In L.A.: Why 50,000 Motorists Caught on Camera Crashing Red Lights Haven’t Paid Their Tickets
Cross posted on www.ronkayela.com
LA contracted with a private company to install red-light cameras at 32
of its 4,300 intersections to catch scofflaws. The company went
bankrupt and now is owned by a firm from Arizona, the state the city is
boycotting, and its contract is up.
In five years, the program has chalked up a $1.5 million loss for the
city because two-thirds of the $466 fine goes to the state and county
and nearly one in five of the tickets for red-light crashing — fully
50,000 of them worth nearly $6 million — have gone unpaid.
You can’t renew your license or car registration if you have unpaid tickets.
Dick Riordan’s Fight Is Our Fight
In standing up in public and denouncing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as irrelevant and calling out the corruption at City Hall that leaves Los Angeles teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Former Mayor Dick Riordan has assumed a role that no other prominent person has shown the courage to take on.
He has heard the cry of the people and is speaking in their voice. It is the voice City Hall has ignored for a long time but they can’t ignore Riordan. So they attack him with all the artillery at their disposal to prevent him from becoming a rallying point for public anger and discontent.
They accuse him when he was mayor of making many of the same mistakes as they are making today, of giving into the blackmail of city unions and too often doing city business for the benefit of special interests. And so they ask, what right does he have to criticize?
Ron Kaye’s State of the City: The Sun Will Always Shine
(L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave his State of the City Speech this week. Ron Kaye satirizes the speech on www.ronkayela.com)
My Fellow Angelenos:
Let me tell you about my Grampa Hymen who worked as a tailor in sweatshops so my mother could get a high school education and I could grow up to be a spoiled brat with a degree from a great university.
I’ve lived my whole life believing everyone deserves the same opportunities to enjoy decent wines from BevMo during the 5 cents for the second bottle sales and to dine occasionally at Pocket Pita and Fab Dogs whether or not they are actually willing to go to school, get jobs and obey the laws.
In recent years, I have done everything humanly possible to hire more city workers and raise taxes, fees and rates to balance the city budget but it has become obvious that Goldman Sachs and those other Wall Street thieves have brought our nation and our city to its financial knees despite my best efforts.
Antonio’s ‘Lockbox’
Cross-posted at RonKayeLA.com.
Remember back when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told us he was tripling the trash fee and going to put all that money in a lockbox and use it solely to hire cops to make us safe on the streets and in our houses?
He never mentioned his “full cost recovery” policy applied only to homeowners except for the 60,000 who were getting the trash picked up free.
Remember when the state got rid of public access TV and the mayor promised to put $10 million of the $25 million they get from cable franchise taxes into a special account that would used to run Channel 35 and restore our opportunity to provide our own shows about important issues to the public?
He never mentioned he was going to use most of the money to run other departments and that he had no intention of ever restoring public access.
In L.A. They Blinked at Budget Cuts and Increased the Deficit
They blinked at layoffs. They blinked at eliminating or slashing funding
for the disabled, for the elderly, for Neighborhood Councils, for
Environment Affairs, Arts, Culture, for just about everything that was
proposed to stave off bankruptcy.
They blinked and squinted in the face of the daunting task they face of
cutting spending, cutting staff, streamlining government.
Watching hour after hour on Wednesday of the City Council confront the
truth of what they have wrought was like suddenly being transported to a
strange planet where everything works backwards.
Are they crazy? Or is it us for allowing them to get away with creating
such a calamity?
Antonio Strikes Out: Krekorian Trounces Essel
This article originally appeared at RonKayeLA.com.
It’s not been a good year for Antonio Villaraigosa.
His scheme to rip off the public with a phony solar energy plan called
Measure B was snuffed by voters. His stooge candidate for City Attorney
was beaten by outsider Carmen Trutanich. And now the compliant Chris
Essel got trounced by Paul Krekorian in the CD2 Council race in the East
San Fernando Valley.
It’s a new day in LA.
Community activists played the key role in all three humiliating defeats
for the mayor and the creaky political machine he heads. There ought to
be a law that bans three-time losers from serving in political office
for the rest of their lives.
Apathy of the Public and the Paralysis of the Power in LA
This article first appeared on ronkayela.com.
How did it come to pass that we, the people, wound up working for the
unions instead of the unions, the public employee unions, working for us?
We can’t blame them for the state of our city. We let it happen by doing
nothing while they organized and pursued what was good for them. They
joined forces with other special interests like developers, contractors,
lobbyists and started electing the people they wanted to into office,
people who serve their interests far better than the public interest.
Even when that became obvious years ago, we did nothing about. We didn’t
pay attention. We didn’t vote. We let them write their own contracts,
their own work rules, the laws they wanted.