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The Thorn West is a state and local news roundup compiled by members of DSA-LA. Our goal is to provide a weekly update on the latest developments in state and local politics, and to track the issues that are most important to our membership.
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Issue No. 89 - December 10, 2021
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- DSA-LA’s 2022 Local Officer Election nomination period has been extended to Friday, December 10 (today) at 11:59pm! You can nominate yourself here.
- The confirmation process for Mayor Garcetti’s nomination to be ambassador to India has finally begun, with the first scheduled hearing on Wednesday. This comes on the heels of major reporting suggesting that Garcetti knew of and tolerated the serial harassment committed by one of his top aides.
- The city’s redistricting map is final. Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Paul Krekorian have proposed a motion to make the city’s next redistricting process independent; see you in ten years. Advocacy groups are still fighting for equity in the county’s redistricting process, which is still ongoing. The current lines include only one majority-Latine supervisory district out of five, even though the Latine community now makes up nearly half the county’s population.
- The former manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has pleaded guilty to bribery, after accepting over $2 million to award a no-bid contract. (More than most councilmembers seem to get.) The city’s Ethics Commission has recently expanded their oversight to include LADWP employees. For anyone who misses Redistricting Commission hearings, the next quarterly meeting of the Ethics Commission is December 15.
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- Members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ Local 37 have been on strike at the Jon Donaire Desserts plant in Santa Fe Springs, CA, since November 3. The DSA is organizing members to join the picket line tomorrow morning, as workers seek higher wages and better treatment. Fact sheet here. Hear more from workers on the BCTGM podcast here. RSVP here!
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- LA Metro has started its GoPass pilot program, offering free rides to all students in all participating school and community college districts. The pilot program begins just as Metro resumes collecting fares January 10; bus rides had been free throughout the pandemic.
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- Dystopia, as several dangerously unhealthy weeks of air quality in Los Angeles County has triggered an apparently unmonitored automated Twitter account from the Southern Coast AQMD to declare every day an “Action Day” without ever explaining what that entails. The glitching intensified this week: the Los Angeles Times was forced to retract an entire story after receiving a one-year-old press release about wildfire smoke.
- A coalition of environmental justice groups have filed a lawsuit against the EPA over their failure to intervene in the air quality problems in the Central Valley, Capital & Main reports.
- Californians have accelerated their water conservation efforts, but remain far short of Governor Newsom’s goal of a 15% reduction in usage.
- This January, California will implement mandatory food waste recycling, becoming the second state in the US to do so. This is intended to help cut methane emissions, as food scraps and other organic materials emit the greenhouse gas as they break down.
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