Month: April 2023

Thorn West: Issue No. 155

State Politics

• Governor Newsom quickly signaled his opposition to a state Senate plan that would accommodate a projected budget deficit with a tax on corporate profits. In Newsom’s proposed budget, the projected deficit is met with spending cuts, notably to climate preparedness.

City Politics

• The City Council Budget and Finance Committee held meetings all week to discuss the mayor’s proposed budget, department by department. Committee chair Bob Blumenfield broke with precedent and did not allow public comment after the first day of hearings.

• The People’s Budget LA coalition presented the results of their annual participatory budgeting survey to the mayor. Mayor Bass, the first mayor to meet with the coalition, responded by acknowledging “the sentiment in the room,” – a prevailing community desire to spend less money on policing – but claiming an obligation to balance it against opposing concerns in places like “Sherman Oaks.”

Housing Rights

• In Shelterforce, excellent first-person coverage of the work that went into the passage of Measure H, the Pasadena rent control measure that passed in 2022.

• LA Public Press checks in with the housing reclaimers occupying vacant homes in El Sereno, whom the city is stepping up pressure to evict. DSA-LA’s Housing and Homelessness Committee has a toolkit to show support.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• [Content warning: police killing] A civil suit brought against Los Angeles County and two sheriff’s deputies by the family of Anthony Vargas, who was killed by LASD in 2018, ended in a mistrial on Monday. Vargas was shot 13 times in the back. Plaintiffs challenged the police narrative of the killing.

Labor

• The WGA released strike rules to their membership ahead of a potential strike, which could start on Tuesday. The president of IATSE indicated that IATSE members are legally permitted to refuse to work struck workplaces.

• Jacobin reports on the complicated victory of unionized Amazon workers in Palmdale, who have received recognition and negotiated a tentative agreement. However, the agreement is not with Amazon itself, but with one of its many “delivery service partners” that act as middlemen with workers.

• Join DSA, along with many left-wing organized labor and immigrants’ rights organizations, at the march in downtown Los Angeles in celebration of International Workers’ Day on Monday, May 1

Environmental Justice

• On Earth Day, harsh critique for Mayor Bass’ just-announced climate change preparedness plan, which contains little more than tweaks at the margins.

• It’s official: The California Air Resources Board today unanimously approved a plan to phase out diesel trucks, statewide, by 2035.

• This year’s record heavy snows are beginning to melt, leading to serious flooding concerns. CalMatters reports on the risks statewide, while LAist covers the same issue for the city.

Issue No. 154 – April 20, 2023

City Politics

• Following her State of the City speech, in which Mayor Bass simultaneously stressed her goal to “rebuild” LAPD by adding 500 more officers while also endorsing the expansion of unarmed alternatives to policing, her office released its draft budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The biggest headline was a massive expansion of homelessness and housing spending, about 20% of which is allocated to Inside Safe. The budget proposes a $19 million increased expenditure on LAPD salaries, even though the city actually spent nearly $50 million less on police than allocated in the previous budget due to failure to hire officers. The budget now heads to LA City Council for potential revisions.

• Through the LA Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department, the city is piloting a participatory budgeting program in three Los Angeles neighborhoods that allows community voting to influence how some city money is spent. Voting will take place through April 30. Learn more here; you may be eligible to participate. People’s Budget LA is conducting their annual budget survey as well.

• The City Council Government Reform Committee is holding a series of public meetings about, among other things, expanding LA City Council. The meeting was not livestreamed and only accepted public comment in person. Live-tweeted here. Video here.

Housing Rights

• Members of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association rallied outside the home of Mayor Bass all weekend, to demand that she follow through on the city’s plan to use eminent domain to acquire the Hillside Villa apartments, to protect them as affordable units from a landlord who plans to skyrocket the rent.

• KCRW reports on Los Angeles’ community land trusts, a housing model in which apartment complexes are acquired and control of them is legally transferred to their tenants.

Incarceration

• ACA-4, a proposed amendment to the California State Constitution to restore voting rights to incarcerated people is making its way through the state legislature. The motion, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, passed out of the Election Committee this week. If passed out of the legislature, it will be on the ballot in 2024.

• ACLU SoCal filed a motion this week to hold the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in contempt of a court order, after years of failing to address barbaric conditions in LA County jails. A hearing will begin in 60 days.

Transportation

Streetsblog LA breaks down “an astonishingly vacuous report” from the Los Angeles Planning Department that vastly oversells the city’s progress on implementing its mobility plan for safer streets.

Labor

• Writers represented by the WGA voted in favor of a strike authorization if their demands are not met in contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers. Nearly 80% of members voted, and 97.9% voted to authorize.

• United Teachers Los Angeles reached a tentative agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School Board. It includes a 21% salary increase over three years and class size reduction, as well as the vast majority of UTLA’s Beyond Recovery program. Included in that program are DSA-LA’s Green New Deal for Public Schools demands, which, if ratified, will be implemented by the LAUSD Climate Committee, chaired by DSA-LA member Dr. Rocío Rivas. The tentative agreement will be put to a ratification vote by UTLA membership in the coming weeks.

Environmental Justice

• For the first time in 17 years, California’s Department of Water Resources will deliver 100% of the water requested by agencies that are part of the State Water Project.

Thorn West: Issue No. 153

State Politics

• After a nearly two-month absence from the US Senate due to health concerns, California senator Dianne Feinstein has asked to be replaced on the Senate Judiciary Committee, while resisting increasingly prominent calls to resign. The committee has been unable to move forward with judicial appointments in her absence, as she is the tie-breaking vote.

City Politics

• The special election in CD6 will officially head to a runoff between Imelda Padilla and Marissa Alcaraz, two of the most conservative candidates in the field, both of whom heavily benefited from independent expenditures from outside groups.

• Heather Hutt was reappointed as representative of CD10 on the Los Angeles City Council, over calls to hold a special election. The appointment passed 11–1, with only Councilmember Monica Rodriguez in opposition. Further recap (and argument against the appointment) here. Both CD10 and CD6 will hold elections again in 2024.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The council passed a revision to the municipal code that makes it a crime to possess a detached catalytic converter without being able to provide proof of ownership. Several councilmembers spoke in opposition, arguing that the law would expand police powers without curtailing theft. The motion passed 8–4, with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Nithya Raman, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and Hutt in opposition. Councilmember Soto-Martinez wasn’t present for the floor vote but summed up his opposition here.

• The Intercept continues coverage of the nuisance lawsuit filed against a journalist by City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto, verifying that the LAPPL’s claims that photos of  “undercover officers” were included in a public records request was actually an attempt to expand the term to include any officer who might one day conduct work out of uniform. “They’re openly calling for a secret police force.”

Anti-Gentrification

• Knock LA speaks with business owners in Inglewood whom the city plans to displace – in order to make way for a people mover connecting SoFi Stadium to the K LIne – about the uncertainty and potential disaster they face.

Labor

• A new contract between LAUSD and education workers represented by SEIU 99 was approved this week with 99% membership approval. The contract agreement was reached after a strike in March that closed schools for three days.

• A motion introduced by councilmembers Curren Price and Soto-Martinez would immediately raise the hourly minimum wage for many tourism industry workers to $25, and to $30 by 2028.

Environmental Justice

• The Biden administration will intervene in the apportionment of Colorado River water allocations among Southwest states, and this week introduced three differing plans for apportioning water rights, featuring high-leverage distinctions for Southern California. A final decision is expected in August.

• The blog Heated measures the climate costs of the LAPD and LASD helicopter fleets.

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.