The highest-ranking city politicos are all coming to San Pedro this week. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich and City Controller-elect Wendy Greuel are attending the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce leadership luncheon on Thursday.
Councilwoman Janice Hahn is also on the guest list for the June 11 luncheon at the Doubletree Hotel in Cabrillo Marina. The chamber will give awards to Villaraigosa, business leader Eric Eisenberg, Niko’s Pizzeria and SA Recycling.
Tickets are available for $60 per person. Visit www.sanpedrochamber.com or call (310) 832-7272 for more information.
Friday, June 5, 2009
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2 comments:
Contributing money to elected officials is an accepted form of democracy and San Pedrans should encourage the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce directors or participants to ask these elected officials when the following is going to stop.
1. Pay to Play
2. Pay to Play, and
3. Pay to Play
We need politicians who can make the right decisions for the greater good of all people and not special interest groups, developers or gang non profit organizations that will benefit $24million from tax payer funds, general fund.
An excellent example, when Former Mayor James Hahn made the right decision, not for the benefit of special interest groups, to appoint Chief Bratton over Parks that benefited Angelenos as a whole, but cost Hahn his reelection for mayor, currently Honorable Judge James Hahn.
Politicians need to Listen, Learn, and Lead.
Los Angeles Magazine, June 2009
By Ed Leibowitz
Dear Mr. Mayor,
Your second term at City Hall doesn’t even begin until next month, but we know you’re already plotting to leave us—at least if you think you’ve got a fair shot at grabbing the gubernatorial crown off that Austrian bodybuilder in 2010.
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Why, you may ask, are we so bitter? It’s a fair question. We weren’t as harsh when your predecessor, James Hahn, ran our city like a midlevel bureaucrat.
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Then again Hahn made the courageous but suicidal political move of ending Bernard Parks’s tenure as police chief in favor of William Bratton, which so outraged South L.A. that when you ran against Hahn in 2005, that former constituency of his was all yours.
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A tattoo on your arm warned that you were “born to raise hell.”
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What an agenda you rolled out for us.
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You didn’t exactly settle into City Hall. Instead, you kept on barnstorming. We watched you plant the first of all those promised trees and fill in potholes and leaflet motorists on Wilshire Boulevard.
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What you now lead is an administration in which politics almost always trumps policy—where solvable problems become impossible to fix.
This past winter we discovered that you couldn’t stop city employees from gulping down almost $184,000 in bottled water three years after a city controller’s audit caused you to institute a Sparkletts ban.
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A fraction of your million trees may have been acquired, but how many have perished in their pots or in parched ground after being handed out to practically any passerby during community events? At our libraries, staff and book purchases have been cut back. There have been no great civic works to mark your tenure—no public art or municipal architectural feat to instill pride. The zoo remains a joke.
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Let’s remove ourselves from the spectacle you’ve made of your private business and look at what should have been three triumphs of your mayoralty: education, the environment, and affordable housing.
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During your spring 2005 runoff against Hahn, pollsters found that what voters wanted most was for the mayor to fix our miserable school system, even though the City Charter and the state constitution prevent anything of the kind.
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Our schools are still a shambles.
As a candidate you promised us the “cleanest and greenest big city in America.”
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But we know that had voters not rejected it last spring, it would have been a windfall for the electrical workers union, whose leaders virtually put it on the ballot.
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But which side were you on when state senator Alan Lowenthal introduced a ports bill that would have done far more, taxing every container and reaping as much as $400 million annually to lessen traffic and pollution?
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You may have called on the governor to sign it, and you may have encouraged some legislators to pass it, but the one time we heard you speak out was when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin urged Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto it, which he promptly did. A nice opportunity for some national exposure, to reinsert yourself into the presidential race after placing all your bets on Hillary.
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Mr. Mayor, the city you have sworn to lead is in crisis.
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Call a press conference and tell us in language that contains no loopholes that you’ll stay with us until the end of your term. Do what more you can for schools, housing, jobs, and the environment, but enough with the bragging.
Los Angeles Magazine http://www.losangelesmagazine.com/article.aspx?id=15528
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