A few weeks ago, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina announced a $45 million renovation of this memorial to the nearly-extinct doughboy veterans of WW I. (God bless them all–my own late father-in-law included.) I’d hoped her plans would include some suggestions for more and better use of this handsome but obsolete facility, but not so….… Molina did promise a new kitchen and plumbing and that the renovated Hall would meet national LEED (Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design) standards. These standards are usually brought to new buildings at their planning stage and cost a whole lot to attain. I’ve never heard of them being applied to the rehabbing of an 83-year old masonry pile built in the dawn of America’s  energy glut. So this part of the proposal  sounds like trying to turn a 1926 Hupmobile into a plug-in hybrid.

Patriotic Hall has long been a structure in search of a day-to-day function. It’s got a library and a fine 660-seat auditorium (the perfect size for chamber music concerts and small elementary-school graduations, but not much else) and galleries of pictures and displays from America’s wars going back nearly 150 years. It also houses the American Society of Military History, LA Chapter No. 5 of Disabled Veterans, the LA County Council of the American Legion, the Military Order of the Purple Heart and The Friends of Patriotic Hall. Not many  tenants for a building this size.

The problem is location. The 1800 block of South Fig St. is far from Civic Center and well off the downtown tourist trail. And LA County  veterans are served well enough by their local VFW and American Legion posts–plus the VA of course. The last time Patriotic Hall was really in the news was when it was renamed in 2003 after the late Bob Hope (My father-in-law, Capt. (ret’d) Min Hamilton of the  Army’s 42nd “Rainbow” Division, would surely have preferred that it be renamed after his own 1917 commander, Gen. John J. Pershing). Before that, I recall its being used in the early `80s as a shelter for homeless veterans. Maybe that was its best-ever use. But  you suspect the true purpose of this renovation is to create jobs, rather than to enhance a county public facility. The rehab plans had been lying around for a while and somehow the money was suddenly there. Now it will go into pay envelopes and the economy and help keep working people fed. That’s fine  with me. These recession days, none dare say “Pork.”

But Molina’s press release didn’t offer a clue as to where that $45 million fixerup money suddenly came from. Asking elsewhere around the county offices, I discovered this is in fact, funding from the ARRA or ‘‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009’’ – better known as the U.S. Stimulus Act that President Obama signed into law on February 17, 2009.  It’s odd that Supervisor Molina, one of the region’s top Democrats, wouldn’t mention where her funding originated. And maybe–even– show some gratitude.

By contrast, Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, a registered Republican, made it very clear earlier this year that $160 million in Stimulus funds now available to LA County for pure employment creation came right out of the ARRA. (These funds will make for 10,000 varied temporary jobs lasting at least until September 2010).  Just last week, the county voted a couple more 7-figure public-works style programs, also confessedly funded with ARRA money. It’s not, you might think,  something you’d want to hide.

Politics being what it is, the more you express your gratitude to  the president and the members the congress people who got the act passed, the more likely you are to see more of said money. That apart, what’s wrong with the ancient  custom of just saying “thank you?”  Even if you happen to be the almighty Supervisor of LA County’s First District?

From david.nikonvscanon via Creative Commons/flickr

Five months to the day after the City of Los Angeles’ highly touted and justly reviled Prop B. for solar power lost at the polls, the Department of Water and Power’s top wonkdom showed up at City Hall last week to explain what they planned to do instead to turn LA’s copious sunshine into useful energy.

Problem was, no one there seemed to expect them. The City Council’s Energy and Efficiency Committee did convene, and there was a DWP item on the agenda. But it had been so long since the committee had asked DWP topkick David Nahai to come up with a substitute plan–you might as well call it a Plan B for Prop. B — that some committee members had given up on ever hearing one. The press ignored the show too (which was repeated that afternoon at a DWP commission meeting).

So there you were last Tuesday, with a huge bureaucratic sequoia falling silently in the political forest. The only echo of which was a full color billboard outside City Hall. It showed our mayor and said that LA was “successful” in ending the dirty burning of coal. Actually that isn’t close to having happened yet. And Antonio will have stopped being mayor seven years before it is supposed to happen in 2020. I couldn’t figure out who paid for the billboard.

The new Plan B was not, in fact, all new — although it little resembled Prop. B. But first, a quick refresher course on that defunct initiative… Prop. B was apparently (the facts were never that clear) a proposal to give the DWP a monopoly installing a zillion new solar panels in LA. But many–including the neighborhood councils — saw the initiative as a super-costly boondoggle favoring the superbly salaried membership of the DWP’s all-powerful local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which strongly supported the mayor’s re election bid. And who would get to do all that work of bringing us another 400 megawatts of power via rooftop solar. Then there was a leaked insider report that the project was going to cost a lot more than claimed.. As the skeptics accumulated, Prop. B’s backers fought back with too little, too late. So what sounded, on the surface, like a nice way to put LA on the road to clean solar power fizzled at the polls March 5.

The Energy and Efficiency Committee three weeks later did a quick postmortem and singled out one key deficiency in Prop. B. It had been cooked up with a “lack of an inclusive public process” as the committee mildly put it. Then they asked for a replacement plan.

The semi-new result delivered last week offers gobs of public input–it plans public hearings literally from now to November. It also includes alternative ways of going solar–not just home rooftop panels but little solar co-ops in less affluent neighborhoods, huge solar arrays out in the surrounding deserts, and what seems to be (maybe I’m just being unduly optimistic) a more inclusive method of selecting possible panel installers. You can read it yourself on the DWP’s website–LADWP.com. If you happen to be a wonk yourself, much of this stuff, minus the public input, will be familiar. It’s from the DWP’s November Solar LA plan (It’s on the website too), which was kicked aside as as the politics-fueled Prop. B emerged at the end of last year.

There are still big problems, uncertainties and controversies; DWP figures it can make solar power the largest of LA’s electricity sources for around $1.6 billion. A consultant said it would cost more than twice that.. And any new costs could go to LA ratepayers, who are already paying a hike of over 20 percent in the past two years.

But solar has to happen, one way or the other. A few years after the 2020 deadline, coal powered electricity will be banned in California. That’s where over 40 percent of LA’s electricity now comes from (these power plants are out of state, so they only make smog for Arizona and Utah). If ratepayers want to keep rate increases at a minimum, they’d better attend some meetings and make themselves heard.

The DWP’s union seems to be out of the center of things this time out, interestingly enough. Maybe Antonio, now in his last possible term as mayor, figured the IBEW can’t really do much for him any more, wherever he goes next.

All this made me wonder why, if opera is so unpopular locally, are its tickets so hard to come by? Is affection for grand opera another Love that Dares not State its Name? Did all these people in reality have season tickets, but were too frightened of being outed to admit it? Maybe even tickets to next year’s controversial Wagner Ring cycle? Which is costing LA Opera a reported $32 million to mount.

And which just drew a hostile motion from Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich. This was a motion which the rest of the LA County Board of Supervisors, confronted on the same day with the county’s worst budget crisis in 75 years, found time to flatten. Mike, as I get it, had just heard that Wagner was an anti-Semite. His reasoning seemed to be that the performances ought therefore to be diluted with material written by non-anti-Semites–maybe Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, or Rogers and Hammerstein.

Now, Mike Antonovich is probably the longest-serving elected local office holder in Southern California — certainly in LA County, where he’s been on the board for 29 years. I giggled to hear him assert, at a Monday press conference protesting the state’s homicidal new budget, that… one remedy to California’s problems would be to remove term limits. Particularly since his legislation against a great composer who’s been dead for 146 years was clearly the product of a political mind that’s seen better days. Not a single local organization or group reportedly backed him on his solo anti-cultural adventure, so it appears that, besides his wide-ranging North County supervisorial district, Mike’s now found himself a phantom constituency to represent. The flesh and blood folks who do vote for him might want to consider whether, in these hard times, they’d be better off with a supervisor more focused on reality.

Be it said that Zev Yaroslavsky, who is the only Jew on the board, led Wagner’s defense.

This has often been the case, by the way–even in Wagner’s own era. Since then, critic Bernard Levin helped reclaim Wagner’s reputation in England after WW II. The Jewish conductors Bruno Walter and George Solti made some of the greatest Wagner recordings of all time — and all of these people distinguished easily between Wagner’s mighty music and his dim-bulb opinions. That music, from the Wedding March to the Ride of the Valkyries, is an indelible part of world culture. The Ring Cycle is by turns profound, absurd, magnificent, silly, and stirring — and like nothing else ever created by the mind of man. Assuming you like that sort of thing, you might even want to check it out.

[Edit: You're right, Burns! Here are tickets to the Ring Cycle.]

I’m talking about the city political furor surrounding the costs of the Michael Jackson funeral.

By now, we all know the story. The reigning, if sequestered, king of pop dies at 50. (Not an atypical age of death for drug abusing geniuses–classical pianist Glen Gould and sci fi genius Phil Dick were both druggies who died early in their sixth decades.) And the world shut off and the hype machine turned on, a machine that is only now sputtering down.

Meanwhile, the city bureaucracy, headless, since the mayor was in Africa on a mission of inconceivable importance, functioned well, if a bit over-conservatively. It put far more police on the street than the occasion, which brought out on the whole about as many people as did the average Lakers game, warranted. This seemed like good planning to me. Far better to over prepare than under prepare. Michael Jackson having not died before, it was hard to know just how many people would stand outside and mourn.

It was an orderly and respectful bunch who attended, in and out. There was a lot less public disorder than you’d have had at the above sports event. The only disorder was at City Hall, where, you would have thought to hear the attention grabbing noise, the runoff elections were going to happen next month instead of the last. Newly sworn City Attorney Carmen Trutanich vowed to investigate the purported $1.4 million policing costs, as though he suspected that most of the cops ordered out for the event had in fact ditched their uniforms and gone to the beach. Controller Wendy Greuel, of whom I frankly expected better things, vowed to investigate the out-of-county provision of sandwiches to the troops, at what seemed to me to be the fair market price of $7 a piece, plus power bars and gum (Do cops get to chew gum on the job these days? What would LAPD Chief Bill Parker think?). She scooted back into her City Hall den, however…when this began to look like one of those low-bidder deals, which of course such contracts are supposed to be. As controllers, of all people, are supposed to know.

Various council members made loud noises here too, insisting it was the intestate estate of Jackson that had to pay the policing costs, or AEG, Phil Anschutz’ entertainment machine that seems to have turned South Park into its personal Vatican. Much was made of the city’s nine figure deficit. Some even said it was obscene to pay that much for policing for a celebrity’s obsequies when teachers were getting pink slipped–as if these two services came out of exactly the same budget.

And suddenly, I felt like I was living in a very small town. Not the self-proclaimed World Class City I set sail to decades ago. But a sleepy burg of 10,000 or so, in the middle of some state beginning with “I,.” a city incapable of dealing with any but the most ordinary event. Celebrity funerals, like meteor strikes or tornadoes, will happen in big cities, and big, sophisticated cities will take them in stride, knowing that, unlike the disasters, the funerals will probably leave behind nearly as much money as they cost the city. And even if not, what can one do?
It’s only the tiny places with the tiny minds that complain as if Jackson had conspired somehow to die in LA and have his memorial here. OK, so this is a big place with tiny minds.

Fo some reason, I recalled the 1980 funeral of Jean Paul Sartre. surely Jackson’s intellectual, if not musical, peer. At least 50,000 people turned out for the Wall Eyed One’s cortege. Did anyone in Paris’ Hotel de Ville gripe about the cost in flics? Or did they even calculate how much those costs were going to be offset by cafe, hotel and Metro revenues? No. A great, and very controversial, public figures had died. The city (and nation) owed him and paid its respects along with the security costs.

Paris was then and is now a city of class. This one, for now, isn’t. But you knew that.

It goes without saying that the meeting was quite important. What was at issue was a fairly technical matter of granting the Gene Autry Museum the right to double the size of and rebuild its Griffith Park exhibit hall. In fact, the outcome appeared to resolve a long- unresolvable city cultural affairs conflict dating back some 25 years. Which had to do with saving that wonderful 95-year-old Mount Washington resource known as the Southwest Museum. Founded by LA’s great eccentric historian-pioneer Charles Lummis, by the early 1980s, the institution was hanging on for dear life. A trusted and beloved executive had been caught selling off artifacts. The collection, most of it stuffed into the landmark tower that juts over Arroyo Parkway, was succumbing to water and vermin damage. The attendance was down, the antique elevator wasn’t working a lot of the time. If you weren’t a school kid on a compulsory class trip, there was almost no chance you’d ever visit it.

And yet this museum, on its 12-acre landmark site, contains the greatest assortment of Native American art and artifacts in all of North America, maybe the world. Of course, that too was part of the problem… Nowadays, Native American culture and arts receive a broad appreciation. But just a generation ago, they were mostly of interest to native peoples and collectors. Then, the SW Museum received a suitor–the freshly minted Gene Autry Museum of the American West. Which had the fiscal resources of a major defense contractor along with, the Culture Vultures claimed, the aesthetic sensibilities of a daily cartoon.

From the beginning, the museum’s resident neighbors smelled a rat. Gene Autry was a movie cowboy. Cowboys and Indians, right? Would we now be turning the native treasures over to the Native Americans’ natural enemy? And what would happen to the landmark if the Autry moved the collections to its Griffith Park facility? What kind of durable cultural entity could replace the museum in its unique fortress? An accordion studio? Or would the lovely old tower become an abandoned, graffiti infested public horror?

All good points. But the fact was that the SWM was on the verge of failing. If it did so, the entire collection would be sold off, lost. In 2003, a deal was made. Autry promised to move part of the collections to its proposed newly expanded museum in the Park. It also proposed to somehow keep the landmark viable. For six years since, the neighbors, now mustered out in their new neighborhood councils, remained hotly opposed. In the meantime, the Autry fulfilled some local fears by closing the museum, except for its gift shop, for renovations.

But the renovations (you may recall seeing the tower swathed in its protective covering for a few months) took place. The collections were preserved and restored. And the Autry folks did an end run around local opponents by getting the state’s Native America community very solidly behind their efforts. You suspected that, under the Autry’s overslick “issues management” of the crisis, it might just be doing the right thing.

One never knows. But I do know, having covered this issue since 1984, that the SWM was never close to big enough to display all its collections. There are enough pieces in storage (90 percent of the entire collection) to fill two museums, at least. And that is now what is going to happen. The original museum has some accessibility advantages. ( One of which is its Gold Line light rail station. Even New York’s museums haven’ t got their own subway stops). And it’s a major part of the city landscape.

But assuring that the Autry will do what it’s said it will do is the tricky part. And this is where the LA City Council came in. Local, state and national government have been getting such a bad rap lately — particularly in Sacramento — that it’s almost embarrassing to have to note that sometimes–like last Tuesday– it can do the right thing..

Jose Huizar of the 14th District proposed an amendment that made the granting of the museum expansion contingent on an enforceable vow to keep the old museum up and running. It sounded like a perfect answer to the problem, even if I do wonder just how such an amendment would be enforced–would it require the Autry to tear down its extension if it closed the old museum? But until I see what the lawyers come back with, I’ll give the city the benefit of the doubt. While the Legislature and the Governor continued to battle mindlessly on our budget, with little fanfare, our own stumbling leaders may have actually solved a decades-old problem for the city.

A few days in another town: Boston, the least happy place on the planet when the Lakers win the championship. It’s also the US city that began a new era in mass transit nearly 50 years ago, when, in the same year that Los Angeles was scrapping its last Red Cars, it created America’s first new major trolley line since way before WW II. Making it the first US city to realize that the urban transportation future didn’t just belong to the automobile.

That 1960 Riverside line is now connected to the vast MBTA Green Line light rail network, whose original 1897 downtown segment was the first US subway line. After 1900, the old Boston MTA, of the famous folk song, also built several different heavy rail subway-elevated systems, each with incompatible equipment— a possible tribute to long-ago City Hall corruption. It also has portions that are dauntingly weird. Take the Silver Line, a hybrid bus system that runs partly underground and looks like it want to be on rails…

On the whole, though, the MBTA works just fine. Though it now looks pretty beat up—the notorious Big Dig having reportedly sucked up squillions of transit dollars that might otherwise have gone into maintenance. And of course there are service cuts in the offing.

Some say that Boston built the nation’s first big rapid transit system simply because it has the nation’s worst drivers. I’d rather not go there. Although the Boston Merge, whereby cars entering a busy roadway simply speed up and hope someone will brake to admit them, can be pretty scary. Yes, people still drive a lot in Boston, if not too well. But the thing is, you don’t have to. Point to point, rapid rail will get you to most places in the East Coast’s Bay Area quicker than driving; at least it will if you access the online timetables and plan accordingly.

That seems like the most and the least you can expect from a rapid transit system anywhere. It’s what we ought to have in LA, but then we’re over 80 years behind Bean Town in putting ours together. Guess we better hurry up.

That 1960 Riverside line is now connected to the vast MBTA Green Line light rail network, whose original 1897 downtown segment was the first US subway line. After 1900, the old Boston MTA, of the famous folk song, also built several different heavy rail subway-elevated systems, each with incompatible equipment— a possible tribute to long-ago City Hall corruption. It also has portions that are dauntingly weird. Take the Silver Line, a hybrid bus system that runs partly underground and looks like it want to be on rails.

On the whole, though, the MBTA works just fine. Though it now looks pretty beat up—the notorious Big Dig having reportedly sucked up squillions of transit dollars that might otherwise have gone into maintenance. And of course there are service cuts in the offing.

Some say that Boston built the nation’s first big rapid transit system simply because it has the nation’s worst drivers. I’d rather not go there. Although the Boston Merge, whereby cars entering a busy roadway simply speed up and hope someone will brake to admit them, can be pretty scary. Yes, people still drive a lot in Boston, if not too well. But the thing is, you don’t have to. Point to point, rapid rail will get you to most places in the East Coast’s Bay Area quicker than driving; at least it will if you access the online timetables and plan accordingly.

That seems like the most and the least you can expect from a rapid transit system anywhere. It’s what we ought to have in LA, but then we’re over 80 years behind Bean Town in putting ours together. Guess we better hurry up.

But the times aren’t right for that mood just now. These, in fact, are the toughest times since at least the early 80s— when last there were last real layoffs, as opposed to simply the elimination of unfilled jobs. The insider mood now is fear. Increasingly, the city’s 30,000 or so employees are looking at one another with the suspicion that some of them, at least, won’t ever get to have a retirement party. Does this mean that they’re going to be working harder to help us civilians when we show up at service counters, so that they’ll get better performance evaluations? Maybe so. The offset, however, will be longer waits in line and shorter counter hours. While libraries go back to the two-day-per-week schedule or even close. And after-school youth programs that have painstakingly, over the past decade, liberated some city parks from gangs disappear, and the gangs return.

This is probably why you haven’t seen a happy face for quite a while on the city’s own official visage, Antonio Villaraigosa. I noticed this for the first time early this year, when AV rolled out his State of the City speech in a corner of the city so obscure that it was actually south of Torrance…There, accompanied by a local high school band that played a mean “Watermelon Man” but couldn’t quite make it through “The Star Spangled Banner,” the mayor first rolled out his own sweetness-and-light solution to the city’s first round of 2009-2010 budget problems: everyone take voluntary days off and pay cuts. But as noted above, it’s not sweet honey time. The workers and their union leaders made some quick calculations; the kinds of employee cuts presented as alternatives to the voluntary giveups were small enough to leave most of them safe in their jobs with full pay and too bad for the Jonahs that got tossed over the side.

The mayor’s smile then was tiny and sidewise. A month later, at City Hall, he rolled out the same proposals with the same skepticism as a result. The mayor this time didn’t smile at all. That’s where it’s been stuck ever since—except that the state’s $25 billion post-May 19 election shortfall is going to cascade onto this city along with every other city and county in the state. And make the proposed layoffs a lot worse. So far, the city unions (one of which, the SEIU local, is distracted by its own huge civil war) remain shy of the “hold hands with your brother’’ option. But the focus is still in Sacramento. When the spotlight moves back here, and the extent of the state calamity’s hit on the city becomes clearer, who knows? Could there be love in the ruins?

Meanwhile, Antonio is dating again—and was spotted with the new object of his affection in a bookstore! Has that ever happened before to a celebrity in this screen-loving town? Will the mayor’s apparent literacy hurt his gubernatorial chances? Tune in next time.