A third of L.A.’s 99 neighborhood councils want City Hall to require lobbyists to admit they are lobbyists when speaking at neighborhood hearings.
, and accused of leading a criminal “pay-to-play” operation at L.A. City Hall. His trial is now scheduled for early 2023.
“It is frustrating, and I would even say beyond the pale” that two previous attempts failed, he said. Lobbyists are currently defined as those who have logged 30 hours of lobbying activity. That definition came about due to a 2008 ballot measure that was created without the input of the Ethics Commission.
But, she said, when Measure R ended the $4,000 threshold and changed the lobbyist definition to an individual who spends at least 30 hours lobbying, it made it much more difficult to track them. “It’s kind of a ‘he said, she said’ kind of a situation,” Holt said. “So we have huge evidentiary problems on that front.”
Nonprofits are now exempt from lobbying rules if they receive government funding and provide free services to the poor, unless they are seeking city funding. In an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News in September, Jacobson, the lobbyist for Build With Strength, said he would support a requirement that lobbyists verbally disclose to neighborhood council members that they are lobbyists — though he added that anyone representing an organization, including a neighborhood council, also ought to disclose their affiliation when speaking at a meeting.
However, according to an October 2021 enforcement action against Jacobson, for not complying with the city’s, the Ethics Commission stated that Build With Strength is a “grassroots lobbying program of the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association” organization in the concrete industry. One of them is Blumenfield, who co-authored the proposal to expand Fire District 1 in 2019. He received the maximum donations from the concrete industry group of $700 in 2017 to his officeholder account, and $800 each to that account in 2019 and in 2022.
In the motion to expand Fire District 1, council members wrote that there is a need to expand the district “to ensure that it captures the changing and growing regional centers and neighborhoods within the city.” It calls for expanding the district to areas where there is high fire risk and wind, as well as to “high density” areas of the city.
Flynn said the councilman “understands Build with Strength to be industry professionals who are advocating for stronger building codes that help lower the risks of danger from fire and earthquakes. They also push for various sustainability efforts to help lower the carbon footprint of development.” The state fire marshal, Mark Richwine, explained the California Building Standards Commission’s adoption of the new codes by saying that it was a way to meet the demands of construction in California, prevent wildland fires, promote forest management goals by thinning forest of younger trees, and provide alternative to concrete and steel as a material that has a lower “carbon footprint.”
“When I’m in a meeting, I want my focus to be on the meeting, not having to doublecheck everyone’s identity,” says York, who is her board’s secretary. Heath Kline, a member of the Woodland Hills Warner Center Neighborhood Council, on Thursday, September 22, 2022.
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