Cities

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Bring on the next bunch of disappointing, underachieving, gagging local athletes. And so it goes with our Trojans, Lakers, Clippers and even the Bruins losing their last three. So much promise, raised expectations and then a quick goodbye to all. The Kings? The who? Oh yeah, I hear they're down already, 2-0. Thank heavens for the grandchildren. They are waiting at home, in for a visit from Arizona, and they don't give a lick about the power trip referee Joe Crawford is on, disturbed fans in Memphis or a visit with the Choking Dogs on Monday night.

At Harvard-Westlake, a private high school in the shadows of the Hollywood Hills, players from the basketball team heaped praise on the alumnus who this week became the first active NBA player to announce that he is gay. "We have a lot of pride in him," Michael Sheng, 17, said of Jason Collins. "He's a hero, an icon for what he has done. " Support from basketball players was more tentative at Susan Miller Dorsey High, a school in the heart of Los Angeles' black community that has long been an athletic powerhouse, producing numerous NFL and NBA players.

Hollywood North is going south. That's the fear among many in the once-booming production community in Vancouver, Canada. Although Vancouver still attracts high-profile movies and television shows, including A&E's recently launched "Bates Motel," the city is rapidly losing its perch as one of the industry's busiest production hubs as it faces rising competition from cities in eastern Canada and south of the border. The city that pioneered the use of film incentives now finds itself struggling to compete with emerging rivals offering stronger tax credits and rebates.

Employees at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, whose union is the single biggest contributor in the current mayoral race, earned average total pay of nearly $100,000 in 2011, according to a Times analysis of the most recent publicly available payroll data. That's more than 50% higher than the average total pay of all other city employees, The Times found. It's also about 25% higher than employees at comparable public and private utilities, according to a report commissioned by the City Council last year.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa came out swinging against the city's labor unions last week, urging lawmakers - and the next mayor - to abandon or pare the 5.5% raise that comes due for many city employees on Jan. 1. Villaraigosa set a defiant tone as he unveiled his latest budget, his last before he leaves office after eight years, saying city workers need to contribute more toward their healthcare costs. Yet amid the tough talk, the mayor's spending plan shows he already has the money to cover those costs if the unions are unwilling to deal.

Ever since the Department of Defense shut down George Air Force Base in 1992, the high desert town of Victorville has struggled to reinvent itself. The city encouraged massive residential and retail development. It invested in two new power plants. And it moved to transform the shuttered base into a thriving cargo airport. But those efforts have mostly backfired, creating financial headaches and scandal for the city of 115,000 residents, perched 90 miles from Los Angeles on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Federal agents searched the homes of Moreno Valley's mayor and City Council members and the offices of a major warehouse developer Tuesday as part of a broad public corruption investigation in a Riverside County town already singed by scandal. Agents with the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and local prosecutors served search warrants at the homes of Mayor Tom Owings and the four other council members and at the corporate offices of Highland Fairview, the company that has proposed a 41-million-square-foot warehouse center on the city's eastside.

I think it's fair to say that the men sitting across the table from me Monday afternoon were not terribly happy with my recent work. Bob Schoonover, president of Service Employees International Union, Local 721, and Art Sweatman, a shop steward and tree trimmer for the city of Los Angeles, found much to dislike in my April 23 column. That's the one in which I said public employee unions need to make a few more concessions. "We did a whole bunch, and we saved the city a whole bunch of money," said Schoonover, who speaks like a boxer working the bag, one jab after another.

It's fun for mayoral candidates to imagine eliminating potholes or building new trains to link the Valley to the Westside. It's not hard to support a spiffed-up LAX (really, what's hard to believe is that it's taken this long) or legions of new police officers making Los Angeles safe. What you don't often hear from these candidates, however, is a thoughtful vision for the Port of Los Angeles. The port can seem far away, but it's crucial to the city's life. Every year, more than $250 billion worth of cargo passes through its 7,500 acres of docks and cranes.

BAGHDAD - Shiite-dominated areas in southern and central Iraq were rocked Monday by car bomb explosions that killed at least 22 people and fueled fears that the country is sliding into a civil war. The violence occurred as Iraqi security forces surrounded the Sunni cities of Ramadi and Fallouja demanding that the area's tribes hand over those responsible for killing five Iraqi soldiers over the weekend. Authorities gave the tribes 48 hours. The deadline passed, but Jaber Jabri, a member of parliament from Ramadi, said late Monday that a tentative deal had been reached to defuse the situation.