August 2014 – Zev Yaroslavsky

Staging Grand Park’s biggest act yet

August 28, 2014 No Comments

With major names like Kanye West and John Mayer on tap, Grand Park is in the spotlight.

The pink furniture is being packed off to storage. The splash pad is disappearing under a protective mat. The street closure notices have been circulating for a week and a security detail of more than 1,000 has been assembled.

With Grand Park scheduled to welcome its biggest crowd yet this Labor Day weekend, local authorities have mustered a similarly impressive response to gear up for Budweiser Made In America, the two-day downtown music festival being curated by Jay Z and promoted by Live Nation.

“There are a lot of headline acts and they’re expecting more than 30,000 people each day,” explained Christine Frias, a program manager in the county CEO’s office who is coordinating the departments involved in the deployment.

“I think, with the help of Grand Park, the Sheriff’s Department and all the collaboration that’s going on, this event will be successful. “

Still, she notes, “you have to take extra precautions when there’s going to be alcohol.”

Preparations for the August 30-31 festival have been the talk of the town since April, when Jay Z and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the bicoastal music festival would be held this year in downtown’s most popular new park.

Though Grand Park has seen some grand crowds—about 20,000 gathered there for its first New Year’s Eve bash, for instance—they have mostly been free to the public and explicitly family friendly.

And peaceful: Frias said the more than 10,000 people who gathered there for July 4 music and fireworks were so well behaved that none of the park’s plants or furnishings had to be replaced.

But the Budweiser MIA concert is the first attempt to use the 12-acre space as a venue for a major ticketed rock concert, and—though neither Jay Z nor his superstar wife, Beyoncé are among the acts on the lineup—this event is expected to be a doozy, with Kanye West, John Mayer and other big names on the roster. More than 30 bands are expected to play over the festival’s two days.

Three stages, an amusement park ride and an exhibition skate park will dot the lawns between City Hall and the Music Center, and 40 to 50 food trucks will ring the venue. And while all ages will be welcomed, the festival site will allow beer drinking at more than a half-dozen public and VIP beer gardens.

“It’s going to be a couple of long hot days, and hopefully people will mostly consume water, but we are concerned about alcohol consumption,” said Los Angeles Sheriff’s Capt. Chuck Stringham.

About 270 sheriff’s deputies and a similar number of Los Angeles police are expected to be deployed on each day of the festival, along with several dozen Music Center security officers and an unknown number of undercover officers who will be enforcing laws against underage drinking for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Another 370 private licensed security guards are expected to be on hand at the behest of the acts themselves and the concert promoter, according to a spokeswoman from Garcetti’s office. The Sheriff’s Department will handle security within the event perimeter and LAPD will be in charge outside.

Alcohol will be permitted only in the beer gardens, and patrons will be limited to two beers at a time and required to produce valid photo I.D.s, he said, adding that attendees will not be allowed to exit and re-enter the venue.

Frias said the park itself will be braced for the masses. Grand Park is owned by the county and operated by the Music Center, although the surrounding streets are mostly the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles. Live Nation is paying $500,000 to the city to cover its costs and $600,000 to the Music Center to cover park rental and county services.

But the promoters must pay extra for any damage, and more than 300 workers per day have been on the site this week, spending an average of 15 hours a day to assemble about 100 tractor trailers’ worth of equipment, according to a spokesman for Live Nation.

Videographers have been filming the lush grounds all week, she said, to establish the park’s pre-festival condition, and the park’s signature hot pink furniture has been stored for safekeeping.

Vulnerable landscaping is being cordoned off with temporary fencing. And, she said, the splash pad around the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain also is getting a custom buffer to protect it from a stage that is being installed over it for the festival deejays.

“The splash pad will be turned off and dried, and then they’re putting a 4- to 5-inch rubberized mat on it to cover it and distribute the weight of the equipment on top of it,” said Frias.

Outside the Lines, the construction firm that helped build the splash pad, will oversee the construction to ensure that none of the festival preparations damages the water feature or surrounding tile and LED lights, she said.

Perhaps the trickiest set of preparations is for festival traffic. Already, various downtown streets have been closed this week for delivery of production equipment and stages. (Most of the work has gone on overnight).

Though ticket sales are not as high as the initial daily estimates of 50,000, the crowds are still expected to set records for Grand Park, and organizers have spent months reassuring downtown residents and business owners that the area won’t be inundated.

“But we’ve had major closures in the downtown area before—we know how to do this,” said Aram Sahakian, who oversees special traffic operations for the city Department of Transportation.

On the Fourth of July, for instance, he noted, thousands cars were swiftly ushered in and out of downtown parking structures by traffic control officers who patrolled the park area on foot and on Segways.

“And how about Fiesta Broadway? That used to bring in hundreds of thousands of people,” Sahakian said.

Organizers are urging concertgoers to take public transportation, Sahakian said, and between 7,000 and 10,000 are expected to ride mass transit into the venue. But the Civic Center station—which opens directly into Grand Park—will be closed so that riders can’t bypass the ticket-takers, and to accommodate safety concerns.

Though the Civic Center station does have a second entrance outside the perimeter of the festival, event organizers and law enforcement insisted that the whole station be closed because the bottleneck that would have resulted from channeling thousands of riders at one time into one exit might have overcrowded the platform and created a safety hazard, said Metro spokesman Marc Littman.

So subway riders are being urged to get off at Pershing Square or Union Station and walk the few blocks to the venue.

Meanwhile, Sahakian said, those who drive will be directed to downtown parking garages, though some may have to park as far from the venue as Staples Center or Dodger Stadium, and ride in on shuttles. Extra traffic engineers and traffic control officers will be on hand to help channel traffic toward open parking structures, he said.

“Yes, this is a first time thing for the park, but we’re prepared,” he said. “Hey, we moved the Space Shuttle, right?”

Budweiser Made in America curator Jay Z performing earlier this year with event headliner Kanye West.

Posted 8/28/14

Rescuing a real Trooper

August 27, 2014 No Comments

Seven months after being found wounded on the street, Trooper gets his first rider.

The 17-year-old gelding was in horrendous shape when sheriff’s deputies found him staggering along a rural residential street in the high desert city of Lancaster.

The malnourished, dark-chocolate brown horse had been shot six times. He had wounds on his forehead, neck, right shoulder and ribs. The deputies immediately summoned workers from the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control, who rushed him to the local animal care center and saved his life. They named him Trooper.

Several weeks later, as Trooper continued his recovery, George Rief walked through the shelter’s door. He’d been dropping by for years, looking for horses to adopt for a rescue operation he ran with his wife in neighboring Kern County. When he spotted Trooper, his heart sank. “He was in a real bad way,” Rief said. But that would soon change.

Trooper is an extreme example of a nation-wide surge in abandoned, abused and neglected horses that has put a strain on local shelters. Since 2008, L.A. County animal care employees have rescued an average of 125 horses per year—far above the usual numbers. Just this week, the Board of Supervisors voted to spend $350,000 for a 10-stall, open air horse barn in Agoura Hills, where there’s a strong market for horse adoptions. The barn will serve as a way station for malnourished, sick and injured horses while they recover and await adoption. It also will double as an evacuation facility in case of wildfires and other disasters.

Horses are expensive to keep, and that’s the problem. Food and basic care cost upwards of $2,000 per year, with boarding adding another $300 to $1,000 a month. When the recession hit, some owners couldn’t handle the outlay, said Marcia Mayeda, director of the county’s animal care and control department. Compounding the problem, demand at horse auctions dropped because of changes in federal laws and regulations that banned the slaughter of horses for meat. Previously, horse meat could be processed and shipped to countries like France and Belgium, where it is a traditional part of the diet.

“That dried up a place for owners to dispose of their horses—not that I’m in favor of that, but it contributed to why we’re now getting the horses,” Mayeda said.

The department accepts individual horses for a fee of $60 or $250, if the horse must be picked up.“There’s no need to abandon horses,” Mayeda said. “They can take them to a shelter and we’ll rehabilitate them and find them a home.”

The county finds homes for nearly all its horses, although some require behavioral training to make them suitable for adoption. In rare cases in which there’s an untreatable condition, animals are euthanized. However, even malnourished, sick or injured animals often make full recoveries and can become riding horses for new owners, said Mayeda, a horse owner herself. Older or less fit animals still find homes as “pasture pets.”

“Even if they are a little arthritic and can’t be ridden any more, people will adopt them to be companion horses for animals they already have at home,” Mayeda said. “Horses are herd animals; they don’t like to be alone.”

George Rief didn’t want that fate for Trooper.

When he showed up at the Lancaster shelter three years ago, he was breaking his wife’s rules. He’s not supposed to go there alone because of his soft spot for ailing horses. “It’s like Home Depot; I’m not allowed there myself, either,” George joked. But when he saw Trooper’s condition, he called wife Clarene and recounted the tragic story. She was happy he went.

The couple first became horse owners because of Clarene’s childhood love of the animals. What started as a hobby evolved into a small-scale rescue operation. Over a period of eight years, the couple adopted 11 horses from the Lancaster shelter.

“At any given time they’d have 10 horses down there—eight of them would be great and two of them were bags of bones,” George said. “So we’d get the two bags of bones and bring them home.”

Clarene continued to nurse Trooper’s wounds, as their veterinarian monitored his progress. A farrier went to work on his hooves, which had grown to twice the length they should have been because of neglect. After seven months of rehabilitation, Trooper was doing so well that he accepted a rider.

“Everything healed up nice,” George said. “He’s as gentle as a lamb and easygoing—loves to be around people.”

The Riefs kept Trooper for a year while they waited for the perfect family to adopt him. He was never for sale, George said, but it took time to find someone who met their unofficial test: “If I don’t like them, my wife don’t like them or the horse don’t like them, they don’t get the horse.”

Finally, last December, a woman seeking a companion horse for her mare passed the test. George Rief has visited Trooper a couple of times in his new home, where he loves to take baths and recently passed a veterinary exam with flying colors.

“He’s getting fat,” Rief said. “I think she’s overfeeding him but I don’t care. He’s just enjoying life.”

Posted 8/27/14

Opera’s beach blanket bravura

August 27, 2014 No Comments

A Roaring ’20s-era staging of “La Traviata” will be shimmying to the beach. Photo/Robert Millard

It’s not every day that the sublime vocal talents of Plácido Domingo share a place in the sun with funnel cakes, caricature artists and an iconic ocean-front Ferris wheel.

But the tourist-friendly charms of the Santa Monica Pier will be meeting the glories of opera at its grandest when LA Opera brings its first-ever free live simulcast to the beach on Wednesday, September 17.

The high-definition broadcast of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” beamed live via satellite from the stage of the county Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to a giant screen on the pier’s wooden parking deck, ushers in a new tradition for the company, which plans to offer the program every other year.

“If I weren’t in the cast for this production, I’d want to be in the audience myself!” Domingo, the opera’s general director, said in a news release announcing “Opera at the Beach.”

Domingo is scheduled to sing the role of Giorgio Germont in a production that also includes soprano Nino Machaidze (as Violetta Valéry) and tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz (as Alfredo Germont), with LA Opera music director James Conlon conducting.

“La Traviata” tells the story of a glamorous courtesan and her doomed love affair; NPR once dubbed it “the original Pretty Woman.” It opens LA Opera’s 2014-15 season on Saturday, September 13, with the beach simulcast taking place at 7:30 p.m. the following Wednesday.

For the production team, turning a day at the beach into a night at the opera has had as many complications as the most byzantine libretto.

The pier has hosted concerts and movie premieres, but never an opera simulcast. Until now.

“It’s been a big challenge. There are other opera companies that routinely do simulcasts, and we’re not one of them. For us this is the first time,” said Rupert Hemmings, the opera’s senior director of production. “The off-site logistics involved with setting up the pier and getting all of the equipment at that end and then of course the actual transfer of the product by satellite—all of that is new to us. It has been a steep learning curve, but I think we have everything in place for a success.”

The 21-by-40-foot screen, elevated on a six-foot-high platform, will be angled toward the ocean at the end of the pier’s parking deck. Folding chairs and blankets are recommended for spectators, who will be sitting on the deck’s rough-hewn wood beams, as they do for Santa Monica’s popular Twilight Concerts series. Although there is no charge for admission, the opera strongly encourages those who wish to attend to pre-order tickets online. (There’s a $1 handling fee for each order of up to 8 tickets.)

No alcoholic beverages are allowed, but there will be a designated beer garden. And while the simulcast is free, parking isn’t—so be prepared and perhaps consider reserving a space in advance.

The opera, underwritten with funds made available by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, will be sung in Italian, with English translations superimposed on the screen during the simulcast.

With the advent of “Opera at the Beach,” L.A. joins a number of other cities where simulcasts have become a popular part of the cultural fabric, including San Francisco’s “Opera at the Ballpark” at AT&T Park and Washington, D.C.’s “Opera in the Outfield” at Nationals Park.

Whatever the locale, the name of the game is enticing new audiences to sample the art form, risk-free, while enjoying a communal event at a local landmark.

“I think that opera can be seen as elitist,” the opera’s Hemmings said. “I don’t feel it is, having been in it for most of my life, but I think when people can get out there and see this kind of thing for free—and see how much fun it is, and how emotionally stimulating it can be—that’s fantastic.”

In this 2010 photo, San Franciscans get their free opera fix at AT&T Park.

LA Opera’s simulcast of “La Traviata” starts at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 17, at the Santa Monica Pier. Free tickets are available here, and directions and parking information are here.

Posted 8/27/14

Valley date with CicLAvia [updated]

August 21, 2014 No Comments

Attention, San Fernando Valley. CicLAvia is heading your way in March.

It’s been downtown, to East L.A. and to the beach, but one major part of town—the sprawling and populous San Fernando Valley—has been left out of the CicLAvia fun. All that changes on March 8, 2015.

That’s when the hugely popular open streets event is set to roll down two well-known Valley thoroughfares, Ventura and Lankershim boulevards. The car-free route now being finalized will stretch down Ventura from Coldwater Canyon to Lankershim, then dog-leg north on Lankershim to Chandler Boulevard, where Metro’s Orange and Red lines meet.

Zachary Rynew, who serves as a volunteer “bike ambassador” to the Valley for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, said the event will energize cyclists in a community that traditionally has lagged behind areas of the city where bike culture has more fully taken hold. With its flat, wide streets, the Valley is ripe to emerge as a cycling hot spot, Rynew said.

“CicLAvia is really going to be an eye-opener,” he said. “The Valley can work at a bicycle scale, it’s just that people need the confidence to get out there on the streets and feel comfortable.”

Aaron Paley, CicLAvia’s co-founder, said details of the event still need to be worked out, but outreach to community and business stakeholders already is underway. Two weeks ago, he and his staff pedaled the route themselves to get a street-level view. Paley plans to continue engaging the community over the next few months before releasing a formal announcement, complete with maps, around the beginning of 2015.

The route’s nexus with major transit lines and bike paths along the Orange Line, Chandler Boulevard and parts of the L.A. River is intended to make the event convenient and accessible for cyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooter-riders and hula hoopers who want to spend the day car-free.

“When we thought about doing the first one in the Valley, I really wanted to pick up on the infrastructure,” Paley said. “We planned it around the Red and Orange lines.”

Buses and trains will play a big part in moving people to and from the Valley CicLAvia, which is expected like previous events to attract more than 100,000 participants. Avital Shavit, project manager of Metro’s open streets program, said transit accessibility was one of the key criteria evaluated under a grant program that awarded the Valley event $366,773 in June.

“CicLAvia has had a direct effect with promoting ridership on Metro,” Shavit said. On the Red and Purple subway lines, she said, “ridership has gone up an average of 25% on the day of CicLAvia events over the past three years.”

She added: “It’s a way to get people to try Metro for the first time. They’re coming to a car-free event and thinking ‘How are we going to get there?’ One great way is by taking Metro.”

The event’s route will pass by major entertainment landmarks like Universal Studios and interact with community staples like the Studio City Farmers Market. Additionally, CicLAvia’s Paley wants to focus on the resurgent waterway that runs through part of the route. “I want to do something related to the revitalization of the L.A. River in the Valley,” Paley said, referring to greenway projects that have made major bike, pedestrian and environmental improvements to sections of the river.

For people like the bike coalition’s Rynew, a 30-year Valley resident, the most exciting prospect is being able to show certain people what they’ve been missing.

“The great part of CicLAvia is that you get to showcase your neighborhood to the rest of the city,” Rynew said. “The last three years has been the most exciting time in the Valley’s development, with the NoHo arts district and all these great restaurants going in on Ventura Boulevard. I think people that are afraid to go over the hill are going to see the Valley in a whole different light.”

Updated: 8/22/14: A spokesman for Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Krekorian emphasized Friday that the date for the proposed San Fernando Valley CicLAvia, provided by the organization’s executive director, has not been finalized and could potentially change in the weeks ahead. There could also be revisions in the route as input is sought from neighborhood residents and businesses, said spokesman Ian Thompson. Krekorian’s council district includes the San Fernando Valley.

Posted 8/21/14

A force of our best nature

August 21, 2014 No Comments

Social worker Cynthia Langley at the bus stop where the Professor had lived for more than a decade.

Cynthia Langley is no quitter. Lives depend on that.

A social worker for more than three decades, Langley fights chronic homelessness one weary soul at a time, spending day and night trying to persuade the most entrenched residents of the street to give housing a chance. She’s never welcomed with open arms. But in the end, she receives enough hugs of gratitude to keep her spirits strong.

“Someone has got to reach out to these individuals. They’re somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s cousin, somebody’s loved one,” says the 58-year-old Langley, herself a grandmother of four. “And I’m stubborn enough not to take no for an answer.”

Earlier this year, I called upon Langley’s employer, the miracle-working Step Up on Second, for help on a case that would take every ounce of her stubbornness and devotion.

For more than a decade, a homeless man had taken over a bus shelter on Beverly Boulevard at Gardner Street near the Fairfax area. Over the years, he’d amassed a rising mountain of boxes and bags. The situation was no longer acceptable—for him or the community.

I knew that if anyone could get him off the street it was Step Up on Second, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit that provides permanent supportive housing to the most vulnerable of our homeless population. In fact, I’d recently allocated county funds to the organization to expand its outreach into the Beverly corridor, an area of increasing homelessness. Langley was brought aboard with that money and would soon come face-to-face with one her toughest challenges—a 64-year-old man who’d come to be called the “Professor.”

What happened during the next four months is both inspiring and instructive—a real-life look at what it actually takes to bring about the first steps in a long journey of recovery. It’s a remarkable story of skill, perseverance and trust, one with a happy beginning but no promise of a satisfying ending. That simply is the reality we face in trying to coax the homeless into homes, especially those who, like the Professor, are battling mental illnesses.

Langley says the first time she met the Professor at his bus stop, he was sitting, as usual, with his back to the street, keeping an eye on his belongings piled high behind the shelter. It was a chilly morning and he was wearing a big brown coat. “He turned around slowly with an angry, suspicious look,” she recalls. After Langley explained why she was there, the Professor said flatly: “I’m not interested.”

“Would you mind if I came back?” Langley asked. He turned his back on her. But she returned anyway, day after day, always deferential. “I know you’re busy,” Langley would say, “so what times work for you? What do you prefer?”

The Professor’s belongings at Beverly Boulevard and Gardner Street, before he moved into his own apartment.

Soon, the facts of his life started slowly unspooling: He was born in Germany. He was physically abused by his father. He immigrated to the U.S. as a teen with his family. He went to UCLA and earned a bachelor’s degree in military science and a master’s in medieval history. He served in the Army. He never married. He even worked as
an adjunct professor at UCLA (hence the respectful nickname bestowed on him by Step Up on Second.)

Eventually, he began sharing with Langley the rituals of his daily life. He told her he’d spend hours at the neighborhood Starbucks. He’d clean up in the bathrooms at Pan Pacific Park, across the street from the bus shelter. Nice people would regularly bring him food and clothing. He’d been living this way, he said, for 14 years.

It also became clear to Langley and the team at Step Up on Second, including program director Dr. Michael Marx, that the Professor was distrustful and erratic. One day he’d be cooperative, the next combative, launching into diatribes and rants. He worried that the Starbucks was bugged.

Langley says she tried to stay mindful of the professor’s delicate mental state. She’d make sure to ask him, for example, whether it was all right for her to take a few notes as they spoke. That way, he wouldn’t think she was scribbling secret things about him to give to the government. Sometimes, he’d get racially provocative. “You’re African American,” he’d say to Langley, “what do you know?” But Langley would say calmly, without a hint of the irritation she felt: “Everyone has a right to their opinion.”

Always, she’d steer the conversation back to the primary objective.

“You’re just another one of those people who think they’re going to get me housed,” he’d say. “You’re right,” she’d answer. “I’m going to keep trying. I really do care about you and I’d like to see you living in a comfortable place. One day, I can imagine you housed. Can you imagine that?”

“No,” he’d respond. “I’m always going to live on the street.”

Still, he was continuing to open up. He eventually gave Langley a link to his past, a friend from his UCLA days with whom he’d once lived just a few miles away—the last home the Professor would know.

When Langley and Marx visited the friend, he said the Professor had been seriously hoarding and he had no choice but to ask him to leave, although they remained in contact. The friend, now in his 70s, also gave Langley and Marx an old datebook the Professor left behind, containing, among other things, his social security card, his honorable discharge from the Army in the 1980s and photos from years back.

Finally, in May, a breakthrough came when Langley and Marx asked the Professor if he’d like to see the Hollywood apartment that, just in case, had been reserved for him at a place called Michael’s Village. To the amazement and elation of the Step Up on Second team, he agreed to get in Langley’s car and go. When they walked inside, Marx took the lead.

“You’re a professor, can’t you imagine yourself sitting here writing?”

“Yes, I could,” the Professor responded. “This is for me?”

“This is your unit.”

“It’s too good to be true,” the Professor said.

“It is good, and it is true,” Marx assured him.

As Langley listened to the conversation, one thought kept going through her mind: “We got him.”

In the weeks ahead, there’d be more challenges to moving the Professor into his apartment. At one point, he changed his mind and vanished for a few days. But his old friend helped bring him back into the fold. He also suddenly became distrustful of Langley, who knew better than to personalize a snub rooted in mental illness. In fact, when it came time to sign the housing contract and other paperwork, Langley went so far as to duck under her desk so she wouldn’t agitate the Professor and send him back out the door.

The Professor finally moved into his unit at Michael’s Village earlier this month. Now, of course, comes the really hard part. Marathoners have a saying that the course is divided into two halves—the first 20 miles and the last 6, the most grueling stretch. That seems an apt description for the difficulties the Professor will confront as he tries to adjust to a roof over his head and neighbors all around him. He is no longer slipping through the cracks.

Fortunately, although he’s got a good distance to go, he’s finally on course—with a committed and compassionate team behind him, coaching him along the tough road ahead.

As for Langley, she’s already focusing her energies on a homeless man about a half-dozen blocks away at First and Detroit streets.

“I think we got him,” she says.

Posted 8/21/14

Rescuing youthful identities

August 14, 2014 No Comments

L.A. County is working hard to repair the finances of foster kids whose credit has been abused by adults.

Minors are ineligible for credit cards and car loans in California. Yet there they were—the names and Social Security numbers of more than 100 Los Angeles County foster children on credit reports dating back years.

The discovery, part of a 2010 pilot survey on identity theft in the foster care system, was a wake-up call, recalls Rigoberto Reyes, chief of investigations for the county Department of Consumer Affairs, which helped conduct the survey.

Some of the most vulnerable children in the county were being exploited so duplicitous adults could obtain apartments, vehicles, jobs, cell phones, gym memberships, health care, even mortgages and bail money.

“In one case, a prostitute had gotten hold of the foster kid’s information and was using the kid’s name every time she was arrested,” Reyes says. “To clear it, we had to get the kid a letter from the Department of Justice’s identity theft registry.”

The study, launched in the wake of a 2006 state law aimed at curbing identity theft in the foster care system, has since grown in Los Angeles County into a protection effort unmatched anywhere else in the state.

Now, with a number of legal and procedural kinks worked out of the system, Consumer Affairs has formally teamed up with the county Department of Children and Family Services to add routine credit checks to the list of services the county performs for its foster children, scouring credit databases for children’s names and clearing them as needed.

“Identity theft is rampant when it comes to foster children,” says Sasha Stern, an attorney with the L.A-based Alliance for Children’s Rights, which provides free legal services to children in out-of-home care. “They move so much, and their personal information is transferred so many times that they’re just more vulnerable. So what the county is doing is great.”

Rigoberto Reyes of the county’s consumer affairs department.

Working through a secured web site with the credit bureau Experian, the two county departments this year have begun routinely checking and clearing the credit records of every foster child over 16 in the county system, quietly troubleshooting one of the most common—and pernicious—obstacles to the children as they age out of the system and attempt to start lives as independent adults. By November, the county also will begin working with the two remaining major credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion.

“Imagine trying to rent an apartment, or buy a used car, if you’ve been stuck with bad credit,” Reyes says. “And now imagine trying to do that if you’re a foster kid, dealing with all the worries foster kids have when they’re being emancipated.”

“Often these kids don’t find out there has been a fraud until they’re denied a student loan or a car loan,” adds DCFS Division Chief Harvey Kawasaki. “Or until an employment agency does a credit check on them as a prospective employee, and then decides not to hire them.”

Although California passed a law in 2006 aimed at clearing foster kids’ credit records, implementation has been slow because of procedural and funding woes. Most counties still do little more than crosscheck the names of their foster children with credit databases, leaving the children themselves to rectify any problems.

But L.A. County has its own in-house consumer affairs staff, as well as about half of the foster children in California. That, Reyes says, is why L.A. was chosen for the 2010 pilot, which checked the records of about 2,110 foster children.

In the last four years, Reyes says, the county has checked the credit of 8,126 foster children, finding that about 10 percent of them had open accounts under their names. That’s significantly higher than the prevalence of identity theft among adults in the general population, which is about 7 percent, according to a 2012 federal study.

“It’s not a lot of kids, but those who do have problems have multiple, multiple problems,” Reyes says.

The fraudulent accounts seemed more likely to be opened by relatives or acquaintances of the children than by their foster families, Reyes says, and most involved credit cards, utilities or medical care. “For example,” he says, “we had one where the sister delivered a baby in the emergency room and used the foster kid’s ID because she didn’t have insurance, and our kid got hit for the bill.”

Some cases also point to lax quality control among lenders. One recent survey of names, for instance, turned up more than 50 credit card accounts that had been opened at one major bank under foster kids’ identities, presumably with social security numbers that would have identified them as minors.

So far, no fraud has been prosecuted through the program. This is partly because the checks until now have involved thousands of names at a time, with an emphasis on clearing up the credit records, as opposed to punishing wrongdoers. But abuses are expected to get more scrutiny as caseloads lessen.

Under the formalized system underway this summer, the names and Social Security numbers of each foster youth will be compared twice with the credit bureaus’ records—once right after the children turn 16, and again, shortly before they turn 18. Consumer Affairs will then clear up any problems.

“About 175 of our foster kids turn 16 every month,” Reyes says. “So even assuming that 10 percent have problems, that’s fairly manageable.”

Even so, he warns, separating fraud from human error isn’t easy. Sometimes the record is as simple as confusing a son’s name with a father’s, or clearing up a credit bureau’s mistake.

In the case in which a $217,000 mortgage was found on a foster child’s credit record, for instance, investigators couldn’t determine whether the loan had deliberately been taken out under the youth’s name or whether the credit bureau had simply erred.

One of the biggest hurdles authorities face, Reyes says, is the reluctance of foster children to press charges against their betrayers.

“We had one where the father was using the kid’s information, and when the city attorney sat down with the kid and told him the process, he stopped returning our phone calls—he didn’t want to confront the father. He was afraid of the guy.

“That vulnerability is one of the hardest things about these cases, but also why they’re so important to resolve.”

Posted 8/14/14

An even grander place to play

August 14, 2014 No Comments

The hard hats were pink, like Grand Park’s benches, and the groundbreaking was kid-powered.

If you build it, they will play. At downtown’s Grand Park, that has been the lesson so far when it comes to kids’ amenities.

From the park’s big, cartwheel-friendly lawns to its spouting splash pool, the wildly popular 2-year-old gathering space has been jammed constantly with children. So far, though, it has lacked one of the most fundamental attractions—a place for children to slide, climb and swing.

That’s about to change. This week, the park broke ground on a 3,700-square-foot, $1 million play area that’s intended to make Grand Park even more of a kid magnet.

Designed with a fanciful forest theme by Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the park’s designers, the fenced play area will anchor the park segment known as Block Four, between Broadway and Spring Street, near City Hall and at the opposite end of the park from the splash pool and fountain.

“Grand Park strives to live up to its mission to be the ‘park for everyone’ in ways that engage, surprise and delight,” said Lucas Rivera, the park’s director. “Now with a children’s play area, we hope to exceed the expectations of even our smallest guests.”

The playground is expected to be completed by this November. That’s not a moment too soon for downtown’s residential community, which has become increasingly family-oriented and reliant on Grand Park for green space.

“I’ve been waiting for it,” said artist Lola Gayle, who was knitting in the park on Tuesday with her 9-year-old daughter, Milo Sandgren, as her 3½-year old son, Kian Sandgren, played in the water.

“How many years has Grand Park been open now? Let’s do it!”

In foreground, Lola Gayle relaxes with daughter Milo. Alyssa Ochoa grabs a quiet moment on the bench at left.

Park officials said the play area was in the park plans from the beginning, but had been postponed because of limited funding.

The playground is being jointly funded by First 5 LA, which is providing a grant of $500,000, and by Supervisor Gloria Molina, who is matching that amount with Proposition A/Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District money.

Aimed at children aged 12 and under, the play area will include a 20-foot-high hardwood tree house with platforms and roller and tube slides. The area also will have berms with rock-climbing handles, a rope climber and a tunnel, and curved hardwood benches for parents and caregivers. Mature sycamore trees will frame the space and provide shade.

Though the playground is expected to take up only a small portion of the 12-acre park’s lawns, its supporters predict a big payoff.

“Grand Park serves, in essence, as L.A.’s Central Park, and one big piece that has been missing is a children’s play area,” said Jennifer Pippard, interim director of First 5 LA’s community investments department.

“We want to be about promoting physical health and good mental health and social interaction, and play areas like this provide those kinds of opportunities.”

Artist Gayle said the play area will make life easier for the growing constituency of young families who have populated downtown Los Angeles in recent years. She said that when she moved in 12½ years ago with her husband, also an artist, families with children were few and far between. “It was just dog parks,” she recalled.

Now, she said, at least five families in her building have kids and Grand Park provides an essential downtown gathering place.

“It’s brilliant, it’s a sense of community,” Gayle said. “I’ve met some really cool moms here.”

The park clientele’s diversity—economic, social, racial and otherwise—also is a big draw, she added.

As Gayle spoke, the sound of families chattering—in English and in Spanish—filled the air, along with the universal language of squealing wet kids. Some parents had driven to get to the park, while others, like Alyssa Ochoa, arrived via public transportation.

Ochoa said she first heard about Grand Park when she was staying at the Union Rescue Mission with her daughter, Nylah Green.

At first glance, they were underwhelmed.

“There was no playground, so I was disappointed,” Ochoa said. Then 2-year-old Nylah discovered the splash pad, and the park became one of their favorite attractions.

They have since moved to a women’s shelter in South Central but, whenever they travel downtown to pick up some free diapers, they make it a point to drop by Grand Park as well.

“When you don’t have any money,” Ochoa said, “you have to find something that’s free.”

The playground design features a tree house and tube slide. Image/Rios Clementi Hale Studios

Posted 7/30/14

Cracking the ER “Code”

August 13, 2014 No Comments

The acclaimed Code Black captures the intensity and complexities of ER medicine at County-USC.

In the beginning, the idea was simply to produce some archival footage—a project pitched by a young medical student to document life-saving efforts unfolding amid the controlled chaos of the emergency room at Los Angeles County’s old General Hospital.

It was there, on the edge of downtown, that the concept of emergency medicine was born in 1971 and, in some respects, had remained the same in theory and practice throughout the ensuing decades.

Despite medical modernizations that had become the norm at most hospitals, the emergency crew at the renamed Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center still operated more like a battlefield MASH unit. Crowds of doctors and nurses swirled around patients suffering the most catastrophic of injuries. Side by bloody side, the stricken were packed into a cramped trauma bay in the ER called “C-booth,” with barely a curtain between them.

But in 2008, all that was about to change, and first-year resident Ryan McGarry, who also had a keen interest in filmmaking, wanted to capture the era before it was gone. Because of earthquake damage to the old county hospital, the emergency department was moving next door to a new state-of-the-art facility that would rocket the doctors into 21^st century medicine, complete with its emphasis on patient privacy and layers of paperwork.

Although initially modest in scope, McGarry’s ambitions for the project soared with the support of top Los Angeles County officials and the help of a producing team that included USC Distinguished Professor Mark Jonathan Harris, who has won three Academy Awards for documentaries.

Director/Writer Ryan McGarry, an ER physician.

McGarry’s film, Code Black, opened nationwide in June and has become a critical success, a gripping and graphic look at the shifting world of emergency medicine for the destitute and working poor who rely on public hospitals, such as County-USC, for their care. The term Code Black refers to the hospital’s designation for the highest level of emergency room crowding. Among other honors, the film won the Jury Award for best documentary at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Focusing on a cadre of idealistic young residents, including himself, McGarry explores the challenging new realities for the next generation of emergency room physicians as they remain committed to maintaining a personal connection with patients while confronting the escalating regulatory demands and settings that emphasize patient privacy.

Dr. Sean Henderson, chairman of the hospital’s emergency department, says his 21-year-old daughter saw the documentary at a film festival in Santa Barbara and was so inspired that she changed her major.

“She decided to become a physician’s assistant because of that movie,” he said.

“Often, doctors are portrayed as overpaid snobs who don’t really care,” he continued the other day, sipping a caffeine-free Coke in his office in the old county hospital. “But I think you’ll see in this movie that this is not always the case. There are people doing things because they really care about the people they serve.”

Still, Henderson said he has some personal reservations about the film—a project he inherited from his predecessor, Edward Newton—and isn’t sure he would have green-lighted it himself.

“I’ve never believed in cameras in the hospital,” he explained. “The fact that you’re in an emergency room with an unplanned, unscheduled, unanticipated event—stressed, waiting, probably less informed than you’d like to be—I think that’s a very vulnerable place to be.”

That said, Henderson praised the filmmaker for getting two sets of consents from patients whose emergency room visits are shown in the film—everyone from a drunken man belting out a romantic ballad in the waiting room to the family of a patient whom doctors unsuccessfully fought to save as they cut into his chest to keep his heart beating.

Henderson, who became department chair in 2012, also appears in the film, but mostly to defend a prominently featured action he imposed in the face of a severe nursing shortage. In a dramatic segment of the documentary, he shut down an area of the new emergency department, creating a monumental patient backlog, to make the point “that we couldn’t continue to care for all these people with inadequate resources.”

“I caused the crisis and I had to defend the crisis. I was the villain,” he said, and then offered a fuller explanation of his actions than he did in the film.

He said that in the past, before Health Services Director Mitchell Katz’s arrival in 2011, “the way you got attention in the county system was to create a crisis. It wasn’t just me. It was throughout the system…If you have a crisis, resources are pulled from someone who’s not having a crisis to take care of your crisis. And so, without permission from the school [USC] or the county, I created a crisis knowing full well that it would create a pushback downtown that would allow them to hear my pleas that heretofore had gone ignored.

“It was manipulative, it was sneaky, and mea maxima culpa. But it worked,” he said, noting that more funding was soon made available for the desperately needed nurses.

Another top L.A. County emergency department official, Dr. Erin Wilkes, said she’s seen her good friend McGarry’s film more than a dozen times in various stages along the way. The two were residents together, beginning in the old hospital’s emergency department. Today, she’s the director of Emergency Medicine Systems Innovation & Quality.

Wilkes said she helped organize various Code Black screenings for county officials, including the Health Services executive team. The feedback was mostly positive, she said, although “there were a lot of questions about what the consent process was like.” Wilkes said McGarry obtained his first consents at the hospital and then got a second round of permissions after showing people the actual footage he wanted to use.

Wilkes said she’d now like to build on Code Black’s positive buzz by holding a panel discussion event at USC that would include McGarry, now an assistant professor of emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College.

In a recent interview with the emergency medicine publication ACEPNow, McGarry talked about the demands of simultaneously pursuing his residency and filmmaking. “It was three years of no vacation,” he said. But he said he had no regrets.

“One thing that I feel very lucky to have experienced,” he said, “is nonmedical people sitting through some pretty tough stuff in cases we show. And at the end of the film people give us a standing ovation. I wish I could share that with every physician, nurse and X-ray tech who leaves a really tough shift.”

C-booth at the old L.A. County hospital operated more like a MASH unit than a modern ER.

Posted 7/17/14

Seeking safe passage

August 13, 2014 No Comments

An overpass in British Columbia offers habitat linkage like that being sought here. Photo/Joel Sartore

For those on the front lines of preserving the vibrancy of wildlife in the Santa Monica Mountains, establishing a safe way for animals to get across the fast-moving 101 Freeway has been a long-held dream.

Some new developments may be pushing that vision closer to reality.

Galvanized by a series of mountain lion deaths in recent years, a multi-jurisdictional team is developing long-term strategies—including possible creation of the state’s first wildlife freeway overpass—as well as more immediate fixes to help link animals with their natural territories on either side of the 101.

Caltrans announced it has applied for a $2 million federal grant to fund environmental review and engineering design of a proposed “Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing” in Agoura Hills.

“US Highway 101 is an impassible barrier for wildlife migrating into or out of the Santa Monica Mountains. Animals with large home ranges, such as mountain lions, are essentially trapped within the mountain range, which can result in inbreeding and high mortality rates,” Caltrans said in announcing its grant application. “This wildlife crossing promises to provide for an improved habitat connection across a fragmented landscape, which will help sustain and improve the genetic diversity of mountain lions, deer, coyotes and other native species.”

The agency has previously applied unsuccessfully for federal funds to build a wildlife tunnel under the freeway. This time around, though, it’s seeking funding to study a range of alternatives, including the overpass. The cost and timetable of building such a structure have yet to be determined.

A decision on Caltrans’ grant application is expected before the end of the year. In the meantime, efforts are underway to jumpstart strategies that would make the crossing safer for animals even before an overpass is developed. They include:

New and improved fencing to route animals away from the freeway and toward the existing underpass, Liberty Canyon Road.
New vegetation around the existing underpass to also help lure animals away from the freeway and toward safety.
Exploration of ways to enhance the wildlife-friendliness of the area, including eliminating lighting or placing it on timers.
A commitment by the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains to provide architectural and landscape design services to help support the search for grant funding of the proposed new overpass.

“The idea is to have a robust crossing area,” said Clark Stevens, an architect who also serves as executive officer of the conservation district, which is working on the initiative with Caltrans, the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority and the office of state Senator Fran Pavley.

The stakes are high, both in the short term and over the long haul.

“What we’re interested in is making sure we continue to have a full complement of species in the Santa Monica Mountains, and that it doesn’t become an island of extinction,” Stevens said.

The overpass idea has been successfully implemented in other states, including Montana and Arizona, as well as in Canada, he said.

The proposed Liberty Canyon overpass, still in the preliminary planning stages, would be, in effect, “a piece of habitat over the freeway,” Stevens said. It could include a “guzzler” watering station for animals as well as chaparral and mature trees.

And, while animals would tend to use the crossing after-hours, humans could enjoy hiking over it during the day.

“One of the great things about it is it would allow a trail connection over the freeway that doesn’t exist anywhere else in that area,” Stevens said.

Many kinds of animals would be expected to use an overpass. But the survival and well-being of mountain lions—the Santa Monica Mountains’ “apex predator”—is particularly critical to the health of the overall ecosystem.

“Mountain lions are one of the ones that are most in need, and most in long-term danger because they exist at such low density and move over such long distances,” said Seth Riley, wildlife ecologist for the National Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area. (Although mountain lions are rare in the Santa Monicas, he noted, they are common elsewhere in California and the U.S.)

Riley said scientists in the Santa Monicas currently are monitoring four adult mountain lions and two kittens via GPS-equipped collars. Another one-time resident, the male lion known as P-22, is believed to have traveled from the Santa Monicas across two freeways and into Griffith Park, where he is now at a “dead end” as far as breeding opportunities, Riley said.

By surviving that journey, P-22 is one of the lucky ones.

The current wildlife crossing efforts were galvanized by the death last October of another male mountain lion, who is believed to have made it across the 101 at Liberty Canyon, only to be forced back onto the freeway and killed after he encountered a fence he could not scale. Earlier this year, three mountain lion kittens also were killed on L.A. County roadways.

Other notable casualties include a young male lion who was shot and killed by police officers after he found his way into a courtyard in Santa Monica in 2012, and another, known as P-18, who was struck and killed by a car on the 405 Freeway near the Getty Center in 2011.

In some ways, it’s remarkable that the species has been able to survive at all in L.A.’s urban sprawl, Riley said.

“It’s an amazing thing that a large carnivore persists in Los Angeles,” he said. “If that were to be lost, that would just be a huge spiritual and aesthetic loss, I think.”

New measures aim to make life safer for even the littlest mountain lions. Photo/National Park Service

Posted 7/31/14

Our new social club—the L.A. River

August 13, 2014 No Comments

Once banned from most of the L.A. River, kayakers are now a regular summer sight. Photo/StreetsblogLA

Most Angelenos know that the Los Angeles River is making a comeback. Still, the hipsters hawking free breakfast on its banks were a surprise.

Waving their arms and proffering scrambled egg sandwiches and muffins they’d cooked on a camp stove, the group of about a dozen young people were on the bike path near Rattlesnake Park on Saturday morning, flagging down cyclists for no apparent reason beyond community building.

“They said they had done it before, and had just decided to do it again,” said one passing cyclist, a 24-year-old from Eagle Rock who’s been riding along the river near Griffith Park for years. “It seemed like they were just, like, ‘Let’s just get together and do something nice.’”

Gathering at the river to do something nice has become a trend this summer, as momentum has built around the restoration and revitalization of L.A.’s long-suffering namesake waterway.

With scores of projects already complete and a $1 billion Army Corps of Engineers plan expected to dramatically improve an 11-mile stretch between downtown and Griffith Park, a nascent but notable scene has taken hold along the once-maligned L.A. River, particularly where it has been spruced up with pocket parks, hiking trails and bikeways.

This summer, for instance, kayaking tours are being offered in public recreation areas in the Sepulveda Basin and in Elysian Valley; later this month, about 100 stand-up-paddlers and rowers will gather in the Glendale Narrows for a first-ever L.A. River Boat Race.

The Los Angeles River Corp. is offering outdoor bike-in movies along the riverbanks later this month and has its second annual Greenway 2020 10k race scheduled for early November. Meanwhile, the Elysian Valley Arts Collective will host its annual Frogtown Art Walk again next month by the river. Nearby, Elysian, an underground restaurant that materialized two years ago on the river near Atwater Village, will be up and running, legally and officially.

Along the L.A. River’s concrete banks, The Frog spot offers food, concerts and more. Photo/Franklin Avenue Blog

Elysian is also the home of Clockshop, a non-profit arts and cultural organization, and the site for more than a few weddings during the past year. And speaking of art, be on the lookout for the L.A. Mud People, a performance art group that frequents the river both as a medium and a backdrop.

“It’s really kind of miraculous,” marveled Lewis MacAdams, president of Friends of the L.A. River, which has itself drawn thousands of passersby over the past six weeks by staging free weekend concerts at The Frog Spot, an informal venue it set up this summer on Benedict Street along the Elysian Valley bike path.

“We’ve been surprised at how many people have showed up—probably 500 or so every Saturday and Sunday,” said MacAdams, adding that FOLAR will also be sponsoring a catch-and-release fishing event next month. “People are getting interested, and looking for community.”

MacAdams sees the interest as an outgrowth of the long political fight to restore the river, which was paved in the 1930s in an attempt to tame periodic but lethal floods. Nearly 4,000 people participated this year in FOLAR’s long-running annual river cleanup, he said—a record turnout—and each cleanup has helped spread the news of the river’s revitalization and potential.

So far, MacAdams said, most of the community activities have centered around FOLAR and the Elysian Valley arts community near Frogtown. “But a lot of it also is the bicycle population,” he said. “There are more bicyclists than we imagined, and they keep coming back.”

Julia Meltzer, executive director of Clockshop and the wife of David Thorne, who runs Elysian restaurant, agreed that the riverfront has become exponentially more active.

“There’s a lot more recreation and sporting,” she said, acknowledging that the various improvements, from friendlier landscaping to paved bikeways, have created occasional conflicts among walkers, cyclists, locals and other constituencies.

Nonetheless, a first-ever, free community campout along the river that Meltzer said she helped organize over Memorial Day weekend—along with California State Parks, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, the Natural History Museum and others—was fully booked within an hour of its announcement.

“I think it’s the big buzz, and the opportunity to come down to the river’s edge legally now,” said MRCA Chief Ranger Fernando Gomez, adding that some 200 campers showed up on Memorial Day and that hundreds more have shown up this summer for MRCA river programs, ranging from free community paddles to evening weenie roasts in Marsh Park.

“It used to be that people weren’t allowed in the river without a special use permit—it wasn’t meant for recreation,” Gomez said. “People would look at the river and think it was disgusting.

“But now, they can go down in, say, a kayak, and they see that the water is actually pretty clean, and there’s a heron right over there taking off with a fish in its mouth. They see that it’s not just all about concrete anymore,” Gomez said. “It’s a river—a real live river—now and people want to be part of it.”

A first-ever L.A. River campout over Memorial Day weekend was fully booked in an hour.

Posted 8/6/14

Month: August 2014

Staging Grand Park’s biggest act yet

Rescuing a real Trooper

Opera’s beach blanket bravura

Valley date with CicLAvia [updated]

A force of our best nature

An even grander place to play

Cracking the ER “Code”

Seeking safe passage

Our new social club—the L.A. River

Follow Zev

More News

The 405 Report

405 speeds little changed

Need To Know

Information Online

Information Online

Information Online

Information Online

Information Online