CBS2 Los Angeles
written by Staff
Tuesday June 4, 2013
LOS ANGELES — Outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa signed off on his final city budget Tuesday.
KNX 1070′s Vytas Safronikas reports the $7.7 billion spending plan, which takes effect July 1, includes a 5.5 percent raise for most city employees.
The City Council approved Villaraigosa’s proposed budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year on May 29 with a 11-0 vote, handing Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti and the next administration what the Mayor’s office called a “more financially secure city.”
The approved budget preserves a 10,000-officer Los Angeles Police Department and funds the city’s Gang Reduction and Youth Development program. The budget also increases funding for various city services, including sidewalk repair, meals for the elderly, graffiti removal and tree trimming.
And while Garcetti acknowledged the city had made progress in its effort to trim spending, there remains more to do in order to trim a projected $108 million shortfall.
“We’ve backed quite a bit away from the cliff, but we can still see that cliff,” Garcetti said. “In a year or two, we’re gonna inch closer to it once again if we don’t do some further things to cut costs and to boost our revenues.”
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Compliments of Keywiki: Antonio Villaraigosa profile
Antonio Villaraigosa, born in 1953 as Tony Villar, is Mayor of Los Angeles.
In 2005, with the support of a leftist led citywide coalition, Antonio Villaraigosa became the first Latino Mayor of Los Angeles since 1872. Before his election he was a Los Angeles City Councilman, California State Assemblyman and Speaker of the California State Assembly.
Early life
Antonio Villar was raised without a father and went off the rails as a teen, before straightening himself out to study law.
Radicalization
For many years Villaraigosa has been a close friend of Gilbert Cedillo, who he met at Los Angeles' Roosevelt High.
Through an Upward Bound program, Cedillo was accepted at UCLA, Villaraigosa went to East Los Angeles College and then transferred to UCLA. The friends both became active in Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan or MEChA, a radical Chicano seperatist group with a strong Marxist-Leninist underpinning.
Both attended the Peoples College of Law, a night school dedicated to producing public-interest lawyers. (Villaraigosa took the bar exam FOUR TIMES, but NEVER PASSED).
Peoples College of Law was founded in 1974 the Asian Law Collective, the La Raza National Lawyers Association, the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild.
Villaraigosa visited Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. He and Cedillo became deeply involved in Centros de Accion Social Autonomo, or CASA, an immigrant’s-rights organization led by the Mexican-American Communist Party USA leader Bert Corona.
Villaraigosa and Cedillo and worked on the CASA newspaper, SÃn Fronteras. “At CASA, we wanted to organize the undocumented into unions, instead of seeing them as a threat,” Cedillo said.
By his late teens, he had anchored himself to the movement -- and to the legendary Bert Corona, a radical organizer and proponent of immigrant rights who nonetheless functioned in mainstream politics. (Corona played a key role in Robert Kennedy‘s 1968 presidential campaign.) With Gil Cedillo and Maria Elena Durazo (much later to become president of the L.A. local of the hotel and restaurant workers), Villaraigosa became a full-time organizer at Corona’s Centro de Action Social Autonoma, CASA for short.
Villaraigosa then turned his organizing skills to the union movement. As shop steward for a local representing federal civil rights lawyers, he found an L.A. office where just a quarter of the attorneys were organized, and enrolled nearly 90 percent of them in the union. He soon went on the staff of UTLA, Los Angeles‘ teachers union, and when the union struck the school district in 1989, Villaraigosa was given the difficult task of building strike support in South-Central -- which, through an ambitious program of house meetings, he did. Soon thereafter, Gloria Molina appointed him to the MTA board, where he was the only member to support the demands of the fledgling Bus Riders Union, and where he won support to reduce fares to 50 cents. In 1994, he was elected to the Assembly. A scant four years later, through the miracle of term limits and his own considerable political abilities, he was elected speaker.
Anthony Thigpenn, who, as the leader of the L.A. Metro Alliance, is probably the most successful community organizer in South-Central, first met Villaraigosa in the mid-’80s, when Villaraigosa co-chaired, with Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Black-Latino Roundtable. The goal of the organization, says Thigpenn, was “to create a common agenda, to assert we have more in common than we have in opposition.” Thigpenn sees Villaraigosa‘s mayoral campaign “as a historic moment in Los Angeles, in terms of getting the most progressive mayor the city has ever seen, who has a vision, a commitment, a strategy to bring all parts of the city together. We want to be a part of that historic moment.”
"Community organizer"
Writing in the Huffington Post of September 8, 2008, in an article entitled "From Organizer To Elected Official" Democratic Socialists of America member Peter Dreier listed several serving US politicians who had begun their careers as "community organizers". They were US Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Representatives John Lewis of Georgia, Jan Schakowsky and Danny Davis of Illinois, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Linda Sanchez of California, and Donna Edwards of Maryland, Washington House of Representatives Speaker Frank Chopp, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, state legislators Beth Low of Missouri, Michael Foley of Ohio, Gilbert Cedillo of California, Tom Hucker of Maryland, Tony Hill of Florida, and Crystal Peoples of New York, Alameda County (California) Supervisor Nate Miley, City Council members Jay Westbrook of Cleveland, Chuck Turner and Sam Yoon of Boston, and Melvin Carter of St. Paul, and San Francisco School Board member Jane Kim.
Socialists organize to "challenge for power" in Los Angeles
On March 11, 1998, Los Angeles Democratic Socialists of America leader Steve Tarzynski wrote an email to another Los Angeles DSA leader Harold Meyerson.
Tarzynski listed 25 people he thought should be on an "A-list" of "25 or so leaders/activists/intellectuals and/or "eminent persons" who would gather periodically to theorize/strategize about how to rebuild a progressive movement in our metropolitan area that could challenge for power."
Tarzynski listed himself, Harold Meyerson, Karen Bass, Sylvia Castillo, Gary Phillips, Joe Hicks, Richard Rothstein, Steve Cancian, Larry Frank, Torie Osborn, Rudy Acuna, Aris Anagnos, Abby Arnold, Carl Boggs, Blase Bonpane, Rick Brown, Stanley Sheinbaum, Alice Callahan, Jim Conn, Peter Dreier, Maria Elena Durazo, Miguel Contreras, Mike Davis, Bill Gallegos, Bob Gottlieb, Kent Wong, Russell Jacoby, Bong Hwan Kim, Paula Litt (and Barry Litt, with a question mark), Peter Olney, Derek Shearer, Clancy Sigal and Anthony Thigpenn.
Included in a suggested elected officials sub-group were Mark Ridley-Thomas, Gloria Romero, Jackie Goldberg, Gil Cedillo, Tom Hayden, Antonio Villaraigosa, Paul Rosenstein and Congressmen Xavier Becerra, Henry Waxman and Maxine Waters.
Tarzynski went on to write "I think we should limit the group to 25 max, otherwise group dynamics begins to break down....As i said, I would like this to take place in a nice place with good food and drink...it should properly be an all day event."
Please click HERE to read his entire profile...
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