for gas or $10 for parking?
So, it’s a bit frustrating to hear California’s senior senator question whether Angelenos will actually use public transit.
In the midst of celebrating the $1.25-billion federal grant to extend the Purple Line subway to Beverly Hills (which is great news,) Sen. Dianne Feinstein
was asked if she thought Southern Californians would embrace the
region’s expanding network the way Northern Californians have embraced
the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.
Feinstein, apparently, was skeptical. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” the senator said, according to KPCC’s Kitty Felde.
The senator went on to describe our love affair with the automobile as a
“kind of glue connected to a car and the bottoms of Angelenos.”
Perhaps Feinstein needs to pay a visit to L.A.’s subway and light-rail
stations, or hop a bus. She’ll see a lot of people who have unglued
themselves from their cars. Metro has about 1.5 million boardings on
buses and trains on a weekday. Ridership has exceeded projections on new
routes, such as the Orange Line busway across the San Fernando Valley
and the Expo light-rail line from downtown to Culver City.
It’s not hard to imagine why. Traffic stinks, and if you create a
convenient, comfortable alternative to driving, many people will take
it. So much for L.A.’s love affair with cars.
The MTA has proposed three fare increases over six years to cover rising costs on a rapidly expanding system.
If you take a bus or a subway in Los Angeles, the basic fare is $1.50.
But that covers only a fraction of the cost of the trip. In L.A., as in
other cities, public transit is heavily subsidized. Fares paid by riders
on the 10 largest transit systems in the country cover, on average,
only 37% of the cost of their trips. On L.A.'s buses, subways and light
rail, fares cover only about 26%; local sales taxes and state fuel taxes
pay for most of the rest.
This week, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation
Authority's board of directors will consider whether to make riders pay a
greater share of bus and rail operating expenses, bringing their
portion up to 33% of the total cost. To that end, Metro staff has
proposed three fare increases over six years to cover rising costs on a
rapidly expanding system.
The initial hike, which would take effect in September, is only 25
cents, bringing the basic fare to $1.75 from $1.50. That seems
reasonable: It's the first increase in four years and is a modest
adjustment that reflects rising costs due to inflation, labor expenses
and the needs of an expanding transit network. Metro has also, for the
first time, proposed providing free transfers, allowing people to
transfer between bus and rail lines within two hours without having to
pay for another ride. That's a good idea that will save money for
riders. Daily, weekly and monthly passes, including those for the
disabled, elderly and students, would also increase in price by 20% to
40%.
So far, so good. But Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Zev
Yaroslavsky and Mayor Eric Garcetti have made a sensible argument for
postponing the vote on the second two fare increases, which were
proposed for 2017 and 2020. Instead, they say, a task force of transit
experts should be appointed to recommend alternative ways to generate
operating revenue. This would offer an opportunity to develop a new
revenue model for public transit.
The
task force should determine what share of operating costs ought to be
covered by riders. Those operating costs are only going to increase as
Metro opens new rail lines to Santa Monica and Azusa, and eventually
builds the Crenshaw Line, the Westside subway extension and the Downtown
Regional Connector. As the network expands, there is a public benefit
in keeping fares low to encourage the maximum ridership.
So who should be bearing the burden if not riders? To start, Metro
should look at ways to shift some transit system costs onto drivers,
which may sound unfair until you consider that they're getting a heavily
subsidized ride on publicly built and maintained roads. If added fees
make it less appealing for people to drive, that's a good thing; fewer
cars on the road reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions.
Metro should lobby for higher fuel taxes to fund mass transit, look at
expanding tolling or congestion pricing to help pay for bus and rail
rides, and charge for Metro parking lots.
The agency should also
look again at a proposal to impose fees on new building development and
should secure funding from the state's cap-and-trade program, which will
generate billions of dollars to be spent fighting climate change. The
benefits of public transit go far beyond the individual rider, and
Metro's fare structure should reflect that greater good.
When Kong Ning left her studio on Jan. 16, 2014, she was fed up.
Pollution levels in Beijing had shot up to more than 18 times what the
World Health Organization deems healthy. Outside, every other person
wore a face mask to protect against the haze clinging to the city.
Before leaving, Kong Ning impulsively snatched one of her canvases
and brought it with her. “The smog is really bad — I want people to see
my painting,” she remembers thinking. The piece she’d grabbed, one of a
series of 11 works in oil called “Smog Baby,” depicted a girl with
different-colored eyes wearing a face mask.
In the nearly 14 years since she left her career as a lawyer, Kong
Ning has devoted her life to creating art that expresses her feelings
toward the environment she has watched deteriorate around her. That day,
she wanted to make a statement.
“I thought that Tiananmen [Square] is the place all Chinese people
feel the most strongly about [as a symbol],” she said of Beijing’s
heavily policed central square, built by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1958 and
known for the protests that took place there in June 1989. “The
pollution was bad so I just went there to document it.”
With the help of a tourist she encountered when she arrived there,
she managed to take several photos of herself holding the painting in
front of the iconic Chairman Mao picture that hangs on the Forbidden
City. Then she was kicked out by armed guards. She immediately posted
her photos on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media site, where they
spread quickly. They plainly hit a nerve among frustrated Chinese
netizens.
“For
her carrying a canvas inside [Tiananmen Square], to do this kind of
performance art, it’s really amazing and also brave,” said Catherine
Cheng, Kong Ning’s friend and a prominent art curator who reposted the
photo on her social media feed that day. Another person to pick up on
the photo was a BBC journalist, who did a story about Kong Ning a couple of weeks later.
China’s chaotic economic development and the colossal energy needs of
a population of 1.35 billion urbanizing citizens have left widespread
land, water, and air pollution in their wake. A recent state study found
that more than 19 percent of China’s farmland is polluted, and another study found that 60 percent of its groundwater is unhealthy.
Most recently, though, air pollution in China’s cities has caught the
attention of global media. Over-reliance on coal-fired power plants,
skyrocketing automobile emissions, and cold, dry winters have left
northern cities like Beijing with smog and haze problems unimaginable in
the Western world today.
Of course, the issue has its complexities: The development that’s
causing the pollution has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty;
China is traveling the same road blazed in previous centuries by
industrializing powers in Europe and North America; besides, even if
China is the world’s largest polluter, it is also investing the most in renewable energy and beginning to regulate its polluters.
However you view the causes and excuses, though, China’s air is in trouble. January 2013 saw China’s first “airpocalypse”
— when air pollution in Beijing basically broke the metrics used to
measure airborne particulate matter concentrations. The World Health
Organization recommends that levels of PM2.5 (particles with a diameter
of less than 2.5 micrometers, small enough to lodge in human lungs and
bloodstreams) should stay below 25 micrograms per cubic meter; instead,
days during that stretch far surpassed the 500 upper limit of the U.S.
Air Quality Index (AQI). This past February saw extremely hazardous
pollution levels again; AQI readings threatening to reach 500 persisted for more than a week.
While many Chinese people living in polluted cities have become
increasingly frustrated, in a society that forbids public demonstration
and political protest, most can do nothing more than complain to friends
and family. Yet an increasing number of people are finding creative
ways to both critique and document this era of air pollution, as well as
to educate people how to protect themselves from it. They have resorted
to performance art and public creative expression in the place of
marching or soapboxing.
This past December, for example, several college students in the central city of Xi’an covered themselves in plastic,
representing smog, and pretended to choke on it in a public square.
Later in February, when pollution levels became dangerous for several
days on end in Chongqing (further west in China), residents took to the streets on bikes wearing face masks with “CO2″ drawn on them behind a red, circular “prohibited” sign.
The same week that Kong Ning went to Tiananmen Square with her painting, students at Peking University crept around campus putting face masks on statues of historic scholars,
like Communist Party co-founder Li Dazhao. The next day, 20 performers,
also in face masks, gathered in front of the Temple of Heaven, the
landmark in Beijing where the emperor used to pray for a good harvest,
and laid themselves down
in a symbolic prayer for clean air. In March, a group in the city of
Changsha gathered for a symbolic funeral for China — which was dying,
they implied, from air pollution.
Still others have used the internet to spread photos of these
performances, as well as satirical songs and comics, on WeChat and
Weibo, China’s most popular social media websites. In April, one Chinese
artist made a splash
during a trip to the south of France: According to the AP, he captured
some Provencal countryside air in a glass jar and then put it up for bid
at an auction attended by prominent Chinese art collectors. The jar
fetched over $800.
Li Tianyuan, a prominent painter and art professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, blew up microscopic images of the pollution particles
being inhaled by people living in polluted cities and has been showing
them in prominent Beijing art galleries. “There are two goals,” he said.
“The first is to make clear what this smog is. The second reason is to
help everyone in society to protect themselves individually, to give
them that awareness.”
In fact, it was only recently that the vast majority of Chinese
people became aware of the hazards of smog — long after food
contamination and water pollution had become hot-button issues.
Wu Di, who photographed the group prayer at the Temple of Heaven,
remembers that the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing gave pause to
many Chinese people, including himself.
“During the Olympics, I saw the American athletes wore face masks
when they came to China,” he told me in his airy studio. (As with all
the interviews in this story, I have translated his quotes.) “A lot of
people thought that was very hard to understand. ‘Why are they wearing
face masks?’ They felt these athletes were humiliating our country. But
actually, from that time I already had started to think about how they
weren’t wearing those face masks for no reason.”
At this point, Wu Di was still working 9 to 5 at a security
surveillance firm, but he started to do some research in his spare time.
He learned about PM2.5 particles and the health risks they pose. The
United States Embassy in Beijing began publicizing the readings of PM2.5
levels in the city after the Olympics in 2008, and the American
consulates in Guangzhou and Shanghai started sharing that data in
following years. But the Chinese government did not follow suit, and
pressured foreign governments to stop as well.
That changed with an extreme air pollution episode in October, 2011;
by the next January, the Chinese government finally began publicizing
its pollution readings. Since then, many more in China have realized the
hazards of long-term exposure to particulates and have begun to take
measures to protect themselves, like wearing face masks and buying air
filters for their homes.
Wu Di quit his job not long after the Olympics to devote himself to photography
highlighting the dangers of climate change and pollution. One image
used on Greenpeace East Asia’s website shows a little girl holding two
heart-shaped balloons. An air tube, the kind someone with emphysema
would use, leads from her nostrils to the balloons. The hazy background
features the iconic, hollow square building that serves as headquarters
for China Central Television.
Another shows the same girl in front of the Temple of Heaven wearing
445 facemasks, the number Wu Di calculated she would need to wear by
2030 if pollution levels stayed the same.
“The goal [of my work] on the one hand is to create art, but on the
other hand it is to hopefully help the public understand even better the
environmental problems and how to protect themselves,” he said. “At the
same time, it also tries to be a piece of criticism.”
The prayer performance at the Temple of Heaven, for example, was a
biting message of how bad things had become, and Wu Di’s photo of it
spread quickly through social media and on news sites.
Another goal of artists like Wu Di is to record the pollution for
posterity. He has spent the past half-year taking pictures and video of
the coal-fueled power plants in the provinces surrounding Beijing, which
are responsible for most of the air pollution in northern Chinese
cities. He finds the project important because many people don’t know
where air pollution comes from. “A lot of people think it’s from
automobiles or cooking,” he said.
He continued, “In the future, I want these works to accurately record
a history of what’s going on in this era just like the 19th century in
England or the industrial revolution in America.”
Li Tianyuan, the Tsinghua University art professor whose blown-up
photographs of pollution particulates currently hang in the 3 Shadows
Gallery in Beijing’s Caochangdi art district, wants to document the
pollution, too, but on a smaller – actually, microscopic — scale.
“A lot of people don’t know what PM2.5 is,” he said. “They are all
talking about it but don’t know what it is exactly. I want to establish
what all of the particles in the air look like so people can see them
very clearly, and understand … where they come from.”
Kong Ning too hopes to “leave her art for later generations” while
also warning people today of the dangers of neglecting their
environment. “My main goal is to express … a desire to protect the
environment and nature and life … because that is essentially all we
have, right?”
Despite these efforts, waking up morning after morning to oppressive,
deadening smog can become disheartening. But these artists maintain
hope and a commitment to doing something, however small, about it.
“I still have hope. If there was no hope, I would not go out and do these things,” Wu Di said.
(Mod: The following is an article published by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailing how senior legislative positions in the California State Assembly
are apparently being sold to the highest bidder. It is an astonishing
report, and sheds more light on just how corrupt our one party state government has become. BTW: This is where Sierra Madre's RHNA numbers come from. So who's paying for that?)
The Center For Investigative Reporting: California speaker gives Assembly's juiciest jobs to biggest fundraisers(link) - In May 2012 and again in June, Speaker John A. Pérez wrote memos to Democrats in the California Assembly. He wanted millions in campaign cash to win a handful of key races.
At stake, Pérez wrote, was their party’s control of the Assembly – and,
as it turned out, the perks and power enjoyed by the lawmakers
themselves.
“It is critical that we band together to maximize our financial
resources,” the burly Los Angeles legislative leader wrote in the memos,
copies of which were obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The lawmakers gave Pérez what he wanted, state campaign finance records show.
Exploiting loopholes in a law enacted to stanch the flow of big money in state politics, the Assembly Democrats
pumped $5.8 million into the campaigns Pérez designated, a CIR data
analysis shows. The infusion of cash helped the Democrats win a
supermajority in the Capitol: two-thirds control of the Legislature for
the first time since 1883.
The system also paid off for the speaker’s biggest fundraisers in the Assembly.
According to the data, Pérez gave lawmakers who raised the most money
the best assignments in the new Legislature – posts on the speaker’s
leadership team and seats on the powerful “juice committees.”
These are seven of the Assembly’s 30 standing policy committees. They
control bills affecting the financial bottom line for the Capitol’s
wealthiest interest groups: from banks, insurance companies and public
utilities to casinos, racetracks and liquor distributors. For lawmakers
who serve on them, the committees are a source of political campaign
“juice”: abundant donations.
Pérez’s spokesman John Vigna said the speaker makes legislative assignments based on merits, not money.
“There is absolutely no connection, zero connection, between Speaker
Pérez’s leadership selections and any political considerations,
including fundraising,” he said.
“Speaker Pérez chooses his leadership team based on their ability to serve the people of California” and nothing else, Vigna added.
CIR’s analysis of more than 38,000 contributions to Assembly Democrats
in the 2011-12 campaign shows a link between donations to the speaker’s
targeted races and a lawmaker’s prospects for important legislative
assignments.
Among the findings:
- The mega-donors to Pérez’s targets, three lawmakers who gave
more than $250,000, obtained positions of power. Each was named to
either a leadership post or chairmanship of a juice committee, along
with a seat on at least one juice committee. The top donor, Toni Atkins of San Diego, was named Assembly majority floor leader, next to the speaker, the top leadership post.
- Lawmakers who gave more than $150,000 were likely to get
multiple important posts. All 18 got one juice committee seat, and 16
got a leadership post, chairmanship of a juice committee or a seat on a
second juice committee.
- Lawmakers who gave less got less. Donors who contributed less
than $150,000 stood a 13 percent chance of heading a juice committee or
joining the leadership. No lawmaker who gave less than $40,000 was named
chairman of a juice committee.
California’s Assembly speakers, Democrat and Republican alike, long have
courted the state’s monied interests, seeking campaign funds to win or
maintain power in the Legislature. Despite efforts to break this cycle,
most speakers also have given political allies leadership posts,
committee assignments and other perks.
The Pérez memos and the pattern of donations that followed them provide
new insights into how those dynamics played out in the 2012 campaign.
Phillip Ung, policy advocate for the political reform group California Common Cause, said CIR’s findings are reason for concern.
“This system of campaign finance buying leadership on committees” has nothing to do with good government, he said.
“When voters see someone is chair of a committee, their expectation is
that person is there because that person is a policy expert, not because
they bought that chair,” Ung said.
Trent Lange, president of the California Clean Money Campaign, described lawmakers as “prisoners” of a process that requires endless political fundraising.
“It costs vast amounts of money to run campaigns, so it is
understandable that the ability to raise money might play a role in
legislative assignments,” said Lange, whose group favors public
financing of campaigns. “What this story tells us is we have to find a
better system.”
Pérez, 43, is a former labor union official and cousin of then Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa,
himself a former Assembly speaker. In 2008, with the mayor’s backing,
Pérez won his first elected office, an Assembly seat in a heavily
Democratic downtown district. The following year, he was elected
speaker. Even in an era of term limits, Pérez must leave the Assembly
next year, he has emerged as one of California’s most powerful
officials.
As the memos make clear, Pérez as speaker has sought to raise money to
maintain control of the Assembly, which Democrats have dominated for
more than 16 years.
But raising money is complicated by a campaign finance law aimed at limiting the influence of big money on state elections.
For decades, California had no limits on political donations in state
campaigns. In those years, the task of raising money for Assembly races
often fell to the speaker, experts say. Willie Brown, speaker
from 1981 to 1995, told his biographer that he raised up to $8 million
per year, much of it from interest groups with business before the
Legislature, and spent the money on Democratic campaigns and causes.
Republican leaders did the same thing, he contended.
After recurrent scandals and calls for reform, state voters in 1996 had
had enough. They enacted an extraordinarily tough law to blunt the power
of special interests in the Capitol: Proposition 208. The
measure said a donor could give no more than $250 to a candidate for the
Legislature. But the courts called the measure too restrictive, and it
never went into effect.
In 2000, then-Gov. Gray Davis and state lawmakers sponsored Proposition 34,
a substitute measure that they said also would tamp down the influence
of big money in state politics while passing constitutional muster. It
had a less-restrictive donation cap, $3,900 in 2012 legislative races,
and allowed unlimited donations to state political parties. Voters
passed it, too.
For a time, Prop. 34 checked the growth of spending in legislative races, experts say.
But as Pérez’s memos show, in 2012, the speaker devised a strategy to
sidestep the $3,900 donation cap and direct millions in contributions to
key campaigns.
One memo was written before the June primary and the other in
anticipation of the general election in November. In the memos, Pérez
ticked off exactly what he wanted from the Assembly’s Democrats, who then numbered 52.
For five Assembly candidates facing tough primary campaigns, the speaker
wanted each Democrat to give a total of $19,500 – the legal limit of
$3,900 per candidate. In the general election, Perez sought $23,400 more
from each Democrat. That represented maximum $3,900 donations to
candidates in six races Perez targeted.
Pérez said it was critically important to elect the lawmakers to maintain Democratic power in the Assembly.
For the state Democratic Party’s “candidates support fund,” which by law
can funnel contributions to targeted campaigns, Pérez asked for
$65,000, also split between the primary and general elections.
Finally, the speaker asked for $20,000 to support Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown’s successful tax hike measure, payable to a separate fund set up by the speaker.
Pérez told the lawmakers not to send the money directly to the
campaigns. Instead, “for proper tracking,” they were told to deliver the
money to an office the speaker maintains near the Capitol.
To comply, each lawmaker faced the challenge of raising more than
$127,000 for Pérez – on top of the $630,000 that, on average, he or she
would need for his or her own re-election campaign.
In the end, the Democrats gave more money than the speaker had
requested. Republicans lost in all the races Pérez targeted, and
Democrats wound up with 55 seats in the 80-seat Assembly – one seat more
than needed for a two-thirds majority. Reaping benefits
Meanwhile, as Pérez doled out legislative assignments between August and
January, those who gave the most money reaped larger benefits, CIR’s
analysis indicates.
“Giving contributions to earn yourself a chair or a seat on a powerful
committee is not how voters would like to see governing taking place,”
said Ung, the Common Cause advocate.
Assemblywoman Toni Atkins, the Assembly’s top donor, gave
$282,000 to the targeted races, records show. In addition to naming her
majority leader, Pérez kept Atkins on a juice committee on which she had
served in the previous term: the Health Committee, which has
jurisdiction over the heavily regulated health care industry. Before
going into politics, Atkins worked as clinical director at a women’s
health clinic, according to her Assembly website.
With health care finance a dominating issue, records show that health
care interests donated $4.8 million to Assembly Democrats in 2012, with
more than half going to members of the Health Committee or Pérez’s
leadership team.
Henry Perea of Fresno, a Pérez loyalist who gave a total of
$277,000, was named chairman of the committee that oversees the
insurance industry. He retained seats on two other juice committees: the
Governmental Organization Committee, with jurisdiction over casino gaming, horse racing and the alcoholic beverage industry; and the Banking and Finance Committee,
which oversees financial institutions. Perea is a former Fresno City
Council member who previously worked as a congressman’s aide.
Pérez’s No. 3 donor, Mike Gatto of Los Angeles, gave $258,000 to the targeted races. The speaker promoted him to be chairman of the most powerful juice committee, the Appropriations Committee,
which has jurisdiction over fiscal bills. Gatto also kept his seat on
the Banking and Finance Committee. He is a former congressional aide who
later practiced civil law.
Gatto declined to comment, referring a query to the speaker. Atkins and Perea didn’t respond to requests for comment.
CIR’s analysis shows that $150,000 was a cutoff of sorts. Most lawmakers
who donated more than $150,000 to the speaker’s targeted races obtained
important committee assignments or leadership posts.
Including the three mega-donors, 18 lawmakers broke the $150,000
threshold. Pérez named six of them to head juice committees. Five more
got leadership posts, and another five got two or more juice committee
assignments.
Nancy Skinner of Berkeley gave $201,000 to the targets. She continues to serve as chairwoman of the Rules Committee, a post that is part of Pérez’s leadership team, and sits on two juice committees: Business, Professions and Consumer Protection,
which supervises occupational licensing and state regulatory agencies;
and Utilities and Commerce, which regulates energy companies and public
utilities. She is a former Berkeley City Council member and
environmental activist. Of her fundraising, Skinner wrote in a
statement: “I am enthusiastic to support our Caucus efforts to elect
great Assemblymembers.”
Roger Hernández of West Covina, who donated $185,000, wound up with seats on three juice committees: Governmental Organization, Utilities and Commerce, and Health.
He was Pérez’s majority whip, but the speaker replaced him in December,
after a former girlfriend accused Hernández in court of abusing her and
using illegal drugs. Hernández didn’t respond to interview requests.
Pérez named two major donors to leadership posts even though they were
incoming freshman assemblymen and thus had no Capitol experience.
Former Pasadena City Council member
Chris Holden managed to steer $199,000 to Pérez’s targets, even as he
was raising money to win what at one point was a five-way contest for an
open Assembly seat. Pérez made him Majority Whip, replacing Hernández. Holden also was
named to two juice committees: Appropriations and Business, Professions
and Consumer Protection. In a statement, Holden said he believed he was
named whip because of his long service in local government.
Anthony Rendon of South Gate, near Los Angeles, an educator and
environmental activist, gave $191,000 to Pérez’s targets while raising
money for his first run for legislative office. After Rendon was
elected, Pérez named the newcomer assistant majority floor leader and
appointed him to the Utilities and Commerce Committee.
In March, Pérez removed Rendon from the leadership team and named him chairman of the Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife.
It’s not considered a juice committee, but it will play an important
role in shaping a proposed $11 billion state water bond measure. Rendon
spokesman Bill Wong said his boss requested the new assignment because
of serious water issues in his district.
Leaner prospects
John A. Perez
For lawmakers who steered less than $150,000, prospects were leaner, the analysis shows.
Eighteen lawmakers gave between $40,000 and $150,000. Of those, two were
named to leadership positions, and one became chairman of a juice
committee. Donations at this lower level didn’t appear to give lawmakers
traction with Pérez, according to the analysis.
Prospects were poorest for lawmakers who gave less than $40,000. None of
this group of 18 lawmakers was named to head a juice committee, and two
were named to leadership posts.
Perhaps because of personal or political considerations, some lawmakers
fared better than others – even when they donated roughly the same
amount of money to Pérez’s targets.
For example, Bonnie Lowenthal of Long Beach and Das Williams of Santa Barbara were among 18 Democrats who gave more than $150,000 to Perez’s targets.
All the others in that group got a leadership post, a juice committee
chairmanship or seats on two juice committees. Lowenthal and Williams
got one juice committee. Lowenthal also was reappointed as chairwoman of
the Committee on Transportation – not a juice committee. She didn’t
respond to interview requests.
In a phone interview, Williams said hard work – not fundraising – is the key to determining who gets good legislative posts.
“The people who work the hardest here often are the people who fundraise
a lot and also happen to be the ones who get more assignments,” he
said. “It comes down to, ‘Are you a hard worker?’ just as much as
anything else.”
Williams said he is satisfied with his own assignments.
“I wanted to be on Utilities and Commerce because I have a passion for
alternative energy, not necessarily because it’s a juice committee, but
it happens to be one,” he said.
Similarly, Assemblyman Luis A. Alejo of Salinas donated $128,000
to Perez’s targets, while freshman lawmaker Kevin Mullin of San Mateo
donated slightly more, $137,000.
Alejo was shut out of leadership slots and juice committees. But Mullin,
son of former Assemblyman Gene Mullin, was given both a leadership post
– assistant speaker pro tem – and a seat on the Business, Professions and Consumer Protection Committee.
Another exception was newly elected Assemblyman Phil Ting, the
former city assessor-recorder of San Francisco. He gave no money to
targeted races, but Pérez named him to the leadership post of caucus
chairman.
Like many freshmen, Ting couldn’t be blamed for failing to donate in the
other races: He spent $1 million to win a tough fight against a
well-financed opponent and had $17,000 left when the race was over.
Perhaps more to the point, Ting and Pérez have been friends since they
were classmates at UC Berkeley.
The experience of Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada of Davis was more typical.
Yamada raised $249,000 to win re-election, with significant
contributions from unions for state employees and teachers. She donated
$9,600 to the targeted races, the least of any incumbent Assembly
Democrat. When Pérez parceled out leadership posts and slots on the
juice committees, Yamada was passed over.
Instead, the former social worker was reappointed as chairwoman of the Assembly’s low-profile Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care. She didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Pérez’s own donations to the campaigns he targeted were modest.
Records show he gave $164,000, less than 17 other Assembly Democrats.
But Pérez was a formidable fundraiser for his own re-election, obtaining
$2.6 million.
Pérez cruised to re-election in his Los Angeles district, winning more
than 82 percent of the vote. He had $1.2 million left over, which by law
he can use for a future campaign after he leaves the Assembly. This
year, he has raised $103,100 for a campaign for lieutenant governor,
records show.
(Mod: Our Assemblyman, pay to play Chris Holden, is
running entirely unopposed for reelection this year. He is guaranteed to
retain his seat. As you can plainly see, one party government and the
resulting corruption works wonders in California.)
LOS ANGELES—The pedestrians moving along the elevated walkway at the
center of downtown Los Angeles barely notice the bronze plaque, even
when they’re stepping on it. If they do see it, the face sculpted into
the memorial — that of Calvin Hamilton — is barely visible, scuffed and
worn after years of traffic. It is also hard to tell exactly what
Hamilton did to deserve such an honor. There's nothing in the
engraving's text describing his Quixotic attempt to transform the city,
or how he failed, miserably, to implement that plan. And there's
certainly nothing to imply that Hamilton was a visionary, one of the
first to recognize that Los Angeles had a problem with cars — and to try
to solve that problem.
For the record, this is what the memorial says:
CALVIN S. HAMILTON PEDWAY AN APPRECIATION - DIRECTOR OF PLANNING
1964-1985 CITY OF LOS ANGELES
The word "pedway" is the key to understanding the planner's vision.
It is also the name of the peculiar kind of urban passage, the
centerpiece of Hamilton's design, where the plaque itself sits.
Hamilton's commemoration isn't on a city street or sidewalk. It's
pressed into a circle of concrete on a pedestrian bridge at the heart of
downtown, just a few yards from the Hollywood Freeway and a stone's
throw from City Hall. About a dozen such pedways exist along Bunker
Hill, the once-stately Los Angeles neighborhood that became, in the
1960s and early 1970s, an urbanized pod of skyscrapers and corporate
plazas.
The pedways are the last remaining artifacts of Hamilton's vision.
But the Los Angeles of the 21st century that is growing around them
— more pedestrian friendly and deeply invested in public transit
— reflect a city that's finally catching up with a figure it has mostly
forgotten.
For Hamilton, those initial twelve pedways were supposed to be just
the beginning. He envisioned hundreds across the city's 500 square
miles. The Los Angeles he dreamed of would have been divided into 29
"Centers," or islands of development, connected by pedways, moving
sidewalks, monorails, and mass transit. Beyond those
intentionally-crowded zones, Hamilton proposed a Los Angeles of limits.
Density would be restricted in residential communities; motor vehicles
and rail would be given equal treatment; commercial development would be
regulated; and parks — lots of parks — would be constructed.
Hamilton's plan, officially called "Concept Los Angeles"
(it is also called the "Centers Plan"), debuted in 1970. The Los
Angeles City Council passed it. But implementation immediately became
bogged down in fights between developers, community advocates, and
political forces. Without any practical plan at all, Los Angeles began
to sprawl, and in 1986, city officials decided that Hamilton — who'd
been accused of a conflict-of-interest over his involvement in a tourism
venture — had to go.
"Cal's style is visionary, and that has served a purpose," former city council President Pat Russell told the Los Angeles Times. "But we're entering an era of implementation."
For the next two decades, "implementation" led to a city that was
hostile to the needs of pedestrians, bike riders, and mass transit
users. Unchecked growth meant freeways; it meant that Los Angeles
continually topped lists of America's most polluted and slowest-moving
cities. It meant that the memory of Hamilton, who died in 1997, was
relegated to a faded plaque.
• • • • •
I moved to Los Angeles in 1989, and being a native New Yorker,
immediately wondered whether it was possibly to actual travel my adopted
city on foot. The answer, back then, was yes and no. If you lived in
the city's crowded east side, then you absolutely could walk. And you
wouldn't be alone, since tens of thousands of people — most poor, many
immigrants, few owning cars — walked everywhere, too. Los Angeles as sketched out in the 1970 "Concept Los Angeles" plan by Calvin Hamilton.But
for vast segments of the city, walking was almost impossible. Wide
boulevards stretched west from the city's center. Many of them were
intentionally built without sidewalks. Pedestrian crossings were
sometimes a half-mile apart, and the police maintained a vigilance when
it came to jaywalkers that one could only wish they'd have maintained in
terms of drivers who treated those wide avenues as freeways. If you did
walk in Los Angeles, you were either poor or wildly eccentric.
But I walked, a lot. It helped that I'm a bit obsessive — and found a
focus for that obsession when I discovered, and began to catalogue, the
dozens of public stairways that dotted Silver Lake, the neighborhood
just west of downtown where I lived. I would travel with map in hand,
counting and charting and modifying my route to make sure it was
complete. If walking was an oddball activity, I wanted to create a
community of oddballs. I wanted people to know that, tucked less than
100 yards from the always jammed Interstate 5 was a mile-long dirt road
that felt like rural Vermont. I wanted to people to know about a
passageway that's squeezed, ridiculously, between the north and
southbound lanes of the 110 Freeway. If pedestrians can find the
entrance, they can walk in what is fundamentally a two-mile long cage,
designed to protect them from traffic. At night, the effect is such that
walkers feel swept up by shimmering waves of light, red and white,
from the head and taillights of the vehicles hurtling by.
I began to show my favorite spots to friends, and soon, my public
walks were attracting hundreds of people. The Big Parade, as it was
called, garnered media attention,
too, which often included a headline or lead paragraph that riffed on
the horrible key lyric in the horrible 1982 Missing Persons song:
"Nobody Walks in LA." "If you believe that," I'd usually say, "you must
only be looking through a car windshield." A
frieze in the World Trade Center in Bunker Hill was supposed to be the
centerpiece of Calvin Hamilton's pedway plan. One
afternoon, I met a friend who promised to show me something new
downtown. We met at the bottom of Angels Flight, a restored funicular
railroad that's now a tourist ride, but which once was part of a series
of vertical transports key — just like public stairways — to getting
people to and from their destinations in a city whose geographic
contours were created by tectonic upthrusts. In Bunker Hill's World
Trade Center building, we entered a nearly empty passage that ended in a
room with a beautifully sculpted frieze. The frieze celebrated various
workers (trucks and granaries, cotton gins, trains, and tankers) but it
also celebrated the passage itself. It was originally intended as the
centerpiece in a whole network of such passages: Calvin Hamilton's plan.
At the end of the hallway, we turned again, emerging thirty feet
above Figueroa Street, crossing above the rush-hour traffic into a busy
hotel. A sign marked "pedway" directed us down a flight of stairs, into
the hotel’s lobby; we crossed the street, arriving at a spiral staircase
that led up to another high-line style sidewalk. It followed the east
side of Figueroa for a block before opening up into a rounded, miniature
plaza. At the center of the plaza — like the hub in a wheel — was the
scuffed plaque. I took a picture and made a note: Find out who Calvin Hamilton was.
• • • • •
Through much of 2013, one of the most popular museum exhibits in Los
Angeles was on display at the tiny Architecture & Design Museum in
the Mid-Wilshire District, right about where sidewalk-free streets begin
to appear. "Never Built Los Angeles"
was an astonishing catalogue of foolhardy concepts, magical thinking,
and most of all, hoped-for utopias. The exhibit showed dozens of
proposed "improvements" on Los Angeles — from a bicycle freeway with
toll booths to a "super-community" of pods to Hamilton's pedways — each
of which not only envisioned paradise but aggressively dismissed
previous visions of perfection. A view from one of the remaining original pedways in Calvin Hamilton's plan. Hyperbolic insensibility wasn't just limited to things that never (or barely) got underway. One of the founding documents of Los
Angeles as it exists today is the city's 1941 master plan. The 112-page
charter barely mentioned pedestrians, bicycles, buses, or trolleys — all
of which were major modes of transportation in the years leading up to
World War II — and instead stated in emphatic capital letters: "HIGHWAY
TRANSPORTATION IS MASS TRANSPORTATION." With those words, freeway
construction began, playing a game of leapfrog that continues to this
day: capacity is estimated and exceeded, leading to suggestions that the
problem is simply not enough freeways.
Freeway construction isn't over in Los Angeles — there are a couple
of projects still on the books — but there's near-universal agreement
that, certainly by Hamilton’s time, the idea that freeways were free –
or fast – wasn’t panning out. Population had risen to six million; the
number of vehicles exceeded three million, and the city was beginning a
decades-long run as the nation's most polluted and congested urban area.
(Lately we're doing better with pollution, thanks to cleaner cars, but
we remain the city where people spend more time in traffic than anywhere else in the country.)
It was against that backdrop that Hamilton came up with his Concept
Los Angeles. He didn't want to eliminate cars; instead, he came up with a
whole second level for Los Angeles, a place where people would be
removed from their vehicles. "Automobiles will be restricted to the
ground level," Hamilton wrote. "Interconnected pathways for pedestrian
circulation will be provided at the second floor and higher levels. This
nearly complete separation of vehicles, transit, and pedestrians, will
enhance the convenience, safety, and pleasantness of the core."
The dozen pedways surrounding Bunker Hill were all that Hamilton was
able to see constructed, and all that's left. The arguments against the
pedway system were numerous. It would be too expensive. It would
segregate people from "real life" down below. But mostly the plan failed
because Hamilton sought to restrict growth outside of his centers,
which brought him into conflict with development interests. The result
of Hamilton's lack of political skills — and the city's lack of
political will — was the ugly sprawl
that now defines L.A.'s outer suburbs: Intersections with fast-food
restaurants at each corner; big box stores stacked into shopping centers
as big as New England towns; and especially interminable, grinding
commutes from the outer suburbs into the central business districts.
After his resignation, Hamilton continued to promote his vision as
the best possible way to build a more human-scale city. "The term 'Los
Angelization' has been used to denote uncontrolled growth," Hamilton
wrote in a 1986 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. "Someday 'Los Angelization' could come to mean controlled growth and preservation of the quality of life."
• • • • •
So where can we see the Los Angeles that Hamilton envisioned? For a
long time, the answer was only in the ultimate regional fantasy product:
the movies. The multi-tiered city envisioned by Concept Los Angeles
played a huge role in 1982's Blade Runner, which is set in 2019. A more recent science fiction film, Spike Jonze's Her,
used the pedways of downtown as a location, extending them and (with
the help of computer-generated imagery) fulfilling Hamilton's plan, at
least for downtown. Though I loved the movie, the storyline also seemed
to confirm the worst criticisms of the Hamilton plan: rather than bringing people together, a multi-level Los Angeles
turned out to be a segregating force, making people so isolated that
they're forced to take virtual lovers.
People gather near the Hamilton plaque during the 2013 Big Parade. (Flickr user saschmitz_earthlink_net)Whatever
flaws in Hamilton's own plan, he deserves credit for recognizing the
social drawbacks of an urban vision that insists on seeing passenger
cars as mass transit, pedestrians and bus riders and bike riders as
superfluous, and building out rather than up. The question, almost two
decades after Hamilton’s death, is how to get Los Angeles back on track.
Today, Los Angeles County has 6.6 million registered motor vehicles and
a population of more than 9 million. Commute times along its 20,000
miles of road, including 520 miles of freeway, are getting worse: in 2013
Angelinos averaged 64 hours in traffic, up from 59 the year before.
There are positive signs, but a sort of institutional schizophrenia is
still underway; though there are more plans to create bike lanes, extend sidewalks, and build new transit lines,
those plans are often met with fierce — and usually irrational —
opposition. "The problem is that policy hasn't caught up with reality,"
says Jessica Meaney, a member of the board of Los Angeles Walks, a
pedestrian advocacy group.
Evidence of this gap comes as the California Department of
Transportation keeps plans on the books for the region's last remaining
to-be-built freeway, the 710, which would connect Pasadena to Long
Beach. I recently was asked to lead a group of CalTrans officials on a
tour of the pedways. The question of the 710 is kryptonite to many of
them, but a few told me that they knew that adding a few more miles of
freeway won't help the problem. "We know that the key is reducing the
numbers of cars on the road," one freeway planner told me. "Not building
more lanes."
For
pedestrians, building is exactly what's needed. The city's sidewalks
are in horrible shape (Hamilton's elevated pedways are an exception).
Many of them were built in the 1920s, and tree roots have twisted and
tilted them, creating hazards that have led to multiple trip-and-fall
lawsuits, including a pair that were settled for $85 million. The city says that nearly half of its 10,000 miles
of sidewalks need repairs, and the estimated cost for such a project
tops $1.5 billion — an amount that dwarfs the city's sidewalk repair
budget for 2013-2014, $10 million. Meaney says that part of the problem
is that transit officials see street repairs and sidewalk repairs as
separate issues. There needs to be a more holistic approach, she says,
to making sure L.A.'s infrastructure is safe, well-maintained, and
positioned for a future when fewer people will need or want cars.
In the meantime, the pedways still hover above the city, and make for
a fun walk. Some people actually use them to commute, the way Hamilton
intended. But their utility is limited by something Hamilton would have
approved of: a flourishing downtown. Los Angeles is discovering that
people don't need to be separate from cars the way Hamilton envisioned,
they simply need to be celebrated above them. Along Bunker Hill
and beyond, residential life — which for decades has felt like an
afterthought in the city's core — is thriving. New housing, development
along the Los Angeles River, and even a trolley line are all planned or
under construction. The new downtown has mostly dispensed with attempts
to tilt toward utopian ideas, focusing instead on common-sense notions
for better lives.
The pedways may remain an artifact, rather than something useful, and
there's been talk recently of whether they should continue to be
maintained. I say they should, and the first step should be restoring
that plaque. That should lead to a second phase of rehabilitation —
Hamilton's reputation. It's a good direction for Los Angeles to walk.
Distant as it may seem today, there was a time early in the Obama administration when Hope
felt like more than just a pretty campaign promise. That was especially
true for the President's ambitious transportation plans. Calls for "livability" were interpreted as a bold shift away
from the car and highway dependence that had defined 20th century urban
mobility in the United States.
Then-Secretary of Transportation Ray
LaHood announced an efficient future in which people would run their
daily errands "all without having to get in your car."
Fast forward five years since that 2009 pledge, and many of the most hopeful transformations have yet to arrive. A proposed national network
of high-speed rail is little more than a wishful map. The Highway Trust
Fund, which pays for road maintenance as well as transit programs, will
run out of money any month. Streetcars with questionable mobility value represent perhaps the most visible addition to city transport systems. There have been some minor victories — transit use is up in places, and bike systems are robust in others — but many more defeats.
Where did it all go wrong? There's never one simple answer to a question like that, but transport historian Michael Fein
of Johnson & Wales University, in Providence, offers a pretty
convincing case that the biggest barrier to LaHood's livable cities
program was the legacy of the Interstate Highway System. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Urban History,
Fein argues that decades-old policies favoring urban expressways (and,
more specifically, regional mega-malls situated at interchanges) spoiled
the broader campaign for better urban mobility:
Working toward walkable, local-oriented, human-scale, "livable"
communities and economies entailed a rejection of the regionally
oriented commercial and commuting patterns fostered by the Interstates.
Realigning these long-standing DOT priorities would prove no easy feat.
The best example Fein offers in support of his point comes from a 2011 plan for a new interchange in Provo, Utah, called the West Side Connector.
One option for the project was to route traffic through downtown Provo
on a system of local roads. This pro-downtown alternative — supported by
the Army Corps of Engineers — would have given a boost to the city's
central business district and overall economic fortunes. In short, it
would have served DOT's stated goal of livability.
Instead, federal highway officials pushed for a direct link between
the connector and Interstate 15 to meet "driver expectations." The Provo
Towne Centre Mall, located at an I-15 interchange, would stand to
benefit from this option — in particular Home Depot, which would have
lost about an acre of parking and some highway visibility from the
downtown alternative.
The Provo case is hardly an outlier. In 2011, for instance, North
Carolina widened Interstate 85 to ease entry to Concord Mills, while
Wisconsin built an interchange off Interstate 94 to serve a Town Centre
mall thirty miles from Milwaukee. These and other projects that
facilitated car access to mega-malls on the fringes of metro areas,
concludes Fein, "undermined the livable community LaHood envisioned":
Had federal officials been serious about challenging auto dependency
and linking transportation, housing, energy, and environmental policy
goals, then policy makers and planners would have had to directly
confront historic development patterns that the Interstate highway
system had long fostered. As part of that confrontation, transportation
officials would have to undertake a more careful reckoning of the costs
of highway economies to livable communities.
Fein seems unsure where to issue this reckoning. Was the livability
program "undermined" by entrenched highway interests? Or were federal
officials not serious enough about their intentions? He does lay much of
the blame on the term livability itself; imprecise for policy
purposes, it meant different things to different people, and in that way
often meant nothing at all.
But he also notes, as any good historian must, that it's far too soon
for a full assessment of Obama's livability goals. The current push
offers clear progress over previous iterations — first Carter's weak
Livable Cities initiative, which focused on the arts, then Clinton's
Building Livable Communities Program, which emphasized urban parks — and
even unrequited boldness deserves some praise. At least, that would be
the hopeful view.
