The Sunday L.A. Times (February 1, 2009) has a few items of concern revolving around Mayor Villaraigosa's potential for achieving a long sought-after a death-grip on the city political front. “A Villaraigosa-Weiss-Greuel troika would consolidate power at L.A. City Hall,” by David Zahniser And Maeve Reston, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-villaraigosa-allies1-2009feb01,0,887745.story
ANTONIO'S “Yes-Man” is Jack Weiss, the current Council Member representing CD-5 over to the north and west side of the city, and Wendy Gruel, CM for CD-2, in the San Fernando Valley and east, both are running for office, and both are bad news for the city if they get elected.
Jack Weiss is running for City Attorney in the city-wide race, with a couple of challengers that would do better for the city, Noel Weiss (same LAST name but on the Good Guy side of things), and Carmen Trutanich http://www.tru09.com/cityattorney.php?Pname=cityattorney, WOULD would each be a good choice over JACK WEISS for that office. JACK'S been in city council for almost 8 years and NOT been in court or handled cases for that long. CARMEN TRUTANIC and NOEL WEISS are both practicing attorneys. It might not be so bad, but JACK has been doing a lousy job in the City Council, especially as Chair of the Public Safety Committee. Only lately has JACK been doing things to try to get "good publicity" with the election a month away.
JACK does things to get publicity? Yes, and that might be taking a few tips from the master of the photo op, TONY VILLARAIGOSA, the mayor who's into including costume changes for his press conferences, and caring not a bit if somebody is dead, since it's a good time to get his face on TV. He did that in Wilmington a few days ago with the death of 7 in a family, he did that in Chatsworth after the trains collided. So you see, getting votes is a little like advertising- show your face and say the same things over and over, and it doesn't matter if none of it it true because you can afford ads that say it's ALL true. Be on the lookout for those.
JACK wants to be City Attorney. Rocky Delgadillo, the current city attorney with an amazingly bizarre history of negatives in his professional, political and personal life is leaving the office, and it would be hard to do more things to rival his terms. But JACK WEISS might be the one to do it, too, but would do it more along the lines of letting the office exercise choices made by Mayor Villaraigosa, and not being independently operated from the other branches.
CM WENDY GRUEL wants to stay around in offices and sees CITY CONTROLLER as an open one she thinks she could manage. Right now, LAURA CHICK is the City Controller, leaving due to term limits forcing her out. CHICK performed lots of audits and opened the doors to numerous instances of waste and fraud going on in the city. She was the one responsible for telling us about all the city cars assigned to so many people, going home with them without a real reason presented. They also had city gas credit cards to use that were abused to some large numbers. There were cases where cars were filling up 10 times in one day, according to the L.A. Times report on the problem.
Well, to get back to GRUEL, she is somebody who has backed Antonio continuously through all the examples of bad management and absentee management, and I have not heard her utter a negative word or level serious criticism in Villaraigosa’s direction- and I can say there were plenty of opportunities to at least clear your throat, if not actually speak up when concerns arose so regularly with the Mayor.
WENDY GRUEL, as the city controller, would be the person who is responsible for checking the operation of the city and how it handles money, and she would be a disaster in that role, in my opinion. WENDY has absolutely no ability to criticize the Mayor, if he wins re-election. All of this waste that LAURA CHICK brought up was during the time of ANTONIO running the show. I will say that maybe he didn’t start every problem, but he didn’t find out and he didn’t check on how things were being run- how could he? He was never really here in the city, and HE'S the chief elected official.
TONY has been out of the city, regularly missing being around for working on campaigns of Hillary Clinton and then jumped ship when it went down, over to Barack Obama, for the last couple of years. When he wasn’t doing that, he was off to other cities to be at fundraiser events to raise money for his own re-election campaign, well over $3 million now, and on the city’s payroll, at that.
HOW COULD WE EXPECT WENDY GRUEL to give TONY anything but friendly treatment as the city “watchdog”, given her allegiance to his administration. She has said she could be exercise her “independent judgment” but so did ROCKY DELGADILLO when he ran for City Attorney and won, after it was revealed that he got almost $500,000.00 of free billboard advertising from some billboard companies. And there were certain billboard companies that had cases the City of L.A. had made against them, all part of the City Attorney’s office responsibility to prosecute. ROCKY said the advertising would not affect his judgment. But low and behold, there was a settlement that was made by the City Attorney with very kind terms to some companies.
After the City Attorney made the settlement, the City tried to come down on some companies when they wanted to put up more billboards. The City applied the terms of the settlement to limit those companies, so these folks went to court to challenge the deal made. The judge said that you couldn’t use that settlement for regulating billboards the way the City did since some companies were less restricted and others got no breaks, and that’s not allowed. So ROCKY’s job had raised some eyebrows and cost the city lots of money, time and still billboards are going up without much ability by the city to stop that.
WENDY can’t say that she will be INDEPENDENT and have anyone really believe it. Being a politician in the first place is already cause for people to reach for their wallets to pay up in order to keep their guy or woman in office and keep their arrangements preserved. For others, it causes THEM to reach for their wallets to be sure they stay safe from being taken out and emptied by deft means.
L.A. TIMES, January 29, 2009 story on L.A. City Attorney race, “What would they do as L.A. city attorney” by Maeve Reston, gives some information on the differences. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/what-they-would.html Not all the candidates were there, but you can see all plan to run the office differently than Rocky.
[Here is an L.A. TIMES story filed earlier in the day on January 29, 2009, by the same reporter, Maeve Reston, before the meeting happened, “In L.A. city attorney’s race, it seems that only money talks.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/in-la-city-atty.html ]
A “CITY DISASTER”? THAT WOULD BE TONY, WENDY AND JACK winning the election on March 3rd.
This would mean that you really have all the offices occupied by the same political machine and that machine will work for itself and its friends (i.e., “special interest” groups and individuals) without the expected checks and balances that are supposed to exist to keep the public from having the wool pulled over its eyes (again and again).
In the City election, your vote really is more significant since there are less voters eligible and many of them are neither interested in voting there, nor care much more than what they hear about in political ads. TONY RELIES ON THAT- That's what the $3 million is all about. WENDY AND JACK follow their boss in the same style of politics
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