Independent thoughts on the most important election in the history of Los Angeles

When the City of Los Angeles is sued, either by someone injured on City property, or by a disgruntled employee, it’s the duty of the City Attorney to defend the City.

I would gladly eat a spoonful of spaghetti laced with dog food for $1M, wouldn’t you? Hell, in these troubled times, I’d take $500K and laugh all the way to the bank.

But our Mayor, and Jack Weiss, signed off on a deal that cost the City (that’s us by the way) $5.5M when they settled Firefighter Tennie Pierce’s case. Yes, Pierce “only” got $2.7M, the rest went in legal fees.

That’s the fiasco that’s been going on in the City Attorney’s Office under Rocky Delgadillo’s “leadership,” and there’s every reason to believe we’ll have more of the same with Jack Weiss.

If Weiss has little experience as a prosecutor, he has NONE when it comes to civil litigation. In fact Weiss is so completely out of his depth in the world of civil litigation that he made two well known blunders that show just how pathetically unqualified and unsuitable he is for the job of City Attorney.

Just a spoonful of dog food cost the City $5.5M, and Jack Weiss signed off on the deal!

Anyone who has tried to drive to or from Downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica knows how desperately congested the east-west streets have become.

The reason for the traffic congestion is the irresponsible high-density over-development that Jack Weiss and the Mayor have supported, but that’s altogether another topic.

When the Mayor chose to hold a photo-op press conference to announce his solution to this problem - a one-way traffic plan on Pico and Olympic, Jack Weiss fulfilled his role as the Mayor’s faithful lap-dog and supported the plan.

Weiss did not care what the effect of such an alteration in the traffic would have on local businesses who would lose customers because the one-way traffic plan also called for no on-street parking.

Weiss did not care what the effect of having customers parking cars on residential streets would have on residents who already have difficulties finding on-street parking for themselves.

Weiss did not care that the businesses and residents impacted by his rash support of the Mayor’s hasty and ill-thought out plan, were his constituents - yes, Pico/Olympic is in his Council District.

But worse than all of the above, the man who wants to be City Attorney, Jack Weiss, DID NOT KNOW that such a major change would require an Environmental Impact Report!

As a result of Jack Weiss’s ignorance of the law, the residents and business owners had to sue the City to stop the one-way traffic plan from going forward, and they won.

The City now will have to conduct an Environmental Impact Report before any such change can be made, and they likelihood is that the EIR will call for the provision of multi-story parking lots to give business customers somewhere to park, and give some relief to the residents.

Pico Boulevard at rush hour

Did not know that changing traffic would require an Environmental Impact Report

Whatever the Mayor wants, Weiss OK’s

It’s a long story, but in essence it goes like this. For years the City of Los Angeles had strict laws on the number of billboards that were allowed in the City.

Mayors Hahn and Villaraigosa started messing with the law. First, it was allowing adverts on bus stop shelters to offset the cost of the shelters. Then it was to allow developers of favored projects, like the Staples Center and LA Live, to make money by having multiple advertising billboards.

The problem was that by making so many exceptions to the law, the law ceased to be constitutionally valid. Billboard operators who were not able to get ‘exceptions’ sued the City, and they won. The billboard operators then started putting up billboards wherever they wanted, without any permits whatsoever. These were illegal billboards, but the City did nothing to stop their growth

Whether Mayor Villaraigosa secretly wanted the billboard operators to win (they were and are contributors to his and Jack Weiss’s campaigns) is another matter. However, the loss of the case might have cost the City millions of dollars, so the Rocky Delgadillo, the City Attorney, came up with a settlement that basically not only allowed the existing illegal billboards to become ‘legal,’ but also allowed 900 of the estimated 9,000 billboards to become digital.

Digital billboards are many times more profitable for the billboard operators because they can display multiple adverts - often changing every 30 seconds, whereas the conventional billboards are costly and slow to change.

The Delgadillo settlement did not include any additional revenue for the City, even though the billboard operators stood to make millions of dollars from the overly generous terms that Delgadillo gave them.

The Delgadillo settlement was proposed to the City Council for approval. When the City Council voted for this ridiculous settlement, there were two lawyers present; Delgadillo and Jack Weiss. Weiss approved the settlement either knowing that it was a bad deal, or because he was ignorant of the law, and had no idea of what he was doing.

Either way, Jack Weiss’s lack of judgment and experience cost the City millions of dollars in lost revenue, and caused the billboard blight that we all now have to live with.

Jack Weiss either has no idea what he’s doing in the realm of civil law, or he’s too corrupt and behooved to his campaign contributors to make fair and just decisions for the City. He would make a terrible City Attorney.

Take a look at that figure. Even though the City Attorney’s Office has a staff of over 500 qualified lawyers, in 2008 the City Attorney’s Office spent nearly $40M on hiring private law firms to represent the City on matters that Rocky Delgadillo felt were “too complex” for his staff.

What kind of cases are “too complex?” Well, one example is the Firefighter case at the top of this page. Instead of letting the deputy city attorneys who routinely defend the City against the claims of disgruntled employees, the CIty hired a private law firm at a cost of $2.3M to “defend” the City against Firefighter Tennie Pierce’s claim that he had been discriminated against after being the subject of a practical joke. Pierce was no stranger to practical jokes, in fact the evidence was that Pierce was the biggest practical joker at the Fire House.

So why does the City spend so much money on hiring private law firms to do the work that the City Attorney’s Office is more than qualified to perform?

1. One reason, perhaps the only legitimate one, is that there are cases where there is a “conflict of interest” which, when simplified, means that the City Attorney’s Office would be representing both sides of a dispute. Genuine conflicts of interest are rare, but they do occur. 
   

2. Another reason why legal work for the City is farmed out to private law firms is that it is a way to do ‘favors’ for supporters. Take a look at the law firms who contribute to the Mayor and Jack Weiss’s campaigns; you might not be surprised to find that some of those law firms are also routinely hired by the City.
   

Whichever way you look at it, there is something very improper about spending so much of our money on legal fees that are, very likely, unnecessary and simply a part of the “pay to play” character of Los Angeles politics.

Jack Weiss has no plan to change the way business is done at the City; that’s why the Mayor is not only supporting Weiss, but fundraising and acting as his campaign manager.

Carmen Trutanich has a plan to cut the wasteful expenditure of City funds on hiring private law firms and at the same time, stop the doling out of ‘favors’ to Weiss and Villariagosa’s campaign supporters.

Under Trutanich’s plan, when a ‘conflict of interest’ is found, the City Attorney’s Office will contract with City Attorney offices of neighboring cities where quality legal representation is available at the government rate, not the $750 an hour rate charged by private law firms.