Look for Mayor Villaraigosa to give the annual “State of the City” speech today, Wednesday, at 5pm.
The 2011 “State of the City Speech” that Mayor Villaraigosa presents each April will be different this time around from what the reports are in the L.A. Daily News and other news sources.
"Villaraigosa to focus on education in his State of the City address-The mayor's emphasis on struggling schools comes as city officials are wrestling with a deficit of at least $350 million and trying to retain services even after deep budget cuts."
maeve.reston@latimes.com
howard.blume@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-of-city-20110413,0,1123266.story
The Mayor has long sought to involve himself in the operations of the LAUSD even though it is outside the jurisdiction of Los Angeles City government. The Board of Education is in charge of running the district. The Mayor directed lots of his attention into getting involved where no other mayor or recent or old memory has ventured. Some wonder why so much attention goes there while the mayor’s personal attention to city business has been demonstrated to be low or worse.
Ultimately the mayor obtained “partnerships” to operate 10 schools that were low performing and so far, no one has reported that this has been a failure. A large segment of the faculty at Roosevelt High were not happy with the way the educational process was being handled by the mayor’s group a few years ago, but that has either been resolved or they have accepted what’s there.
To get back to the speech, the mayor is abandoning puttying more pressing issues into the forefront of the topic. The budget problems don’t do much to show the mayor being at the top of his job, so he will move to the education area, something that really is not the pressing issue for the city administration, but when you consider how severely distressed the city’s finances are now and will continue to be for years, the education area might make the mayor look good, satisfying his ego, and that’s part of the needs for this mayor all along.
The main motivation I expect here that puts “Education” into the spotlight is that it is a distraction from what bad news the budget issues bring us. There has been poor performance by the mayor and city council in handling taxpayer money since Day One.
There is one thing that most don’t notice that’s changed from the first ones made by Villaraigosa, and that’s the style of delivery. In the first one and maybe the second one, too, Villaraigosa appeared to use the Martin Luther King, Jr. “I have a dream…” style that you associate with some greatness of purpose. Unfortunately, there’s been no greatness with this mayor.
Maybe the mayor’s former delivery was made with the idea that these speeches would be part of future videos that all would refer to in L.A. history. Well, that’s not happening, so Antonio’s just using his regular style in making these speeches, finally abandoning the notion that he would ever be a great or even competent orator or that the content would be somehow worthwhile.
For a while in recent years, the mayor’s spoken words as heard in the news, were interrupted by “uh’s” and “ah’s” that gave the impression of either some underlying health problem his mental processes, or, simply a lack of preparedness on his part for the subject discussed.
Well, I don’t expect any great surprises as I have come to see most politicians, especially this one, use these moments to set up things for themselves, skipping the possibility that they would admit blame but usually finding some other reason for things turning out so poorly. He used “dreams” a lot in his themes. What I think will be his “dream” here will be some attempt at leaving his mark on the education system. The marks that he left elsewhere were of little use to the residents and businesses of Los Angeles.
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