Public safety, salary reform and jobs were some of the topics that Los Angeles mayoral candidate’Kevin James addressed last Thursday as guest speaker at the Pacific Palisades Community Council meeting. James, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in LA, said that his vision for the city is highlighted in an ‘eight-point plan’ that will focus on creating a business friendly environment, repairing infrastructure and balancing the city’s crumbling budget. ’I entered the mayor’s race because when I moved here back in 1987 as a very young person, Los Angeles was still a place where young people came’it was a land of opportunity,’ James said. ‘I’ve watched some of our opportunities slip away.’ An Oklahoma native, James moved to L.A. after law school to work for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he stayed for two years before taking a position with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Besides practicing law for 25 years, James has also served as chairman of AIDS Project L.A. and hosted radio programs on KABC and KRLA, where he focused extensively on City Hall and other local issues. L.A. has become a place where the best and brightest people are moving elsewhere in the country, James said, citing lack of economic prosperity here. ‘We absolutely have to bring jobs back to L.A.’ ’On day one as Mayor, I would put through a business improvement package that includes the elimination of the gross receipts tax’not the elimination of the business tax, but a new way of calculating the business tax that is modeled after our most tax-friendly neighbors. ’The second part of the business improvement package is streamlining the permitting process,’ he said, noting that L.A. ‘cannot be a city where you have to go to 13, 15 or 17 different departments to open a business and it can take you six to eighteen months.’ L.A. has found itself on the brink of bankruptcy, he said, and the City’s budgeting problems have to be solved long-term, which means cutting City salaries and pensions. ‘My opponents have proven through their performances and the decisions that they have made that they do not have the independence needed to make the kind of decisions to rein in the salaries and pension obligations.’ Part of James’s government reform plan would include transforming the L.A. City Council into a part-time body. ‘Our City Council is now closed out to the people of the community because you have to serve on L.A. City Council full time and you would have to leave your career’. [Part-time councilmembers are not] a novel idea. We have 88 cities in L.A. County’87 of them have a part-time City Council.’ The candidate’s reform plan would also focus on transportation and public safety. James, who was endorsed by L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley on Friday, said that prison realignment is just another term for early release. ‘Seventy percent of early releases will be coming back to the L.A. area and they are coming back to an employment rate that is 15 percent. It’s hard enough for a felon to get a job with a five percent unemployment rate.’ The rank-and-file of the LAPD is reporting spikes in crime in almost every neighborhood of the city, he said. ‘They attribute much of this to early release.’ ’We don’t have the money to hire more police but we don’t have to,’ James explained. ‘What we need to do is reform the way they do policing in the LAPD.’ A former federal prosecutor, James said that LAPD officers are spending too much of their time behind the desk and this is due to the department’s current consent decree, which came about because of LAPD’s Rampart scandal. ‘The consent decree has been satisfied but many of those policies remain in place and are outdated, and not needed.’ Also, James said he would lower the rate of parking fees in the City, noting that fines go unpaid because of the $68 cost of the ticket. ’A $15 parking ticket is not intimidating,’ he said. ‘You are going to have better collections if you lower the parking ticket price.’ On safety issues impacting Pacific Palisades, James stated that ‘the issue on Engine 69 is a very simple issue for me. There are parts of the city that are a higher fire danger than others and it is very easy to describe which parts those are.’ Engine 69 being reinstated as a 12-man crew is ‘something that makes public sense.’ James argues that the City can save Engine 69, 82 and others being threatened by tackling the issue of pensions and increasing salaries. ‘I am going to have to be the one that is going to have to tell police and fire that they are not going to get the raises they were counting on.’ As mayor, James said he would consider having the city file for bankruptcy. ‘If the unions refuse to give us the freeze we need on salaries and the givebacks on pensions’they could force us to bankruptcy.’ James’s main opponents in the March 2013 mayoral primary include Councilman Eric Garcetti, L.A. City Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilwoman Jan Perry.
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