Free Republic

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa moved Thursday to eliminate 1,000 city jobs and begin planning layoffs of city employees, one day after the City Council failed to muster the votes to do so to deal with an ongoing budget crisis. “We’re living beyond our means, we have difficult choices to make, we must protect our economic future,” Villaraigosa said during a late afternoon news conference. “Unfortunately, instead of making progress, we are headed in the wrong direction. That ends today.”

Every year around this time the world waits with bated breath for Pennsylvania's famous furry forecaster, "Punxsutawney Phil," to emerge from his burrow and tell us if spring will arrive early, or must we endure six more weeks of winter. Granted, winter in Southern California doesn't pack the same wallop it does in Cheyenne, Wyo., but since "Punxsutawney Phil" saw his shadow, winter it will be. Not to be upstaged by Pennsylvania, Los Angeles has its own February tradition. With atomic clock-like precision, "PunkTheVoters Paul" came out of his burrow, saw his shadow, and scurried away from the city's massive...

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decided not to run for Governor this summer and media consultant Charles Feldman believes he knows why: "Many have been puzzled by his decision recently not to run for governor; I am not. That's because I think he has already begun seriously entertaining the notion of running for the US Senate," he writes on The Huffington Post. The key to this is the future of Senator Dianne Feinstein. Will she run for Governor and win? Will she retire near the age of 80 when her current term is up in 2012? Or will she go for reelection,...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today announced his selection of Douglas Guthrie to become the new general manager of the city’s Housing Department. Guthrie, a former top official at the Chicago Housing Authority, most recently worked with private ventures focused on affordable urban development and the redevelopment of old public housing into mixed-use city centers. Guthrie served for six years as president of Kimball Hill Urban Centers in Chicago, which built mixed-income affordable housing in many depressed city centers that most traditional developers would avoid, including a project with former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, one of...

An appointee of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa voted two years ago to direct millions in public pension dollars to a company that invested in his own private equity fund, according to documents obtained by The Times. Elliott Broidy, chairman of Markstone Capital Partners, served until May on the Fire and Police Pensions board, which provides benefits to the city's retired police officers and firefighters. Real estate company CIM Group invested $500,000 in Markstone's private equity fund in 2004, according to an e-mail to the city's pension agency. Three years later, Broidy voted with his colleagues on the pension board...

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A 32-year veteran who helped clean up a corruption-plagued division of the Los Angeles Police Department was unveiled Wednesday as the city's new top cop. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced the appointment of deputy chief Charlie Beck as head of the LAPD following the decision of chief William Bratton to resign earlier this year. Villaraigosa said Beck was "the right man to lead the Los Angeles Police Department at the right time." "He's a man of character and integrity. He's a police officer who is tough on crime, and he's a leader with deep respect...

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's top executive, H. David Nahai, has resigned from the agency effective immediately, the mayor's office announced this morning. In a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Nahai said he was leaving to take a position as an advisor to former President Clinton's climate initiative. Nahai had served two years as a DWP commissioner before Villaraigosa elevated him to the post of chief executive and general manager in 2007. Ever since, he had been under fire from an array of forces. He drew strong criticism from the head of the powerful International Brotherhood of...

President Obama gave a corker of a campaign speech yesterday at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, promising to deliver on his promise to ease the rules for union organizing. If you want to know what this means in action, consider the current Teamsters play to control California ports. The dispute concerns the Clean Truck Program announced in 2007 by the Port of Los Angeles to ban the dirtiest trucks from carrying port cargo. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former union organizer, seized on the program as an opportunity to help his Teamster friends. Current law doesn't let the Teamsters organize...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- apparently a heavy sleeper -- was on the defensive Wednesday about why he's been violating the city's watering law. At a news conference celebrating the city's reduction in water use, the mayor said his home's sprinklers were in use during illegal times because of a glitch in the system. "Thank you for alerting me to this issue," Villaraigosa said Wednesday. The mayor told NBC4's Joel Grover that he was unable to hear the sprinklers because he's a heavy sleeper.

One of the nation’s largest and most troubled school districts finally got desperate enough to try something new to rescue its schools: private-sector competition. The Los Angeles Unified School District approved a plan to turn 250 of its schools to the private sector for management as charter schools, after winning a battle with the teachers union. Union officials threatened to take the school district to court, while Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa practically dared them to try

Villaraigosa joins rally in support of schools resolution August 25, 2009 |  2:12 pm Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa added his voice to a rally in support of a plan to give charter schools access to 50 new schools scheduled to open over the next four years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Villaraigosa spoke outside district headquarters before a crowd of at least 2,000 charter-school parents and supporters who drove or were bused in for the occasion. Most wore light blue shirts emblazoned with the slogan: “My Child, My Choice.”“We’re here today to stand up for our children,” Villaraigosa...

It was a town hall, certainly, but without the sense of chaos, the hint of danger, that we've come to associate with the words "town hall" in recent weeks. No gun-toting patriots, no dark portents of tyranny. No energy, in fact, at least not at the start of things. It was a blazing July morning, a Saturday, and several hundred people were clustered around tables in a subterranean conference room at USC. They were talking about overthrowing the government, and trying to stay awake. It was taking awhile for the coffee to kick in. ... "A small group of extremists...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's chief counsel, Thomas Saenz, has been tapped to become president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization announced Tuesday. Saenz has been one of Villaraigosa's closest advisors since taking the post in August 2005, recently serving as the mayor's lead representative in negotiations with city labor unions over salary and benefit concessions to help close the city's $530-million budget gap. And he helped to successfully defend a city ordinance that required hotels near Los Angeles International Airport to pay a "living wage" to workers. Saenz also was one...

Los Angeles will end use of coal-fired powerThu Jul 2, 2009 4:33pm EDT By Bernie Woodall LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Los Angeles will eliminate the use of electricity made from coal by 2020, replacing it with power from cleaner renewable energy sources, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Consumers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned utility in the United States with 1.45 million electricity customers, will see higher power bills in the fight against climate change, he added in his inaugural speech for his second four-year term as mayor on Wednesday. California does not have any...

Back in the day Angelenos seemed to have a preference for nondescript business-like mayors who kept a relatively low profile and were soft spoken such as Mayors Jim Hahn, Richard Riordan, and Tom Bradley. Now we're stuck with a narcissistic, egomaniac, skirt chasing, ambitious little caudillo who with a penchant for young reporters and news anchors. His first fling was with a young hot tamale reporter working for a Spanish language television station. Mirthala Salinas's job was to cover the mayor. She certainly did. The little caudillo's fling with her cost him his marriage. His wife forgave him once one...

A Los Angeles television reporter is dating Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, about two years after his extramarital affair with another local newscaster led to the breakup of his 20-year marriage. KTLA-TV Channel 5 reporter Lu Parker, a former Miss U.S.A., has been dating Villaraigosa since March, station officials confirmed Monday. On Sunday, while working as a weekend anchor, Parker announced a story about the likelihood of Villaraigosa running for governor in 2010. "Now that we're aware of the relationship, she will no longer be covering local politics," said KTLA-TV news director Jason Ball, who defended the journalist's ethics but declined to...

FROM the time we are little kids and see that first big red "F" scrawled across the top of a quiz, we try to steer clear of failure. Failure is personal - which is why Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa must be very unhappy these days. A trip to the grocery store or even his beloved LAX newsstands will be joyless for the entire month of June, thanks to Ed Leibowitz and those killjoys at Los Angeles Magazine. "Failure" is the headline plastered on the cover of the latest issue. Right there in big letters across the mayor's body, an epitaph to...

LOS ANGELES (CBS) ― Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has a message for Sacramento: hands off my dough. The mayor plans a high- profile lobbying trip to the state capitol Tuesday to protest potential confiscation of local government money by the nearly-bankrupt state government. Villaraigosa will be joined by mayors Jerry Sanders of San Diego and Miguel Pulido of Santa Ana. Villaraigosa's office said Monday that one state proposal to partly fill a $21.3 billion budget deficit would divert 8 percent of local government revenues to the state, which would reduce the Los Angeles general fund by $68 million. The...

If Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa does decide to run for governor - as many expect he will - he won't be using the cover of the latest issue of Los Angeles Magazine for his campaign launch. Emblazoned across a cover photo of a nattily dressed Villaraigosa is a giant headline: "Failure."

Villaraigosa calls on City Council to declare a fiscal emergency In light of L.A.'s $529-million budget deficit, the mayor seeks the authority to layoff and furlough thousands of city workers. The council is to consider the matter later this week. By Phil Willon May 12, 2009 With Los Angeles facing a $529-million budget deficit, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday urged the City Council to declare a fiscal emergency that would grant him the authority to layoff and furlough thousands of city workers. The request signals a more hard-line tack by the mayor to win salary and benefit concessions from the...