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• Central Library, 630 W 5th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071
• Van Nuys Branch Library, 6250 Sylmar Ave., Van Nuys, CA 91401
• West L. A. Regional Branch Library, 11360 Santa Monica Bl., Los Angeles, CA 90025
• San Pedro Regional Branch Library, 931 S. Gaffey Street, San Pedro, CA 90731
• Granada Hills Branch, 10640 Petit Avenue, Granada Hills, CA 91344

The post Final EIR of City of Los Angeles’ Proposed Single-Use Carryout Bag Ordinance appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

The city gives its road network an average grade of C. But a Times analysis finds wide disparities, and they’re not driven by wealth or political power.

Explore pavement quality ratings for each of the 68,000 street segments in L.A., graded from A to F.

From the L.A. Times, May 4, 2013

A drive along Angus Street in hilly Silver Lake requires navigating a gantlet of buckled concrete slabs and dirt-filled cracks.

But on South Seabluff Drive in Playa Vista the ride is smooth, the pavement is black and you can smell the fresh asphalt.

Despite the city’s best efforts to keep up with the constant flood of road repairs, Los Angeles is a city divided — by its potholes, cracks and ruts.

Interactive map: See your street’s grade

A Times analysis of street inspection data found wide disparities in road quality among the city’s 114 neighborhoods.

The streets in the newer development of Playa Vista, which the city’s database gives the highest ranking with an average grade of B, scored 80% higher than those in Silver Lake, which ranks among the worst with a D-minus average.

The differences are not driven by wealth or political power. In fact, some of the poorest parts of the city have some of the best roads.

The heart of the problem is aging streets, heavy traffic, undulating terrain and the sheer size of the network. The streets in the poorest shape tend to be in hillside neighborhoods, such as the Hollywood Hills, Mount Washington, Los Feliz and Bel-Air.

But layered on top of those problems is a street repair strategy that bypasses the worst streets in favor of preserving salvageable ones. Street officials have also made a political decision to bring the overall grade of roads in each City Council district to the same level.

For Angelenos waiting for their street to be rebuilt, abandon all hope: There is a 60-year backlog of failed streets — meaning residents might not see them fixed in their lifetimes.

“If you ask people ‘How many of you have been a victim of crime today?’ nobody will raise their hand,” said Rusty Millar, a Silver Lake Neighborhood Council representative. “If you ask ‘How many of you have been a victim of bad streets and traffic?,’ everybody will raise their hand.”

::

With its stately homes and manicured lawns, Hancock Park is one of the wealthiest areas in L.A. and considered one of the city’s historical gems. But that hasn’t helped get its mostly ancient concrete streets repaired: The neighborhood has an overall D-minus grade.

Hancock Park residents Michael and Ruth Steinberger live on Rimpau Boulevard, which was graded F when last inspected. They have complained to the city that their street has a severe rut at the intersection with 3rd Street that has scraped the undercarriage of their Mercedes countless times.

“It ruins every car,” Ruth Steinberger said. “And God forbid you don’t know about it and you are coming in at normal speeds — you can get hurt.”

After decades of neglect, Los Angeles is trying to play catch-up in places like Hancock Park.

It’s a Herculean task, given the size of L.A.’s street network — the largest municipal system in the country with 6,500 miles of paved roadway. Factor the number of lanes into the equation and there are enough miles of road in the city to build a 10-lane freeway from here to New York City.

The average grade of the city’s roads is a C. The network scores lower than all 10 of the most populous counties in the state, according to city and state data.

But the average grade tells only part of the story. More than one-third of the streets in the city have a score of D or worse, meaning they must be resurfaced or totally reconstructed.

“I not only sympathize with those residents, I also empathize,” said Nazario Sauceda, director of the city Bureau of Street Services. “I can tell you with a straight face that we are doing the best we can with the money we have.”

In some neighborhoods, such as Silver Lake and Hancock Park, more than half the streets are graded F, the Times analysis found. Those streets have foot-deep potholes and giant cracks that can flatten tires and ruin suspensions.

At the other end of the spectrum, nearly half of Winnetka’s streets and more than half of Playa Vista’s are graded A.

The city’s goal is to raise its entire street network to a B average, but that can’t be done without more than $2.6 billion in new money, according to the city.

This year, the aim is to work on roughly 800 miles of road. Most of that — about 70% — involves applying crack and slurry seal to preserve roads. The rest is the much more expensive work of resurfacing streets.

Even 20 years ago, the city employed what was called the “windshield method” to find problems — driving around the city and fixing whatever looked bad. At the time, the city adopted a “worst-first” strategy — fixing the broken streets before all others.

But that doesn’t work in the long run because of limited resources. Rebuilding a street is five to 10 times more expensive than patching one. If work crews just replaced the worst streets, hundreds of miles of passable streets would fall into disrepair sooner, city officials said.

In 1998, the city began using a computerized pavement management system to help plan street maintenance and repaving with a constrained budget. Using a state-of-the-art van equipped with cameras and lasers, workers created a database for the roughly 68,000 street segments. The vehicle is outfitted like an undercover FBI surveillance unit; employees inside gather photos and measurements to document pavement distress.

The first time city officials crunched street inspection data was in 2005, and they found big discrepancies in the average street quality ratings among the 15 council districts, ranging from B to D grades. Since then, the bureau has worked hard to narrow those gaps, Sauceda said.

“We don’t have enough money to improve the condition of the network,” he said. “My job is to distribute misery equally.”

The Times analysis found that disparities between council districts persist. Streets in CouncilmanTom LaBonge‘s Hollywood district have an overall grade of D-plus. By comparison, CouncilwomanJan Perry‘s South L.A. district ranks highest with a C-plus grade and an average street quality score that is 26% higher than LaBonge’s.

LaBonge said he isn’t surprised by the Times’ findings because of the age and geography of roads in his district. It includes some of the lowest-scoring hilly neighborhoods. Many of the those areas have hard concrete streets that were built more than 50 years ago and are well beyond their life expectancy, city officials said.

“If you go through Beverly Hills, there isn’t a pothole there,” LaBonge said. “Why? Because every tax dollar stays in Beverly Hills. But in Los Angeles it’s shared from San Pedro to Chatsworth. People in my district want to see improvement, but it’s also a shared city.”

That’s little consolation to homeowner Gregory Leskin, who lives on that treacherous stretch of Angus Street in Silver Lake.

Nearly three years ago, he got fed up with the severe cracking on his block, went online and submitted a request with the street services bureau to fix it. He’s still waiting.

“It’s dilapidated and in desperate need of repair,” said Leskin, a clinical psychologist at UCLA.

::

Earlier this year, Councilmen Joe Buscaino and Mitchell Englander proposed a $3-billion bond issue to fix streets graded D or F but put it on hold after other council members complained there was not enough public outreach. Since then, Buscaino, chairman of the Public Works Committee, has held meetings across the city to get public input on a similar measure that could go on the November 2014 ballot.

There is growing concern at City Hall that the pool of money available for roadwork will shrink dramatically. President Obama‘s federal stimulus package ran out last summer; and funding from Proposition 1B, a statewide measure that passed in 2006, expires in June after providing $87 million for roadwork in Los Angeles.

That money allowed the city to increase its street repair and maintenance spending to an all-time high of $105 million this fiscal year. At the same time, however, the city’s general fund has been contributing far less, down to $1.1 million this year from $32.2 million in 2007, budget officials said.

Additional funding is the only solution to saving the street system in the long run, said John Harvey, director of the University of California Pavement Research Center.

“If you continually under-fund it, there is no magic in pavement management,” Harvey said. “You can’t do it. You are going to continue to deteriorate.”

Times staff writer Ben Welsh contributed to this report.

ben.poston@latimes.com

Interactive map: See your street’s grade

How we reported this story

The city’s database of streets maintained by the Bureau of Street Services includes location, rating, street type and last inspection and repair.

The city scores each street segment on a 100-point scale called the pavement condition index. The Times mapped the data to neighborhood and council district boundaries.

Streets located along the borders of neighborhoods or districts were counted for all adjacent areas. The Times analysis took into account the street surface area, work history and pavement deterioration over time.

The pavement database is a snapshot in time from late April and may not reflect recent roadwork or inspections, according to the Street Services bureau.

How the city of L.A. grades streets

A streets: no cracking, no oxidation and no structural failure. No maintenance required.

B streets: minimal cracking, no oxidation and no structural failure. Slurry seal required.

C streets: minimal cracking, zero to 5% of structural failure. Blanketing (repaving) required.

D streets: some cracking, 6% to 35% of structural failure. Resurfacing required.

F streets: major or unsafe cracking, 36% to more than 50% of structural failure. Resurfacing or reconstruction required.

Source: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services

The post Grading Los Angeles’ Streets appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

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“Our partners at the US Geological Survey and Caltech have been working on the development of a cutting-edge early warning system.” Mayor Villaraigosa said. “We’re proud to provide this additional funding to improve the system’s capacity and bring it to the level required to make earthquake early warning a reality in Southern California.”

The USGS, in partnership with CalTech, UC Berkeley, and the Southern California Earthquake Center, has been developing an Earthquake Early Warning system for Southern California since 2006.

The objective of earthquake early warning is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. This can be done with sensors placed near active fault zones that detect the first energy waves to radiate from an earthquake.  Those first waves travel at the speed of sound but cause little damage.  The following waves, which bring the strong shaking that causes most of the damage, travel slower.  The greater the distance from the epicenter, the longer the warning time which can range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds.

Those seconds could:

• allow people to drop, cover, and hold on and grant businesses time to shut down and move workers to safe locations,
• give medical professionals time to stop delicate procedures,
• protect travelers by providing time for trains to slow or stop, for elevator doors to open, for bridge traffic to clear, for slowing or stopping traffic, and even stopping landings and take-offs at airports, and
• enable emergency responders to prepare by opening fire station doors and starting generators.

When the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan in March 2011, 50 million residents received warning in advance.  The country’s earthquake information systems gave people about 200 miles away in Tokyo up to 30 seconds or more to prepare before strong shaking from the epicenter reached them. People closer to the epicenter, which experienced the strongest shaking from this offshore event, received up to 5-10 seconds warning.

For further information, visit www.shakealert.org

The post Mayor Villaraigosa Announces $5 Million in Grants for Earthquake Early Warning System appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

The April edition of the Lake Balboa NC Newsletter is packed with information about your community, including:

• A Food Forward Earth Day event;
• Worldfest 2013 at Woodley Park;
• Council District 6 Election Candidates;
• California Native Plant Week;
• and more!

Click here to download your copy of the latest Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council Newsletter.

The post April 2013 Newsletter Now Available appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

The candidates are out there, stumping for votes, inundating inboxes, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread their messages.

No, we’re not talking about a certain upcoming mayoral election—although, like that contest, the outcome of this one could have ramifications for the future of Los Angeles.

This hotly-contested race is called MyLA2050, and the candidates, all 279 of them, are vying for a piece of a $1 million pot that aims to underwrite 10 of the best ideas for changing life here for the better.

It’s crowdsourcing with a conscience. And to scroll through the entries is to peer into the idealistic, entrepreneurial, only-in-L.A. psyche of a metropolis in transition.

Want to support a door-to-door urban composting program?

Underwrite a rolling neighborly Potluck Truck?

Jumpstart an off-the-grid, self-sustainable artists’ habitat called ValhalLA?

Here’s your chance to cast a vote—and just one, according to the rules—for the project that captures your imagination, or your heart. While public voting won’t directly award any money, it will determine the top 10 vote-getters in the eight categories from which winners will be chosen by the Goldhirsh Foundation, which is sponsoring the initiative. (The categories are education, environmental quality, health, social connectedness, art and cultural vitality, income and employment, housing and public safety.) Two other “wild card” projects will be selected as well—regardless of whether they receive popular acclaim. Each of the 10 winners will receive $100,000 to implement their idea.

On social media, the politicking is getting fast and furious as the voting deadline—high noon on April 17—approaches.

“HoneyLovers! Can you spare 30 seconds to help us out? We are in the running for a $100,000 GRANT to help make Los Angeles PESTICIDE FREE! We would LOVELOVELOVE your support! PS—You do not need to live in Los Angeles to vote for us so spread the buzzzzz!!!” read one appeal on Facebook from the beekeeping-promoting HoneyLove (aiming for a “Pesticide-Free Los Angeles 2050.”)

And that’s far from the only get-out-the-vote effort going. “We are gaining momentum in the voting. We are not there yet,” said a recent post on behalf of the Potluck Truck candidate from Project Food Los Angeles. “One of our members is counting on this grant to tell her father to back off the consistent pressure to get a real job! A victory here would be a strong validation of the power of ideas…we think it’s a good one! Please VOTE!”

Some, like the Eagle Rock Yacht club, which promotes dodgeball as a gateway to youth education programs, are offering incentives: folks who vote for the project get $10 off the $45 fee for the organization’s spring leagues.

In the midst of the all the competing appeals, however, some would-be voters seem stymied by the contest rules, like one who recently asked on Facebook: “Am I the only one who finds this confusing? Can we vote for one each in multiple categories? Or just for one? I have so many friends who are competing for this!”

Others have run into frustration because the voting website won’t open on older versions of Internet Explorer. (Contest organizers suggest using Firefox or Chrome browsers.)

“At first it was kind of nail-biting because I’m very passionate about the idea and I wanted everybody to hear about it. I was blasting it out there,” said Courtney Carter, who’s promoting the ValhalLA artists’ habitat. She said she’s been checking the contest leader board “like every second” to see how her entry is faring with the voting public.

Vivian Liao of City Earthworm, who’s behind “You Can Compost That!” has also been an energetic stumper.

“I do a lot of Facebook and Twitter campaigning. Obviously, there’s a lot of friends-and-family bugging,” she said. “I’m blogging about this also.”

It’s understandable that some people are having a hard time choosing which program to back. There are entries from famous institutions like the county Natural History Museum (proposing anUrban Safari program to “discover and document” the biodiversity of the L.A. Basin) and candidates from tiny outfits like HoneyLove. Naomi Ackerman’s Advot Project seeks to change the lives and relationships of teenagers through theater and dramatic exercises. Community Builders Resource Network wants to bring charitable organizations together for greater impact.

Some contenders grew out of established success stories, like the heartwarming international video sensation Caine’s Arcade, or L.A.’s favorite car-free rolling block party, CicLAvia. Others are more niche (“Beautiful Rain Barrels in Public Places.”) Some are big (“The Million Reusable Bag Giveaway”), some are small (“Park-in-a-box”), some sound like poems (“Endless Orchard”) and some sound like they’re on a mission (“Empowering Teens with the Knowledge and Skills to Make Healthy Decisions.”)

There are concepts for apps and maps and pop-ups. Garden-related ideas are huge, and there are a number of proposals advancing new, socially-conscious purposes for food trucks. The Los Angeles River figures in at least two: A temporary summer riverfront park and an Elysian Park “swimming pool/industrial cistern” to be used as a public plunge.

And like any campaign, there are the catchy slogans and exhortations: “Kids who sling kale eat kale,” ”Dodgeball, prosperity and the Common Good,” “State of the art lighting for city parks!”

The contest is part of a broader initiative, sponsored by philanthropist and GOOD magazine founderBen Goldhirsh, to rethink the future of L.A. A report—“Los Angeles 2050: Who we are. How we live. Where we’re going.”—was released in February, with the aim of stimulating “an outbreak of idealism that strengthens civic engagement, challenges the status quo, and demands more for the future of Los Angeles.”

Shauna Nep, a social innovation manager on the project, said the contest is a way to bring more attention to the findings in the report and to “create a more participatory and transparent process” for tackling some of the challenges it explored.

The $1 million derby brought out a wide range of entrants, she said—“a lot we were familiar with, and some we’d never heard of before.”

And, while it has not received much attention in the mainstream media, she noted that it has been a lively topic on blogs and social media networks.

“We’re overwhelmed,” she said.

Meanwhile, don’t worry that you’ll have to wait around till 2050 to see your favorite innovations take shape. The rules call for all the winning projects to be implemented this year.

The post Vote and Help Spread a Cool $1 Million appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

In a city the size of Los Angeles, one of the fastest routes to City Hall is the internet. In the time it takes to find your car keys, you can be online and communicating with the Mayor and the City Council.

Effective Neighborhood Council advocates typically know three things; they know the issue, they know what they want, and they know who can help them.

Then they do something about it. Here are a few tips for effective email advocacy, followed by the email addresses of the Mayor and the City Council, complemented by a simple link that allows you to email the Mayor and the City Council with one click.

Identify yourself and your Neighborhood Council. Let them know that you are a voting resident or a taxpaying business owner or an active parent volunteer.

Be polite and professional. You can disagree, you can be firm and forceful, but always remember that you are creating a public document and your objective is to persuade.

Be clear and state your objective. You can complain all day long but if you don’t get to the point and ask for help, compliance, or support,  you won’t get what you want.

Look for common ground. We live in a great city and we’re all partners in making it even better. Let people know that you want to help them help you.

Encourage others to join you. There is strength in numbers and if you take to time to write a persuasive email, share it with others so that they can support you.

Be grateful. Take the time to write, even when you aren’t asking for something or opposed to something. Become the memorable constituent by noticing the good and by thanking your leadership when they get it right.

Contact the Mayor and City Council:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – Mayor@lacity.org

Click HERE to determine your Council District and contact your councilman below.

Ed Reyes, CD 1 - councilmember.Reyes@lacity.org

Paul Krekorian, CD2 – Paul.Krekorian@lacity.org

Dennis P. Zine, CD 3 – councilmember.Zine@lacity.org

Tom LaBonge, CD 4 - councilmember.LaBonge@lacity.org

Paul Koretz, CD 5 – Paul.Koretz@lacity.org

vacant, CD 6 – councildistrict6@lacity.org

Richard Alarcon, CD 7 – councilmember.Alarcon@lacity.org

Bernard Parks, CD 8 – councilmember.Parks@lacity.org

Jan Perry, CD 9 – Jan.Perry@lacity.org

Herb J. Wesson, Jr. CD 10 – councilmember.Wesson@lacity.org

Bill Rosendahl, CD 11 – councilman.Rosendahl@lacity.org

Mitch Englander, CD 12 – councilmember.Englander@lacity.org

Eric Garcetti, CD 13 – councilmember.Garcetti@lacity.org

Jose Huizar, CD 14 – councilmember.Huizar@lacity.org

Joe Buscaino, CD 15 – councilmember.Buscaino@lacity.org

To contact the Mayor and ALL Councilmembers, email CityHall@EmpowerLA.org which will forward your email to ALL emails above.

The post The Fastest Route to City Hall appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

Click here for the questions with answers and the regional budget powerpoint results.

Additionally, the Citywide results are posted at budget.lacity.org.

The post Los Angeles Budget Challenge Results: North Valley & South Valley appeared first on Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council.

Click here to add us as a friend on Facebook.  We look forward to seeing you there.

If you don’t use Facebook, don’t sweat it.  We will still post all of those goodies here first.

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