Garcetti Says Los Angeles Has Lost Confidence

Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti was the guest speaker at the Encino Neighborhood Council meeting Wednesday night. Garcetti, who was born and raised in Encino, said he was glad to be back on “home turf.” He discussed the area’s past, present and future:

“It’s a very painful transition that we’re in,” the 13th District councilman said at the Encino Community Center. “We remember what it’s like to drive 20 minutes everywhere, and we still kind of hunger for that. We remember what it was like when we had very little traffic. We remember what it was like when we had a certain level of safety, which now we’ve returned to, thanks to the good work of LAPD.

"But what we’ve lost in Los Angeles, in my opinion, is our confidence," Garcetti said. "We used to be a fearless city, a city in which we could work on projects that would put man on the moon. We have institutions like Caltech, where we’ve had more patents come out of ... than any other university in the world.

"We bring the most creative minds, whether someone wants to be the next movie star from Kansas or whether it’s an immigrant getting off the plane tonight from Armenia," he said. "There are people who come to Los Angeles because they believe there is something unique about L.A. But we have to recapture that spirit.

"So [with] this year’s ballot, part of what I wanted to do was work with my colleagues to put things on there that set us on a clear fiscal path of resolving our deficit,” he said.

Garcetti went on to describe a few of the upcoming ballot measures (G, H, I, J and L). He also talked about one of the programs he plans to foster in his district during the next two years—his final years on the City Council because of term limits. The program is known as Los Angeles Neighborhood Dreams (LAND) and aims to get community members involved in identifying projects and programs that should be priorities as neighborhood improvements.

He said LAND has helped his district improve neighborhood streets and enhance road safety by having potholes fixed, developing after-school programs and creating more green space.

“I remember as a kid, Ventura Boulevard was threatened with becoming a real concrete canyon. And by listening to you debate, it’s a threat that hasn’t ended,” Garcetti said. “Encino was really one of the first places that took back for communities the idea of having some standards. The idea of being able to control the density, the height and the character of what really defines a neighborhood. I thank you for that.”

During a question-and-answer session, Garcetti addressed the city’s dire financial crisis. As much as $500 million is outstanding debts owed to the city, but Garcetti says that’s a very unrealistic number because the city has never written it off or sold its debt.

“Once you write all that off it’s about $50 million,” he said.

Garcetti said Los Angeles could collect millions of dollars owed to the city to ease the budget crisis that has forced severe cuts in services. However, collecting all of the debt would be impossible because it includes ambulance fees owed by the homeless and parking tickets owed by tourists and others who have left the state.

The last question he addressed was about Farmers Field—a planned $1-billion football stadium in downtown L.A.

Noting that tourism is one of the city's top industries, Garcetti explained how Farmers Field had the potential to boost the convention and tourism businesses. The stadium could be connected to the Los Angeles Convention Center, he said, serving as a 90,000-square-foot extension to the center when it isn't being used for football games.

"It could be a big economic engine for us,” Garcetti said.