The Mayor's theme for his fourth "State of the City" address today will be "Green Collar Jobs" according to the L.A. City News Service story posted on NBC's web news, http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Mayor-Wants-LA-to-Green-Collar.html "Mayor: 'Green Collar' Jobs Tied to LA's Future, " Tuesday, April 14, 2009.
Villaraigosa is in a situation of a monumental budget deficit as far as that record goes for Los Angeles. The time for some layoffs of City workers appears to be nearing. Both he and the council have cut so many of the city services, sold city "surplus" real property and worked hard to maximize fees and taxes imposed on the city folks to really put it to the residents and it just doesn't end. The idea is that the government was supposed to exist to serve the people in providing an organized and orderly environment in which they can live, not for the politicians to screw it up and then have all the bills mount up higher and higher every year.
The address theme first used by Villaraigosa was "Dream with me" and that was really about what he wanted to do in the future, and not much about what was done at the moment. In a sense, we are still in that zone. The idea for now in tryiny to take out some of the citizens' pain from all this chaos is to hear about employment opportunities that he will bring up. "Jobs." That's always good to work into speeches and plans. When it comes to government, though, it's usually "government-created" jobs that would not exist in other circumstances and the employment is funded by tax dollars, a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" situation if you happen to follow the money trail.
A lot of the "green" items are just expensive matters and there's money to be made that creates a danger of inside dealings with favors traded for personal benefit in financial and political terms.
What would be good is for private sector jobs to open up. That's another angle of what's happening to the plan to get rail cars for the MTA. An Italian firm with a history of failing to meet contract deadlines and specifications is favored by Mayor Tony for getting the big dollars coming from the billions that Prop. S will be spreading as it's collected in sales taxes. The L.A. Weekly has a good article last week on that job picture, "Los Angeles Infrastructure or Bust- Metro gives second chance to a snafu-riddled Italian railcar builder," by Beth Barrett, April 8, 2009, http://www.laweekly.com/2009-04-09/news/metro-gives-second-chance-to-a-snafu-riddled-italian-railcar-builder/
In that situation to make the firm's proposal sweeter to tilt the balance in their favor, they said that they will open a manufacturing company here in L.A. and employ hundreds. Good approach to use. But nothing is verified and you can say anything at this stage. The Mayor is trying to get them to be chosen, and the bad track record for an existing contract doesn't seem to be making much difference. And why should the Mayor care what the REAL cost to the city will be? He's trying out for becoming the candidate for Governor and needs all the points he can get to use as his "accomplishments."
Good politicians use even their mistakes and failures as positivies, once they turn around some concepts or re-cast the applicable facts. I said "good politicans" and that doesn't mean that a "good poltician" is the same as a "good person" or anything like that. It's all unrelated, and totally coincidental if found so. They just happen to get a lot of mileage out of bad things. And Villaraigosa is that, very good since he is still in office, being re-elected by a slim margin of the small voter turnout in March. That happened when Villaraigosa should have been replaced by just about anyone willing to get down to doing real city business. What we have are decisions that are affected by all the "how will this impact on my career advancement?" thinking. You will undoubtedly see that in today's address.
To his credit, Tony has dropped the annoying speech style of delivering it as if he himself were the reincarnation of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Listen to that first speech and you can see how pretentious it is. I thought that Tony did this so he could collect his speeches to roll out again after he climbed the political ladder, something like a high school yearbook, video-style, and address his ego-centric needs. But really we are in bad shape as a city and a lot of what people don't want to acknowledge is a big part of the problem. Illegal immigration, though it affects many personally, is one of the issues that really is never touched as a negative and that's probably a big failing of the lawmakers who pander to every and any source of votes, no matter how costly in the overall picture.
Tony will now get around problem areas in speaking events by not taking any questions. He only does rehearsed speaking. Too much "off-the-cuff," unscripted speaking brings out a flurry of "uhhs" and "aahs" and other gastric noises mixed into the content that you might get from consuming too much rich food. No, Tony knows his strength is not that and he leaves spokesman Matt Szabo or his personal counsel Tom Saenz with the job of handling delivery of the heavy duty explanations to the press.
But another cause of the financial predicament is the increased spending decisions without any well thought-out plans to fully meet the expenses they generate. Expecting the boom economy of the real estate market to generate untold amounts of revenue was another mistake. Much of the Benjamin Franklin stockpile of sayings would have been useful to follow to be more careful with the money. And they STILL spend like nobody's business in city hall and Sacramento.
Tune in on the radio or t.v., if it's important enough to carry there, and decide about those things for yourself. Even if you don't live in the city, you will always have an impact from the fallout in assorted ways, so no one is insulated from the nonsense and shady dealings of Los Angeles poltitics. THAT would be a useful subject for our high schoolers to learn, and they might be able to see how they need to change things that don't automatically come up "right" by being ignored, as many now assume.
------
Posts
