Health Care for Saints

I know that given the choice and the need, I‘d certainly prefer to be home. For many, it’s simply more efficient and strengthening to be taken care of in a familiar environment. It‘s what both the county representatives and health-care consumers want. And in this aging population, with its rising life expectancy, the demand for home care isn’t going to slack off.

So it‘s time for the state to get with the program, right? What do you say there, Assemblyman Cedillo?

City Hall Survives Doomsday

December 7 was one kind of day of infamy. Very locally speaking, December 8 was another. It was the day that the Los Angeles City Council managed to schedule itself four major and highly contentious items on the same agenda.

This made for a nightmare of congestion and frustration for everyone from the parking attendants in the basement to the visitors who waited -- and waited -- outside the packed Council Chamber to speak or listen.

Many of us saw this logjam coming months ago, when the Sunshine Canyon landfill-extension issue was continued to that date, which also included a re-hearing on the issuance of Mello-Roos housing-development bonds for the contentious Playa Vista project. Along the way, the meeting schedule further acquired the ornery Greek Theater lease and, for good measure, a Van Nuys golf course.

City Hall was, unsurprisingly, crammed. Sunshine Canyon alone filled the entire morning and ran into lunch time. Then came the final three acts. It was a long time to stand in the Council Chamber lobby waiting to have your say on that golf course.

Now most of the people who spoke December 8 had a chance to speak before, at one or another committee -- or even council -- meeting. Yet, particularly with Sunshine Canyon opponents, you felt the frustration that their point was not getting across. Even though the eventual council vote was a hairbreadth 8-7.

Sunshine was one of the two neighborhood issues (most anti--Playa Vista speakers didn’t come from the immediate surrounds of that massive project; the Greek issue was about who runs the place, not how the place is run) that day. I wondered if things would have turned out otherwise if the new charter‘s neighborhood councils were up and running.

That’s a complex question, given that Sunshine Canyon is a lab-specimen case of NIMBY. However discreetly it‘s done, reopening this dump on the northern city-county border to the city’s disposables won‘t enhance the lifestyle in nearby Granada Hills.

But an active 12th District neighborhood council might have kept alive the key issue behind Sunshine: Despite a decade’s recycling, L.A. produces far too much refuse. The new half-square-mile dump is to last 25 years. By 2020, lame duck Dick Riordan promises, the city will recycle 70 percent of its trash.

But can we count on the unforeseeable future members of the City Council to remember that promise? And, for that matter, what‘s supposed to happen to that other 30 percent?