City Hall Is Giving Away the City

The government of any great city must have a social conscience. It must truly represent all of its citizens. Here in Los Angeles, with its great diversity, there must be a firm commitment to meet the challenges facing us as we approach the new millennium.

The fact is, this great urban center is changing rapidly. The minorities are becoming the majority and there will be major strife in our neighborhoods and in our government. The current city administration sees this “majority minority” on the horizon and is moving now to control our government before this shift concludes. They’re totally insensitive. They have no understanding of what people care about, what their needs really are. The social climate is changing, but the people who need the most help are being ignored. The administration is sitting in an ivory tower making decisions without a thought going to the populace. The priorities go to the rich and the famous. Meanwhile, these decisions are occurring while the city is sleeping.

Each day, Los Angeles gets closer to becoming the Giveaway City, a metropolis whose valued assets are being given away to the private sector. This public giveaway is symbolic “scorched earth” policy, leaving nothing salvageable behind. It will take away our public buildings, land and tax structure to benefit the wealthy and increase their power over our community. This policy is based on greed, with no social conscience or commitment to the people involved. It’s about taking from our citizens and giving to the people who deserve it the least, the rich. It’s the extreme form of privatization. It’s taking the rights of taxpayers by removing their elected representatives from the process.

The citizens must take a careful look at the details of these “new deals” being mapped out over long periods of time and then suddenly revealed publicly and pushed through the process using time constraints and farfetched scenarios of bringing more jobs and benefits as justification. DreamWorks, the new film studio, is a case in point. The jobs and benefits that will occur would have been there without the city rushing to give away massive tax benefits. Instead, it was “make the decision fast or we’ll go elsewhere.” It’s simple blackmail. So corporations are given unbelievable tax benefits, free land and whatever else they need or demand. The rich developers have all of the benefit, the taxpayer none.

The whole agenda is a Trojan horse: It sounds good, it looks good, but hidden inside are some devious schemes that take advantage of the communities and individuals who make up the bulk of our city.

Many citizens remember the recent attempt to sell our public library to a tobacco company. Anything is fair game for a takeover by the dealmakers. The latest example is a proposed arena that will gut part of our Convention Center, dislocate residents, give a private company the right to the signage at the location, have the city forfeit any admissions tax for events and cede valuable land to the developers. There will be more deals like these and our children and our grandchildren will be paying for these costly mistakes for years to come.

Charter reform is the big issue right now. Take a careful look at all the specifics behind the proposals. Most of them simply give more and more power to the mayor and less decision making to the voter. If the mayor’s initiative passes, more power goes to him and his partners. And if taxpayers don’t wake up and pay attention to the hidden agenda being formulated in Los Angeles, the library will be owned by that tobacco company, our parks will be in the hands of rich developers and City Hall will be controlled without the voice and the will of the people. This is supposed to be a diverse city, not a divisive one.