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COG Moves Towards Endorsing California Beauty Pageant Contestant - The other day I received the following e-mail from an irate reader: "You'll be proud to know that the COG is moving in the right direction - City dollars being used at the COG to discover yet another worthwhile opportunity and important issue that will have a positive affect on the cities of the San Gabriel Valley. Item #6 Endorsement of Ms California USA. So you'll have 31 or so members sitting around earning their $50 to discuss endorsement of a pagent contestant? Really?? Maybe this is a way to get the geezers to pay attention."
Below is the agenda that includes what could be the most significant SGVCOG initiative since their battery recycling effort of a year or two back.
Executive Committee Regular Meeting Agenda
Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 4:30 PM
Alhambra City Hall, Conference Room A 111 South 1st Street, Alhambra, CA 91801-3796
PRELIMINARY BUSINESS4:30 PM
PRELIMINARY BUSINESS4:30 PM
1.Roll Call
2.Public Comment (If necessary, the President may place reasonable time limits on all comments)
PUBLIC COMMENT
CONSENT ITEMS (It is anticipated that the Executive Committee may take action on the following matters)
3.Meeting Minutes – 2/6/13
Recommended Action: Approve
4. Correspondence
Recommended Action: Receive and File
GENERAL COUNSEL (It is anticipated that the Executive Committee may take action on the following matters)
5.Status of Public Records Requests
Recommended Action: Receive and File
PRESIDENT’S REPORT (It is anticipated that the Executive Committee may take action on the following matters)
6.Miss California USA – Jodie Loree
Recommended Action: Direction to staff regarding SGVCOG endorsement.
SCAG sees longer economic recovery period, with L.A. County trailing Orange County(SGV Tribuneclick here): Southern California's economic recovery is moving slower than predicted and the results are varying greatly from county to county.
A SCAG committee, led by President Glen Becerra, a city councilman from Simi Valley, will use the report to lobby Sacramento lawmakers this week to relax stringent regulations such as the California Environmental Quality Act and focus on improving California's business climate.
Becerra said the mission will be to convince Sacramento that it needs to help businesses grow by adding jobs and convince those here to stay. "How many Fortune 500 companies are here anymore?" he asked the group. "The companies that can move, they are long gone."
The report characterized the six-county region's economic growth and job creation as "slow, uneven and inconsistent" and said returning to pre-recession employment will take longer than originally predicted by its economists in 2010.
Los Angeles County won't recover fully from the Great Recession until 2018, two years later than SCAG economists had predicted, according to the report entitled "Accelerating Southern California's Economic Recovery." A worst case scenario pushes recovery back to 2020.
(Mod: Yeah, it's all CEQA's fault. Nothing to do with the Rain Tax, or all of those bizarre "sustainability" initiatives peddled by our most intrusive of Regional Planning Organizations. It also looks like we have yet another vaunted SCAG "regional forecast" that didn't quite pan out. Does SCAG ever get it right? Can anyone think of a Federally funded organization in greater need of a few sequestration cuts than SCAG?)
City Hall’s Brand of Socialism: Soak the Working Class with Higher Taxes to Support Millionaire Cops and Firefighters(Ron Kaye L.A. click here): This is your last chance Los Angeles: If you pass Proposition A’s sales tax hike and put Greuel or Garcetti in the Mayor’s office, Feuer in City Attorney’s office and Zine in the Controller’s office with eight failed legislators, five obedient staffers and two cops on the City Council, you deserve the calamity that is coming.
Check out City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana’s “Road to Financial Recovery — City at a Crossroads” Analysis released Feb. 7 and see just how feeble City Hall’s efforts have been to rein in costs and how precarious the city’s financial position remains because of the inadequacy of the measures taken — more smoke and mirrors than substance, to be sure.
Santana who’s own position is said to be even more precarious than the city’s because the unions that so heavily funding the sleazy Greuel, Garcetti, Feuer and Zine campaigns have demanded he be fired. His crime: Daring to suggest over and over that stronger measures were needed while the elected officials showed what moral and political cowards they are by remaining silent.
You can see the depths of political perversity that reigns at City Hall in the opening words of Santana’s report when he credits “the steadfast leadership of the mayor” and “the resolve of the City Council” for a serious of half measures that have reduced general fund positions by 14.4 percent but not reduced salary costs a single penny.
Between the lines of his report, deep in the details, is a shocking story of mismanagement by those who would presume to rise to higher office like Greuel, Garcetti and Zine and those who want to double their salaries at public expense as Councilmen after years of destroying the state’s financial position as legislators in Sacramento.
(Mod: Just an awesome rant from Ron Kaye. Be sure to read the rest of it. Our kind of guy.)
Local cops increasingly turn to social media for preventive policing (Pasadena Star Newsclick here): On a cold and drizzly morning at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau, a 25-year-old social media dispatcher is sitting at a computer station in a dimly lit room skimming social media feeds on three large screens.
The tech-savvy civilian dispatcher is part of the bureau's new, 24-hour Electronic Communications Triage or eComm Unit that monitors social media and Internet content, shares information with the public and trains sheriff's officials to use such platforms.
"They're watching social media and Internet comments that pertain to this geographic area, watching what would pertain to our agencies so we can prevent crime, help the public," LASD Capt. Mike Parker said. "And now they're going to be ramping up more and more with more sharing and interacting, especially during crises, whether it's local or regional."
Since launching last September, the eight-member eComm unit has identified a suicidal teen on Instagram, intercepted bomb threats made on Twitter and discovered plans for hundreds of illegal drug parties via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
(Mod: How do you think our local gendarmes have been able to bust all of those unicorn and rainbow "nature dance" parties?)
Store owners say plastic bags ban causes more shoplifting (Seattle PI.comclick here): When the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a ban on plastic bags and required businesses to charge a nickel for paper bags, city leaders believed it would be better all around. "I think we've gotten to a place where it's really going to work for the environment, businesses and the community in general," Councilman Mike O'Brien said at the time.
But the bag ban is contributing to thousands of dollars in losses for at least one Seattle grocery store, and questions have been raised about the risk of food-borne illness from reusable bags that shoppers don't often wash.
Mike Duke, who operates the Lake City Grocery Outlet with his wife, said that since the plastic-bag ban started last July, he's lost at least $5,000 in produce and between $3,000 and $4,000 in frozen food.
"We've never lost that much before," said Duke, who found those numbers through inventories of stolen and damaged goods.
The Dukes opened the Lake City grocery store in June 2011, and Mike Duke said in the year before the plastic-bag ban losses in frozen food and produce were a small fraction of what he's seeing now. As he explained to seattlepi.com and also the North Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the shoplifters' patterns are difficult to detect.
They enter the store with reusable bags and can more easily conceal items they steal. The reusable bags require staff to watch much more closely, and even though the store has a loss-prevention officer and more than a dozen security cameras, it's tough to tell what a customer has paid for and what they may already have brought with them.
(Mod: OK, I guess we couldn't get through a Sunday News without at least one reusable shopping bag bashing article.)
Enjoy your day off. And watch out for whatever it is you're worried about.
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