Encino wants more Park Rangers!

....yet City Hall still doesn't get the message. Four new full-time Rangers and one Supervisor  (who are replacing three retirees), and still no Chief for FY15 doesn't constitute any kind of investment in the Park Ranger Division.

Upcoming Rec & Parks Budget Hearing -- don't waste your time.

For the past decade or so, a number of parks advocates including myself have braved the annual May Day labor protests downtown to go to City Hall in person and express our support for City parks and recreation in Los Angeles.

This Thursday the May Day cycle continues - City Hall's Budget & Finance Committee will be holding their public hearing on this Mayor's proposed budget for the Department of Recreation and Parks.

This year, however, I won't be wasting my time on this sorid farce.


The farce:

Since 2007, our electeds have happily stripped more than $155 million and almost half the workforce from the Dept. of Recreation and Parks via "chargebacks" - the almost-certainly illegal act of taking City Charter-mandated money designated specifically for this department. Until Mayor Villaraigosa,  City Hall rightfully recognized these monies as untouchable. They were granted to the Department of Recreation and Parks by The Citizens of Los Angeles in the 1920s and continued to be so in every update of the City Charter to date.

Mayor Villaraigosa, his Chief of Staff, Jeff Carr, and his CAO, Miguel Santana, came up with "chargebacks" as a way to effectively steal these funds. We've discussed ad nauseum the perversion of the public will that are "chargebacks" here on this blog over the years.

 $155 million in taken Charter-mandated monies later, Santana is still CAO. His budget continues to balance the City's budget on the backs of the Children of Los Angeles. Our new Mayor apparently sees no reason to stop this shameful theft. 

Neither does Recreation and Park's (Interim) General Manager, Mike Shull, apparently. His response to the Mayor's budget? An apothetic, simple letter that nit-picking a couple of things and essentially fails to discuss the big picture in context.

And then there's the Budget and Finance Committee's handling of last year's Recreation and Parks hearing. The only thing the shameless members of the Budget and Finance Committee actually accomplished was to make sure the individual parks and recreation facilities in their own districts received special treatment.  Paul Koretz was the worst offender in this area. Finally, CAO Santana actually taunted Rec and Parks' Regina Adams after her impassioned plea to correct the City's path.

Expect the same shameless behavior this year; the Budget and Finance Committee membership is essentially unchanged from last year, and, amazingly, Santana is still CAO.

Taken in totality, there is absolutely no reason to go Downtown this week. There is no swaying this much groupthink. Who wants to waste their time trying to talk ethics, logic, and priorities to these people?

I won't be bothering. You probably shouldn't be bothering, either.

First General Manager the Mayor should retain - Jon Kirk Mukri

This past April, author Bob Gelfand stirred a few people up with his somewhat confusing rant on CityWatch LA:  Who Should the New Mayor Fire First?  In it, he states that the first person the new mayor should fire is Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri.

 
I couldn't disagree more with the author.

The first General Manager the Mayor should absolutely retain is Jon Kirk Mukri.

General Manager Mukri works very well with an extremely passionate and diverse parks community. He's made the Mayor and every City councilmember look really really good over the years with key projects in their districts, and other cities look to his department as a national leader. This in spite of the crippling budget cuts and chargebacks the City Council has levied unfairly on the department. Yes, some of the parks are a mess, but the department hasn't been allowed to keep enough employees or hire to keep up with demand.

The biggest reason to retain Mukri?  The man truly cares about the kids in this city.

I know a little bit about how the Dept of Recreation and Parks works, having been a parks advocate and an operations volunteer with the department for the past decade. I know I am not the only one who found the Gelfand's content a bit nutty. Most people I spoke with read it and went... "what?? huh?"

In actuality, the author's main complaint about Mukri specifically seemed to be that Mukri didn't know who the author was. That isn't exactly a heinous crime.

"Condom Tree" at Harbor Regional Park

The vast majority of the complaint sketched out in Gelfand's article lies squarely on the performance of Assistant GM over Operations, Kevin Regan. That particular administrator is someone with whom much of the community has difficulty. He isn't doing a good job -- witness Gelfand's description of the perpetual operations mess in Harbor Regional Park  -- and the employees he oversees are allegedly abused by this person unless they've been promoted to be one of his "spies". The only thing Regan is supposedly good at is sucking up to politicians.

Keeping Regan in that position in a department that is as public service-oriented as Recreation and Parks is the only thing I can really ding Mukri on.

Regardless of Mukri's performance to date, the rumor mill has been in full swing since it began to look like Garcetti could win the election. "Those in the know" have been saying that Mayor Garcetti will be exacting revenge on Recreation and Parks' general manager  because Mukri's significant other, Claire Bartels, was Wendy Gruel's chief of staff for ages.

I believe that Mayor Garcetti is above such nonsense. Garcetti was raised in a political family where politics is what you do outside the home and couples may have different political ideals when they are at work. Mukri did not campaign for Garcetti's opponent, so why would there be retaliation on an excellent manager? If Garcetti is indeed calling the shots, I can't see this kind of nonsense controlling his decision.


So how do the employees feel?  When then-mayoral candidate Garcetti announced that if elected he would make all of the City's general managers reapply for their jobs, I started taking an informal poll of Recreation and Parks employees I know who have been in the department for a long time. The question:

"Of all the General Managers the Dept (of Recreation and Parks) has had in the last two decades, which one could have managed to keep the department intact given the $155 million taken from the Dept budget over last 5 years?"

The answer could have been one of these four:  

• Jackie Tatum (1993)
• Ellie Oppenheim (2000)
• Manuel Mollinedo (2003)
• Jon Kirk Mukri (2004)

or none of them at all. All of these general managers were chosen by previous mayors to run the department and could be considered a reasonable example of someone now-Mayor Garcetti might choose. Some of the four were very popular with their employees.

Everyone I asked did spend time thinking about their answers, but ultimately it has been unanimous so far:

Jon Kirk Mukri, 8 - 0. 


Mukri became GM not very long after I began caring for Amir's Garden following Amir's passing in 2003. He was coming off of experience in straightening out the General Services Department - a true 'managers' department, with very little direct public interaction. Given the mess he corrected there, it was clear this guy was a very good manager in the literal sense of the word.

That said, the Department of Recreation and Parks is a very different beast from General Services. Public interaction at every turn is mandatory.

First time I ran into the gentleman face to face was at an Arts Parks Committee meeting at City Hall in 2004. Every City employee in the room was dutifully spewing the praises of the impending Consolidation and creation of the now-defunct Office of Public Safety. Most of us parks advocates in the room were there to pull the Park Ranger Division out of that consolidation and keep them in our parks where they rightfully belong.

The spewing was thick in there and the whole meeting was pretty ugly - loaded with obscene revisionist history which is something the City specializes in. As the meeting ended, Mukri came over to us parks advocates in the audience and said something that was one of the pro-Consolidation bullshit bullet-point guarantees designed to assuage the fears of the unwashed masses. None of of those guarantees ever later materialized, by the way. Pretty sure I responded with something like "Stop insulting our intelligence!" Because, in all honesty, the entire plan created by Wendy Greuel and James Hahn stunk to high hell. 

That was how new RAP GM Mukri was publicly introduced to "the community" he would have to work with for the next decade. And you know what? The man never insulted our intelligence again. He's been a pretty straight shooter to both politicians and the community alike, even when we vehemently disagreed with him.


So here we are in 2013, and Mukri has had to reapply for his job along with the 30-some odd other City general managers. That process is kind of insulting, really. It's one thing to carefully evaluate current managers, but another to treat them like political and managerial neophytes.

That said, would you recommend that Jon Kirk Muki keep his job?

I absolutely would.

Which GM should be fired first?

Gelfand asked for input on this in his CityWatch piece. I never saw him report out on the feedback, but a great candidate to get the axe first is Animal Services General Manager Brenda Barnett. Many reasons why, and LA Weekly details a lot of them, but that's a subject for a different article.

LA's parks system decimated: Nat'l rankings highlight Mayor and City Council's damaging policy

The Trust for Public Lands' latest ParkScore ranking of the parks systems in major US cities was just released.  While New York  ranks #2, Los Angeles ranks ... 34th.  Detroit for all of its problems ranks considerably higher than Los Angeles.

“You can’t have a great city without great parks,” said Mr. Benepe, who, under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, oversaw 1,700 parks and beaches during a period of expansion and major capital investment.

Black on the bar graph shows the
funding taken from LA's parks since 2007.
(click image to enlarge)

Benepe's statement certainly does not bear any resemblance to Los Angeles' dedication to its parks. LA City leaders have effectively stolen $151 million in mandated park funding from LA's parks department since 2007 and used it to cover holes in other City departments' budgets. This this Los Angeles' version of 'dedication' - a policy of completely decimating LA's parks.

You will hear LA politicos brag about Mayor Villaraigosa's 50-parks initiative... an initiative with funding for the acquisition of 50 postage stamp-sized parks, but no funding -- zero -- for maintenance, programming, or security going forward. Hardly a significant investment in LA's parks, particularly when compared to New York.

Meanwhile it only gets worse for LA's parks this next fiscal year. Although Mayor-elect Garcetti is a signatory on ParksSave's pledge to restore parks funding, Garcetti as councilmember, the Mayor, and City Council unanimously approved taking another $70 million in chargebacks ($64 million) and hidden indirect charges ($7 million) from the Department of Recreation and Parks during the upcoming year alone. Another $70 million in one year!

The compounded result of the Mayor and City Council's policy is that today, the Department of Recreation and Parks is at risk of losing its recreation function completely.  Let me repeat that: Los Angeles is at risk of losing all public recreation programming. Now that's dedication.

Garcetti as Mayor does have the opportunity to change all of this destruction come July 1 when he takes the oath of office, however, and one hopes he realizes what is at stake.


“You can’t have a great city without great parks” is one of those universal knowns, whether here in the states or anywhere else on Planet Earth.  Yet the City of Los Angeles actively steals millions from its parks, dishonoring the foresight Angelenos had when they tried to protect LA's parks by mandating special funding specifically for parks in the City Charter.

Shameful.

Stay tuned for the deflecting, marginalizing, and scapegoating of managers that is sure to follow.

Brian D'Arcy: the Four Million Dollar Kiss-of-Death

Mayor-elect Garcetti must remember this ↑ and this and this come July 1.

No more obscene pay raises for the LADWP at the on-going expense of every other City service, especially our City parks.

Soboroff's parks commercialization plan completely misses the real parks funding problem

In a recent commentary on KPCC,  Parks Save chairman Steve Soboroff bemoans the huge funding cuts suffered by City parks during the past five years. Not surprisingly, Soboroff claims that the cure to these cuts is:   (drum roll)  commercial partnerships!  No surprise coming from Soboroff, but City parks stakeholders already vehemently rejected the first real attempt for blatant parks commercialization two years ago when Warner Bros tried to blanket parks with advertising for their Yogi Bear film. SoCal Connected covered the complete public rejection of this attempt in detail. So this is probably a non-starter.

In all honesty, Soboroff's push for commercialization as a cure to parks budget cuts completely missed the real issue. The truth of the matter is that recent parks budget cuts are actually a brazen and shameless violation of the Los Angeles City Charter, something Soboroff fails to acknowledge, much less address.

In 1925, realizing even then that parks are one of the first cuts made when funds become tight, the Citizens of Los Angeles saw fit to protect City parks outright from being decimated during times of economic hardship. They wrote directly into the City Charter that a percentage (.0325%) of City property assessed valuations would go directly to the Parks Department  (the Parks & Playgrounds Dept at that time) for its exclusive use. The Charter-mandated parks funds are controlled by the Recreation and Parks Commissioners solely for use by the Dept. of Recreation and Parks.


When the City Charter was updated in 2000, this City Charter mandate was continued by the People of Los Angeles, reaffirming their protection of City parks. These dedicated parks funds still constitute the majority of the budget for the Department of Recreation and Parks and parks programming today.

Unfortunately, as this most recent budget crisis hit, City officials began looking anywhere they could for new monies.  In 2008,  Mayor Villaraigosa's top aides came up with a plan to get their hands on these dedicated, Charter-mandated funds: chargebacks. The scheme would cover budget holes through charges levied on the Dept. of Recreation and Parks by other City departments under Villaraigosa's "Full Cost Recovery" plan. Their oft-quoted rationale was 'Recreation and Parks should have to pay their bills'.

And boy, did they pay! Last year a record $50 million was charged back from Charter-mandated parks funding, representing 36% of the entire fund. "Full Cost Recovery" is incremental, so the budget for FY14 will take even more of the dedicated parks funds from our parks.

The Charter mandate for City parks was enacted precisely to protect our parks from these hard times. Yet these chargebacks proffered by Mayor Villaraigosa and supported by the entire City Council completely violate this mandate of the people of Los Angeles. 

Clearly the City knows they have no legal right to chargeback these Charter-Mandated funds from either the Department of Recreation and Parks, or Libraries. The Library Dept. had the same Charter allocation as Recreation and Parks. Unfortunately, when voters passed Prop L for Libraries in 2011, they had no idea that the City had covered their legal butts on chargebacks by adding a second part to Prop L forcing Libraries "to pay their bills" - effectively removing the Charter-mandate for Libraries. But not for Recreation and Parks.

The results of the City's City-Charter violation could be devastating. Recreation and Parks has outlined the consequences of chargebacks in recent budget process documents, warning that the pursuit of "Full Cost Recovery" may ultimately result in the complete loss of the recreation function of the department (pg. 215 of this document).  Imagine no money for recreation in a city the size of Los Angeles! This is simply criminal. Yet our electeds continue to shamelessly ignore the damage from chargebacks. A lawsuit by the Citizens of Los Angeles against our own government is likely the only thing that will correct this willful violation of the City Charter and force our representatives to do the right thing.

We wrote up a full listing of the various chargebacks in FY12 with an analysis of each ( Mayor's Budget for Rec and Parks Target's LA's Most-Underprivileged ) for those interested in the detail.


You might think that, logically, the chargebacks would be equitable among the many City departments. But they aren't, hitting Recreation and Parks and Libraries by far the heaviest.

One of the chargebacks to the Dept. of Recreation and Parks (a City Department) forces them to pay the Dept. of Water and Power (a City-owned utility). Forcing the Recreation and Parks commission to "willingly" pay the Dept. of Water and Power is simply one way to launder the Charter-mandated parks funds for the General Fund through the Dept. of Water and Power. The City Council then withdraws those funds, now clean and free of the Charter-mandate and lost within lump sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars from LADWP allocated for the City's General Fund each year.

If  the Dept. of Recreation and Parks must pay LADWP, then there is one burning question that demands a public response from City officials before any new budget is signed:

If, as the City Attorney repeatedly claims, Dept. of Recreation and Parks must pay their LADWP bill the same as any other rate payer, then why doesn't the Dept. of Recreation and Parks receive franchise fees from LADWP for the thousands of acres of park land and park resources they use -- just like LADWP would have to pay to any other ratepayer whose land and resources they use?

Wouldn't this be both playing fair and helping our parks as one would hope our electeds would want to do?

Sadly, the answer is that the exchange would probably be an equal exchange, and losing those General Fund dollars nicely laundered through the Bank of LADWP is not on our electeds' agenda. That said, Eric Garcetti is a signatory to Parks Save and if elected, he must be made to keep his pledge and correct this ongoing crime against the will of the People of Los Angeles.

Frequent hiker rescues highlight need for additional Park Rangers

The four-day search and rescue of two hikers found less than a mile from their vehicles in OC's Trabuco Canyon last week has highlighted the recent significant increase in these expensive and dangerous activities. Modern Hiker has a good discussion of this issue today and LA Weekly published an article addressing this issue with some focus on City parks. Griffith Park seems to have a helicopter rescue every other week with amateur hikers going off-trail.

Earlier this week LAFD, after a third helicopter rescue above Veterans’ Park, broadcast this:

*UPDATE: Veterans Memorial Park Trailhead* LAFD helicopter hoisting uninjured boys from precarious location (2 trips w/ 3 victims each) to awaiting Fire Engine transporting to parking lot. LAFD had similar incidents last 2 weekends in nearly same location. LAFD reminds hikers to REMAIN ON TRAILS. – Erik Scott###

Calling our Mayor, CAO, City Council, Budget Chair Paul Krekorian, and Mayoral Candidates Eric Garcetti (a Parks Save signatory) and Wendy Greuel:  

If there was ever a clear argument for more Park Rangers this budget cycle, this is it.  When Park Rangers are in the field and interacting with hikers, educating hikers, and are on-site managing the sensitive resources that contain trails, the number of these types of incidents decreases. With respect to City parks in particular like Griffith, there are such few Park Rangers left right now that these parks are essentially not patrolled and are a veritable free-for all. No one is “home”, so anything goes, and this doesn’t just enable unprepared hikers but it allows vandals to damage these resources at-will.

I personally can vouch for people reaching out to resources like Rangers when they are on-site. On busy days, park neophytes who make their way into Amir’s Garden keep me from getting any work done at all with the questions about trails, preparation, distances, difficulty, wildlife, etc. And that’s A Good Thing. I answer everything and direct them to additional resources. Exactly what Park Rangers should be doing as part of their vital job duties – if we actually had any Rangers.

The bottom line is that we need a more reasonable management standard for our urban wilderness areas that is primarily proactive (Rangers, volunteers on-site) as opposed to reactive (expensive and dangerous Search & Rescue).

Time to correct this and hire more Park Rangers and a Chief Park Ranger this budget cycle.