The Los Angeles City Council returned from its three-week recess last week and wasted little time diving into difficult issues.
Even before lunch, four members -- Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel, Tom LaBonge and Jan Perry -- stepped outside the heavily air-conditioned City Hall to hold a news conference and take a provocative stand against power outages.
LaBonge told the press that he was in Germany on a city-related trip during the outages. There's nothing wrong with going to Germany, of course. . . .
But exactly how many days has LaBonge traveled abroad for city business this year?
Thirty-two, including three trips to Europe -- an impressive number by City Hall standards.
Among his travels: an April trip to Lyon, France; a May trip with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to San Salvador and Mexico; a July trip to London and Berlin; and a late August trip back to Berlin.
The man does not sit still.
Why the frequent travel?
LaBonge is the longtime president of the local chapter of Sister Cities, the group whose mission is to promote cordial international relations. Three of his trips were for Sister City events and the fourth -- to London and Berlin -- was to promote Los Angeles as a tourist destination and to attend a festival in Berlin called Volksfest.
LaBonge provided an itinerary for his Berlin trip in August. Among the activities were a bike ride, a boat ride on the Spree River, a guided tour of Berlin's Olympic Stadium, a visit to the national gallery and a chance to meet various city officials at Berlin's city hall.
Not exactly Truman, Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam. On the other hand, by all accounts, LaBonge adopted the same frenetic schedule he has in L.A. -- lots of running around, snapping photos and persuading the masses that L.A. isn't such a bad place. At one point, he gave a Berlin library 40 books about Los Angeles.
LaBonge also spends time barking orders to the council deputies that he takes with him on each trip.
Two staffers went with him to Central America, another two to Berlin in late August and his legislative deputy Young-Gi Kim went to Berlin in July and stayed there for six-plus weeks as part of an exchange program.
Sounds nice. But how do LaBonge's constituents benefit from these trips?
