Categoria: Editorials

On Tuesday, Service Employees International Union Local 99, supported by United Teachers Los Angeles, plans to begin a three-day “Unfair Practice Charge Strike” to highlight their demands for 30% and 20% pay raises, respectively, plus other demands too numerous to list here.

The COVID-19 pandemic is referenced throughout the unions’ public statements, as if it’s a reason to toss the limitations of district budgets into the dustbin of history.

“These are workers who just a few years ago were deemed essential,” said SEIU spokesperson Blanca Gallegos, “and yet the district is now disrespecting and undervaluing their work.”

UTLA’s pre-bargaining “Beyond Recovery Platform” praises educators and students for their “tremendous strength and resilience through the COVID-19 pandemic…amid devastating levels of community and family trauma, economic stress, emotional isolation, and racial inequity,” without mentioning the union’s own contribution to those problems. While other districts, not to mention other states, safely reopened schools, UTLA battled successfully to keep LAUSD schools closed longer.

SEIU Local 99 represents about 30,000 cafeteria workers, custodians, bus drivers, special education assistants and other LAUSD employees. UTLA bargains for about 35,000 teachers, counselors, therapists, librarians and nurses.

Both SEIU Local 99 and UTLA have formally terminated their contracts with LAUSD, a step that prevents the district from raising a legal argument against a strike. In an FAQ document made available online and then removed, UTLA told members that “long established law requires the district to maintain the status quo on salary, hours and other working conditions until a new agreement is bargained.”

In 2019, UTLA was on strike for six days before an agreement was reached for contract terms that then-Superintendent Austin Beutner had previously declared unaffordable. All parties emerged from the final bargaining session in agreement that what was needed was a tax increase, which the LAUSD board quickly voted to place on a special election ballot. Voters said no.

The next year the pandemic came along, and federal money for schools was produced out of thin air.

UTLA’s “Beyond Recovery Platform” calls for LAUSD to “take action to support federal COVID relief monies becoming permanent as of 2024” and also to support tax increases, described as “state initiatives in 2024 to permanently increase state school funding.”

The union’s callous disregard for the education of LAUSD students continues to be sickening.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

California needs more juice. Our demand for electricity is rising sharply from mandated shifts away from carbon-based energy.

In 2020 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Last August, the California Air Resources Board implemented it with the Advanced Clean Cars II rule. The rule said “establishes a year-by-year roadmap so that by 2035 100% of new cars and light trucks sold in California will be zero-emission vehicles, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.”

Add the recent bans on natural gas stoves in new homes by Berkeley, Los Angeles and other cities — meaning a move to electric-powered stoves — and the demand for electricity will rise even higher.

To survive this transition, the state needs to reconsider nuclear power. A good development came last week for the Diablo Canyon plant, scheduled to be shut down in 2024-25. On March 2 the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it “granted an exemption to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. that would allow the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant to continue operating while the agency considers its license renewal application.”

That will buy us some time to figure out the optimal path forward. It’s “wonderful,” Michael Schellenberger told us. He is the founder of Environmental Progress, which advocates for nuclear power, and was named Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment in 2008. He also ran for governor last year as an independent.

“The next step should be to restart San Onofre and add new reactors to it and Diablo,” he said. “Adding the same kinds of reactors we have experience building and operating is the key to keeping costs of new nuclear low.” The San Onofre plant in northern San Diego County was shut down in 2013 due to generator problems.

Schellenberger also advocates what are called Generation IV reactors. Existing nuclear reactors are mostly generation II and III. The Generation IV World Forum is made up of 13 countries, including the United States, coordinating the development of six promising technologies. The group has said they could be “available for industrial deployment by 2030.” With subsequent generations of nuclear technology, they become safer.

Gen IV nuclear power has been endorsed not just by Republicans, but by President Joe Biden. He dedicated $150 million to develop them in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Because, as the Department of Energy announced, the technology is “critical to achieving America’s climate goals.” Even the 2020 National Democratic Convention’s platform urged, “We will advance innovative technologies,” including “advanced nuclear that eliminates waste associated with conventional nuclear technology.”

For California, Schellenberger said, what’s needed now is “more education of legislators. But we are making progress. It took three years of blackouts in a row, but today, most Californians are pro-nuclear.” Also helpful, he said, would be “a new, pro-nuclear governor capable of making it happen.”

A step forward now would be to redefine nuclear power — as well as hydro — as renewable energy for meeting state non-carbon goals. Previous bills from 2020 to do so were AB 2898 by then-Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, R-San Luis Obispo, for nuclear; and ACA 17, by then-Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, for hydro. Neither passed in the Legislature. New bills like these need to be advanced to prepare for the bountiful Gen IV nuclear future.

Let’s keep the lights on.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

America can do better.

It ranked only 23rd in the world on the Human Freedom Index 2022, released by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute. Evaluating the year 2020, the report compared 165 countries, comprising 98.1% of the world’s population, on measures of personal and economic freedom.

The U.S. was ranked eighth globally as recently as 2008, suggesting a troubling weakening of human freedom in a nation that once prided itself as the land of the free.

“We have been deteriorating in most categories,” co-author Ian Vasquez, vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute, told us. “Certainly with the COVID lockdowns and restrictions it did. In terms of rank, the big factor has been this long-term deterioration in economic freedom.”

A big hit occurred during the 2007-10 Great Recession and what Forbes called President Obama’s “Record-Shattering Regulatory Rulebook.” Vasquez said, “The biggest long-term deterioration is in the rule of law. First is the rise of crony capitalism, such as bailouts to particular companies — favoritism of certain industries close to power.”

And then there have been attacks on private property rights, including from the U.S. Supreme Court in cases like the 2005 Kelo decision, which authorized eminent domain for economic development reasons.

Other contributing factors to America’s slide in human freedom over the last two decades, Vasquez said, have been “the war on drugs, the war on terror and the regular wars.”

Related: Freedom is our strength. Let’s extend it by offering refuge to oppressed people.

The index runs from 0 (worst) to 10 (best). Overall, America scored 8.52. For comparison, the top countries were Switzerland (8.94), New Zealand (8.75) and Estonia (8.73). Canada ranked 13th (8.47) and Mexico 98th (6.60). However, the index didn’t score on gun rights, Vasquez said, because of no cross-country data. With that, America’s strong Second Amendment protections would have improved it against such gun-control countries as New Zealand.

On the bright side, the U.S. scored high on freedom of religion (9.8), sound money (9.6) — this was before the recent inflation, mind you; “civil society entry and exit” (9.6) and “association, assembly, civil society” (9.3) And although Vasquez said there’s “no data for it” to compare globally, “drug legalization is getting a little better, especially for marijuana. That’s undeniable.”

Our country ranked badly on criminal justice (6.0), “movement of capital and people” (4.6) and top marginal tax rate (5.0), which is 37% nationally. But even worse here with California’s added top 13.3% state income tax rate.

Related: Land-use bill promotes freedom and property rights

Overall, this report is a call to advance freedom in America.

Democracy, freedom and economic growth, symbiotically reinforce one another around the world. America must course-correct. The Declaration of Independence dedicated us to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You only can be happy if your life is your own and you’re free.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

Following Councilmember Nury Martinez’s resignation from office last year, a special election is being held on April 4. Ballots will be mailed out soon. If no candidate received a majority of the vote in April, a run-off between the top-two vote-getters will be held in June. Our editorial sent out surveys to the seven candidates, all of whom responded, to get a sense of where they stand on the issues. We will be publishing their responses, lightly edited for clarity. Their responses are presented in the order in which they responses to the survey.

Previous questions:

How would you evaluate Nury Martinez’s tenure on the council (before the leaked audio)?

What three ordinances would you pass to help your district?

What would you do to promote economic growth in the city and in your district? 

Do you support or oppose the March 2024 ballot measure related to hotel development and the use of active hotel properties as nightly homeless housing?

Question: Recent polling by our newspaper showed more than half (58%) of Los Angeles resident said the city is headed in the wrong direction, with majorities citing a perception of rising crime and homelessness. What do you think?

Isaac Kim: “We need change. I am not the status quo. I will bring a new attitude and perspective to the role. Actively looking for solutions and pursuing goals, I am an operator who wants to do good for our neighbors, district, and city.”

Rose Grigoryan: “I think not only these issues but also the negative outlook on the city’s current direction can have a profound impact on quality of life and the well-being of communities. Thus, it is important for the city leaders to listen to the concerns of its residents and aim towards creating a safer and more inclusive community for everyone.”

Antoinette Scully: “I don’t believe that crime is rising since studies show that it has been decreasing for decades. The perception of rising crime shouldn’t dictate how we make decisions about our policing and should inform how we connect with our communities. I do believe that homelessness is rising and that death and other crimes against unhoused people are rising. I think we should be using twice the funding we use for social services and public care.”

Imelda Padilla: “I think that rising crime and homelessness are two of the most pressing issues we are facing in Los Angeles and it will be my top priority to address these crises immediately if elected to serve as council member for District 6. We need to address these problems at their root, which in large part are economic and health related. I will work across the aisle in city council and across all levels of government to marshall the resources this monumental task will require. I will also work with all stakeholders, including residents, community organizations, business leaders, faith-based groups, and health organizations to develop and operationalize sensible solutions that make our communities safer, more sanitary and sustainable. The status quo is not working. We need fresh ideas in City Hall and leaders ready to be bold at addressing the unsheltered community.”

Douglas Sierra: “While reports from the LA District Attorney’s office cite a stagnation of crime, we still feel like our neighborhoods are becoming more unsafe, forcing us to raise our families elsewhere. Many of my high school classmates no longer live here for that reason. The American Dream of homeownership is getting out of reach. I want to reverse course in this way of thinking and ensure that our city looks and feels safe to live in— whether you’re walking your kids to school or running errands to the grocery store. There shouldn’t be the worry of someone breaking into your home or getting accosted on the route home with your children.”

“I believe significant changes need to be applied to the culture and policies of public safety and policing. Studies have also shown that blighted land and abandoned lots that litter our district increase the perception of crime and violence within urban and suburban areas. Our city can and should be working proactively to transform said lots into parks and affordable housing that seeks to address the housing crisis and the needs of our district as a whole. In my tenure, I will advocate for a restructuring of community safety commissions and support infrastructure investments to beautify our city and hopefully reduce the causes of violence and crime at a systemic level.”

Marco Santana: “I would agree and I believe the rise in crime and homelessness is reflective of how broken City Hall’s approach has been in addressing these issues. Each councilmember has taken a different approach to the unhoused residents within their districts, acting as if homelessness is a problem they can ignore if it’s on the other side of their council district’s line. They have taken a piecemeal strategy to what is ultimately a regional problem. I want to work with my fellow councilmembers, our Board of Supervisors, and our new mayor to make sure that we have a unified approach.”

“I stand for safe neighborhoods and safe schools. We ask our law enforcement officers to deal with too many issues they are not equipped for – like mental health calls and unhoused individuals – when they should be working to address violent crime. One of the simplest ways we can do that is by expanding CIRCLE (Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement), a program designed to help law enforcement focus on crime suppression and prevention by diverting non-emergency calls related to homelessness.”

Marisa Alcaraz: “I think City Hall’s most significant function is to protect Angelenos and make our communities safer. Our criminal legal system of over-policing and imprisonment is broken, and we need transformational change. We can create brighter futures and safer neighborhoods by investing deeply in holistic care that considers the whole person and includes access to quality medical and behavioral healthcare, community-led intervention, better neighborhood schools with culturally appropriate teaching staffs, job and entrepreneurship training, mentorship programs, and caring, comprehensive support networks for families and individuals in crisis. Putting people on track for success through programs such as these and catching them with care before they slip into the criminal legal system is less expensive than maintaining a failed, exploitative system of prosecution that disproportionately harms Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities.”

Following Councilmember Nury Martinez’s resignation from office last year, a special election is being held on April 4. Ballots will be mailed out soon. If no candidate received a majority of the vote in April, a run-off between the top-two vote-getters will be held in June. Our editorial sent out surveys to the seven candidates, all of whom responded, to get a sense of where they stand on the issues. We will be publishing their responses, lightly edited for clarity. Their responses are presented in the order in which they responses to the survey.

Previous questions:

How would you evaluate Nury Martinez’s tenure on the council (before the leaked audio)?

What three ordinances would you pass to help your district?

What would you do to promote economic growth in the city and in your district? 

Question: Do you support or oppose the March 2024 ballot measure related to hotel development and the use of active hotel properties as nightly homeless housing?

Isaac Kim: “Respectfully and honestly, I would have to educate myself more and learn more from the people closest to the problem before answering this question.”

Rose Grigoryan: “I think it is a complex issue that requires careful consideration of many factors. We have to consider potential long-term benefits and/or drawbacks of the measure. I myself have concerns that the measure can bring safety issues and have a negative effect on tourism in the city.”

Antoinette Scully: “Remains to be determined. I personally spent a lot of time working with unhoused people, some of whom spent time in our Project RoomKey hotels. It’s more nuanced than just yes or no. I will always generally support efforts to increase interim shelter and long-term affordable housing. But I also know that sometimes our methods aren’t universally available to people or humane. In some of the hotel programs, the guests were forbidden from cooking in their rooms (yes, even a microwave), holding a key to their own room, or coming and going as they saw fit.”

“We will also need to address the racist policies for entry into these interim programs. It was impossible to provide shelter to Black neighbors. Problems with our racist systems will not be solved with color-blind solutions, and I welcome the chance to explain this further to anyone curious.”

Imelda Padilla: “I support a move for hotels to become more responsible, but what concerns me more is the unregulated proliferation of short-term rental Airbnbs operating outside of the LA City ordinance rules. We see the dire, unintended consequences of Airbnb in our communities with incidents such as the deadly shooting in Benedict Canyon that took place at an Airbnb party house. These party houses sponsored by Airbnb take some of our quieter communities like Lake Balboa and our ranch style homes in Van Nuys and turn them into potential crime targets. That’s the neighborhood by neighborhood conversation happening with our local neighborhood watch councils and homeowner associations. It’s unfortunate that one of my opponents is being backed by city hall lobbyists representing Airbnb. That said, the responsible hotels that do outreach in the community and provide an economic hub for its workers and are done in concert where needed (I love the Airtel at the Van Nuys airport) is the responsible way we should plan in the Valley.”

Douglas Sierra: “Oppose. I don’t believe this ballot measure was advanced with the highest level of scrutiny. The city council missed some critical points in understanding the failures of some of the previous hotel housing initiatives and overlooked consultation with community members affected by this crisis. In addition, some hotel owners have been proactive with city officials to house homeless people, using the entire hotel, which allows mental health professionals to be on-site. This approach should be the preferred option. There are serious unintended consequences that can arise for all community members, all along the scale of income and privilege, due to the poor writing of this ballot measure. The unhoused population has profound roots causing their instability, and it’s my job to find a solution for our district and our city that eliminates the risk of homelessness while also ensuring equity for all income levels. On the whole, I believe further dialogue is needed before any drastic action is taken, seen as a temporary fix to a complex issue.”

Marco Santana: “I support the intent of the ballot measure to use hotel properties as nightly homeless housing although I do have concerns about what the impacts would be on our hospitality industry as well as the lack of details in the measure. Since the measure has already been placed on the ballot, it is too late to make changes and provide more details. That being said, we need to find more ways to get unhoused individuals out of their encampments and I hope this ballot measure can be a part of a broader package of solutions to help address our homelessness crisis.”

Marisa Alcaraz: “We are in a homelessness crisis and so all options to house individuals living on the street should be explored. The primary concern with this measure is how it will be paid for and how it will operate. We can not place individuals with high acuity into hotel rooms without including services and case management. In the case of this ballot measure, I believe it would be feasible to implement if we were able to use housing vouchers funded by the federal and state government and if they were used for those with low acuity, as well as for emergency situations like women and children fleeing domestic violence.”

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

Remember when allowing the legal sale of marijuana in California was going to be such a panacea for the state?

After a century of active state-sanctioned prohibition, which harmed thousands of lives, and cost untold hundreds of millions of citizen-earned tax dollars, the underground cannabis market would finally be brought out into the sunshine in the Golden State.

The financial benefits that would be reaped for Sacramento and our cities!

The safety it would bring to the trade, with its bans on dangerous pesticides and herbicides, and its elimination of the exploitation of often undocumented workers!

The freeing-up of law-enforcement budgets to concentrate on real crime and public safety!

Formerly incarcerated Californians who had been hounded down the decades for the supposed crime of pot transactions and possession would see their records properly wiped clean, and, if they so desired, could get first in line for opening up licensed shops, like liquor stores for weed, with the same kind of regulations. Nothing too onerous. Don’t sell to the kids and don’t become a neighborhood nuisance, Easy enough to get set up in every city in the state, right?

Sadly, if that’s the way you think it’s gone for the legal marijuana business since California voters approved Proposition 64 in 2016, you’ve been smoking too much herb.

Taxes, regulations, over-regulation, the pressures of competing with the still-vibrant underground sellers — they all have driven legal cannabis cultivators to the brink of going out of business, and into despair.

“Despite the challenges of growing an illegal crop, including enforcement raids that still scar residents, the ‘war on drugs’ kept product scarce and prices high,” CalMatters reports.

As one longtime resident and veteran of the business puts it: “Everybody was making so much money it was insane.”

Not so much in the late winter of 2023.

A pound of fancy cannabis that might have fetched $1,000 or more several years ago is now selling for just a few hundred dollars — not enough to cover expenses and taxes.

Legal sales in the state fell by 8% last year to $5.3 billion, according to tax data from Sacramento, marking the first downturn since actual legal sales began in 2018.

Farms are closing down, and thousands of unemployed and under-employed cannabis workers are looking for new jobs, or are leaving the growing region entirely.

What’s the answer?

It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to analyze the industry’s problems. If lawmakers and the governor don’t deregulate, lower or temporarily eliminate taxes and make it possible for the mom-and-pops to compete, the legal industry that Californians said they wanted to legalize seven years ago is simply going to disappear.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature last year did eliminate one cultivation tax after farmers begged for some relief. But that was too little, too late.

Much more needs to be done. And undone.

“State Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat who represents the north coast, blamed Proposition 64 for setting up family farmers for failure with a litany of ‘suffocating rules,” as CalMatters notes. “He is preparing to introduce legislation this spring that could undo some of those regulations for small growers, including an ‘antiquated, cockamamie licensing structure’ that requires them to keep paying annual fees even if they fallow their land because of the price drop and a ban on selling cannabis directly to consumers, something that is allowed for other agricultural products.”

California needs to change those strictures and more to save the industry. Individual cities and counties as well need to cut their crazy red tape tying up retail businesses. And one promising big change is in fact being looked at by the state. Department of Cannabis Control Director Nicole Elliott has requested an opinion from the state Justice Department on negotiating deals with other states to allow weed to be exported there.

Neighboring Nevada and Arizona, for instance, are huge markets for California wine. Why not for the second-most-famous California crop as well?

President Joe Biden sure knows how to pick them. Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and former California Department of Labor head Julie Su have respectively been nominated by the president to serve as ambassador to India and U.S. secretary of labor. Both have left troubling records here in California.

On Wednesday, President Biden declared that Su, who is currently deputy secretary of labor, is a “real leader.”

“Julie is the American dream,” Biden said at the White House, according to the Associated Press. “She’s committed to making sure that dream is in reach for every American.”

While there is indeed much in Su’s personal story to admire — the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she attended Stanford University and Harvard University — her record as a leader is suspect at best.

As head of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency from 2019 to 2021, Su supported and enforced Assembly Bill 5, which crushed independent contracting in the Golden State.

As California labor secretary, she was also in charge of the Employment Development Department, which has gained notoriety nationwide for its $32 billion unemployment fraud scandal.

On Feb. 17, several Republican members of California’s congressional delegation — Reps. Kevin Kiley, Darrell Issa, Jay Obernolte, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Ken Calvert and Mike Garcia — penned a letter to President Biden calling attention to all of this and warning that Julie Su’s record in California should be disqualifying.

“[T]ogether, these two situations scream ‘incompetence,’” they wrote. “We urge you not to nominate Julie Su to be the next Secretary of Labor.”

Clearly, Biden did not heed such warnings. Biden is obviously aligned with Su and the state of California when it comes to prioritizing union interests — he has repeatedly called for passage of the federal PRO Act,  which would allow for unionization of independent contractors — but his ignoring of the EDD scandal is inexplicable and inexcusable.

Likewise, Biden has doubled down on his nomination of Garcetti, first nominated to be ambassador in July 2021 and again in January 2023.

On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee punted a hearing over Garcetti’s nomination to next week.

Biden wants to reward Garcetti for being among his earliest supporters in the 2020 presidential race. But there are legitimate concerns to have about Garcetti.

Last year, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Oversight and Investigations unit concluded “Garcetti likely knew, or should have known, that his former senior advisor was sexually harassing and making racist remarks toward multiple individuals.”

It also doesn’t help that Garcetti’s former deputy mayor, Raymond Chan, is on trial right now as part of a massive corruption investigation. To be sure, Garcetti has not been implicated there, but the optics aren’t in Garcetti’s favor. He presided over a corruption-plagued City Hall that has seen multiple council officials go down for corruption.

Somewhat embarrassingly, Garcetti’s parents have spent tens of thousands of dollars to lobby senators to support his nomination.

At best, these are highly questionable nominations. At worst, they’re just political malpractice and don’t speak well to the president’s judgment.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

Seven candidates are running in an April 4 special election to replace former City Council president Nury Martinez, who resigned last October following the leaked release of a recording on which she and two other council members used racist language during a discussion about manipulating redistricting.

Business consultant and Sun Valley resident Douglas Sierra offers voters solid credentials, good ideas and a deep concern for the well-being of the community in which he grew up and is now raising his own kids. He has our endorsement.

Sierra, whose parents came to the San Fernando Valley as immigrants, earned an Associate of Science degree in mathematics from Los Angeles Mission College, a Bachelor of Science degree from UCLA in mathematics and economics, and a Master of Business Administration degree from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He has worked as a business analyst for the Child Care Resource Center in Chatsworth and was an MBA intern at Gilead Sciences.

Most recently he has been a full-time senior consultant for Monitor Deloitte, where he provided strategic consulting to large companies in fields such as aerospace, commercial banking, pharmaceuticals and technology.

Sierra makes the case that Los Angeles has suffered because people in government lack an understanding of the unintended consequences of their policies.

Some examples that he cited to our editorial board included the recent decision to charge five-figure fees to restaurants for permits to continue outdoor dining, the burdens on mom-and-pop landlords imposed during the pandemic, and plans for hydrogen power at high costs that will be passed down to consumers.

Sierra was critical of the unaffordably high per-unit costs of publicly funded homeless housing projects, citing one in Pacoima at $800,000 per unit and housing at Jordan Downs that has cost between $700,000 and $1.5 million per room. “There are not a lot of people at City Hall with business experience,” he said.

Sierra said it’s his goal to bring more housing and economic development to the northeast San Fernando Valley district, which includes Arleta, Lake Balboa, North Hollywood, North Hills, Panorama City, Van Nuys, and Sun Valley.

He said the Valley has not received its fair share of services, and Council District 6 “has been most affected by the lack of care from city officials.” Douglas Sierra is well-qualified to address the city’s challenges and finally deliver the kind of representation that the residents of CD 6 have been missing.

Douglas Sierra deserves your vote.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

Few of us are experts on incarceration.

But we are the ones who pay for it. Who, nominally, at least, have hopes for it. That it keeps us safer. That it treats with some kind of dignity those who through either deep faults of their own or, as they say, extenuating circumstances, get caught up in it.

Shouldn’t we, the citizens and taxpayers, have the maximum opportunities to know how our jails and prisons are working?

For those of us who don’t spend a lot of time ourselves under the roof of The Big House, excellent journalism surely offers us the best way to get a good picture of life for prisoners.

As NPR host Ailsa Chang remarked the other day in a radio story about American prisons: “Something the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson said really stuck with me. He was talking about how if a society is going to incarcerate children, it should believe in their ability to change.”

And how can we hope to understand what, for instance, life is like for incarcerated children unless we allow reporters into our penal system to find out?

That’s why we stand in support of the California News Publishers Association and the California Broadcasters Association and Senate Bill 254, which would reopen access to the state’s prisons to the media.

We say “reopen” because the concept of allowing reporters more access to prisons and the imprisoned is not new — all this bill would do is bring us back the abilities we in the press had in our state until the mid-1990s.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who introduced the bill, also touts it as a move that would “open access to prisons for state legislators and other state officials in order to provide policymakers with the information they need for effective oversight.”

SB 254, which would also apply to local jails, “would also bring California back up to par with other states that provide both the media and public officials with greater access to their prisons, including Maine, Florida, and Rhode Island,” according to Skinner.

Access for reporters and lawmakers seems like a no-brainer to those who believe in the free flow of information. But to the governor and others during the “tough-on-crime” era of the mid-1990s, knowledge was not power. They saw the media telling what life was really like for prisoners as encouraging do-gooders to make life more cush for everyone from hardened convicts to short-timer jailbirds.

And they didn’t think that living the lush life was what doing time was meant to be.

So for almost 30 years state correctional authorities have had the ability to keep reporters out of prisons almost entirely through some of the strictest regulations in the country. We just don’t know what life is like inside without being able to talk to those who are there, and see for ourselves.

And it’s not as if the press associations with the help of legislators haven’t tried to get the onerous restrictions lifted. “Since 1998, there have been nine attempts by the Legislature to roll back CDCR’s 1996 regulations and restore media access to prisons. The Legislature passed all nine bills between 1998 and 2012, and each time the then-governors vetoed the legislation,” Skinners office reports. “SB 254 would be the Legislature’s 10th attempt at restoring media access to prisons. SB 254 would also apply to city and county jails because state realignment of prisons allowed for tens of thousands of incarcerated people to serve their sentences in local jails.”

The bill would allow reporters to tour prisons and jails and interview incarcerated people during prearranged interviews. It would allow the use video cameras and other recording devices, which are now mostly prohibited. It would prohibit prison and jail officials from monitoring interviews, which obviously could make prisoners reluctant to talk freely. It would protect jailbirds from being punished for participating in a news media interview. And, for the prisoners’ own protection, it would require officials to inform their attorney of record before a prearranged interview.

Pass and sign SB 254 for a more informed, more humane California.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.

Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, has proposed legislation that would prohibit banks which “do business with gun manufacturers from doing business with the state of California,” as the current text of Senate Bill 637 states. Min pretends the bill is about gun violence. But it would do more to promote Min’s upcoming congressional campaign than it would meaningfully address gun violence.

“SB 637 will force Wall Street to make a choice between the blood money offered by the gun industry and doing business with the state of California, sending a clear message and more importantly a strong market signal that the state of California will not, either directly or indirectly, finance gun violence,” Min said in a statement announcing the bill last week.

This sort of hysterical rhetoric is not a serious response to the very real and serious problem of gun violence in California across the country.

For one, it calls on banks to discriminate against lawful businesses simply because some politicians in government don’t like the sort of products being sold. That is an improper use of government power.

There are other problems, too. “The goal of this bill obviously is to drive the firearm industry out of existence, and with it the ability of law-abiding Americans to exercise their right to acquire firearms for lawful purposes including self-protection,” argues Larry Keane from the National Shooting Sports Foundation in a recent commentary. “It would shutter the industry that provides the tools law enforcement uses to protect America’s communities and the U.S. military to defend the homeland.”

Indeed, as much as Min doesn’t like it, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The overwhelming majority of gun owners and gun purchasers are exercising their constitutional right to protect themselves.

By contrast, it is commonly the case — perhaps even mostly the case — that those who use guns in the course of criminal activity are already not allowed to have them in the first place.

This is not the first time Dave Min has used the power of legislation for a hollow political stunt. Last year, the Legislature approved his bill SB 915 to ban the sale of firearms on state property, with the chief target being gun shows on fairgrounds. As pointed out by the Rural County Representatives of California, “Throughout the nation, there has been no evidence of firearms being obtained improperly at a county fairground property. SB 915 simply creates winners and losers in the retail firearm industry, and would drive firearm consumers to other retailers, including those that operate out-of-state.”

Alas, what Dave Min was after was a cheap legislative victory which gives the illusion that he’s fighting gun violence when all he’s actually doing is using the real problem of gun violence for cheap political points. Reject the stunts. Reject SB 637.

The Editorial Board The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.