What’s happening today?
The Leadership Table for Regional Homeless Alignment, an advisory board that looks at aligning efforts to tackle homelessness regionally, is meeting at 1 p.m. They’re set to discuss a spending plan for Measure A revenue that’s generated from local sales tax to fund homeless services. This committee is an advisory version of another board, called the Executive Committee for Regional Homelessness Alignment, and it has a range people on it, including the head of the Central City Association, the Los Angeles police chief, as well as people from the homeless service provider sector, the general manager of LA city’s housing department and the head of LA county’s homeless services department.
LA city’s Recreation and Parks Commission is meeting in Venice, at Penmar Recreation Center, at 9:30 a.m. today. Their agenda includes a proposal to purchase or transfer properties in South Los Angeles to build more park facilities and a bike lane project at Westwood Park, where the Bad News Bear Baseball Field is located.
And LA city’s Cultural Heritage Commission is meeting this morning to consider historic landmark applications for an apartment building that appeared in the movie Sunset Boulevard and a flashy, mid-century modern Cadillac showroom in the San Fernando Valley.
What just happened?
Michael Woo, who helped set up LA city Ethics Commission, nominated to new LA County ethics panel
After deliberating for about six hours, the Measure G task force settled on nominating Michael Woo, a former LA City Council member who played an instrumental role in setting up LA city’s Ethics Commission, to serve on LA County’s new Ethics Commission. That ethics panel will eventually have seven members.
Woo, who says he is “officially retired,” recounted to the task force on Wednesday that when he told a former colleague on the LA City Council that he was headed down to the Hall of Administration to interview for a seat on the new LA County Ethics Commission, “she responded instantly with an email saying, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Meaning, why would you want to do that?”
As he reflected on this reaction, Woo told the task force members that the job they were interviewing people for that day might require someone who can go into it with their eyes wide open. And it would require a certain degree of toughness.
“Apart from the noble sentiments that you have heard, and, in some cases, expressed during today’s meeting, I harbor no illusions that the work ahead will be at that level of nobility,” Woo said. “There’s a lot of detail work, minutiae. Being involved in implementing ethics enforcement is a thankless task. It invites scrutiny, and dare I say, it invites allegations of hypocrisy, and other kinds of personal criticism that may be leveled at the individuals who you choose to serve on this commission.”
Woo then said he was willing to “risk this exposure, because, as I said in the beginning of my statement, because we’re here at the beginning of the process, at a time when important decisions are gonna be made, formative decisions, ensuring that the Ethics Commission will get off on the right foot.”
As it happens, Woo chaired a committee on the LA City Council that wrangled together a 1990 ballot measure, called Proposition H, which was approved by voters and that set up LA city’s Ethics Commission.
If Woo’s nomination is approved by the Board of Supervisors, he is expected to join two others who were approved earlier this week – Amanda Susskind and Wilma A. Franco. And these three would then nominate the four remaining members of the new commission.
The task force interviewed Woo and five other candidates on Wednesday. The panel deliberated for about six hours, and came out at around 10:30 p.m. to announce their 9-2 vote to nominate Woo. Governance Reform Task Force meeting recordings are usually posted up here. They go up fairly quickly, and should be there soon, if it isn’t there already.
A few more things…
Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman, who are dueling for the Los Angeles mayor’s seat, are sharing their plans for addressing homelessness at a forum spread out between Wednesday and Thursday that’s hosted by KTLA and Hope the Mission.
LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn took exception to the House of Representatives voting Tuesday night to block California’s rules to control pollution at the seaports. The regulation requires ships to cut their engines when docked, to avoid the harmful, polluting emissions that come from idling ships. You can track the legislation here. Hahn says she has been fighting for such regulations since her time on the LA City Council. Clean air at the ports consumed much of Hahn’s terms on the city Council. The Clean Air Action Plan for the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports was adopted in 2006 early on in her time on the council, followed by an update in 2006 that featured “shore power” goals, which aimed to give ships a way to stay powered up by plugging into an electrical outlet when docked. Hahn sent around a statement on Wednesday saying that “Congressional Republicans are trying to roll back decades of efforts we have made here in Los Angeles to protect our port communities from the pollution that ships spew when they are docked. These members of Congress do not breathe the air we do in San Pedro, Wilmington, and Long Beach. Their children do not have asthma from this dirty air. Their family members do not have cancer because of diesel fumes from container ships. I urge our US Senators to block this harmful bill.”
The LA City Council on Wednesday approved Genesis LA to manage a $102 million Measure ULA grant program that’s aimed at preserving existing affordable housing by helping people pay for upgrades. Genesis LA was involved in a similar program at the LA County level that focused on community land trusts, which are ownership cooperatives that preserves land for the public good and tries to take it out of the speculative market. They also approved Ysabel Jurado’s package of motions on the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, including a motion that calls for withholding rebuild permit applications by the company.
The NBC4 news chopper that went down during coverage of a fatal traffic crash in Chatsworth was owned by a company with a business address at Whiteman Airport, according to this LA Times story. They also quote experts who say that the position of the helicopter could have made it difficult for the pilot to execute a safety maneuver in response to its rotors stopping, which they speculate may have been what happened based on the video footage showing the last moments of the helicopter. The story also says a third victim of the crash was on the ground, along with the pilot and reporter in the helicopter. The driver of the SUV that crashed into the Metro 166 Line bus was arrested. Two passengers of the bus were killed. A community vigil is being held in Chatsworth tonight at St. John Eudes Parish.
