Supervisor Speaks on Measure H, the Future of the San Pedro Courthouse and Homelessness
By James Preston Allen, Publisher
On recent Wednesday evening, newly-elected Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn sat looking out over the main channel of the Los Angeles harbor.
She was relieved she won’t have to commute to and from Washington, D.C. anymore; she was relieved she isn’t in Congress anymore, fighting hundreds of other representatives for every item for her district. Now, she only has to convince to other people on the five-member board of supervisors to get something passed.
Hahn does have doubts about the size of the supervisors’ districts and how representing 2.5 million constituents probably should be changed to either 9 or 11 supervisors, representing about one million. Yet, she admitted that passing that change would be a challenge.
“If you ask people if they want more representation, they’ll say, ‘Yes,’” she pondered. “If you ask them if they want smaller districts, they’ll say, ‘Sure.’ But ask them if they want more politicians, they say ‘No’.”
She was ecstatic about Measure H, the recently passed quarter-cent sales tax.
“I am so happy this passed with some 69 percent approval,” she said. “In Inglewood, it was like 84 percent.”
Although a sales tax is a regressive form of taxation, it was one of the few options the Los Angeles Supervisors had to address the $350 million cost of providing services for homeless people in the county. In the past, these costs included the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arresting and detaining the homeless. The LASD reported that it was spending $120 million annually on this, which is more than the $80 million that the City of Los Angeles spends.
Hahn explained that Measure H is the one campaign that officials didn’t need to “educate the voters on” as every part of the county now has experienced people living on the streets in their neighborhood. Hahn admitted that there were other sources of money which could have been used, like taking the $120 million out of the sheriff’s budget. However, she didn’t think that voters would have supported that solution. The other supervisors didn’t want to use the county’s emergency funds for this crisis, she explained.
“This measure is about getting results, not just number crunching and if this is an emergency, then we should use the emergency fund,” Hahn said.
There weren’t enough votes on the board to support that.
A significant part of the six-prong implementation of Measure H is the creation of a coordinated system that relies on the Affordable Care Act. If Congress had passed their “replace and repeal” American Health Care Act that went down in flames on March 24, Los Angeles County would have been left with a giant hole in the budget, one that Hahn has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to report back on with options. Luckily, that won’t happen this budget year.
There is still the problem with Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who has proposed cutting his department’s budget by $48 billion. This would affect the motel and rent subsidies that the county receives from the federal government.
“It’s a problem, one that I’m going to talk to all these people about [in Congress] when we go back to D.C. at the end of April,” Hahn said.
Looking at a copy of Random Lengths News with a picture of Paul Ryan and other conservatives on the cover, she commented, “I know all of these people,” implying that her years in Congress may have some influence on these Republicans.
I am not so sure.
The San Pedro Courthouse Deal
“The first thing I did when I got into office was to put the brakes on the courthouse development,” Hahn stated matter-of-factly. “I wanted to make sure that everyone had the opportunity to [have a say in] what it should be and why it’s so important.”
I suggest that the highest and best use was for it to still be a courthouse as this was something promised to the San Pedro community when it was consolidated into the City of Los Angeles back in 1909.
“I think there are a lot of promises that the city has reneged on over the years,” she responded. “What I want is for there to be buy in [on this project]. We can’t make a decision without going to the public first.”
The courthouse development was rushed through in the last months of Hahn’s predecessor Don Knabe at the urging of Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino. Like so many of his attempted projects, there was very little public input and no public process.
With Hahn back in Southern California on a full-time basis, we can now return to some semblance of democratic consensus building and community outreach that’s been sorely lacking these past five years.
The public input that Hahn wants will come from meetings in San Pedro. They will take place on April 5 and 15 at POLA High School at 6 p.m. and 10 a.m., respectively. Hahn said that community feedback on the project is important before the developers give us their solutions.