Blog by Kay Ebeling
Housing cost keeps me from moving back to my hometown L.A. Meanwhile I've been watching their City Council meetings online from five hundred miles away, to keep track of all the progress, to watch the fast and effective actions council is taking after homelessness was declared an emergency January 2023.
Progress has been inept and
scandalously slow as City of Angels Blog reported in May.
However, I've kept watching the meetings, mostly because of the lively Public Comments section, which to me is where the real stories lie, although the city website doesn't even bother to include them in their “minutes.”
Here are some interesting words from the Oct 31 meeting, Video is linked below.
At 01.37.25 Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, who is circulating petitions to run for council herself, calls in her comment by phone.
Transcript:
On item Twenty three.
Interesting thing about
this emergency declaration, there's no rent freeze, there's no eviction
moratorium. The main function of it is
to expedite building contracts.
Now I don't know what
kind of emergency you all have ever experienced where we go, quick, we need to
expedite a process that'll take years, even if we start today it’ll take
years.
And in an emergency, specifically, you look around for resources you have like the roughly two and a half vacant units for every unhoused resident that exists in Los Angeles. And you use that.
(Two and a half vacant units for every unhoused resident that exists in Los Angeles!)
Stacey, cont’d:
You
look at what capital incentives are profiting off of the crisis and you curb
them. All this emergency declaration does
is make it really easy for developers to line their pockets. Then Item 24 is an emergency action that's
super vague but okay thanks, Mayor Bass.
You do those emergency contracts.
Item twenty six is an
economic study about the rent stabilization ordinance. My problem with these studies is that you get
funding for them, you use the public’s time to pass the motions for studies,
and then time goes by and we never hear back.
We're still- waiting to
hear back the report on 4118.
So I don't know if a
hundred and eighty some thousand dollars for this study is going to be money
well spent. That's information that
would be good to have but I don't know why it's going to cost so much to get
that information.
Item twenty eight is a joke.
(Those lights aren’t helping. If you want to help victims and survivors of domestic violence, get people off the street,)
As a survivor of
domestic violence, I can say with absolute certainty that those lights aren’t
helping. Domestic violence is the
leading reason women become homeless.
If you want to help
victims and survivors of domestic violence, get people off the street, make
housing a human right, make health care free, all those things will help D-V
victims a lot more than lighting up a bridge and I don't know why we're
entertaining Kevin DeLeon’s motions anyway.
Comments continue at 01.40.25 of video
* * *
[Earlier in the meeting at 01 31 14 public speakers [SOUNDS LIKE] Sandra and James Myers made thus plea to the ever distracted City Council members present:
S: This is about the
homeless [SOUNDS LIKE] nonprofit organization Hopkins. They have you in the program for a year, and
we did everything they said and we never received our voucher. Then they started selling the vouchers for
four hundred dollars apiece. If you're a
couple, that's eight hundred dollars we can't afford. And I'm like well that's not right.
So we went downtown to
the library and the case manager told us to give this to the president of the
meeting here today. So he can see the names of the people involved at
Hopkins.
You guys give millions
of dollars to them, for them to provide places for the homeless, and they're
not doing what they're supposed to do. And
it's time to be heard about that. The
people need help and [the homeless agency] is not giving it to them. If we do
the program, why do we have to pay four hundred dollars apiece for the
vouchers?
***
A court officer takes her papers and the meeting goes
on.
Here at City of Angels Blog we will be covering more Public Comments at city council meetings and other words of interest in the coming months. I used to transcribe for a living and AI has replaced all my jobs, so I finally retired at age 75. But I still want to keep up my skills, dinosaur as they are. Beats dementia…
***
The L.A. city council
is not making much progress in the homeless emergency,
As City of Angels Blog reported in May: WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2023
TRANSCRIPT: Public speakers beg for housing; L.A. City
Council approves a luxury Marriott instead, on site that used to be a public
library and had been promised to the community for years.
https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2023/05/transcript-public-speakers-beg-for.html
***
The speaker calling in
transcribed here, Stacey
Segarra-Bohlinger, is now
circulating petitions to run for City Council herself after months of appearing
before Council with smart, intuitive, problem solving comments in her 1-4
minutes of allotted time, during which most council members are shockingly and
shamefully distracted, In her comments,
Stacey also often sings in a theater-trained voice an improvised lyric about city
government, a practice I hope she puts to good use in her campaign for
council.
Almost every time Stacey
Segarra-Bohlinger speaks at Council Public Comments, she zings a ringer and
summarizes everything the city government is doing wrong and how to fix it,
with insight and Rogers and Hart clarity.
Watch here in the near
future at City of Angels Blog for more coverage of Stacey’s campaign and other public comments to L.A. City Council meetings.
WATCH THE CITY COUNCIL MEETING HERE
https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2023/11/regular-city-council-103123-quoted-in.html
***
-ke
Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger
