The State of the City speech for 2011, the 6th one delivered by the mayor of Los Angeles, Antoinio Villaraigosa, and the accompanying delivery style by the mayor is what you'd might expect to hear with all thing in order, a very rosy picture.
He did not really explain just where the money is going to come from to pay for all the things he described when you have to notice now that the libraries are closed 2 days a week and the LAPD has put a hold on new academy classes until the money situation is settled.
The mayor is responsible for the city and that interest into LAUSD's area is not anything that's in the city's charter, but that's just a small detail for the mayor, too small to really pay attention to. Maybe the real issues that a mayor's actual responsibility touches just is not interesting enough. If you followed what the mayor has done over the years, the story calling him "The 11% Mayor" for all the time spent on real city business is appropriate.
Since that story came out Antonio's not produced much improvement, hiring Austin Beutner to the be "Job Czar" and head up over a dozen city departments. Usually each department has a separate person to run it. DWP was one of Buetner's departments until the recent appointment of a "permanent" general manager.
But the Mayor is never one to let taking credit slip by without attaching his name to it. And here, you have to really wonder about the "deal" he's talking about with the city employee unions. There's got to be a lot of Council members wondering how the mayor is going to make his predictions happen when they've been working off and on for the last year to balance the budget.
Well, at least the speech sounded good. There is one thing I am very sure of, and it's not the accuracy all that was mentioned in the speech. I know that the mayor had somebody write it for him. The whole thing was too slick. I really wonder how many of the city council members have begun to doubt Antonio's abilities. Maybe that's the wrong question since that's probably happened a long time ago. They now should wonder what is his game plan, since it's not re-election this as his last term.
You can bet on the regular things here, that "friends" will be the ones to get contracts, other deals and the benefit of the money from whatever projects and programs that public tax money supports. Whether it will be spent wisely for something measurably productive is yet another question. Count me in as one of the doubters of the whole group. With Wesson, Huiizar, Cardenas and Council President Garcetti each fined for violations of ethic rules and the mayor getting a fine for "ticket gate" with all the free tickets received, how can you have faith in them. And I forgot that Alarcon's still facing a trial along with his wife for lying on voting documents about where he really lived.
By the way, don't worry that any of them will actually feel any pinch from paying the fines since they have diferent funds that come from the same ones that got them into trouble and these sources will provide the money to pay fines. So in the end, there's no shame and no pain. And these are the leaders that continue to be elected and re-elected to office, a real crime that voters had all in the palms of their hands to change. An especially dismal picture when you see these people win elections with roughly less than 10 per cent of the city's registered voters choosing them as way less than 20% of the registered voters show up at the polls.
I still wonder how Antonio came to see the city as he described in the speech.
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