Author: David Hunter

Thorn West: Issue No. 172

State Politics

• Today is the state Legislature’s second of two yearly “suspense days,” when the progress of many proposed bills can be suspended until the next year’s session. At the end of the day, here’s what advanced.

• CalMatters covers this summer’s continuing increase in COVID-19 cases, including how to know if you are optimally vaccinated.

City Politics

• A long-awaited report from the chief legislative analyst contains proposals on how to expand the number of city council seats, as well as how to move to an independent redistricting commission. The Ad Hoc Committee on City Governance Reform met this week (video here) to begin reviewing the report.

• Former LA Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was sentenced to 42 months in prison for corruption that took place when he was a member of the LA County Board of Supervisors.

• With the next primaries in March, the first debate in a Los Angeles City Council race was held in District 2. DSA-LA has also begun its endorsement process, and will be considering the endorsement of several candidates for council. On September 10, members are invited to meet and ask questions of these candidates via Zoom. RSVP here!

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The LAPD Mission Division gang unit that is being federally investigated is suspected of routinely stealing from people at traffic stops, as well as slipping tracing devices into their cars.

• Days after approving a new LAPD contract which unbalances the budget by giving massive raises to police officers, Councilmember Traci Park spoke gleefully about cutting the budgets of other city departments.

Housing Rights

• Los Angeles City Council passed a $150-million spending plan for funds raised by Measure ULA on Tuesday. The funds will be directed to six programs, including tenant protections and affordable housing production. City officials said ULA money can be spent only as it comes in, so the city won’t be able to use the full $150 million until the tax generates $150 million.

• Recent court orders have temporarily prevented the displacement of unhoused people by cities that do not provide viable shelter alternatives, citing the decision in Martin v. Boise that this practice violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In response, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, speaking at an anti-unhoused rally staged at the courthouse, demanded that judges reverse this decision in order to allow the city to resume displacing encampments regardless of whether or not viable shelter alternatives exist. Governor Gavin Newsom suggested publishing the personal contact information of judges who refused to do so.

Labor

• The Nation offers praise to Los Angeles as the country’s “leading union town.” Join DSA-LA’s Westside Branch this Saturday in support of workers on the picket line at the Fairmont Miramar, where hotel security have attacked striking workers for demanding more dignified working conditions!

• In advance of Labor Day, Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Tim McOsker introduced a package of legislative motions intended to crack down on wage theft in Los Angeles.

Environmental Justice

• The California Public Utilities Commission voted 5–0 on Thursday to let Southern California Gas increase the fuel storage at the Aliso Canyon gas storage field, eight years after a methane gas leak forced thousands of San Fernando Valley residents to evacuate their homes for months.

Thorn West: Issue No. 171

City Politics

• Los Angeles Public Press covers last week’s surprising unanimous vote to reject City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s nomination to the City Ethics Commission, which occurred without debate. The nominee — the president of the Reseda Neighborhood Council — rose to prominence last year as a proponent of lobbying reform. Statement from Mejia here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Los Angeles City Council voted 12–3 to approve a new LAPD contract that could add nearly $1 billion to the budget in increased salaries for officers over the next four years. The LAPD has been operating well below its targeted staffing numbers; this has not led to an increase in crime. Public comment was relentlessly opposed to the new contract. Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Nithya Raman were the dissenting votes and spoke against the contract at a press conference before the vote, along with activists from Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles, La Defensa and DSA-LA. Chapter statement here.

• Federal prosecutors and the FBI’s civil rights division will investigate an LAPD gang unit in the Mission Division. Many details are still unknown, but among the subjects of the investigation are the unit’s systematic failure to record stops on body cams.

• During an interview, Mayor Karen Bass repeated a long-debunked myth, widely believed and circulated by law enforcement officers, that merely touching fentanyl “could kill you.”

Housing Rights

• A package of tenant protections passed in Los Angeles this January requires landlords to send notice to the Housing Department every time they file an eviction. Six months and 40,000 eviction notices later, the controller’s office has taken this newly public data and released a database showing that the vast amount of evictions are for unpaid rent — and that the median amount owed is only $2,678.

Labor

• The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) leaked the terms of its most recent offer to the Writers Guild of America (WGA). In a letter to its membership, WGA leadership called the terms “neither nothing, nor nearly enough” and said that the offer contains ”too many loopholes.”

• The text of SB 799, proposed state legislation that would allow striking workers to collect unemployment insurance, has now been released to the public, and can be read here.

Transportation

• In 2022, a coalition of transit activists collected enough signatures to put Healthy Streets LA — which will require the city to implement its mobility plan whenever it repaves a street — on Los Angeles ballots in 2024. In response, the City Council asked for a similar but competing measure to be drafted by the City Attorney within 15 days. Fourteen months later, the city’s legislation has finally been drafted. Streets for All analyzes its shortcomings.

Environmental Justice

• Though Los Angeles was fortunate that the impact of Tropical Storm Hilary was relatively mild, there is still a lot to criticize about the city’s response, particularly the failure to proactively inform and provide necessary resources to the unhoused community.

• Meanwhile, with the storm approaching, Texas Governor Greg Abbott continued the practice of transporting asylum seekers from Texas to Los Angeles. “It displays a complete and total lack of common humanity,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Thorn West: Issue No. 170

State Politics

• The California State Legislature is back from recess this week for the final five weeks of the 2023 legislative session. All new bills will need to be voted on before September 14 in order to pass along to Governor Gavin Newsom to be signed or vetoed.

Housing Rights

• Residents of the Aetna Street encampment in Van Nuys successfully blocked a sweep. LA Public Press has firsthand coverage.

• A change in federal regulations will eliminate a significant bottleneck that prevents unhoused people from moving into available permanent housing units while working on their applications, causing units to remain empty for months while the application process drags on. Mayor Karen Bass lobbied for the change.

• After being heard at the Budget and Finance and Housing Committees this week, the initial spending plan for funds collected by Measure ULA, developed by the ULA Citizens Oversight Council (COC), was advanced to full council with a full $150 million of front-funding.

Labor

• Among the bills under consideration by the California State Legislature will be legislation that would give striking workers the right to collect unemployment benefits, as is already the case in New York and New Jersey.

• A report from the Writers Guild of America calls for antitrust agencies to regulate streaming platforms.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• In LA Taco, a report on how two-thirds of Los Angeles’ $1.3 billion in COVID-19 relief funds went to fund the police and fire departments, with none of it going toward housing.

• Next week, LA City Council committees will begin discussing the proposed tentative agreement between the city and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which increases the starting pay for LAPD officers by nearly 13%.

Environmental Justice

• Los Angeles received its first-ever tropical storm warning, as Hurricane Hilary is predicted to pass through the area over the weekend. LA Public Press spoke with mutual aid groups that are concerned the city has not done enough to help the unhoused community prepare for the likelihood of torrential rain and flooding. Updates from the city and county noted here.

• This month the LA Times is running a special series focusing on the effects of climate change across the state and city, and what can be done on both the individual and governmental levels.

• Politico rounds up some of the climate-related bills that the state legislature will consider in the upcoming final few weeks of this year’s legislative session.

Thorn West: Issue No. 169

DSA held its biannual national convention over the past weekend, with over 1,000 socialists gathering in Chicago to set the direction of the organization for the next two years. The Los Angeles chapter sent over 60 delegates, the second-largest delegation, and one of its members was elected to DSA’s 16-person National Political Committee.

City Politics

• This Tuesday the Los Angeles City Council’s Personnel, Audits, and Hiring Committee will meet for the first time in several months, as the absence of Councilmember Curren Price has led to several cancellations. This week the committee will discuss impediments to the Targeted Local Hire Program, which the city relies on to staff open civilian positions.

Labor

• Los Angeles city employees represented by SEIU Local 721 staged a 24-hour walkout on Tuesday in response to alleged unfair labor practices by the city. The union also used the opportunity to draw attention to the city’s thousands of staffing vacancies, which for numerous reasons the city has been slow to fill. “If you’re our members, there’s immediacy — if you’re working mandatory overtime every weekend, if you haven’t seen your family,” said union president David Green.

• The LA Times reports on numerous instances of violence being used against striking hotel workers by the security forces employed by hotels. Jacobin also has continued coverage of the hotel workers’ strike, with articles on a strike-breaking app and a strike-breaking conference of political science academics.

• Last Friday representatives of the WGA and AMPTP met to discuss the possibility of resuming negotiations. Though initial reports indicated that there had not been much progress to restart negotiations, it has since been announced that negotiations would resume today.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Meanwhile the city has moved with feverish speed to address a parallel staffing decline in the LAPD, offering double-digit percentage pay bumps for starting pay in the latest contract. (Having fewer police officers has not corresponded with an increase in crime.) Los Angeles Police Protective League officers will vote to ratify the tentative agreement next week, after which the LA City Council must vote to approve it, first in the Personnel Committee and then in full council.

Housing Rights

• In 2022, years of tenant organizing at Hillside Villa led to a historically successful result, as the LA City Council passed a motion to acquire their building through eminent domain to maintain affordable rents. In the year since, the city has made very little progress on following through. Last week, the building’s owner delivered dozens of pay-or-quit notices to tenants. Thread from tenant rally here. 

• In July, reporting from ProPublica and Capital & Main uncovered several residential hotels — in which units are supposed to be kept as affordable housing — renting to tourists, violating the rules in plain sight. The Los Angeles Housing Department has responded by sending out notices to noncompliant owners. A motion from Councilmember Bob Blumenfield also aims to strengthen what has been lax enforcement of the ordinance, which LAHD claims is the result of departmental short-staffing.

• Relatedly, KCRW covers the city’s failure to enforce its tenant anti-harassment ordinance.

Environmental Justice

• The South Coast Air Quality Management District board approved new regulations to help the Southern California region hit federally mandated targets for reducing nitrogen oxide emissions. It is a first-of-its-kind rule that will require dozens of food manufacturers to soon begin replacing their gas-powered ovens with cleaner electric models.

Thorn West: Issue No. 168

State Politics

• CalMatters details early industry spending on 2024’s public ballot initiatives, including a massive expenditure from the fast-food industry on a measure that would overturn a state law establishing a fast-food workers’ council to set wages and work safety standards.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Measure J was an LA County ballot measure that mandated 10% of the county budget be spent on social services, and not police or jails. After it passed in 2020, a lawsuit successfully had it overturned in the courts. Now, in a reversal, Measure J has been found constitutional on appeal. “Measure J was our response to what we think public safety is and what it should look like,” said Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who co-chaired the electoral campaign for the ballot measure.

• The mayor’s office and the Los Angeles Police Protective League have come to a tentative agreement over the next labor contract for the LAPD. The agreement includes a 13% increase in starting pay for new officers, who will now start near $86,000. This is meant to address the fact that the number of LAPD officers has dropped by 1,000 as it has struggled with recruitment. The decrease in police officers has not corresponded with an increase in crime.

• Los Angeles took another step toward initiating a pilot program based on the CAHOOTS model of unarmed response to people experiencing mental health crises. A funding mechanism passed this week, as the city council returned from summer recess.

Incarceration

• LA Public Press has continued in-depth coverage of last week’s planned disruption of a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting demanding the closure of Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. The protest captured more attention this week after several of the children interned at the facility attempted to escape.

Labor

• Today, representatives from the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers met for an hour, the first such meeting since the writers strike began, three months ago. The meeting lasted one hour.

• Hotel workers in UNITE HERE Local 11 continue to organize walkouts as they seek fair contracts from 60 area hotels. This week, the union, along with many California politicians, called on singer Taylor Swift to delay her Los Angeles tour dates this weekend, in solidarity.

Housing Rights

• The LA Times editorial board asks if City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is deliberately obstructing the construction of a supportive housing project on a city-owned parking lot in Venice.

• A town hall meeting to discuss 30 proposed units of interim shelter in CD 5 was overrun by opponents of the units.

Thorn West: Issue No. 167

State Politics

• A statewide public ballot measure to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act has qualified for the 2024 ballot. If the measure succeeds, it would allow local municipalities to expand rent control locally; Costa-Hawkins, as state law, dramatically restricts municipalities’ ability to do so.

• Have an opinion on currently proposed statewide legislation? California DSA invites DSA members to recommend legislative endorsements, both in support and in opposition.

City Politics

• Protesters briefly shut down a meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, to demand the closure of Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, where conditions are inhumane. Los Padrinos was recently reopened only after two other juvenile facilities were ordered to close by the state due to unsuitable conditions.

Health Care

• California is experiencing an uptick in cases of COVID-19.

• Premiums for health insurance sold through the Covered California marketplace will increase by nearly 10% next year, the highest rate hike since 2018.

• In-N-Out Burger recently announced a policy to prohibit its workers from wearing face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but California regulations prevent them from implementing it here.

Labor

• At a rally this Tuesday, striking WGA workers will deliver a petition with over 25,000 signatures demanding justice from NBCUniversal, which has attempted to thwart picketers by closing down sidewalks and has repeatedly ignored instructions from the city to install pedestrian protections. Details here!

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Los Angeles city controller’s office has released a database of all LAPD arrests from the last four years, searchable by race, geographic area, and type of arrest. Among the audit’s findings were that Black and brown people were disproportionately the target of arrests.

• Streetsblog LA thoroughly documents the outrageous contradictions between a report from LAPD Chief Michel Moore on an incident last year in which an officer shot an unarmed man and bodycam footage of the same incident.

Transportation

• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass took over as chair of Metro for the upcoming year. At her first meeting as chair, a coalition of activists anchored by ACT-LA, and supported by DSA-LA, rallied in support of fare-free public transit.

Housing Rights

• Tenant protections enacted in response to COVID-19 gave many tenants until August 1 to pay off rent debt accrued between March 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021. With that deadline now here, many anticipate a wave of evictions. For anyone with concerns about tenant protections moving forward, Councilmember Nithya Raman published a breakdown of rights, protections, and requirements on Instagram, as well as in a subsequent bulletin jointly released with Mayor Bass.

• A lawsuit initiated by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles aims to immediately end the freeze on rental increases that applies to LA rental housing currently subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance. The rent freeze on RSO units will expire on February 2024 even if the lawsuit is unsuccessful. Currently, this ren freeze is the only thing legally preventing rental increases as high as 8.8%. The maximum allowable increase has recently spiked because it’s indexed to inflation.

Environmental Justice

• CalMatters breaks down the battle between Big Oil and environmentalists over a law that bans new oil and gas wells near homes and schools. Though Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law last year, it’s been on hold since oil companies qualified a measure for the November 2024 ballot that would overturn it.

• A heat wave continues across Southern California, during a July that may be the hottest month in recorded history.

Thorn West: Issue No. 166

Labor

• Jacobin covers the first week of the SAG-AFTRA strike. SAG-AFTRA has released a negotiation status report showing in detail how little the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has been willing to give. Mayor Karen Bass, after a much-derided initial statement calling on “all sides to come to the table,” released a second statement expressing support for striking workers.

• Members of striking unions including the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and UNITE HERE attended a Teamster rally and picket on Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles. Some 340,000 Teamster drivers and warehouse workers are poised to go on a nationwide strike against UPS if they cannot come to terms on a contract before August 1.

• In further “this is all one struggle” news, NBCUniversal recently pruned the trees outside their studio, removing shade from picket lines — only a week after LAPD communications revealed a plot to remove a tree that provided shade to an encampment. Universal has been fined $250 by the city for trimming trees without a permit. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have filed unfair labor practices charges.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Knock-LA has published the results of an intensive survey of every time Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies have fired a weapon at a person.

• Local media once again chose to validate the strange and incorrect belief, seemingly prevalent among police officers, that simple exposure to certain narcotics is a health risk, after several LAPD officers were taken to the hospital for “meth exposure.”

Incarceration

• Starting on October 1, Los Angeles County will all but eliminate the use of cash bail for defendants accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies. Before this announcement, the use of cash bail had already been paused, as a result of a lawsuit. The decision comes as the public has become increasingly aware of decrepit and unsafe conditions of LA County jails.

Environmental Justice

• Southern California is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. LA Public Press covers the annual shortcomings of Los Angeles’ system of cooling centers, which in the neighborhood of Skid Row has only gotten worse.

• California’s three largest electric utilities have proposed a plan to charge customers not just for how much energy they use but also based on their household income. Their proposal is designed to accommodate a new law to make energy less costly for California’s lowest-income customers.

• An experiment in Pacoima applied “cool paint” to 10 square blocks of streets. One year later, the results have shown temperatures that are 10 degrees cooler than regular asphalt.

Thorn West: Issue No. 156

City Politics

• The Los Angeles City Council Budget and Finance Committee wrapped up two weeks of hearings with a presentation from the People’s Budget LA coalition that began by calling out “eleven LAPD officers doing nothing” in the lobby of City Hall. A revised draft of the budget will now move on to the full council for deliberation.

Labor

• The Writers Guild of America has gone on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Stakes for writers are high, as the job is becoming one that doesn’t provide a sustainable living, and the two sides were still far apart in contract negotiations. Jacobin covers in further detail. Picket lines are ongoing, and DSA-LA is rallying members to support any way they can.

Anti-Gentrification

• In Compton, community members are fundraising to purchase the Compton Community Garden, which will otherwise be purchased for redevelopment. LA Public Press covers.

• DSA-LA joined with United Teachers LA, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and Reclaim Our Schools LA to rally against a proposed zoning waiver that would allow a charter school to be built on vacant land owned by LAUSD.

Transportation

• In Culver City, a newly installed council has voted to roll back parts of MOVE Culver City, the highly successful road redesign that reallocated space away from cars and toward buses, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Reporting in the LA Times covers the deposition of a whistleblower from within the LAPD SWAT Unit, alleging a deeply ingrained culture of corruption and violence controlled by an inner circle of officers known as the “SWAT Mafia.”

Environmental Justice

• In a lawsuit filed this week, environmental groups argue that the California Public Utilities Commission acted illegally when it slashed compensation payments for power generated by solar panels. 

• Grist explains state Senate Bill 233, which mandates that all electric vehicles be equipped with bidirectional hardware. Bidirectional charging allows the power in vehicle batteries to be rolled back into the grid itself to bolster grid reliability.

Issue No. 152 – April 7, 2023

City Politics

• DSA-LA’s annual convention will take place on Saturday, April 22. DSA-LA members will discuss and vote on chapter priorities for the upcoming year. RSVP here, and read about the proposed resolutions here!

• Results in the CD6 special election have started to come in, with Imelda Padilla and Marisa Alcaraz in the top two spots. Both candidates are in favor of the recent revisions to 41.18 designed to further displace unhoused people; current totals project a runoff election between the two of them. More on the candidates here.

• The only currently active petition to recall Councilmember Kevin de León will not move forward, as signatures were not submitted by the deadline. The petition was organized in part by a CD14 resident who had attempted to recall De León several times already, motivated by opposition to a Tiny Homes Village in Highland Park.

Health Care

• Governor Newsom has proposed two major changes to the state’s mental health system during his state-of-the-state press tour: a bond measure to fund an increase in the number of residential psychiatric treatment beds, and a regulation requiring counties to spend a certain amount of their mental health services budget on housing for unhoused people with severe mental health issues. CalMatters covers the pushback the second of these has received from mental health workers.

• The LA Times published a historical look at the LAPD’s anti-abortion squad, which existed before Roe v. Wade.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The City of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit “immediately denounced as legally meritless” against a journalist with Knock LA, who legally obtained a database of photographs, along with names, badge numbers, and other public information, of LAPD officers. The information is public and was provided by the LAPD in response to a public records request. The “Watch the Watchers” database, hosted by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, can be found here.

Housing Rights

• Knock LA has platformed a letter from residents of an encampment on Aetna Street in Van Nuys that may be the target for an Inside Safe operation. The letter, responding to shortcomings in previous incarnations of the program, forcefully asserts the needs of the community that will have to be met in order for them to participate.

Labor

• The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) has set a strike authorization vote, with voting to begin next week on April 11. The WGA is entering contract negotiations with the American Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP); a yes vote would authorize the guild’s negotiating committee to call for a strike, if deemed necessary, on May 1. At issue are lagging pay and job security for writers, especially as the shift to streaming platforms has allowed studios the opportunity to reset the labor market in their own favor.

• A dockworker shortage at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports drew attention to protracted labor negotiations between the union that represents West Coast dockworkers and the industry group representing maritime shippers.

Environmental Justice

• The California Air Resources Board (CARB) will soon decide on a rule that would require most new heavy-duty trucks to be zero-emission by 2036. CARB proposed to extend the zero-emission deadline for some 200 garbage trucks, but after pressure from waste companies, that exemption grew last month to around 10,000 conventional combustion trucks.

Thorn 119

State Politics

• The current state legislative session will close on August 11, leaving the fate of several bills with a dwindling window of time to be passed. Streetsblog Cal urged support for AB 2438, which aligns transportation policy with climate goals. A reader brought our attention to AB 2632, which significantly regulates the use of solitary confinement in California prisons. Both bills have passed the Assembly but need to be passed in the state Senate by the deadline.

Healthcare

• A Los Angeles County indoor mask mandate, scheduled to go into effect today, has instead been paused. The county has been in a “high” state of community transmission for two weeks, triggering a mandate according to the CDC’s revised guidelines. The County Board of Health has pointed to a recent decline in hospital infection rates to explain the reversal.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• A town hall was convened on Zoom to address widespread concerns about the LAPD shooting of Jermaine Petit, who was unarmed and was shot in the back. LAPD representatives were unable to coherently answer community questions about the incident and abruptly ended the Zoom. Petit has inexplicably been charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon. Knock LA has been covering.

• On Monday, Sheriff Alex Villanueva was again scheduled to testify before the Civilian Oversight Commission about deputy gangs. He once more canceled his appearance at the last minute, this time refusing to comply with his subpoena until a list of formal demands were met, including the right to cross-examine witnesses.

Housing Rights

• With a crowd of protesters outside Los Angeles City Hall to denounce the City Council’s proposed expansion of 41.18 anti sit/lie/sleep zones, the vote was continued until August 2.

• Council also discussed the Declaration of Local Emergency, which is currently one of the only things preventing a flood of evictions in Los Angeles, and which must be extended monthly. The council voted to extend for another month, but Counclimember Bob Blumenfeld pulled the item for discussion and spoke ominously about the need for an “exit strategy” for “mom and pop housing providers.”

Labor

• Frequently, newspapers devoting disproportionate attention to property crimes are asked why they don’t report on wage theft committed by employers. This week, CalMatters did some reporting on wage theft.

Transportation

• LAPD shutdowns and councilmembers bickering over graffiti: agony over the new Sixth Street Bridge continued to deepen and intensify this week. L.A. Taco recaps from a community perspective.

Environmental Justice

• Reuters published an investigation focused on the radioactive contamination from Santa Susana Field Lab just outside LA, but also broadly surveying the way corporations such as Boeing are granted “conservation easements,” which critics see as a tool for companies to limit their toxic waste cleanup responsibility.

• The LA Times interviewed Max Gomberg, who this month resigned in protest from the California State Water Resources Control Board over Governor Newsom’s inaction in combating the state’s worsening drought.