Author: Thorn West

Issue No. 102 – March 25, 2022

City Politics

• Another mayoral debate was interrupted by protests from a coalition of activists. The action took a similar form as the protest two weeks ago at Loyola Marymount University, with each candidate being heckled in turn, to express that none of the candidates on stage offer humane platforms on homelessness or policing. There are mayoral candidates with more progressive platforms, but they have yet to be invited to any of these debates due to the importance of meeting preconceived thresholds of support.

• A court had issued a restraining order barring former council president Herb Wesson from serving as interim councilmember in CD10 while Mark Ridley-Thomas faces federal corruption charges, as Wesson has already termed out. Last week that ruling was set aside.

• On March 30, Knock LA is co-hosting a forum for the candidates for Los Angeles City Attorney.

Housing Rights

• On the anniversary of the police displacement of the encampment at Echo Park Lake, the Echo Park Research Collective has released a report that tells the story of the encampment, the eviction, and its aftermath, relying on first-person accounts from the people who lived there. Most prominently, the report drives a final stake through the heart of Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell’s repeated claims that the displaced residents of the encampment were provided “housing” by the city. For this and much more, read the report here. Coverage here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• L.A. Taco covers: The city has used half of the funding received under the American Rescue Plan Act on LAPD payroll — $317 million. The city did not disclose this in its public-facing records on how ARPA funds were being spent, and this information was only revealed by a records request from candidate for comptroller Kenneth Mejia.

• The Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission is launching a seemingly large-scale investigation into deputy gangs in the Sheriff’s Department. Earlier this week, a letter sent to the Sheriff by Inspector General Max Huntsman indicated that there are 41 known gang members in the department.

Transportation

• Governor Gavin Newsom has finally unveiled the details of his plan to respond to high gas prices. Included is a $400 payment for car owners ($800 if you own two cars), a pause on increasing the gas tax, and $750 million in grants toward suspending fares for public transportation. Streetsblog LA critiques: “It’s a mess.”

• Investing in Place tries to figure out how Metro fell so far short of ambitious goals, stated in 2020, to expand LA-area bus service.

Environmental Justice

• The State Water Resources Control Board announced it was sending letters to farms and cities that draw water from California’s rivers, warning them to prepare for mandatory cutbacks. Similar curtailments were also put in place in 2021, but not until late August.

• This week, California proposed lowering the standard for hexavalent chromium, the “Erin Brockovich chemical,” to ten parts per billion in drinking water. While even lower would be better, the costs of cleanup in cities where the water routinely tests at three times that rate are onerous.

Issue No. 95 – February 11, 2022

State Politics

• In CalMatters, an autopsy for AB 854, the tenant protection bill authored by Assemblymember Alex Lee that was held from a vote last Monday. Said one tenants rights activist: “Why would they listen to us when we don’t give them any money […] but the Apartment Association is the reason that they’re in office?”

City Politics

• With Yasmine Pomeroy announcing that she will drop out of the race, District 3 Councilmember Bob Blumenfield does not have a progressive challenger ahead of tomorrow’s filing deadline.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Current mayoral front-runner Rep. Karen Bass has released her “public safety” plan, which calls for increased police funding and hiring, which Bass argues is necessary because Angelenos don’t “feel safe,” having seen “news coverage” of crimes. Response from Stop LAPD Spying and LA CAN here, tying this into the similar platforms of the other mayoral candidates and the failed criminal-justice strategies of the past.

• Check the Sheriff is leading a renewed charge for an amendment to the LA County charter that would allow the Board of Supervisors to impeach and remove the sheriff, as is the policy in other California counties.

• A tool developed and released by the Kenneth Mejia for comptroller campaign maps the most frequent locations of LAPD traffic and pedestrian stops, and can be filtered by race.

Education

• On Tuesday the LAUSD Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution supporting a “climate literacy” curriculum across the district’s 950 schools. DSA-LA had endorsed the resolution and sent more than 350 letters to members of the board.

Housing Rights

• LA City Council voted to advance a measure that will ban the repair of bicycles on public sidewalks. Supporters explicitly argued that the motion was necessary to give the police additional pretext to harass unhoused people whom they suspect, but cannot prove, are in possession of stolen bikes. The motion, which passed 11–3, only calls for the ordinance to be drafted by the city attorney. The ordinance itself has not yet been passed.

Transportation

• Healthy Streets LA is gathering signatures to get a public measure on ballots this November mandating that Los Angeles implement its Mobility Plan. The plan was passed in 2015 to protect pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation, but councilmembers have repeatedly caved in to opposition within their districts. (Sign/volunteer here.)

Environmental Justice

• SoCalGas has been fined $9.8 million by the California Public Utilities Commission related to last year’s revelations that it had continued to use income from ratepayers to fund lobbying efforts against clean energy policy, in flagrant violation of a 2018 court order. The Public Advocates Office had recommended a fine of $124 million.

• On Wednesday, Councilmember Nithya Raman introduced a motion to require that all newly constructed buildings in Los Angeles be zero-carbon. The motion, already co-signed by much of the council, seems likely to pass. It is written to go into effect on January 1, 2023.

• At the state level, proposed legislation would end all offshore drilling in the state of California, following last year’s disastrous Huntington Beach oil spill.

Issue No. 95 – February 4, 2022

State Politics

• Monday was the last day this year to pass AB 1400, the bill to create single-payer healthcare in California. Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the bill’s author, declined to put it up for a vote, the second time in five years that a single-payer bill with grassroots support was killed without a vote. Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the legislature and support for single-payer healthcare is in the California Democrats’ platform. Statement from the California Nurses Association here.

• AB 854, legislation that would protect tenants by mandating a five-year period before new owners of rent-controlled housing could evict their tenants, was also withheld from a vote, despite grassroots support.

• The Ballot DISCLOSE Act, which would add space for a short (but revelatory) list of who supports and opposes each statewide ballot measure to appear on the ballot itself, did make it out of the assembly and heads to the state senate.

City Politics

• Civil rights attorney Erin Darling has declared as a candidate in CD 11, to take the place of councilmember Mike Bonin, who last week decided not to seek reelection.

• The Los Angeles Ethics Commission has completed its semiannual release of campaign finance data, searchable here. Representative Karen Bass has far outraised all other candidates for mayor, while DSA-endorsed candidate Hugo Soto-Martinez is now out-raising incumbent Mitch O’Farrell in the campaign for city council district 13.

Transportation

• Metro approved a motion to cut bus service by 12% in response to a shortage of bus drivers. The labor shortage has been exacerbated by the Omicron surge, but low starting wages have made it impossible to attract workers. The cuts are planned to be temporary, but who knows.

Housing Rights

• The advocacy group KTown For All has released a report card for all LA city councilmembers’ housing and homelessness policies. Councilmembers have a lot of autonomy to shape response to homelessness in their district; this recaps how they each have been using it.

• NOlympics dispels several myths about how the Super Bowl will benefit Los Angeles.

Labor

• The inspiring wave of unionization efforts in Starbucks stores across the country has arrived in Los Angeles.

Environmental Justice

• L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti will nominate councilmember Nithya Raman to the South Coast Air Quality Management District governing board. One of her top priorities: reducing emissions at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports.

Issue No. 94 – January 28, 2022

State Politics

• Article 34 of the California Constitution prevents any public housing from being built in the state without first being approved by a citywide referendum. Senate Constitutional Amendment 2 would strike that, removing a major obstacle to the creation of public housing. This week, SCA 2 passed through the Senate. It will also need to be approved by statewide referendum.

• On Monday the state Assembly will vote on AB 1400, the proposed plan to create a universal healthcare within California. Capital & Main covers some of the political terrain. Toolkit for supporters here.

City Politics

• Councilmember Mike Bonin has announced that he is dropping out of his reelection campaign, citing mental health concerns. Bonin, currently serving his second term, had become a reliably humane voice on the council; he and Councilmember Nithya Raman were consistently the only two votes against 41.18 anti-unhoused enforcement zones. There is still a small window for someone with similar commitments (or better) to take his place in the CD11 race. Upsetting news.

Transportation

• Los Angeles’ elected leaders once embraced Vision Zero, a plan to redesign city streets to eliminate traffic fatalities. These promises have not been followed through on, and deaths have only been going up. Biking in LA parses the failure.

Housing Rights

• On-the-ground reporting from Knock LA covers the displacement of unhoused encampments that’s been happening around SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, in the weeks leading up to the city’s hosting of the Super Bowl.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Several whistleblowers spoke to LAist about the absolute disregard for COVID safety protocols from the sheriff’s deputies who oversee Twin Towers correctional facility. “It’s chaos in there.”

• Cerise Castle live-tweeted the candidate forum for Los Angeles County sheriff.

Climate Justice

• While some have argued that the proposal to remove incentives for installing home solar panels are a retrograde cash grab for utilities, an editorial in Grist counters that the current subsidy rewards high-income households, and that the proposed changes would better socialize the benefits.

• On Wednesday, Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to ban new oil and gas drilling within city limits and phase out existing oil and gas production over the next 20 years. A huge victory!

Issue No. 93 – January 21, 2022

State Politics

• Hey now, AB 1400, the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act, has passed out of the Appropriations Committee and now heads for a floor vote in the state Assembly! Here’s the toolkit to easily write your assemblymember asking for their support, as shared by the DSA-LA Healthcare Justice Committee.

City Politics

• DSA members voted heavily to endorse Fatima Iqbal-Zubair in her campaign in Assembly District 65, as well as Eunisses Hernandez, who is running to replace Gil Cedillo in CD1. Statement here.
• A petition to recall Councilmember Mike Bonin seemed like it might have gathered the required number of signatures to force a vote, but an entire third of the signatures were found to be invalid, and it failed to meet the threshold.

Police Violence And Community Resistance

• Whistleblower reporting from L.A. Taco revealed that the increase of package thefts off of Union Pacific trains was preceded by the railroad slashing its security budget. The public will pick up that check from here on out, as Governor Newsom has announced a new “multi-agency” task force to prevent rail theft.

Housing Rights

• Video: Pete White and General Dogon of LA CAN dismantle Councilmember Kevin de León’s assertion that the reason he has failed to care for the unhoused in his district is that activists are bribing unhoused people to decline services.

Education

• The LAUSD Board of Education meets Tuesday, to approve over $620 million in service and procurement contracts and to discuss tentative agreements with the Teamsters and California School Employees Association, among other unions. Up for announcement: Board Members propose a resolution on “Climate Literacy,” to commit LAUSD “to transforming our teaching of climate change to meet the scale and urgency of the crisis.”

Transportation

• Now that Metro has resumed fare collection, Curbed considers what we’ve learned from Los Angeles’ unintentional two-year experiment with free bus service. (It’s good and we should keep having it).
• Streetsblog critiques Metro’s participatory budget survey, while still recommending that everyone with a stake in public transportation participate.

Climate Justice

• Residents of the city of Carson are suing several local warehouses and a refinery over air pollution after the South Coast Air Quality Management District failed to hold anyone accountable for pollution. Air quality gets so bad there that, in the words of one plaintiff, “when you’re driving through your city, you have no option but to slam on the brakes, bust open the door, and start throwing up on the road.”
• CalGEM is deploying drones to detect methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. However, with only one drone patrolling all of Southern California, some sites might be monitored only once every two to three years.

History of the Ruling Class

• Former Wall Street Journal editor Ronald Schafer tells a little bit of Los Angeles history this week in a story about the oil baron Edward Doheny and the 1923 Teapot Dome corruption scandal. That library on the USC campus that bears Doheny’s name? The donation came after USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid testified as a character witness at Doheny’s trial for bribing the Department of Interior for oil leases.

State Politics

• Governor Gavin Newsom has released his first budget proposal for the next fiscal year (here), with a record-breaking $45 billion surplus. CalMatters has an early breakdown of what’s inside.

• AB 1400, the statewide single-payer healthcare bill, passed out of the Assembly Health Committee, 11-3. It will be voted on in the Appropriations Committee, on January 21. The Newsom budget contains funding to make MedCal insurance available to all undocumented residents, closing a loophole that excluded those aged 26-50. Newsom campaigned on a single-payer system and the two proposals don’t compete, but he has struck a cautious note while bragging about creating “universal access” to health care.

Transportation

• Despite the surge in COVID infections stemming from the omicron variant, LA Metro resumed fare collection on its buses on January 10, as scheduled. Fares were suspended to allow boarding from the rear, but transit activists argue that bus rides should be made permanently free. A Metro survey is soliciting feedback on its budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

• StreetsBlog breaks down the transportation elements of Newsom’s budget.

Labor

• A study published in the Los Angeles Times revealed that two-thirds of Kroger employees struggle to afford basic needs. Employees of Kroger-owned supermarket chains are striking for higher wages in Colorado

Housing Rights

• Despite the surge in COVID infections, which include numerous outbreaks in the city’s shelter system, the city council approved 70 more sites for 41.18 enforcement on Wednesday, with only councilmembers Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin voting no. Organized public comment in opposition provoked councilmember Kevin De Leon to baselessly accuse activists of literally bribing unhoused people to resist services.
• The surge in COVID cases was justification enough for delaying the greater Los Angeles homeless count by one month.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Despite calling for the resignation of current sheriff Alex Villanueva in 2021, the Los Angeles Democratic Party will not endorse any of his opponents in the 2022 election until after the primary. As Knock LA has reported, Villanueva’s two most serious opponents in this race have problems of their own. Neither was able to meet the endorsement threshold. Candidates for sheriff are required to have law enforcement experience, per a 1989 state law that was written to keep criminal justice reformers out of office. SB 271, a 2021 proposed law that would once again allow civilians to run for sheriff, appears now to have been entirely rewritten.

Environmental Justice

• Newsom’s budget earmarks $22.5 billion for fighting climate change and protecting at-risk communities from changing weather patterns.

• Meanwhile, Newsom has effectively backed out of the debate on the state’s controversial proposal to slash financial incentives and add fees for new home rooftop solar systems.

City Politics

• The authors of AB 1400, which would create a historic universal healthcare system in California (called “CalCare”), have now proposed a tax measure to fund the program. The assembly will discuss AB 1400 on January 11. With the political fight over CalCare about to re-intensify, a coalition of activists have begun organizing to get this bill passed. Toolkits here.
  
• DSA-LA is holding a candidate forum Saturday, and will consider whether or not to endorse three additional candidates in 2022: Bryant Odega and Eunisses Hernandez, who are running for Los Angeles City Council seats, and Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, who is running for state Assembly. The forum will include a Q&A open to all and a closed session for DSA members in good standing. RSVP here.

Labor

• Workers at the Jon Donaire Dessert plant in Santa Fe Springs, CA, remain on strike after voting to reject the company’s “final offer” in December. Senator Bernie Sanders has now joined local politicians in supporting the strike. The DSA-LA Labor Committee has been organizing members to join the picket line.

• Labor Notes looks ahead to the potential strikes of the new year

Housing Rights

• Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is conducting its annual count of the Los Angeles County unhoused population, after failing to do so last year due to the pandemic.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Officer William Jones was named as the LAPD officer who opened fire inside a clothing store on December 23, killing an unarmed suspect and a 14-year-old customer. Even in a month in which the LAPD killed nine people, this attracted national attention, and also triggered the usual spasm of copaganda media spin, in this case suggesting that Jones was a well-meaning officer who had been trying to improve the LAPD from within. Knock LA’s coverage dispels this myth.

Environmental Justice

• The holiday break saw record rain- and snowfall. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada measured at 200% of its December 30 average, according to the Department of Water Resources. However, CalMatters reports that the drought isn’t over, as the state has adopted new regulations aimed at stopping residents from wasting water.

• A failure of the sewer system in Carson caused a leak of millions of gallons of sewage, shutting beaches in Long Beach over the weekend.

• Environmental justice groups argue that the state’s cap-and-trade program has failed on its promised emission reductions.

City Politics

• Los Angeles County has finalized its new district map, which was drafted for the first time by an independent commission. The new map achieves the goal of creating a second majority-Latine district. However, the new districts appear to blunt the advantages of progressives (and Republican supervisor Katherine Barger) in favor of moderates. Many argue for the county to be split into more districts. Five supervisors currently see to the needs of ten million residents.

• The Los Angeles City Ethics Commission met and will form an ad hoc committee to discuss amendments to the city charter, which could give the commission greater independence from the mayor and city council (@56:40). The commission’s last reform push was thwarted by the council, whom the commission regulates.

• Politically behested donations are back in the news thanks to a records request for emails related to the Mayor’s Fund. Mayor Garcetti faced only brief questions about his record in Los Angeles as his confirmation hearings to become ambassador to India began last week.

• The budget requests from each city department have been posted for the public this year.

Labor

• The Hollywood Reporter recaps an empowering year for workers in the entertainment industry.

Housing Rights

• Reporting in the New Republic draws national attention to the health crisis faced by Los Angeles’ unhoused population every time it rains.

• Caltrans is finally going to put a number of vacant homes up for auction. The city of Los Angeles plans to purchase several lots to develop more affordable housing.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Los Angeles Times debunks the purportedly drastic rise in shoplifting.

• More research from the Brennan Center has been published, this time revealing data on LAPD surveillance of activists’ social media accounts.

• Cerise Castle interviews Cecil Rhambo, candidate for Los Angeles County Sheriff, in Knock LA. Rhambo is branding himself as a reformer alternative to incumbent Alex Villanueva, but has his own disappointing record on disciplining deputy misconduct.

Environmental Justice

• Cargo ship gridlock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have resulted in unhealthy air for the communities in and around the region. Curbed talks to residents of communities where pollution from the ports is estimated to cause 1,300 premature deaths each year.

• On Monday, the California Public Utilities Commission proposed an overhaul of the state’s net-metering program for rooftop solar. Canary Media explains how the new plan largely embraces the arguments made by the state’s three big investor-owned utilities by disincentivizing self-installed solar panels.

• Much-needed rain fell on Tuesday, providing a little relief to drought-ridden California. In addition to the rain, several inches of snow fell in the Sierras, increasing the snowpack from 19% of the average to 83%.

Local Media

• Thorn West will return in 2022 with its own web platform. Thank you to all readers and contributors for a great year. Knock LA is fundraising this week; we’ve relied on their reporting all year. LA Podcast, LA Taco, and LAist also provide indispensable reader-supported independent journalism.

City Politics

• DSA-LA’s 2022 Local Officer Election nomination period has been extended to Friday, December 10 (today) at 11:59pm! You can nominate yourself here.

• The confirmation process for Mayor Garcetti’s nomination to be ambassador to India has finally begun, with the first scheduled hearing on Wednesday. This comes on the heels of major reporting suggesting that Garcetti knew of and tolerated the serial harassment committed by one of his top aides.

• The city’s redistricting map is final. Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Paul Krekorian have proposed a motion to make the city’s next redistricting process independent; see you in ten years. Advocacy groups are still fighting for equity in the county’s redistricting process, which is still ongoing. The current lines include only one majority-Latine supervisory district out of five, even though the Latine community now makes up nearly half the county’s population.

• The former manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has pleaded guilty to bribery, after accepting over $2 million to award a no-bid contract. (More than most councilmembers seem to get.) The city’s Ethics Commission has recently expanded their oversight to include LADWP employees. For anyone who misses Redistricting Commission hearings, the next quarterly meeting of the Ethics Commission is December 15.

Labor

• Members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ Local 37 have been on strike at the Jon Donaire Desserts plant in Santa Fe Springs, CA, since November 3. The DSA is organizing members to join the picket line tomorrow morning, as workers seek higher wages and better treatment. Fact sheet here. Hear more from workers on the BCTGM podcast here. RSVP here!

Transportation

• LA Metro has started its GoPass pilot program, offering free rides to all students in all participating school and community college districts. The pilot program begins just as Metro resumes collecting fares January 10; bus rides had been free throughout the pandemic.

Environmental Justice

• Dystopia, as several dangerously unhealthy weeks of air quality in Los Angeles County has triggered an apparently unmonitored automated Twitter account from the Southern Coast AQMD to declare every day an “Action Day” without ever explaining what that entails. The glitching intensified this week: the Los Angeles Times was forced to retract an entire story after receiving a one-year-old press release about wildfire smoke.

• A coalition of environmental justice groups have filed a lawsuit against the EPA over their failure to intervene in the air quality problems in the Central Valley, Capital & Main reports.

• Californians have accelerated their water conservation efforts, but remain far short of Governor Newsom’s goal of a 15% reduction in usage.

• This January, California will implement mandatory food waste recycling, becoming the second state in the US to do so. This is intended to help cut methane emissions, as food scraps and other organic materials emit the greenhouse gas as they break down.

City Politics

• A motion proposed by Councilmember Nithya Raman, calling on the state to revise its food codes to better accommodate the needs of street vendors, passed unanimously.

• For the second week in a row, Councilmember Joe Buscaino was scolded on the floor of city council. This time, Buscaino’s motion to impose 41.18 enforcement zones against sleeping, lying, or sitting at 161 sites in his district was chided as overreach.

Housing Rights

• The Los Angeles Daily News has published its annual report card grading California cities on how close they are to meeting their state-mandated housing requirements. Last week, Los Angeles (C-minus/D) updated its housing plan to accelerate the growth of the city’s capacity for affordable housing.

• Some California municipalities are taking steps to blunt the impact of SB 9, the state law that attempts to address the affordable housing shortage by drastically curbing single-family zoning. SB 9 goes into effect January 1.

NOlympics

• Analysis from NOlympics LA breaks down the “Games Agreement,” to show how the blueprint agreement between Los Angeles and the Olympics committee exposes the city to potentially limitless cost overruns. Today the city council voted to approve the agreement, with Councilmembers Raman and Mike Bonin the only votes in opposition. Knock LA live-tweeted the discussion.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Metro board voted to extend its contract with law enforcement agencies by six months and to approve $75 million in related cost overruns. The six-month window’s stated purpose is to give Metro’s new Public Safety Advisory Committee time to make recommendations.

Environmental Justice

• Though the fracking ban proposed by Governor Newsom failed in the legislature, the state’s Geologic Energy Management Division has rejected an unprecedented 109 fracking permits in 2021, approving only 12.

• A “net-zero” carbon housing development in Tejon Ranch north of Los Angeles has been approved to go forward. The development’s climate commitments were won through extensive litigation from environmental activist groups.

• A proposal to bring a coastal oil pipeline back online following a disastrous 2015 oil spill is facing opposition.

• Hundreds of toxic sites in California will be threatened as sea levels rise due to climate change, according to environmental health professors at UC Berkeley and UCLA.