Magic's Deep Pockets

In 1995, Riordan made de la Rocha commission president. She quickly launched an investigation of Bycel and lobbied other commission members to push him out. And by year’s end, Bycel was gone. To this day, the justification for Bycel’s dismissal has never been disclosed, and de la Rocha’s career on the panel has since proved undistinguished.

There was a formidable backlash against Bycel’s firing — including harsh criticism on the Times’ own editorial page. De la Rocha’s action also inspired Councilman Mike Feuer to shepherd through a voter-approved charter amendment that deprived Riordan of his power to appoint the Ethics Commission president — and one of his two appointments on the commission itself. When the amendment was enacted, the commission quickly removed de la Rocha from her post.

So de la Rocha’s impetuosity eventually cost her the job of commission president. As it also cost the mayor considerable power over the commission.

Despite the major collateral damage, de la Rocha did do the mayor’s dirties for him on the Ethics Commission. Riordan knows she can be counted on in the crunch. Even unto the ouster of popular, if controversial, managers.

You may ask, why does Riordan need someone of such keenly proven hatchet-personal capabilities on the city Police Commission? What message is he trying to send, and to whom?

OffBeat wouldn’t be surprised if the message weren’t a gentle reminder addressed to the increasingly outspoken Police Chief Bernard Parks as to who really holds the reins at City Hall. And as Bycel’s career suggests, this is a message any general manager ignores at his professional peril.

ROCKET SLIME

It’s been more than a decade since Rocketdyne shut down its nuclear-test site to focus on cleaning up the toxic goo contaminating its sprawling compound between Chatsworth and Simi Valley. The cleanup has been a long, slow process, with the aerospace giant fighting for ludicrously lenient standards every step of the way.

One of the barriers to better standards has been a standoff between the California Environmental Protection Agency and the state’s Department of Energy, which in a classic conflict of interest both regulates the cleanup and owns the grounds on which Rocketdyne’s nuclear site is situated.

So OffBeat was heartened at the announcement last week that the EPA, which backs a much more stringent definition of "clean" than the Department of Energy, plans within two months to submit a proposal to examine contamination levels on Rocketdyne grounds. A 1997 UCLA study linked increased cancer-death rates among Rocketdyne employees with exposure to nuclear materials on-site.

The EPA has been pushing for a contamination report for years, but has been unable to wrest the funding from the Department of Energy, which controls the bulk of the cleanup cash. Rocketdyne recently got nearly $150 million from the government toward its cleanup costs, and it looks like the EPA may finally get a slice.

Trouble is, the stricter the standards the more it costs to extract the toxic waste that has leached into the ground from the 16 aging iron-and-concrete reactors and other nuke facilities at the site.

At a recent meeting of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Workgroup (ostensibly created to figure out how best to clean up the site but, OffBeat suspects, really just a device to placate those pesky concerned residents and anti-nuclear activists), about 60 spectators looked on as various governmental and Rocketdyne types bemoaned the high cost of cleanup.

"We want to do the right thing," proclaimed Hannibal Joma, the local site manager for the Department of Energy. "We don’t want to break the bank," he added. "At the same time we don’t want to leave contamination on that site." Just where this heartfelt financial concern leaves Rocketdyne employees and local residents remains to be seen.