Challenge to the status quo of Los Angeles
By James Preston Allen, Publisher
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting awfully tired of seeing Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino’s smiling face everywhere I look.
He has become the cheerleader-in-chief for Council District 15 — nothing more. The sad part about it is that being a councilman is not about you. It’s about serving the people of the district. It’s about getting bigger things done than opening a coffee house and praising small business owners for taking a risk. It’s about more than conducting photo ops while pretending to care about the homeless — especially while the Los Angeles Police Department is out arresting them on meritless warrants because they have no better options than to camp out in front of the San Pedro City Hall building because there are no other options.
Buscaino’s latest campaign mailer claims that he is “the councilman of the Port of Los Angeles.” This is strange since most of us here believe that the Port of L.A. exists as the 16th district of the city. It has no elected representatives on its commission and very little to hold it accountable to the Harbor Area residents without the threat of protests, strikes or litigation.
The Harbor Department is insular in so many ways and immune to public accountability except by higher authorities (i.e. the Los Angeles mayor, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the State Tidelands Commission and the California Air Resources Board), with no serious public engagement except the public relations initiatives at neighborhood councils. Not since the POLA unilaterally canceled the Port Community Advisory Council has there been any significant public oversight of port activities. Buscaino has not stepped into this void.
Buscaino’s past five years in office have been an abject failure. He failed to garner support for his delusional waterfront dreams and other grandiose proposals. Because of his abhorrence of real collaboration, he is incapable of leading by consensus, costing him his core ethnic support — Italians, Croatians and Greeks.
To put it more bluntly, what Buscaino has put forward thus far as a pathway to the future of the greater Harbor Area is neither bold nor brilliant enough — let alone sustainable. What he has done so far is to adopt the initiatives of others like the Gaffey Great Streets Initiative that left people wondering exactly why would you put a playground at an exit park where some 63,000 cars pass onto the 110 Freeway?
Then there is the Nelson One project, which surprised everyone this past year. Proposed by a man convicted of real estate fraud in Solano County, it would put a 15-story high-rise on one of San Pedro’s narrowest streets. And none of the projects in the pipeline have any affordable housing units.
Complain all you want about what Measure S doesn’t accomplish, but Buscaino’s development plans for the lower 15th are the poster child for spot zoning and back room deals.
As for Measure S, I have been reading everything that has been written in the Los Angeles Times against this measure and all the propaganda for and against it. As confusing as this is for most voters not familiar with zoning law and development what this comes down to is whether or not to push the pause button on business as usual at city hall. Los Angeles has been remiss in its obligation to finalize and approve the 35 community plans that make up its General Plan, which gives everybody a chance to chime in on development issues.
The plans that are in place are some 20 years old and every time a developer wants a variance to the plan or a zoning change, it gets wrapped up in city bureaucracy forever. So to speed things along, political grease is applied in the way of campaign contributions and donations to officeholder accounts. In the record business, it’s called payola. At city hall, it’s called pay-to-play, but it’s all the same.
Now I doubt that we’ll ever get that kind of money out of politics, but what we can have are 35 community plans that are reviewed by the 95 neighborhood councils and approved by the city council. We can have a general plan that reflects the consensus of the communities and the council signed by the mayor. That’s a democratic process. What we have now is just bad governance.
Measure S is the reset button that holds up only 5 percent of current projects in the pipeline and the moratorium is for only two years. So let’s use those two years to fix the city and come to some plan on where to build density, where and how to build affordable workforce housing and what to do with the cities excess real estate assets. Who knows? Perhaps we could actually build homeless housing on some of it?
As for Measure H, Los Angeles County’s quarter-of-a-cent tax, isn’t the best way to finance a cure for the homeless crisis. But it is a “right now” solution that has citizen oversight. So, I’m endorsing a yes vote on it. I’d prefer to place a luxury tax on any real estate valued at over $5 million and to change the appraisal laws on property transfers that occur when a business is sold.
For instance, when Exxon Mobil sold their Torrance refinery to PBF Energy, a Parsippany, N.J.-based company, all of that property didn’t get reappraised as a real estate transaction but was transferred without it, because it’s a sale of total business assets. I’d love to know which lawyer wrote that loophole into Prop. 13.
Lastly, Nancy Pearlman for the Community College Board seat 6 is my endorsement. She’s one of the few true progressives in local office.