http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deal14jan14,0,7443424.story?coll=la-home-headlines
The complications of the condemnation process of a furniture factory for a police station that would later become a proposed site for a proposed dog pound that now appears to be turning into the expansion of a furniture design studio (not to mention the way police bond money was used to buy the furniture factory/police station/dog kennel/furniture design studio and how the eviction of the previous owner was handled) - hardly shows our city at its best. But at least there is a logic as to how it has all come down.
Still, no one at City Hall (prior to Parks becoming councilman) looks very good in this as Patrick McGreevy correctly points out.
But regarding the inference that anyone who accepted donations from the owners of the design studio has been swayed by those donations is clearly unfounded when one looks at that history of the transaction.
When former Chief soon to be Councilman Bernard Parks ran for office, he promised to bring better paying jobs to his district and to improve the quality of development in his district, both of which will happen with this new project.
He is only doing what he had promised to do. And encouraging him at the time was one other major political force that seemingly supported transferring this land to the design center; a political force that put Parks on the spot back in 2003 by all but asking that he stop the pound and allow the design center to expand.
And that major - albeit, fully unmentioned in the article - political force was... the LA Times!
Yes!
City Putting a Pound in the Way of Progress
By Michael Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times Monday December 01, 2003
The question raised by Francisco Pinedo's plans to turn a few square
blocks of South-Central L.A. into the leading furniture design mart
on the West Coast is this: Can the city of Los Angeles get out of its
own way?
The very LA Times now condemning politicians for supporting this, clear back in 2003 practically DEMANDED that these same politicians support this! For more on this, go to the below link and scroll a very, very long way down to get the the story.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:IkWzPVM8s84J:www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/adm/loeb/04e50goldenstate.pdf+dog+pound+design+%22los+angeles+times%22&hl=en
And now - two years later - the Times is attacking the politicians for doing what the Times had asked them to do! Now of course to actually know all this, there would have to be at least one editor at the LA Times would actually reads the LA Times... but well... you know.... just cause you make the sausages doesn't mean you really want to eat them.
Much more on this later....
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