Where to begin? I embedded myself at Los Angeles City Hall, acquiring a bureau steps from Council chambers and equipped with live, hi-fi broadcast lines to break important news stories as soon as they happened.

I documented the City of LA’s downsizing and service-slashing, sorted through a messy DWP rate hike scam, watched in amazement as Council stumbled through medical marijuana regulation, saw rent control advocates Tazed on the marble floors of chambers, called out council members on shared sacrifice and witnessed Richard Alarcón’s indictment on perjury and voter fraud charges — tweeting and blogging along the way.

Seemed the right thing to do in an era when there’s plenty of talk about transparency in government but precious little accountability showing through.

Beyond City Hall, hundreds of other stories were breaking.

As Laker rioting flared following the team’s NBA championship game, I got up close and personal with out of control fans in a breathtaking night of live, format-breaking reports on John Phillips’ show. Got so deep into Bell that the BBC World Service picked up on my coverage of flagrant corruption there. Broke the first reports of the Station Fire from a chopper over the then-tiny blaze. Chronicled Antonio’s Villaraigosa’s foibles and freebies.

The radio station broke new ground, a first in its 85-year history. Our scrappy little news shop won more Golden Mic awards this year than all-news leviathan KNX. Kevin Roderick of LA Observed declared us a player in the City Hall press corps, leading an effort to overturn new restrictions on reporters.

But new priorities have emerged. Programmer David G. Hall who’d invited me on board, a fervent believer in the necessity of journalism, has been replaced by management that considers local news a “service feature” rather than the lifeblood of a talkradio station claiming to serve its community.

Hall gave me the freedom to cover stories I thought important regardless of when or where they broke. I could dive deep into nuance and detail during in-depth segments with the station’s whip-smart talk hosts. Until last month when I was sacked by cell.

Management had made no plans to replace me, but there’s talk of perhaps bringing on a per diem or part-time reporter to pick up the slack while my salary, insiders say, paid for a pricey new talk host. The station’s year-old City Hall Bureau has been dismantled evaporate as a promising prima facie news source reverts coverage focused mostly on routine news conferences.

What’s next? I’ve produced lots of radio and television and I’ll find another challenge. But what happened at this station is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon as news institutions shrink and the ranks of journalism’s foot soldiers dwindle. To this reporter, the body blows to American newsgathering will become a hallmark of this century as surely as steam, steel and world war dominated the last.

And so it goes.

Pass it on...

One moment please, I'm raising my rates.

Parking meter rates jacked up in real time? It’ll soon be reality in Los Angeles, making on-street parking so prohibitive some drivers will be priced out, freeing spaces for others willing to pay several dollars more per hour at a meter that charged far less minutes earlier.

On-demand pricing is on its way to a parking meter near you.

“It’ll be adjusted to what’s going on in that block,” says Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s Peer Ghent of the city’s ExpressPark program now in development. “When the blocks are full, the price will go up. When blocks are empty, the price will go down.”

Meters would also charge more for extended parking. “The first hour might be $2, the next hour might be $3,” says Ghent. “That’s to insure short-term parking.”

Traffic engineers claim up to 90% of traffic congestion is caused by drivers searching for a place to park. They say their scheme will reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions while offering motorists greater convenience — though at a cost calculated to drive away the frugal.

“Most of the time, there’ll always be one or two spaces available on any given block,” says Ghent.

Playback The Peter Tilden Morning Show: Parking Meter Madness
Click arrow to play, right-click icon to download

ExpressPark is quickly becoming a reality. Right now, 5,500 parking spaces are being readied for a one-year pilot program which becomes operational in July, 2011, funded by a federal DOT grant. Street sensors and smart meters are being installed from the Garment District to Chinatown, Civic Center to Little Tokyo, able to send demand data to computers that can boost meter rates in a heartbeat.

Those 10,000 new solar-powered, credit card-reading parking meters now being installed citywide will also be capable of plugging into ExpressPark if the downtown experiment is a success.

City Council, which sets parking fees, has granted LADOT permission to hike existing downtown meter rates up to 50% for the pilot program, increasing the rate at $4/hour meters to $6 when cars pack the streets. The city estimates meter revenues will rise as much as $1.5 million during the test run.

But while the feds prohibit LA from using ExpressPark funding as a revenue booster, Council members will have the freedom to set rates at their whim in 2012 when the grant expires. It’ll be tempting for a cash-strapped city: push a button, parking revenues skyrocket.

Traffic engineers dream of a day when ExpressPark will include a parking guidance system to help drivers locate premium parking spots. Digital message signs along city streets would direct drivers to open spaces.

“You might be driving down Second Street where the block is full and the sign would direct you over to First or Third Street because there’s available parking over there,” says Ghent.

The data would also be made available to Garmin, TomTom and other in-car navigation systems, smartphone apps and Metro’s new 511 traffic hotline.

ExpressPark is also about behavior modification. “If you raise the pricing for parking you can discourage people from bringing cars downtown,” says Ghent, “and fortunately we’ve got Metro’s Blue, Gold and Red Lines.”

But some wonder whether ExpressPark is really about imposing a new class structure on LA’s streets. Will parking become the exclusive turf of those wealthy enough to afford market-driven pricing while poorer drivers (who allegedly have equal access to the city’s parking spaces) are shooed away by exorbitant rates?

ExpressPark may be the latest example of a familiar Orwellian axiom: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Pass it on...

Antonio Villaraigosa’s subway to the sea is an old idea now being given a second chance. Los Angeles might have had a U-bahn to the Ocean more than 80 years ago if the overhead railroad that came with it hadn’t sunk the city’s subway plans.

More than one subway to the sea was on the drawing board in 1925 as LA City and County teamed up, eager to burrow 26.1 miles of subway linked to many more miles of surface track.

LA’s first slice of subway had just opened — an antidote to waves of new cars streaming off new Detroit assembly lines and on to downtown LA’s narrow streets.

The Hollywood Subway was now whisking riders beneath downtown traffic from a tunnel entrance at First Street and Glendale Boulevard. Though less than a mile long, LA’s first subway seemed to be making a difference by trimming downtown commutes by 20-60 minutes.

Subways were the future of Los Angeles voters were told, and the pivotal 1925 mass transit master plan promised more. Underground routes would spread like tentacles from the new Subway Terminal Building at 4th and Hill. One subway would carry passengers to the 11-year-old City of Beverly Hills. Another would link downtown and Larchmont by tunneling under Seventh Street, Vermont Avenue and Third Street.

The new Pico subway line would stretch to Union Avenue. Another would surface at San Vicente at Pico, eventually pushing on to Venice. The Hollywood-Santa Monica line was also beach-bound.

But voters balked at the $320 million price tag ($3.8 billion today), especially when the Southern Pacific Railroad would own the mass transit network built with public dollars. Angelenos smelled a scam and SP’s Red Car trolleys were downright stinky.

The Pacific Electric Railway had been created by Henry Huntington but was controlled by Southern Pacific Railroad by the early 20s. Under the 1925 plan, SP would construct and operate the mass transit network with taxpayer funds. It would also raise its Red Car fares from 5 to 8 cents — a 60% hike that brought howls from riders miffed that service on PE’s 1,164-mile system had declined. Downright pathetic, said many.

Pacific Electric’s ridership had peaked in 1924 with 109 million passengers, but its growth curve crumbled as SoCal switched to automobiles. LA’s population grew 128% during the Twenties while its car count soared 550%.

The 777,000 vehicles registered in LA County by 1929 took their toll on PE’s passenger count and schedules. Trolleys that once sprinted across open bean fields were slowed to a crawl as trucks, buses and autos moved in, jamming streets, intersections and crossings.

The nation’s largest mass transit system was also a fiscal mess. Pacific Electric hadn’t turned a profit on its passenger lines since incorporating in 1901. Didn’t matter. The Red Car’s real mission was real estate hype.

The Red Cars were aptly named — constantly running in the red as a loss leader to enhance the value of new towns and subdivisions Huntington staked out along his right of way — real estate bait for scrub brush acres in an overly-saturated land market.

It worked. Huntington made huge profits in huge land deals. But like the Hollywoodland sign, the Red Car outlived its usefulness once Huntington’s land holdings had been flipped. The Red Car was small change to the high-rolling millionaire — a game of pennies, nickels and dimes.

Huntington cashed out and moved on to exploit the more micro Los Angeles Railway, a patchwork collection of neighborhood buses and electric Yellow Cars.

Huntington had devised the exit strategy years earlier. Many US trolleys ran on cheaper, narrow-gauge tracks but Huntington had built the Red Car to commercial railroad specs to assure a back-end sale. If Southern Pacific hadn’t bought the line, competitors Union Pacific or Santa Fe might well have — and for good reason.

Pacific Electric’s true worth was roadbed and rails that could serve as freight feeders for SP’s long lines, a far more robust profit center than a passenger line being bled to oblivion by autos.

Red Car maintenance budgets fell as accidents rose. Dead zones were confusingly rerouted, buses brought in to cut costs. A municipal marriage of convenience between pubic transit and private enterprise had turned toxic.

By the time they were offered a fix, voters were in no mood to prop up the PE or enrich the SP — a railway with a robber baron rep, long despised for cutthroat freight rates. Worse, SP had convinced urban planners to build miles of train tracks high above the streets of Los Angeles as part of the mass transit makeover.

Los Angeles had a sun-kissed vision of what it could become. As far back as the late 1800s, émigrés agreed that LA should not evolve into another congested, railroad-riddled city like those they’d left back East. They were urged on by the City Beautiful movement which claimed that an urban environment built on aesthetic values set the tone for citizenship and quality of life.

By the early 1900s, LA had far more single-family homes than any other big city in America. Telephones, $350 Fords and cheap gas from nearby oil wells fueled the freedom to live away from the noise and stifling summer heat of pre-air conditioned downtown. But mobility spawned unexpected problems. By 1920, downtown Los Angeles had become gridlocked.

48% of folks pulling into downtown LA in 1924 arrived by car. Seven years later, cars carried 62% of downtown visitors. Then, as now, parking was nearly impossible. Then, as now, City Council stumbled through a series of wildly unpopular parking fee schemes.

Trolleys clogged the streets, too — swarming in from all over the basin to form massive traffic clots in downtown municipal arteries.

Subways seemed a workable solution but Angelenos were not about to see their sunny city clouded by 83 miles of elevated tracks carrying soot-spewing trains as the 1925 plan proposed.

Freight and passenger trains would share high-rise rails with Pacific Electric. Automobiles would fight their traffic battles beneath miles of steel bridgework as steam locomotives chuffed and rumbled overhead.

Voters rejected the mass transit plan, including its network of subways, largely to keep the “el” out of LA. And despite fierce railroad opposition, approved reducing rail congestion even more by merging the three major passenger lines serving LA, each of which operated its own terminal, into Union Station — a $10 million project that dragged on for 13 years while railroads fought bitterly over the station’s location.

Henry Huntington died a few months later but SP’s Pacific Electric limped on for 35 more years, mostly shoving box cars around LA’s streets while fewer riders boarded the Red Car. Many passengers returned out of necessity during World War II’s gas and tire rationing, but vanished at war’s end.

The last of the crumbling Red Cars was taken out of its misery in April 1961. Semi trailers had made box cars passé as Los Angeles businesses expanded beyond easy reach of PE tracks.

The die was cast, the car still king.

The once-amazing Hollywood Subway, all that remained of LA’s first underground transit dream, became the stuff of urban legend, homeless squatters and graffiti taggers after its final train pulled out in June, 1955.

Civil Defense authorities packed the tunnel with barrels of water and crackers at the height of the Cold War. Here, sheltered by concrete deep beneath LA’s streets and palms, was an Angeleno’s best hope of surviving a Soviet nuclear attack — or so they were told.

LA subway proponents rolled over and snoozed, stirring only when dreams of a downtown airport or Disneyesque monorail interrupted their sleep as traffic roared by on the 101, the 10, the 5.

Linkage
Metro | Past Visions of LA’s Transportation Future
LA Streetcar | Bringing Streetcars back to Downtown LA
EHRA | Pacific Electric’s Hollywood Subway
Los Angeles Times | Union Station Helped Turn a City Into a Metropolis
Wikipedia | The City Beautiful Movement

Pass it on...

Cutting back on lawn watering caused this?

So that’s why LA looked like Yellowstone last summer. Geysers spewing, sinkholes yawning, all caused by broken water pipes stressed to the breaking point by the DWP’s twice-weekly lawn watering restrictions. So says an expert analysis of over more than 100 water main blowouts occurring over three months in 2009 — more than twice as many as in any of the three previous years.

Tuesday, a blue-ribbon panel revealed that DWP’s conservation efforts, which led to the lowest use of water in 35 years, caused the citywide spurts. Meantime, the DWP continued to blame the bursts on system instability caused by the Coldwater incident.

That big burst inundated Coldwater Canyon on September 5th. A 62″ pipe the DWP had laid down in William Mulholland’s day blew out, washing away cars, wrecking homes and flooding businesses. Studio City was a soggy mess.

Another main ruptured three days later causing a huge sinkhole in Valley Village — one large enough to swallow a fire truck.

Playback The Peter Tilden Morning Show: Water Main Mayhem
Click arrow to play, right-click icon to download

DWP shot down anyone who suggested the utility’s water conservation rules were to blame. “That’s clearly nonsense, dangerous nonsense,” DWP General Manager David Nahai told me last September, claiming Angelenos were simply suffering from “water main awareness.” Pipes break every day, he said. We’d just never noticed. Nahai resigned a month later.

But why were pipes popping? Tectonic activity? Climate change? Everyone had theory but the definitive report issued Tuesday finally offered some answers.

Experts from private industry, Cornell University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering led by Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Jean-Pierre Bardet say limiting lawn watering to Tuesdays and Thursdays significantly reduced pressure in DWP pipes inducing metal fatigue, especially old cast iron pipes weakened by soil corrosion.

90% of the pipes that blew are cast iron. 65% of the 7,200 miles of pipe in DWP’s water distribution network is cast iron. DWP, which swaps 22 miles of old pipe for new pipe every year, says it’s stepping up its replacement efforts, though it’ll take a couple of years of study and planning before the upgrade gets underway.

The panel’s recommendations…

• Replace the conservation program with one that does not induce pressure fluctuations. Even-odd watering days, for instance.
• Get some modern sensors! Bardet says DWP’s old-school pressure gauges that look like World War II submarine gear are “antiques.” The world’s gone digital. DWP has not.
• Use acoustic monitoring to listen for telltale changes in water flow.
• Increase asphalt-penetrating probes to explore for water leaking around pipes before they explode.

DWP says it has yet to review the panel’s findings. At least for now, the utility stands by the results of an internal investigation indicating pressure fluctuations triggered by the massive Coldwater Canyon rupture set off a chain reaction of blowouts that followed.

The water may be gone but resentment still seeps through Studio City. 16 of 41 homeowner claims against the DWP have been rejected or stalled. Fifth District councilman Paul Koretz is furious. He says the DWP is strong-arming elderly homeowners into settling for a fraction of their claims, wearing them down. Koretz ought to know. He’s a former Insurance claims adjustor.

Pass it on...

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

Los Angeles’ fiscal crisis deepens

The 41st Mayor of Los Angeles has patched potholes and synchronized stoplights. His gang reduction program has become a nationwide standard. His support of chief Bill Bratton helped transform the LAPD from a cop culture Angelenos once feared as armed and dangerous.

But Antonio Villaraigosa has consistently failed in his dreams of transforming Los Angeles into America’s greenest city.

His most recent plan — a “carbon surcharge” to help finance LA’s transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy — has triggered a chain of events that threatens the city’s most basic services and financial future. It is the latest in a series of environmental misadventures by Villaraigosa.

His 2005 campaign promise of planting a million trees withered in drought and mismanagement. His highly-touted Green Tech Corridor failed to attract any green tenants or create a single green job after he axed the development chief who could have made it a reality.

Villaraigosa’s Solar Initiative B was rejected in 2009 by voters who saw 1,500 acres of silicon panels costing up to $3 billion as payback, wrapped in green ribbons, to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who continue to energize the mayor’s career.

But as Los Angeles struggles under relentless recession, Villaraigosa refuses to reconsider his latest green scheme — quickly and dramatically boosting the Department of Water and Power’s renewable energy portfolio. Like his earlier environmental attempts, it is a worthy goal based on flawed methodology.

Greenhouse gas spewed by DWP’s coal-burning power plants, including the utility’s Navajo facility in Arizona, is not the issue. No one is defending pollution, but LA businesses and ratepayers are furious over the mayor’s sketchy path to an environmentally-friendly future — and the cost of getting there.

The mayor’s push for renewable resources will not reduce fossil fuel use by a single lump of coal over the next five years, as far down the road as the DWP is looking. It will increase power rates as much as 38%.

Meantime, the overwhelming bulk of more expensive, renewable power now coming online to meet Villaraigosa’s 20% goal is being generated outside California, draining DWP customer cash from LA’s economy while failing to create hometown green jobs.

Long-time LA industries are seriously eying the exit hatches, claiming significantly higher DWP electricity rates are no longer sustainable.

Los Angeles’ battered economy and tax base will suffer even greater losses should sudden, steep increases in the cost of electricity drive industry out of town. The city would undoubtedly lose more traditional jobs than elusive green careers can possibly replace. Gone, too, are those once-attractive deals and incentives once offered by LA’s municipally-owned utility to attract new business to LA.

Rather than compromise, Villaraigosa and DWP Acting General Manager David Freeman have sparked a war with City Council members infuriated by the utility’s arrogance, its refusal to divulge its efficiency efforts, and by the opacity of DWP’s Villaraigosa-appointed managers and commissioners.

Rather than urge his board to accept a relatively minuscule reduction of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour in his proposed rate hike while City Council weighed alternative options, Villaraigosa announced Tuesday he would close all non-essential city services two days a week.

This, while the DWP pleaded poverty after having been rebuffed, reneging on a promised revenue-sharing payment of $73.5 million to the city’s precariously balanced budget — a budget-buster unopposed by Villaraigosa despite nearly $1 billion in DWP cash reserves.

The mayor’s two-day shutdown proved impossible in light of city worker contracts, but with 4,000 job cuts already underway, further service reductions would have been devastating. The plan was withdrawn late Thursday.

Council is still waiting for that $73 million from DWP.

Without it, the city’s emergency reserve fund would be drained to an historic low as LA’s options for dealing with disaster become increasingly limited.

Yet the mayor continues to lay blame on a city council shell-shocked by months of excruciating budget-cuts and the protests of constituents angered over slashed services.

A turf battle is underway over control of the nation’s largest municipally-owned utility, a juggernaut that for much of its 108 years has run roughshod over City Hall, the Owens Valley and anyone who stood in its way.

Last week, Councilman Tom LaBonge said DWP continues to behave as portrayed in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

LA’s City Council is retaliating by proposing to dramatically reduce the mayor’s sway over the DWP, turning over an unprecedented share of DWP control to outside experts, neighborhood councils and to itself.

Even if successful, this significant change in the city’s charter cannot be implemented until voters weigh in later this year.

Meantime, the crisis has fueled a feeding frenzy by bond rating agencies this week, circling the city like sharks and increasing the stress on Los Angeles’ cash by boosting the vigorish on municipal and DWP bonds.

Crisis brings out the true colors of any leader and many Angelenos are seeing red — not a mayor who prides himself on being green. Imposing an economic crisis on a city is unacceptable under any circumstances, more so when the perception of a leader suggests a cynical use of ego and ambition in the name of environmentalism.

This week, Villaraigosa hit the media trail pitching the wonders of Los Angeles to any camera or microphone within reach — from CNN to Art Laboe’s show — a time-tested technique for this seasoned campaigner.

This time, the smiles and boosterism fell flat.

LA is in trouble. Its mayor shoulders much of the blame.

Pass it on...

As the Herald-Examiner reported, “Graves’ idea of fun is to be buried alive for days in a steel coffin with only a narrow food and air shaft connecting her with the world.”

Graves was interred near Fifth and Vermont, headlined as “the most outstanding, astonishing attraction ever!” in an era when America found itself engrossed in bizarre real-life dramas.

How long could someone sit in a tree, or on top of a flagpole? How soon before a fox-trotting couple might collapse in exhaustion at a months-long marathon dance contest? In November, 1935 curious Angelenos were dying to know how long a beautiful young girl could remain buried alive.

They came by the thousands, plunking down plenty of Depression-era coin to stand vigil around the clock at graveside, watching as meals were lowered down the air pipe venting Gloria’s steel sarcophagus, chatting with the girl through an intercom from six feet under.

Yes, she was down there — until the LAPD stepped in. It was more than Chief James E. Davis could bear. Seven days after Gloria had been prematurely laid to rest, Davis ordered Los Angeles police officers to exhume the coffin, remove the girl and arrest her.

Graves was charged with violating City Ordinance 71.181, banning endurance stunts. The so-called Marathon Ordinance had been passed in 1928 and signed into law by Acting Mayor William Bonelli to criminalize seemingly endless dance-a-thons that could jeopardize contestants’ health. Burying a teenager alive? Close enough.

Two matrons assisted Graves into court for an appearance before Municipal Judge Scott, “weak and pale” reported the Los Angeles Times. She was released on $50 bail.

A $500 fine or six months in jail were possible but Graves refused to take the charges, uh, lying down. She’d invested more than $1,000 in the mega-morbid performance police had abruptly stopped. The Herald-Examiner covered Graves’ arraignment the following morning…

“Gloria Graves, attractive ‘buried alive’ girl, brought her crypt to court today and showed it to jurors and gaping spectators. She did it to prove she was harming no one, including herself, when she was buried alive for seven days. Miss Graves showed the court how she sleeps serenely in her coffin away from earth’s turmoil.”

The tactic worked. Prosecutors declined to file charges. The case — and “tomb girl” — vanished from Los Angeles along with her faux funeral fun. LA, in its municipal wisdom, chose not to force Gloria from coffin interment to cell block confinement.

Months later, Jack Loreen of Old Orchard, Maine claimed a world record for being buried alive as he began his ninety-fourth day in a coffin buried in San Francisco (which still welcomes extreme quirkiness with open arms). All in all, the phenom seems an eerie, early forerunner of reality TV thrills.

On which side of the topsoil is Miss Graves currently chilling? That’s a mystery.

Pass it on...

Cone-crazy valet commandeers Abbot Kinney Boulevard

It’s Sunday evening in Venice and, as usual, there’s no place to park on Abbot Kinney Boulevard — though there’s lots of empty curb space. Sorry, that’s private parking for Hal’s Bar & Grill. Huh?

United Valet Parking has coned off nearly a block’s worth of parking spots on the east side of Abbot Kinney between California and Andalusia Avenues on behalf of Hal’s, seizing — then selling — un-metered Los Angeles city street. I paced off fifty-five yards in United’s boulevard blockade, enough space to park 11 average American cars.

It’s completely illegal of course, but United has been commandeering the boulevard outside Hal’s for months. When caught in the act of coning the street in December, United’s valet threw karate kicks at me and my camera as I tried to catch him in the act.

Welcome to Hal’s. No photo or I kick you! Hiyyyyyyh-ya! Oh — and try the steak.

The whole story, as heard on TalkRadio 790 KABC…

Playback The Peter Tilden Morning Show: Venice Valet Steals Street
Click arrow to play, right-click icon to download

“…and we should have three or four valets on duty on weekends,” Hal’s Don Novack told me Monday morning between profuse apologies, pinning the blame on United’s under-staffing.

“We told them to stop,” Novack says of the street-hogging, “but they won’t.” Why not change valets? “We’re under contract,” he shrugs.

So one lonely recessionista valet is left standing at Hal’s podium. Unable to abandon his post to hunt for car stashes in parking-poor Venice, he executes his street-stealing scheme just before dusk, waiting — cone in hand— to claim another spot soon as he eyeballs someone heading for their parked car. A cone here, another there. In an hour or two much of Abbot Kinney Boulevard has been captured. Hal’s personal parking lot. You wanna piece?

What a sweet racket! Hal’s customers park their own vehicles then pay for the privilege of doing so on a slice of free city street. Valet boy simply stands on the sidewalk laying cones and pocketing cash — no longer required to slip behind the wheel of a strange-smelling car and actually park it. Is he really a valet? Or simply a grifter selling the street in a snappy red vest? Literally, a street dealer.

10am Monday morning. I’m in the Culver City offices of United Valet, glancing uneasily at a vested mannequin making odd gestures next to a giant company logo in the firm’s uncomfortably stark reception area. United Valet’s president Kenny Mohammadi Sabet is nowhere to be found. I’m told he’s opening a new location out of town. Where? United refuses to say. Available to speak when? April.

City officials say United is one of several parking operators that owe millions in back taxes to cash-strapped Los Angeles. Maybe that’s why Kenny won’t return my calls.

But Don Novack did.

“United just phoned and told me they’re firing the valet,” Don tells me minutes after I’d left United’s office. Oh, great. To appease a mild case of media outrage, the little guy at the end of the food chain, who probably had nothing to do with his company’s under-staffing, takes the fall. Bad valet!

And what about guys like this Hal’s customer who paid United to park on a street the City of Los Angeles has decreed as free? Has he purchased stolen property? You reading this, Carmen Trutanich? Are we talking possible criminal charges?

The problem is rogue valets who are equally cool with mounting counterfeit valet zone signage on city power poles. This, when they’re not looting your meter change, stuffing your car into a tow-away zone or ripping up a parking ticket you won’t see ’till it’s overripe and bursting with late penalties. FYI, “valet zones” are illegal in Los Angeles. The only city-authorized valet areas lay between those waist-high white passenger loading zone signs poled into the sidewalk. All else is fraud, folks.

Now that rogue tow trucks have been leashed, LA eagerly awaits a new valet parking ordinance commissioned by City Council in December and currently under draft in the City Attorney’s office.

Like Pasadena, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, LA will soon license valets who must pass criminal background checks and post proof of insurance. They must also prove they have available parking spaces if they want to play valet.

Now for those counterfeit valet zone signs at the restaurant down the street.

Pass it on...

Hey brotha! LA’s first Latino mayor since 1870 is actually a black guy? You’d swear Antonio Villaraigosa was straight outta Compton as he lapsed into jivespeak while presenting awards to Jamie Foxx, Chaka Khan and Tavis Smiley at African American Heritage Month celebrations at City Hall. Say what?

Hear what the mayor had to say — and how he said it — in a delightful little segment from John Phillips’ show. Was it outreach or outrage? You make the call.

Playback: LA’s Jive-talkin’ Mayor
Click arrow to play, right-click icon to download

Audience reaction ranged from giggles to amazement. Hundreds of African Americans who packed Council chambers or watched video projections on City Hall’s south lawn seemed slightly startled as hizzoner rapped on — not shuckin’ or jivin’ as much with the drop-dead eloquent Tavis Smiley as he did with entertainers Kahn and Foxx. LA’s mainstream media took no notice. Not even the Militant Angelino who took the crowd pic above took exception.

Younger blacks seemed more amused than their civil rights-era elders or those from the Afro-centric generations of the 70s and 80s.

But imagine the reaction had former mayors Jim Hahn or Dick Riordan lapsed into Ebonics at a celebration of black achievement. A conversation at DiversityInc offers a clue…

Answer
Almost everyone has to deal with white people, but most white people live a highly segregated life — especially socially. This leads to discomfort in business and social interactions — that’s where you’ll hear dumb talk and stupid “accents.”

Different rules seem to apply to LA’s highest-ranking elected official, seen here smooching Chaka Khan who, like Foxx and Smiley, didn’t speak in the vernacular voiced by the Mayor of Color.

Regardless, his ratings seem solid in the African American community.

In a 2009 Los Angeles Times poll taken before Villaraigosa pulled out of the governor’s race, African Americans gave the mayor a 63% approval rating and clearly preferred him as their choice for governor (39%) over Jerry Brown (27%) and Gavin Newsom (4%).

Still, Villaraigosa never ceases to amaze. And it was something of a stunner to watch the mayor of Los Angeles morph chameleon-like into a black dude.

Leonard Zelig lives.

Pass it on...

Think you can outrun this baby?

Fast, furious crime-fighter
Los Angeles Police dreamed of cruising the City of Angels in Pontiac’s G8 GT, built in Australia by GM subsidiary Holden and first released in 2008 in the United States — until GM dropped its Pontiac line. Back to the drawing board.

Still, the G8 would have been a sizzling-hot patrol vehicle sporting an impressive 361 hp 6.0 liter (364 cubic inch) Generation IV V8 engine with a 6-speed, 6L80 automatic transmission.

Together, they’re capable of hitting 60 mph in just over 5 seconds with quarter-miles as low as 13.5 seconds. The speedometer tops at 180 mph but despite the best intentions of on-board Active Fuel Management, the G8 GT averages only 15 mpg city, 24 mpg highway.

The contender: Chevy Caprice
Now, LAPD is transplanting its extensive R&D into a 6.0 liter Chevrolet Caprice PPV also made by Holden which is aggressively pursuing the law enforcement market now that Ford is winding down production of its 224 hp Crown Victoria, the all-time classic American cop car.

High-tech accessories
Advanced gizmos embedded in the G8 have upped the odds of catching crooks. Thanks to FLIR (forward-looking infrared) officers can identify and track heat signatures oozing from suspects — even with headlights off. Yes, the car can see in the dark.

The low-profile lightbar houses PlateScan cameras able to read up to 8,000 license plates per shift, comparing them to stolen vehicle or Amber Alert databases stored on an in-trunk computer, able to notify officers with a voice and on-screen alert within a second of a positive ID hit.

Here’s an audio report I filed when PlateScan first surfaced. Since, dozens of LAPD units have been equipped with the technology.

Playback: PlateScan
Click the arrow to play, right-click the icon to download

Built for uncluttered comfort

Cop-customized
Officers have asked forever for the interior enhancements implemented in the Pontiac G8 prototype. The laptop computer that once rode between officers now resides in the trunk, reducing the possibility of injury in a crash. A built-in dashboard touchscreen is one interface, though officers can also plug in a standard keyboard.

Gun-toting is far more comfortable thanks to cutouts in the seats to accommodate side arms. Reinforced lower back panels should help reduce stress. Under-seat fans circulate cool air through the seats in SoCal summers helping reduce heat damage to Kevlar vests.

Skinned for savings
As for the white on this black-and-white — it’s no longer paint. Vinyl skin now saves a custom paintjob and eliminates the pesky chore of making sure folks who buy a used cop car paint those trademark white doors. The peel-off skin means higher resale value the department is hoping to maximize. “Our black-and-white fleet is worth $50 million dollars,” says newly-named LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, “and currently we sell it for $2 million when its service it through.”

The only problem (besides Pontiac’s demise)? Los Angeles’ huge fiscal deficit means these super-squaddies will have to wait at least until 2011. The pressure’s on to keep the department’s fleet running as-is for another year without adding any new vehicles.

Still, like any car-crazy aficionado, a cop can dream of a rad ride.

Pass it on...

Of course it had to happen. Google wants Twitter, offers $250 million. Twitter laughs it off saying, “Wouldn’t sell for a billion.” And rightly so. Twitter’s search engine does what Google cannot: analyze real-time trends. And Twitter’s got buzz. Anyway, what’s a billion compared to trillions being tossed around these days?

As the Freep’s web editor puts it, “We are Twitter’s currency. Twitter will grow and grow, sell itself to Google or Facebook for billions of dollars, and then another free service will come along and do the same.”

Right. That next big thing? Flutter.

You heard it first — right here…

Topic Two: Kogi. Not the Kogi indigenous people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, nor the state of Kogi in north-central Nigeria. This is L.A.’s Kogi mobile BBQ — a smart adventure in restaurateurism that seductively blends two of Angel City’s yummiest cuisines: Korean and Mexican.

Kogi comes to Kinney

I began following @kogibbq on Twitter last week (not taken in by hilarious impostor @omgwtfkogibbq). As every Angeleno knows by now, Twitter is the only way of knowing where the taco truck will next appear. But soon as I began following Kogi, the truck began following me. OMG! There it is, in Brandelli’s parking lot on Abbot Kinney — with a line of foodies and fans some people 50 deep. Pull over!

I’m in, on line, hooked by the story at SeriousEats, documenting a day in the life of the little truck that’s redefining the notion of meals on wheels. Its marketing turns out to have been as inspired as its menu, though vehicular food fetishism has a kink or two.

Eric Shin ( < --- a pic of Eric, taking orders) emerges to tell two women behind me they are officially the end of the line and then lays a terrible responsibility on them them — they must shoo away anyone else who shows up.

Fat chance! Another 30 people arrive in the next ten minutes, determined to be fed and refusing to take no for an answer.

The ladies are tortured by their dilemma. They cannot convince the others to quietly go away and feel awful 'cause of their lack of persuasion. But really, who needs such mealtime anxiety, such terrifying gastronomic guilt? Eric, dude. Get a traffic cone with a sign.

The Menu

Gotta say the food is extraordinary. Started with the Kogi Dog which has forever ruined Pinks and Carney’s. Odd to embed that undeniable hot dog taste we learned as kids in a symphony of Korean kimchi sauerkraut. Yum.

The Spring Pork Taco is small but awesome. Tender pork in onions, cilantro and spicy soy-sesame chili in a corn tortilla. Muy delicioso.

But Kogi did me in with the short rib burrito which sorta impersonates its vending machine cousins at first glance — but at first bite? Yow! Ever been served a dish you just didn’t want to end? This was that. I’m drooling now, just thinking about it. Here’s the inside scoop…

Total tab with a Diet Coke: $14.75. If ya get the chance, do this. It’s worth a wait and the crowd’s totally fun to play with — a party celebrating cross-cultural, next-gen, gourmet L.A. at its finest with food we sincerely hope will never be seen in Gelsons’ freezer section.

Follow that truck.

Pass it on...