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THIS IS THE OPINION PAGE
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NEW ADVERTISING KIOSK AT NATIONAL AND MOTOR HELPS GIVE PALMS AN IDENTITY; WE COULD DO WITH MORE OF THEM
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Unlike many nay-sayers, The Sun really likes the "street furniture" being placed around our city by the Viacom-Decaux Co.
<— Compared with a lot of the dreck that passes for advertising in Palms, this new kiosk on the northeast corner of National and Motor in a paragon of simplicity.
Its color (green) was chosen by a vote of Palms stakeholders some 18 months ago, and, as promised, owner Viacom-Decaux has emblazoned the word PALMS on one side.
The only thing lacking is a way for the Palms neighborhood to post notices of community events on the side of the triangle facing the sidewalk.
That, too, was promised by Viacom.
A representative of Viacom told The Sun that he would find out when the Palms community can get a key and begin posting notices.
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Another Viacom product, a bus stop with a protective awning to ward off sun and rain, is to the west just across Motor Ave. —>
The company is installing shelters and other street furniture on city sidewalks under a contract that allows it to display advertising. Our city could receive a $150 million share of the profits over the next 20 years, says the L.A. Times.
No word yet on when that ugly bench across National (not a Viacom product) will be removed. |
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Some people don't like the 'street furniture' — including City Council Member Jack Weiss, as well as the new chair of the Palms-Westside Village Neighborhood Watch
The City Council has recently ended a procedure that allowed individual council members to block the placing of these shelters and kiosks within their districts. This is what Patrick McGreevy of the L.A. Times reported on Dec. 17, 2005:
The Los Angeles City Council acted Friday to remove roadblocks that have kept hundreds of ad-bearing bus shelters and other street furniture out of affluent areas of West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.
The council voted to curtail the power council members have to block such things as bus shelters, kiosks and self-cleaning toilets from their districts.
Neighborhood activists from Westwood, Mar Vista, Woodland Hills and Pacific Palisades objected to the new policy, saying that it would lead to a proliferation of "sidewalk billboards."
Viacom Decaux is installing shelters and other street furniture on city sidewalks under a contract that allows the firm to sell advertising to display on the sides. Los Angeles could receive a $150-million share of the profits over the next 20 years.
"This is really an embarrassing and repugnant and gross amendment because you have relinquished the obligation to control this to Viacom," said Bennett Cohon, a Westwood community activist.
Under the current process, Viacom Decaux submits to each council member a list of proposed sites for street furniture in the council member's district, and council members can reject a site and request alternative sites.
However, some council members have declined to act on requests, preventing street furniture from being installed for years. The program has been operating since 2002.
Of the 2,035 requests by Viacom Decaux, 1,300 have been approved.
The new policy — which only applies to council districts where fewer than 75% of the requests have been approved — requires each council office to respond to a request within 15 days.
If they say no, the council members must offer Viacom Decaux three alternate sites within 500 feet of the proposed location, or work collaboratively with the firm to find another site within 15 days.
 Westside Councilman Jack Weiss [left] was the lone vote against the change, arguing that neighborhoods shouldn't be forced to accept the advertising.
Weiss said Viacom Decaux is concentrating its street advertising in more affluent districts. He said 15 kiosks were proposed for the 15th Council District, which includes Watts, and 11 were approved, while 126 kiosks have been proposed in his 5th District and 19 were approved.
Weiss said he is listening to constituents. "This is not a street furniture issue. We are talking about sidewalk billboards," Weiss said.
Other council districts where fewer than 75% of the furnishings have been approved include Wendy Greuel's 2nd District, Tom LaBonge's 4th District, Bill Rosendahl's 11th District and Eric Garcetti's 13th District.
Councilman Greig Smith said he warned his colleagues a year ago in a memo that red tape and other glitches are costing the city millions of dollars because Viacom Decaux is not paying for furnishings that are denied.
One report in February said the city could have received $14 million since 2002, but had only received $9.7 million.
"We weren't doing our job in moving them through the system," Smith said.
The new policy will be conditioned on negotiations to get Viacom to pay Los Angeles all or part of the lost revenue.
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Here is how Cliff Cheng, our new Neighborhood Watch chair, feels about the issue, in an e-mail sent on Dec. 16
to 21 community leaders
 i wonder if the NC is working on the Viacom street furniture issue? viacom was caught by a congress working group member trying to sneak by a new law that says once they decide on a location for kiosks, bus shelters, public tiolets, if we dotn like it we are responsbile for finding another location near that location first proposed or else they automatically get their first choice location. a notice from councilman zine about this issues follows.
this is obviously a citywide issue which impacts us locally. alone Palms NC lacks the clout to stop Viacom from forcing their advertising upon us. billboard companies have played a big part in LA politics. councilman miek fuer, jack weiss' predessor, opposed them. when feur ran for city atty, they funded rocki. rocki won becasue of the billboard companies. we havent had our first congress meeting. had we been up and running we could strongly oppose them.
the watch is concerned from a security angle. SLO Vasquez brought up these concerns when we were still an organzing committee. bus shelters unless they are designed a certain way can encourage homeless people to sleep on them. sleeping in public is illegal - homelessness is not. placing toilets in public can attract drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless. i am willing to do a letter or co-sign one of yours.
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 KARL FENSKE: Proposed Congress would create unnecessary layer of government
[The author is a Board member of the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council; to read the full version of his article, click here for the CityWatch Web site. That site also has coverage of the pro-Congress viewpoint.]
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. . . The reason many NCs [neighborhood councils] have been reticent to jump into the [proposed] NC Congress [see local story on The Sun's front page] isn’t because they don’t want to assist other NCs in resolving citywide issues.
For many. the reason is the dilution of single NC’s voices. At my NC we work with three Council Districts. We have worked with many of our neighbors locally and areawide on a range of issues. When we advise our CD, the mayor or any other city department about our views, we speak on behalf of our community. . . .
The Congress . . . seems to be too much more government. . . . It is an unnecessary layer. . . .
I don’t think the Congress is intending to silence other N’s, but that would be the logical result of what the Congress plans to do. . . .
Beyond these structural issues is the issue of burnout for those involved. NC reps are all volunteers. As is most often the case in each NC, there is a core of active participants. These participants have more and more demanded of them with these additional meetings outside their area. . . .
It makes it nearly impossible for those who have full-time or multiple part-time jobs and family lives to be involved — or to feel that they are somehow not involved enough.
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HOW I SPENT THE EVENING OF JAN. 19
AND THE MORNING OF JAN. 20
By George Garrigues
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 I went out to Hollywood for dinner with some acquaintances at a Thai restaurant Thursday evening and, having satisfied my lust for spicy food, I was driving back home when I decided that the rather dull pain in my chest was not exactly to my liking, so I pulled into the Kaiser Hospital on Venice Blvd. just off La Cienega and checked into the emergency room.
Wheelchair, oxygen, blood tests, nitroglycerine, some aspirin to chew on, X-ray, blood pressure — the whole nine yards— and I rested fairly comfortably, not willing to sleep, in one of those cubicles just off the bustling E.R. central HQ, kind of interesting, really, to look out and see the various patients being wheeled in and out and the staff going about their duties.
The doc was (of course) young and knowledgeable, very concerned, poking and prodding my chest and asking lots of questions and nodding with interest, and the nurse was a funny Tennessean (complete with Gomer Pyle accent) who was really pissed when somebody tossed out his cup of frothy latte with soymilk that he had paid almost four bucks for, but I told him that if I got out alive I would buy him a cup of coffee; neither of us believed that, but the camaraderie served to help pass the time.
I really didn't even mind it so much when the nurse, well, rather botched the job of tapping a vein and blood ran down my arm, yet he mopped it up quite satisfactorily I thought and told me that the alternative (that is, having no blood at all) would not be in my best interest.
When he went out to lunch, he was replaced by an attractive Fiji woman who, when I asked her, said she herself had NEVER been a patient in a hospital, but then, after thinking about it, recalled that she had given birth to her children in hospitals — one in Fiji and one in New Zealand — but we agreed that childbirth is a natural occurrence and a mother cannot really be called a PATIENT after all.
There were two tests for the presence in my blood of an enzyme called troponin, which, if found, would have indicated that I had suffered a heart attack. The first test, done about 10 p.m. I think, was negative.
But the doc was not satisfied, so we waited until 1 a.m. and another gollop of blood was sent down to the lab, where the lab guys did their thing and couldn't find any troponin in THAT batch either, so the doc said go home, and the first nurse pulled out the stuff he had stuck in my vein, gave me some forms to sign and sent me out, bleeding again because he hadn't really tightened up that bandage in the crook of my arm. Maybe he would have done better had he been able to finish his latte.
I got home about 3 a.m., and my dog Poppy jumped all over the damn place, but refused to pee when I took her outside, merely began chewing grass like crazy, and I remembered she had been off her feed earlier on Thursday and wondered where in the house I would find a nice pee puddle (later discovering that my shy  roommate had actually taken her outside without having been told to do so, which certainly surprised me; I had not thought him capable of such a thing).
And today, Friday, I returned to Kaiser and did a stress test on a treadmill, and quite frankly I felt really good about it, and the doc gave me a clean bill of health, and I went back home to sleep for a couple more hours, and bit by bit over the day the residual pain in my chest and my back went away, so I am now convinced that all I had was a pulled muscle, or something like that, and it cost me only seventy dollars for all that care and attention and byplay with the nurse guy and the Fiji woman, not to mention the ten bucks for the Thai dinner, so I think, all in all, I spent a rather interesting and cheap Thursday and Friday, don't you?
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