Marc B. Haefele

A startling plaudit appeared in last week’s letters section from none other than school-board member David Tokofsky. Tokofsky alleged, "I suspect that the constituents of the 14th [City Council District] are in for a dramatic loss of services and representation if Councilman Alatorre is not there in 1999." Actually, the......

A skeptical young Metropolitan Water District chemist explained it to me 10 years ago. Over a dinner of Montana Avenue pasta, she laid it out straight: "In the environment, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." I noted the remark and filed it away. At that precise time, though,......

The Daily News had fun lately with the aftermath of the "triumphant" Riordan Far East junket. The News found plenty of witnesses to several cases of upgrading the mayor's party's airline accommodations from business to first class. The upgraded included Mr. and Mrs. Riordan (though the mayor later claimed he'd......

An otherwise conservationist friend once said, "The problem with the Los Angeles River is that there is really no such thing. It's a concrete flood channel." That was what I thought. Until I attended my first Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) conference last week.It wasn't just a routine......

I woke with a start. The Tuesday council meeting had been droning along with mesmeric predictability. There was a six-figure transfer from the Storm Water Abatement Fund. Some General Plan updates. A Request for Proposal for an L.A. Triathlon. A list of new "Technical Corrections for the Plumbing Code." My......

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Where Alph the Sacred River Ran is actually not one of the named destinations of Mayor Richard Riordan's current Asian safari. But there aren't too many other Far Eastern places the city's 80-person official trade task force - enough people......

By the arcane calculus of county politics, Peter Kerndt's National Institutes of Health grant caused a lot more than $1.5 million-per-annum's worth of trouble. That's why, though it promised to facilitate research to cure the world's most widespread deadly disease, the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday officially voted the......

Here's a question for you: How could Richard Riordan neglect Los Angeles even more than he already does? The answer: become governor. For that matter, could anything do more to revive the Northern California secession movement? Or at least leave the state - and, with it, our city - teetering......

Dick Riordan did the right thing by California last week - counter to the urgings of rich business friends and certain ranking egos at the Los Angeles Times, he declined to run for governor. You could follow his reasoning. Competing against Jane Harman and Al Checchi, Republican Riordan wouldn't get......

The McKinley Building doesn’t jut over the horizon. It’s not the city’s tallest, oldest or most significant architectural landmark, but it once was a building that assured you — after you walked into its soothing, European-style courtyard — that the world was a better place than it had seemed a......