For the past ten months, RAP GM Jon Kirk Mukri has been doing Mayor Garcetti a solid by managing Los Angeles's beleaguered Dept. of Transportation while the Mayor searched for a new GM for that department. Approved last week, Ms. Seleta Reynoldsstarts as the new DOT GM in mid-August.
At the time Mukri began babysitting DOT, he was still the General Manager of Recreation and Parks. Ostensibly, that has not changed. Mukri is still the General Manager of the Dept. of Recreation and Parks. Come August, will the Mayor return Mukri - arguably the most talented manager in Los Angeles - to Recreation and Parks? Or come August, will the Mayor's wife (Amy Wakeland) be allowed to continue filling key Recreation and Parks positions with more of her girlfriends.
Speaking of Mrs. Garcetti's friends, Kafi Blumenfield - aka Mrs. Bob Blumenfield - seems to have gone missing from the Recreation and Parks Commissioners' coffee klatch. Given the hideous conflict of interest her appointment represented, it's good to see that someone finally came to their senses on this. The Recreation and Parks Commission has a great deal more legal and fiscal power than most of the other figurehead commissions in Los Angeles. Recreation and Parks is semi-proprietary, and pretty much every major department activity must be approved by the Commission.
Given the poor legal performance by Mrs. Garcetti's friends on the Crystal Springs Baseball Fields project and the "Old Zoo Performance Stage" ... or whatever new name the Bandshell has this week, one can only hope that a new commissioner without baggage but with enough technical knowledge and actual talent will be appointed to replace Blumenfield.
We've previously noted another key poor legal performance in the same hearing by Acting Rec and Parks GM Mike Shull. Shull stated for the record that neighborhood children will walk to the new ballfields from surrounding neighborhoods. Honestly? The proposed fields are more than a mile from just the the park entrance. The walk through the park is along a public and sometimes secluded jogging trail. Any parent would think twice about before letting their child walk alone or even with friends on it.
Thinking we've had enough of the bullshit pretend leadership being appointed over our City parks. Seriously. One way or another, it's time for a real manager to take back the managerial reins of Recreation and Parks.
Griffith Park is getting a Park Advisory Board. Yes, you heard that correctly. The current councilmember vociferously opposed this idea when the Griffith Park Master Plan Working Group originally proposed it a few years back, but now it is happening. Unfortunately, the surprising acquiescence on said councilmember's part is likely due to a plan to fill the board with their chosen people.
From all appearances, at this point in time there is an actual process in place for the selection to the new Griffith (Park?) Park Advisory Board. Personally, I actually believe in the Park Advisory Board system in principle. I hope the establishment of Griffith Park's first PAB is completed with due diligence and foresight, not politics. Fingers crossed.
Still empty.
Finally...properly staffing and supporting Park Rangers remains a thinly veiled joke in Los Angeles. No new hires, no proper Chief as required by POST, and no action on the Mitch O'Farrell motion to resurrect a real Ranger program. That motion was supposed to be heard in April. To date? Crickets... Meanwhile, the Ranger Division struggles to have one single full peace officer Park Ranger available a couple times a week for the new Hansen Dam Ranger Station. That station needs twelve Rangers plus Park Patrol officers for full coverage.
A token four new Rangers and a supervisor is included in the FY15 budget, but no action on that either. Four new Rangers doesn't even cover attrition, folks. I'd laugh, but honestly as a dedicated parks volunteer, I find the hypocrisy -- "Los Angeles cares about our parks, parks resources, and park safety" blah blah -- utterly nauseating. Cities that have nice things take good care of their nice things. To look at our parks right now, Los Angeles must not give even the slimmest of shits about them.
This will be voted on in City Council on October 8th.
Do you think any of our City Councilmembers will care enough to catch this major missing piece and correct it? Or will lack of proper qualified leadership continue to threaten the very existence of the Park Ranger Division?
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.
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?"
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?
It was a good day yesterday for two teenage boys in Griffith Park.
As teens all too often do, they
were driving way too fast on hairpin turns at Mineral Wells and completely
blew this ↑ corner and went off the road toward the picnic area, smashing into one of the posts. The car transferred all of the speed and energy it was carrying onto the first post - bending it, then it bounced off another post, flipping the car on
its side and back onto the roadway.
Both boys walked away from the crash
with minor injuries. The only remaining sign of the accident is a
cockeyed post and a small scattering of sand to mop up some oil.
The scene of the accident doesn't look like much. A bend in the road
road. Some posts, one post slightly out of step with the rest. These
posts haven't been here long. Maybe 5 years, give or take. That's no
time at all when talking about a park that has been a valuable place to
recreate and relax for Angelenos for more than a century.
I clearly remember the discussion five years ago about installing the posts and
gates around Mineral Wells and the Green Recycling facility.
This was at the beginning of Villaraigosa's brutal "full-cost recovery"
plan and the Department of Recreation and Parks was being aggressively stripped of funding by
City Hall. Posts and gates like these are definitely pricy. They were an
expensive project that could easily have been short-cutted or blown off
completely given the financial situation.
It was actually the General Manager, Jon Mukri,
who made the posts and gates happen. He came out to the site himself
and walked the location, then made the decision to do the full project.
It's
difficult to tell from my lame photography, but beyond the posts there
is a pretty steep dropoff into the Mineral Wells picnic area. It's an
area that is filled with parents and kids most weekends.
Any
vehicle missing the hairpin curve and hitting that dropoff with speed
would flip and roll, seriously destroying it. Anything in its path would
likely be crushed.
These posts probably saved the lives of those two teenage boys along
with the handful of parks users who were at the location yesterday
afternoon. And anyone who criticized Mukri's decision to complete this
project at the time should be grateful they were just plain-old wrong,
and not dead-wrong.
On Sept 9, 2009, fifty parks users and community members from regional parks* all over Los Angeles drove into the heart of Los Feliz during rush hour to meet one-on-one with Councilman Tom LaBonge.
No need for such a unit utilizing the full skills set of a Los Angeles City Park Ranger had been or has yet to be demonstrated, and the people who use the parks daily wanted an explanation. More importantly, they needed to be heard.
The Rangers being pulled by Recreation and Parks from real field work were Rangers grandfathered under somewhat controversial conditions at a time before POST certification. Some of those grandfathered were already peace officers. One swears an oath to be a peace officer. A few chose to ignore that oath in the grandfather deal, although they readily accepted continuing to receive the same pay as the full peace officers.
The schism caused by how poorly this change was handled still taints the entire Division today, and certain individuals, the Department of Recreation and Parks itself, and the associated unions continue to take advantage of it as a destructive manipulation tool.
The non-peace officer Park Rangers arePublic Officers as defined in the California Penal Code and are trained to do a number of vital park-specific services, including:
• Security
• Patron assistance
• Firefighting
• Search and rescue
• Community policing
• Wildlife and resource protection
• Education and interpretive - both formal and the all-important in the field interactions
Public officers can enforce City parks codes. Peace officer Park Rangers do all of these things, with the additional job of being able to enforce all State and City codes - not just park codes - and arrest.
All Park Rangers know their parks like the backs of their hands. Locations without addresses are their forte when an emergency call comes in. They are the de facto "facility managers" of the large open spaces in Los Angeles. Their visible presence can be the difference between civility and safety, and complete and utter anarchy on a busy day.
To do their jobs, they must be tactical in their response, working in the parks, on patrol, and with the public. Being a Park Ranger isn't just a job, but a vocation in the true sense.
During the two and a half hour meeting in September in Los Feliz, every single citizen, neighbor, and parks user who made it there in rush hour said almost the exact same thing to Tom LaBonge. It didn't matter which parks they came from across the City. They needed Park Rangers on patrol in their parks. Park Rangers doing the full scope of Park Ranger duties. Vital duties that were borne out of the very day-to-day need in the parks of Los Angeles as it has evolved over the century.
Why would you pull highly-trained and paid Rangers from the field? The heavy lifting with respect to interpretive work, if there is such a thing as compared to the need for other services in parks, can easily be done by trained docents and volunteers in similar, but appropriately scaled down uniforms.
But as is often the case with the City, this whole action wasn't about the public or what parks really need. The very next day after the meeting, Tom LaBonge met with Recreation and Parks Assistant General Manager Kevin Regan. LaBonge told Regan that he wanted the Interpretive Unit created anyway, to just do it. To hell with the public and public safety. To hell with union work agreements. To hell with CA POST. And to hell with taxpayer dollars. Tom wanted people in Ranger hats available for show and tell at the drop of that very recognizable hat.
So it was written. So it was done.
Today, by AGM Kevin Regan's orders, these ten public officer Park Rangers do not respond to the required chain of command that California POST units are required to adhere to. They spend their days not in the Park Ranger Station, but allegedly watching television for the most part over at CSY, Recreation and Parks' central service yard on the Atwater Village side of Griffith Park. They are now Regan's -- and LaBonge's -- highly-trained, overpaid and underutilized 'Interpretive Unit', whether there is a real demand or not. Whether it fits their job descriptions or not. Whether it best serves the parks, or not.
Ten million visitors descend upon Griffith Park alone annually. Regan's and LaBonge's body-snatch has left just ten peace officer Park Rangers to handle almost all of the work load. Other regional parks have no Park Rangers.
Unless management-by-malice and draconian practices are considered Best Practices within the Department of Recreation and Parks, it is truly hard to fathom how Assistant General Manager Kevin Regan has come to wield such exclusive control over the Park Rangers.
Originally a tree trimmer within the Department and well-known among other employees for running his personal home business doing the same while using City equipment, rarely is something positive said about Regan as an administrator outside of the official record, such as it is.
Communities who've dealt with Regan on important issues over the years during tenures as a superintendent in their area for the most part simply despise him. The stated complaints? Abusive. Arbitrary. Insane. Threatens. Lies. Flakes. Misrepresents. ... and other not so proper words we won't publish. It wasn't very hard to collect peoples' thoughts in this regard. The words flowed freely.
In fairness, with a little work we did find two community members who had been charmed by Mr. Regan at some point. Older women, both in their '70s who say lovely things about the man. But just two. And two in a City the size of Los Angeles isn't even worth mentioning statistically as an aberration.
With a pedigree like this, making Regan one of the faces of a major public service department is a choice someone somewhere should be questioning.
Since being handed carte blanch with the Park Ranger Division, Regan's not-terribly-positive behavior seems to have escalated to new levels. Perhaps it is the fact that the employees he is dealing with are both college-educated and either peace or public officers, therefore they are not easily intimidated. Whatever the reason, Regan has been on a mission that to any observer is clearly diametrically opposed to the successful enabling of the Park Ranger Division. People he supervises in other divisions openly state that they are grateful Regan is so hyper-focused on controlling the Park Rangers... it keeps him off their backs.
Beutell does and says whatever Regan tells him - he himself is under orders to do so. A puppet peace officer to disguise the fact that a civilian is running a California POST agency.
Regan's Interpretive Unit is sub-commanded by Senior Park Ranger Sharie Abajian. Abajian, a non-peace officer, was not a finalist for promotion to Senior Ranger until, likely needing a spy, Regan chose to intervene in the formal process and select her. By way of her comeuppance, Sr. Ranger Abajian is indeed loyal, shamelessly makings no secret about her activities in this regard.
What has Regan actually accomplished during his tenure as commander-in-chief?
A detailed, well thought out Strategic Five Year Plan for the Park Ranger Division, developed by both peace officer and public officer Park Rangers in May 2009 at the request of the General Manager, sits ignored. Reading this plan is a good way to understand the history of the Park Ranger Division, who these people are, and why their job has evolved into what it was at the time of writing.
Regan wants none of this - revisionist history is underway. His revisions. If he says it enough, it must be true.
It's all about control. In an employee complaint he and Abajian themselves initiated, Regan allegedly ordered an investigating peace officer to create or manufacture the necessary evidence that he could use to fire the individuals. The investigating officer refused to manufacture evidence, and the investigation did not warrant termination. In fact, it barely warranted investigation.
For more than two years, Regan sat as decision-maker on the 3-person personnel hearing committee that investigated personnel grievances directly involving himself and his subordinates, including Park Ranger senior staff.
Regan regularly discusses personnel issues with other employees, agencies, departments, and officials. He conducts personnel management and discipline via broad sweeping, dictatorial email which is sent to high-level Recreation and Parks management, other agencies, and City officials. He does this typically with few, if any of the facts actually in hand. The facts come later, and they are not rebroadcast to the original recipients.
A
popular acting chief park ranger with 30 years experience is sitting in an
office downtown, having been moved there by Recreation and Parks
with no substantiated reason for having done so. The Ranger is the only Sr. II in the division, and as such has important administrative duties. No real reason for the removal except "it's a personnel issue" will be
forthcoming, because a real investigation has no hope of turning up
anything real. Better to let the rumor mill be judge and jury.
Yet
for the record, this
Ranger was Acting Chief for at least five years which technically
gives him job rights to the position in Civil Service rules. His removal
had nothing to do with anything Civil Service. California POST approved him in the position. The real reason for his removal is likely that he remains in the way of Regan's 'Interpretive Unit'.
Regan put a non-peace officer supervisor in charge of peace officer
Park Rangers in the mounted units and the Observatory security. This is
against California POST policy.
Park Rangers work with a number of other agencies in the performance of their duties. They have Memoranda of Understandings and Agreements for things like booking suspects and mutual aid with the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department just to name two. MOUs clarify roles and are directly related to officer safety and job performance.
Out of the blue, Regan outright canceled the MOU between the LAPD and the Park Rangers. He did not notify any Ranger Division administration. Attempts to re-establish the MOU by Senior staff were derailed by Regan. The last word was that Regan and Beutell would be writing a new MOU. Regan claimed that Park Rangers, even peace officers, do not need an MOU with the LAPD.
In summary, and trying to be positive for a moment, when he was first assigned the Division AGM Kevin Regan may have had more noble motives. That has evolved to today: Regan's major actions as the faux commander in chief of the Los Angeles City Park Rangers are now all about removing the support systems from every single part of the Park Ranger Division - except Regan's 'Interpretive Unit', that is.
The hardworking men and women who are forced now to make up Regan's 'Interpretive Unit' were grandfathered into the Division in 2002. Their jobs and responsibilities were worked out in two Union meet-and-confer documents from the time, and their liability-protection as it applies to their specific work inside parks is clearly laid out in the California State Penal Code for Public Officers.
There is no question about what those job duties are, unless you listen to Kevin Regan who claims otherwise when convenient. That said, read for yourself. There is no issue in what these public employees are supposed to be doing. None of these documents have been revoked, only conveniently ignored. Non PO Ranger Duties-RecandParks Non-PO Ranger MOU-RecandParks
As we move into a number of holiday weekends this month, these public officer Park Rangers assigned to Regan's 'Interpretive Unit' will not be working as real Park Rangers. With few exceptions, they only work Monday-Friday now no matter when the busiest time in your average park occurs. Obviously this would be the weekends. Regan for his part is trying to now cut off peace officer Park Ranger services at 8pm, too. Parks close at 10:30pm.
Meanwhile back in the parks themselves, the patron calls come in and the services need to be provided. The remaining peace officer Park Rangers scramble to handle as they can, while Regan's 'Interpretive Unit' watches TV and hikes.... and contemplates interpreting things. They only do something if their commander says they can. Yet if calls are coming in and the Ranger Watch Commander sees five of them sitting there, if Sr. Ranger Abajian is not around to ask, they might as well be wall paper. Expensive, highly-trained wall paper who must properly follow someone else's orders.
There are no more Monthly Reports detailing unit activity to speak of, although a recent public records request by community members may see a hastily created one make an appearance. We'll be happy to publish that anticipated work of fiction when and if it makes an appearance. Comparison to Park Ranger Monthly reports before Regan's 'Interpretive Unit' came to be should be instructive.... like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
"Mayor NarcissusVillar celebrates while others grieve"
Would it be beneath Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to use the budget crisis at City Hall, to settle "old political scores" against perceived political opponents? Thus, could those acts of political retributions lead to the death of innocent Angelinos?
If you find my opening premise repugnant, then I argue that you really don't know the inner workings of the man born "Antonio Ramon Villar" who is now Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
It is no secret to those "in the know" within the Los Angeles political community, that Mayor Villaraigosa exhibits an vindictive streak to those who dare impede his pursuit of furthering the "cause of self".
The list is long of those who have face the "wrath of Villar", former Mayor James Hahn, SEIU's Julie Butcher, State Senator Gil Cedillo, his father, former CD 14 Councilman Nick Pacheco, Mothers of East Los Angeles, the Ramona Gardens Community, the McOsker Brothers, Corina Raigosa, Talkshow Host Doug McIntyre, Kevin James and more.
Not wanting to be an addition to this list, may be why that the City Council walked on egg shells and thus were mutual partners with the Mayor during his first term in office. But with his political star now dimming to "black hole status" the "collective fifteen within the horseshoe" are now doing their best to avoid being suck in to vast darkness that is the fail policy and governance efforts of the current Mayor.
Speculation is rampant that the current Fire Department "brownouts" are part of an strategy to punish the leadership of United Firefighters of Los Angeles Local 112, in regards to their outspoken retorts of the Mayor's wishes for contract concessions and cutbacks in fire services.
Local 112 President Pat McOsker and his brother Tim. who was former Mayor James Hahn's Chief of Staff, are veterans of past political fueds with the Villaraigosa Machine. Thus, Local 112 President McOsker is once again in another political fight to safeguard the interest of his union members.
But in a moment of budget crisis unseen in recent history, the leaderships of all the various factions affected by the decisions made at 200 Spring Street, would be well served to view the KABC Channel 7 video that highlighted the emotional testimony of El Sereno resident Luis Gonzalez who father suffer a fatal heart attack on Febuary 23.
In his heart-wrenching comments before the City Council yesterday, Gonzalez describe the nine plus minutes it took for paramedics to respond to the innitial 911 call. Station 16's paramedic squad, which was the closest to his father's location, was not in use due to the "brownouts" cutbacks.
One can accept that in the execution of normal political discourse, there will always be some sort of "political pay back" as part of the dialog. But in this budget crisis the act of "settling a political score" may had just taken a deadly turn.
OTHER NEWS:
** Happen to catch Mayor Antonio Viilaraigosa on KABC 790 AM with morning host Peter Tilden this morning. It would be worth the effort to link to the pod cast just to refresh the memory on what a political bumbler sounds like early in the AM.
Besides possible City bankruptcy and other serious citywide issues, the implementation of Mayor Villaraigosa's expensive planned retirement package, aka "golden handshakes", will have a serious detrimental effect on the Department of Recreation and Parks, and Griffith Park in particular. Along with enticing the most skilled senior employees to retire, when coupled with the abusive management of Assistant General Manager Kevin Regan, the pricey retirement packages will encourage frustrated experienced employees and employees sick of the abuse to bail out. Regan's favorite targets appear to be the most productive employees - after all, if you don't do anything, then you don't draw attention to yourself - and the divisions most likely to be impacted are the ones Regan is rumored to ply his managerial skills upon the most: Forestry, Golf, Park Rangers, and Personnel, although reports of Regan's managerial abuse come from almost every part of the department.
As this digest has described before, the antics of Mr. Regan coupled with the passage of this package may result in the largest loss of experienced talent in the history of the Department of Recreation and Parks. Since we first publicized this "hush-hush" internal issue, no significant management changes in either personnel or policies have been implemented by General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri, pretty much implying his support of both Regan and the impending catastrophic loss to his own department. Whether the support stems from a similar misdirected-punitive managerial philosophy, or simply from inability to act is unclear. We'd like to hear from those who know Mukri as to which they think is the case.
More on the ramifications from a passage of the "golden handshake" package comes from two articles in today's edition of CityWatch:
$130,000 + is the value of the Golden Handshake that each city employee will receive if they sign up for the Early Retirement Incentive Program (the “E-RIP”). The City intends to finance this $293 million program by burdening the already seriously underfunded Los Angeles City Employee Retirement System (“LACERS”) with an additional $250 million in Unfunded Accrued Actuarial Liability. The City will also lay out $43 million in cash to finance the $15,000 cash incentive to each participating employee. The City … and the unions they count on to fund their election campaigns … propose to finance the $250 million liability over a 15 year period beginning in two years.
On July 1, 2011, the plan calls for increasing the retirement contribution for each remaining city employee by 0.75%, not the 1.07% determined by the experts. As a result, LACERS is short changed by about $100 million according to the Report to the Ad Hoc Committee dated September 1, 2009 (the “Report”). The Report, in a major concession to the City, since prudence would dictate no amortization period, recommended a “reasonable” amortization period of five years. However, this would require a contribution rate of 2.86% of payroll as compared to the 0.75% rate contemplated by the Early Retirement Plan. The 15 year amortization … or pay back … was not considered “reasonable” by the Report, but was only “acceptable.”
This 15 year amortization schedule results is a negative cash flow to the retirement system for the first seven years, is not consistent with the recommendations of the Government Accounting Standards Board, and would result in significantly higher interest payments ($180 million) by the City. The Report also questioned, with good reason, the City’s ability to successfully manage the “backfilling” of positions vacated due to the E-RIP. In classifying the long period as not desirable, the Report said, “The backfill rates are difficult to monitor, difficult to enforce, prone to circumvention, and can be negated by higher than expected salary increases or superseded by new ordinances during the long 15 year period."
Another major consideration is that the City’s contribution to the employee retirement program is going to increase by about $450 million next year, contributing to the projected budget deficit … your city budget … of over $1 billion. This in itself raises significant questions about the City’s credit worthiness and whether LACERS should even consider participating in the E-RIP at all. Given all the questions surrounding the E-RIP, it is amazing that a committee of LACERS Board of Administration voted not only to participate in the E-RIP scheme, but to do so with a 15 year amortization schedule, contrary to the five year recommendation of the Report. This appears to be a blatant violation of their fiduciary duty to LACERS participants and their beneficiaries and may expose the Board Members to liability for negligence. Put another way, Mr. Holoman, would Magic Johnson Enterprises engage in such a scheme?
The E-RIP is an ill conceived, self serving, overly complicated, Enron like scheme that the City cannot afford given its dire financial condition. The LACERS Board of Administration should not approve the E-RIP in any form, but if it does so, with the recommended five year amortization term. Likewise, the City Council should not approve the E-RIP, but inform the mayor, his financial wizards, and the unions that the City cannot afford to pay departing employees $130,000 each, no matter how such payments are financed. The City has some very tough financial decisions. But raiding LACERS and delaying only makes the financial situation worse. The delay alone costs the city about $12,000 a month. That’s your money folks!
(Jack Humphreville is a publisher and the Rate-Payer Advocate for the greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council. Humphreville writes LAWatchdog for CityWatch.)
Bernard Parks, L.A. City Councilmember from District 8, Chairman of the Budget & Finance Committee on Saturday spoke candidly with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition in a nearly two hour Q & A session at their monthly meeting. Even Ron Kaye (Link to Kaye commentary and video clips), former editor of the L.A. Daily News, and sharp critic of city hall, complemented Parks on his understanding of the financial problems facing the city and appreciated his concern. According to Parks the city employee unions have crafted work rules and influence to stymie any rational chances to bring the budget under control. Here we are in September, he said, and the unions have not allowed one dollar of the Mayor’s budget of shared sacrifice to be implemented. The city’s finances are rapidly becoming a dark comedy like the 1989 movie “Weekend at Bernie’s”.
Except the dead guy in our case is not Bernie but our City of Angels. City employee unions pretend that LA is still alive and well because they are determined to continue to have their really good pay and perks uninterrupted even though they are dragging around a corpse just like in the movie. The need to confer with individual unions and even individual employees with arcane civil service work rules regarding job protection and layoff essentially has taken the fine tuning of staffing and firing decisions out of elected official’s hands.
Enter the “bumping rule”. Parks said that even after several decades of being a city employee he was surprised at this one. When the Mayor and Council have determined that the layoff of several thousand employees … the least essential to running the city … is necessary, and those employees are so informed, they not necessarily laid off? Apparently an employee can go back to the department where they initially entered city employment and, depending on job class and seniority, “bump” another employee who would then be laid off.
When the smoke clears it is possible that none of the original employees have been removed from the city payroll. So, for example, mechanics and collections personal necessary to keep vehicles maintained or to collect fees owed the city could be out of work while less necessary workers stay on board. Parks said that this has happened in the past. The Councilman’s economic portrait clearly painted a city that is almost certainly near or at insolvency. Still it is unclear whether LA will be able to file for Chapter 9, the bankruptcy section for municipalities.
In Sacramento there is a bill supported by unions, AB 155, that would require a municipality to get approval of the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission before filing. Unions hope to prevent municipalities from filing for bankruptcy altogether or at least delay the process long enough to give them more leverage. The DWP employee union, IBEW, represents 95% of the employees and their pay, Parks said, is 40% higher than the rest of city workers, even though only a small fraction of DWP workers actually work with high voltage.
If you try to bring their pay in line with other city departments, he said, we could find ourselves without water and power. So the rate increases will continue. All of this, according to Parks, because the Democratic Party in seeking to gain more control of State and Municipal government made this pact with public employee unions. They are legal monopolies. To get elected and receive their funding and support in LA and many parts of the State you need a 100% pro-labor voting record. Parks knows what he’s talking about. During his recent run for LA County Supervisor the unions turned on the money spigot with independent expenditures and drowned him. Parks offered a partial solution to undo the influence of employees by appealing to the business community to get more involved in changing the downtown culture.
(Michael N Cohen is a member of the Reseda Neighborhood Council and is a long time community activist in the San Fernando Valley. Views expressed are entirely his own.)
Hard working city employees are really starting to wonder what in the heck is going on with Rec and Parks' once-popular General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri.
The word on the street: Mukri's top guy -Assistant Gen. Manager Kevin Regan - has the entire department either hating him, terrified of him, or believing he is a complete lunatic. From multiple detailed reports, Regan apparently abuses employees to the point that most of the professional and skilled ones who are forced to work under his tyranny can't wait for those 'Golden Handshakes'** from the Mayor to materialize so they can bail out.
Regan supposedly terrorizes less educated employees and makes educated, motivated employees hate coming to work. He bad-mouths his own department's employees to other departments, and to other employees. Every management action is rumored to be punitive. Employees are either set up to fail, or they have every ounce of initiative beaten out them by Regan's pico-managing* actions. A possibly over-promoted arborist, Regan doesn't seem to really know what he wants, so he makes it up as he goes along while his false-starts and declarations keep workers wondering if their job will even exist the next time they come in. A number have confided to this blog that they don't want to even be in the same room with Regan because they know he's going to beat them up, no matter how good a job they're doing.
(*pico is even smaller than micro - look it up.)
In short - AGM Kevin Regan is the perfect example of everything any good manager should avoid at all costs.
Tellingly, Kevin Regan is also the epitome of old Recreation and Parks culture - exactly the culture Jon Kirk Mukri swore to eliminate when he left the General Services Department to head Recreation and Parks.
Unless Mukri gets control of the tyrant acting in his name, Mukri's tenure as General Manager will be forever linked with the largest loss of job knowledge that the Department -- and perhaps even the City -- will ever experience.
Rumor has it the Park Ranger Division will be the first large casualty, with 120 years of experience just waiting to jump on those retirement packages as soon as they're available. Similar losses for the exact same reason in the Forestry Division and Golf Division are right behind them.
What a sad legacy for Mukri to leave the children and people of Los Angeles with!
(**Golden Handshakes might be on hold as the City's entire budget process is collapsing even as we type this.)
Tomorrow is the 1-year anniversary of the devastating Griffith Park fire. One of the largest fires in the long history of a historic park is rumored to have been started by an off-duty Camp LeJeune marine who fell asleep with a cigarette in hand sometime in the early afternoon. One year on, no one has ever been charged with starting the fire, and details about this individual and why they were in the park in the first place are limited. In fact, in reviewing the fire and the resulting goings-on since that fateful afternoon, there are still a whole lot of questions that remain unanswered.
To mark the historic occasion, it probably goes without saying that the Autocrat of Griffith Park will be holding court.Tom LaBonge and his ongoing obsession with the LAFD takes over the Greek Theatre parking area at 10AM Thursday so he can ask everyone on City time about the high school they attended. Various City officials will be forced to make appearances. Rec and Parks General Manager Jon Mukri is one of the lucky ones performing at the Autocrat’s bidding tomorrow instead of running his department.
Q: What happened to your promise of a fully staffed and equipped Park Ranger Division?
Q: Why did you make Recreation and Parks pay millions of dollars from their budget toward the cost of fire recovery when the funds should have come from the City's emergency contingency account?
Q: Why are you holding ‘Park Restoration’ community group events that plant tree after tree after tree in a Chaparral - not Forest - ecosystem?
Q: Why have your groups been allowed to plant non-natives in a native ecosystem?
Q: Why are your aides telling members of the public things like ‘wild cucumber is invasive and needs to be ripped out from the burn area’? (Wild cucumber is decidedly native.)
At the time Mukri began babysitting DOT, he was still the General Manager of Recreation and Parks. Ostensibly, that has not changed. Mukri is still the General Manager of the Dept. of Recreation and Parks. Come August, will the Mayor return Mukri - arguably the most talented manager in Los Angeles - to Recreation and Parks? Or come August, will the Mayor's wife (Amy Wakeland) be allowed to continue filling key Recreation and Parks positions with more of her girlfriends.
$130,000 + is the value of the Golden Handshake that each city employee will receive if they sign up for the Early Retirement Incentive Program (the “E-RIP”). The City intends to finance this $293 million program by burdening the already seriously underfunded Los Angeles City Employee Retirement System (“LACERS”) with an additional $250 million in Unfunded Accrued Actuarial Liability. The City will also lay out $43 million in cash to finance the $15,000 cash incentive to each participating employee. The City … and the unions they count on to fund their election campaigns … propose to finance the $250 million liability over a 15 year period beginning in two years. 
Bernard Parks, L.A. City Councilmember from District 8, Chairman of the Budget & Finance Committee on Saturday spoke candidly with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition in a nearly two hour Q & A session at their monthly meeting. Even Ron Kaye (