Mike Feuer
The war on congestion, his Schwinn Stingray and playing catch with his dad
In January, ex-Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane convened a gathering of civic leaders to talk about jump-starting plans to fund the region’s transportation system. Westside Assemblyman Mike Feuer delivered one of the more inspirational speeches of the day, talking up his specific legislation, while others talked generalities.
Now, five months later, Feuer takes stock of his legislative agenda. Three of his bills have passed the Assembly and will be taken up by the Senate, including one that would make it easier for Los Angeles to set up special districts along transit corridors to pay for projects. Another idea – lowering the number of votes needed to pass a sales-tax increase – from two-thirds of the electorate to 55 percent – is on hold because of Republican opposition.
Feuer talked about his legislative battles, L.A.’s troubled transit past, and the inspiration of his father, a World War II prisoner of war and a longtime school principal.
–Alan Mittelstaedt
CityBeat: Everybody loves to complain about traffic. But can’t it be amusing sometimes, too?
Mike Feuer: One time, while I was on the City Council, I had meetings downtown in the evening and was running late for a
father-son T-ball game. I changed almost all of my clothes while I was in my car on my way to the game. When traffic isn’t moving for 10 minutes at a time, you can accomplish a lot.
You laid out a grand plan that January day. What came of it?
Each of the three bills on the way to the Senate offers an opportunity to Los Angeles, and in one case cities throughout the state, to adopt a different approach to funding transportation. The bill that would be applicable to the entire state is a tool called Infrastructure Financing Districts. My bill would remove a key impediment to using IFDs – the two-thirds voting requirement – for affected property owners because the funding comes from a portion of existing property taxes, and there is no new tax levy being imposed on anyone.
The climate change mitigation bill would allow Los Angeles County, through the MTA, to ask voters whether they would like to assess themselves a fee, either on a gallon of gasoline or on a vehicle license fee, to fund public transit and road improvements. The amount of money at stake is enormous – $400 million to $600 million a year.
The third bill would enable the MTA and the county of L.A. to put before the voters a proposal for a half-cent sales tax by a two-thirds vote to fund an array of essential public transit and highway projects delineated in the bill.
What about the constitutional amendment to allow a half-cent sales tax measure to pass with 55 percent instead of two-thirds of the vote?
I decided not to put it to a vote yet in Sacramento because ACA 10 requires Republican votes to put this constitutional change to a statewide vote of the people, and they’ve made it clear to me that they don’t intend to allow Californians to make this change, at least not for now.
Back in January, did you overreach on some of this stuff?
I ran for office to do what I consider the most important things to do, not to nibble at the edges.
You’re doing more on transportation than hanging out in Sacramento to talk up various projects.
I have been at City Hall and have been working very closely with members of the Board of Supervisors and the MTA. If we’re going to solve our transportation problems in this region, it’s going to require a tremendous level of teamwork among those of us who work at every level of government. Sacramento doesn’t have much money to deliver to Los Angeles. So we should be liberating voters in Los Angeles to decide for themselves if the status quo is good enough and, if it’s not, are they prepared to have some skin in the game?
Who in Washington is doing what you’re doing in Sacramento?
There are certainly many members of Congress who have performed critical roles and continue to do so on transportation issues. Lucille Roybal-Allard is a very key member of the California delegation on these issues. Howard Berman has been crucial when it came to a carpool lane on the 405 freeway. Our senators have been very important. All these people and others will be very critical in the year to come because very soon there will be reauthorization of federal transportation dollars. There will be a tremendous need for teamwork. And Henry Waxman has been so crucial on air quality issues. And increasingly, everybody recognizes the deep relationship between transportation and curbing our air pollution here. And Adam Schiff and David Dreier have been very important for people who advocate for the Gold Line in the San Gabriel Valley.
Any dark moments in the last two decades of transportation history that you would change if you had a magic wand?
I wish very much that L.A. had built the subway system that L.A. needs 30 years ago. It would have been much less expensive. We would have had tremendous reductions in serious illness from air pollution. God knows what we could have achieved economically and even in terms of keeping families together, instead of relegating commuters to waste hours in traffic.
In three hours or less, what kept that from happening?
Elected officials have not been nearly as unified around key transportation goals as we should be. There is a perception in Sacramento and Washington that we in L.A. historically haven’t had our act together.
How seriously are you considering a run for City Attorney next year?
I’ve been asked to run by many folks. I’m thinking about it, but I haven’t decided. Things are going really well in Sacramento, and I love my job. So there are two good choices.
I was a reporter in San Bernardino back in the mid-1980s and used to stop in and chat with your father when he was principal of Parkside Elementary School.
I went to Parkside before my father was principal there. On weekends, I’d sneak onto campus and ride my Schwinn Stingray there.
Are you more ambitious than your father?
No, we’re ambitious in different ways. My dad was a prisoner of war during World War II. He’d been a turret gunner in a B-24 bomber, which had been shot down on his last mission. He parachuted for the first time in his life and he landed really hard on his feet and he couldn’t walk. He was captured by the Nazis and taken to Stalag 17. Being Jewish in the camp was obviously a horrible experience. But that was a formative time for him. He developed a profound commitment to changing the world by educating kids.
How did he end up as an educator?
One day, he and I were playing catch at Parkside School. I was in high school, and I remember asking him why he chose his job. He had told me bits and pieces of what it was like to be in the camp before. But he began to describe the march, as the Nazis were running from the Americans who were coming to liberate the camp at the end of the war. And my dad couldn’t walk, so the Nazis wanted to amputate his feet and leave him behind. My dad was 22 years old, and he didn’t want that. So he hung onto an oxcart. Picture this long line of people walking across the entire country of Austria in the snow and then about a mile behind them, one guard, one German shepherd and one guy holding onto this cart being dragged across the plain. My dad told me, having endured the war and thinking he was going to die, he wanted to do the most important work in the world. And my dad, as you know, is a ferociously brilliant guy. For him, that work was the training of kids. He became a teacher and then a school principal. For 36 years, he was an educator. And he still volunteers in public schools here in Los Angeles. He was 85 years old on May 20.
Did that get you thinking about your own career?
My ambition grew from that conversation actually. Ambition means a search to make the biggest impact you can in a short time. That lesson, to find the most important work in the world, led me in a little different direction than my father.
Published: 06/04/2008
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How ironic, that Feuer celebrates his father's triumph over the Axis bad guys, but now all he wants to do is oppress us.
The trouble with guys like Mike is they've never had to work for a living, make a payroll, or balance a checkbook, so they think every problem is solved by stealing more money from the public.
A case can be made for the subways and other mass-transit projects. I don't even mind paying higher sales taxes, but the state is already collecting RECORD TAXES by any measure. Feuer and his brethren were sent to Sacramento to SOLVE problems, not create them.
If our pols would apply common sense to the budget, we'd be swimming in surplus. If the media would actually examine the budget instead of simply parroting the union party-line (What do we want? "More!"), we could return California to its Golden-State status.