Today is the special election for the office of Council member for CD-2 that was vacated by Wendy Greuel as she won the race in March, 2009 for City Controller, getting even more votes than even Mayor Villaraigosa, in his underwhelming win.
If you live in CD-2, do go vote. There will be no lines, no waiting and a lot of lonely poll workers waiting for people to come by. These election are usually decided by a small percentage of the registered voters, and the ones that bother to vote will make the difference.
The interests of each of these candidates was suspect in the special election a few months ago, but these were the two top vote-getters. It's tough as both of these persons may not have the interests of CD-5 residents and business persons as a priority, and both have other elements competing for their attention.
You can read Mayor Sam's blog where it all Krekorian and "down with Essel"- the Krekorian supporters clearly in the majority for posts there. http://www.mayorsam.blogspot.com/
I don't live in CD-2 and my choice if I could vote, went back and forth depending what news came out about each. I finally decided.
I finally decided that Essel would be a better choice because she is not as attached to Politics as a life that the challenger Paul Krekorian has practiced. Krekorian is a career politician and strongly influenced by the unions, continues to increase government spending without any real balanced cutbacks to control that spending, all working as part of the Asembly to make no progress on the budget and not really being somebody I want to see on City Council.
I think that Chris Essel has the best chance of bringing jobs to L.A. and as a business person with successes behind her, she is in a better position to know what works in business and so far, City Council practices over years, has cost jobs, chasing many out of L.A. and California as too expensive and having too may regulations to operate a busines. Businsses hire people and losing businesses costs jobs. Krekorian is a politician and without actual business experience to know what works and what doesn't, demonstrated by the loss of jobs and businesses statewide.
Chris Essel, not a career politician and has the best chance of "doing right" for the residents and not being in the pocket of the mayor as too many others have been.
I would like to try to start off with a CM with some hope and not another slick, well-spoken politician who will give us more of the same, and that's been mostly bad most of the time for us.
There are already 4 ex-Assembly members, Herb Wesson, Richard Alarcon, Paul Koretz and Tony Cardenas, and I don't see much that's a postive from their own membership in the Council. There's not a real need for another of this background, although the job gives a big pay hike to the successful candidates. They all are primarily politicians and that demands of them the continual quest for getting re-elected or elected to a new office, above all else.
See "Los Angeles on $300,000 a Year," an L.A. Weekly item published just before the March 2003 City Elections, http://www.laweekly.com/2009-02-26/news/los-angeles-on-300-000-a-year/
The race is pretty close, I would say, and each side has to say they are winning to keep voters from staying home. Not being the "favorites" here, there are some who voted in the last election who won't vote now. That's still not right. There is a choice, and that should be used. The term is up in a couple of years and we will see what shape the victor here has left things by that time.
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