Remembering Jamiel

Bernard Parks showed up unannounced at a street-side ceremony last Saturday to dedicate a memorial to Jamiel Shaw Jr., the 17-year-old football standout at Los Angeles High School, at the spot where he was gunned down steps from his house on 5th Avenue. Drawing on the loss of his own granddaughter to street violence in 2000, the ex-police chief tossed aside a millennium’s worth of pablum usually spouted at such events by well-meaning people trying to console grieving family and friends.

“At the funeral, I’m sure a number of people said, ‘He’s in a better place.’ I just want to be selfish and say, ‘He’s not.’ He should be on 5th Avenue being a role model as he’s been. He should be at L.A. High School playing football. He should be at that rightful scholarship in college, carrying on his talents so that all of us can appreciate it. Although he’s in another place, I think the better place would be for him to fulfill his potential on earth so that we could all share in it.”

Parks joined the mayor and Councilmember Herb Wesson in calling on the Pentagon to reassign Jamiel’s mother to allow her to remain at her Arlington Heights home, with her husband Jamiel Sr. and their 9-year-old son Thomas. “Sgt. Shaw needs to be home with her family to make sure that she can give that guidance and attention to her young son Tommy,” said Parks. “When this news conference is over, we have to realize that the family continues to struggle with this – every birthday, every Christmas, every major event in their life. They will be saying, ‘Where’s our son?’ And he won’t be there.

On Wednesday, Anita Shaw learned that her leave had been extended two weeks and that she would be stationed at Fort

Irwin.

Zev’s State of the City

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky stood at the podium in a ballroom at the Wilshire Grand hotel, taking shots at the L.A. Times, blasting “stupid growth” policies that create unlivable communities, and longing for the days when more issues were debated openly rather than swept under the rug at City Hall.

This was Monday’s monthly lunch of the Current Affairs Forum, convened by Emma Schafer, with 40 or so well-behaved downtown business and government types, lawyers, lobbyists, union organizers, and journalists gathered around a U-shaped table.

Too bad Zev wasn’t holding forth at the old Redwood Room, with his targets crowded around to deflect the criticism with a few rounds of their own over a long night of rowdy story-telling and imbibing. The bar would have been full, led by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Planning Director Gail Goldberg, and unnamed clueless and stodgy editors at the Times who, if their abysmal coverage of this event in the next day’s paper is any guide, wouldn’t know certain local news stories if they reached up and scribbled the lead on their foreheads. For an hour, Zev talked about growth, traffic, and the stresses facing bottom-line-worshipping newspaper groups – all among the top five issues engaging and annoying the populace from Long Beach to Woodland Hills, from the Westside to the San Gabriel Valley.

Zev hates traffic jams as much as the next solo commuter in the car ahead of you: “If we do nothing between now and 2015, somebody’s going to shoot somebody on the streets between the 405 and Ocean Avenue. You can’t just be oblivious to the fact that people are traveling at an average speed of 2 mph going eastbound from Santa Monica during the afternoon peak. The public wants relief.”

The wholesale revamping of zoning rules now being ramrodded through neighborhoods around the city, tripling densities and turning one-story buildings into three-story mega-complexes or worse, will only make it more unbearable. And the rule changes have been slipped in without enough public scrutiny.

“What drives me up a wall is from the day I walked into City Hall on June 10, 1975, there wasn’t an issue like this that wasn’t debated. We always had debates. Tom Bradley and I went at it. These battles were legendary. It went on until the day I left City Hall. Issues weren’t kept off the radar screen.” Zev, at 59, passes for an elder statesman in these parts. He served two decades on the City Council and is in his fourth term as a county supervisor. He’s said he plans to run one final time in 2010 before term limits force him out.

It used to be that you could read about all of the policy clashes in the daily newspaper, which created a rigor of accountability. “No politician or city councilman from the Westside worth his salt would ignore the public, or would do so at his peril, because they’d read about it in the Thursday edition or Sunday edition of the L.A. Times. Well, they haven’t had a zoned section in years.”

The twice-weekly community section was killed in 1995, and now Zev laments that worthwhile stories remain unwritten or dismissed in three-paragraph briefs buried in the California section. “The Orange County Board of Supervisors gets more coverage from the L.A. Times,” Zev complained. “I don’t mean to pounce on the L.A. Times, but it’s a critical problem. It has consequences.” A subdivision in Santa Clarita, approved two weeks ago on 3-2 vote, with Zev and Gloria Molina opposed, “barely warranted a brief.”

On the traffic innovations front, Zev gave a forensic analysis of the Pico-Olympic debacle, the three-phase traffic plan unveiled by the mayor to much fanfare last November, nearly a year after Zev proposed a more radical plan to turn the east-west thoroughfares into one-way streets, with two lanes reserved for buses to travel in both directions. Zev tapped into his office budget to hire traffic engineer Allyn Rifkin to examine the idea.

The mayor’s plan now faces legal challenges by Westside business owners who fear they’ll lose their neighborhood tone and customers when street parking is gone. “When you take away a merchant’s parking in front of his store,” says Zev, “there’s got to be something that that merchant and the community at large gets in return.” This phase of the mayor’s program calls for the synchronization of traffic lights, with the final phase increasing the number of lanes moving in one direction.

Zev sees little merit in signal wizardry alone. “The public will not perceive a benefit. The whole notion of synchronized traffic signals is oversold. When you have volume of traffic like we do in peak hours, the best computer system in the world won’t solve your problems entirely.”

The jury is still out on the mayor’s plan. “If his idea works, God Bless him, I’ll give him all the credit in the world. If it doesn’t work, the sooner he knows that, the sooner he can make a decision on whether he wants to ratchet it up and go back to Rifkin’s plan.”

Oh, so now it’s Rifkin’s plan?

Exposing some of the tensions with the mayor for the lunch crowd, Zev said: “Maybe it’ll be better luck if it’s called Rifkin’s plan than Yaroslavsky’s plan. It seems to be an issue.”

On the subway front, Zev said a top priority must be extending the Purple Line west from Western Avenue to Santa Monica. He’s working with Assemblyman Mike Feuer, who’s pushing legislation to lower the votes needed for a sales tax increase from two-thirds majority to 55 percent. If the legislature goes for it, voters, too, would have to approve the lower threshold. “Whether we have a sales tax measures on the ballot in November is still an open question,” said Zev, who sounded more optimistic than in past outings. “We’ve gotta have a fighting chance. Nobody wants to go into this as a suicide run.”

After lunch, Zev took a few more questions from L.A. Sniper:

Sniper: “From where I sit, if you and the mayor got along better, so much more could be accomplished.”

Zev: “The mayor and I get along fine on the policy issues that we agree on. Where we don’t get along are on policy issues we don’t agree on. I’ve dealt with four mayors now. Lord knows, Tom Bradley and I didn’t agree on everything, but we worked together and talked to each other several times a week. Same with Dick Riordan when I was in City Hall.”

Sniper: “How often do you talk to Antonio?”

Zev: “Not often, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. I didn’t talk that much to Jimmy Hahn because I’m not a city councilman. We will have no problem working together on a common agenda for transportation. The traffic problems and the congestion problems in the western part of the county are as acute as they are anywhere in the United States.”

Sniper: “Is it totally out of the realm of possibility that you’ll be running for mayor next year?”

Zev: “I am not running for mayor next year.”

Sniper: “How can you be so sure?”

Zev: “If I were running for mayor, you’d know about it. Most of the talk about me running for mayor has been emanating out of City Hall from people who are trying to marginalize some of these policy issues by reducing them to political tiffs when, in fact, they’re substantive policy issues. I’m not going to keep my mouth shut when I see my neighborhood affected by what the city does. And as a former city councilmember, I’m not going to sit back quietly and watch 20 years of my work product dismantled without a fight. This has nothing to do with running for office.

Fine, really, but Zev and Antonio still need to meet for dinner at the Water Grill soon to hash all this out. I’ll buy – if they pickup the bar tab.

Send insults and ammo toBigAl@lasniper.com.