Los Angeles City Council

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a routine 5% pay increase for its members, the mayor and other high-ranking officials. Acting on the recommendation of the city's official Salaries Authority, the council approved unanimously, and without discussion, 5% pay hikes for each of the next two years for themselves, Mayor Tom Bradley, Controller Rick Tuttle and City Atty. James K. Hahn. The move comes at a time when the mayor's financial affairs are under investigation and various city officials are calling for changes that could dramatically increase the salaries of elected officials, while prohibiting them from receiving outside income.

Joining a growing number of municipalities, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday adopted a "responsible banking" ordinance that will require banks doing business with the city to disclose detailed data on loans and foreclosure activity by community. Much of the information is already reported under federal law but can be hard to find in voluminous federal banking reports, said Miguel Santana, city administrative officer. The new law would bring the information together on a city website that the public could search by census tract, he said.

In a move that promises to spark a battle over who governs development in Los Angeles, City Council members John Ferraro and Zev Yaroslavsky on Thursday urged the council to seize control of the Community Redevelopment Agency from Mayor Tom Bradley and his appointed commissioners.

Months after demonstrators with Occupy L.A. demanded an aggressive crackdown on Wall Street banks, the Los Angeles City Council approved a watered-down plan requiring regular reports on local lending and charitable giving from financial institutions that seek city business. The council voted 13 to 0 to draft a law requiring those banks to disclose data on their foreclosures, small-business loans and other involvement in city neighborhoods. But council members dropped plans to rate the banks after being warned by budget managers that such a move would be too expensive.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to adopt a comprehensive medical marijuana ordinance that clamps strict controls on dispensaries, which have spread with a velocity that stunned city officials and angered some residents. Settling the last controversial issue on its list, the council decided to require the stores to locate at least 1,000 feet from so-called sensitive uses, such as schools, parks, libraries and other dispensaries. The decision to reject a 500-foot setback reflected the council's intent to write the most restrictive rules that would still allow dispensaries.

Joining about a dozen small Southland cities in an attempt to combat neighborhood blight, the Los Angeles City Council moved Tuesday to restrict yard sales in residential areas, limiting them to daytime hours and prohibiting the sale of new merchandise.

Los Angeles officials on Friday banned tall retaining walls that dot the city's canyon communities from Woodland Hills to Mount Washington, with critics calling the massive bulkheads "the hillside strangler." City Council members said the oversized concrete walls that loom over neighboring homes are wrecking the rustic feel of the city's canyons and hillsides.

A proposed 24-story condo tower with shops and office space in Brentwood was unanimously approved by the Los Angeles City Council. Construction of the building at the northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Barrington Avenue should begin in January 2006, said developer Ken Kahan, president of California Landmark. Five units in the tower will be rented to low-income tenants and the other 73 units will be sold at market rate, probably in the high $600,000s to low $700,000s, he said.

The Los Angeles City Council gave final approval Tuesday by a 13-1 vote to a long-awaited ordinance regulating development in the city's hillside neighborhoods. The ordinance, adopted after minimal debate Tuesday, seeks to halt the trend of building large houses on small hillside lots and to make hillside living safer through a series of fire-protection measures. Adoption of the law has been a top priority of homeowner groups, led by the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns.

The City Council agreed Wednesday to pay $3.57 million to settle six lawsuits alleging that Los Angeles police officers violated the civil rights of residents, including a man who was wrongly arrested and convicted for the murder of three women.

The Los Angeles City Council has a new president, Herb Wesson. But does a new president change anything? The council president is just one vote of 15 on that notoriously difficult to manage body. In that sense, he's not much different from his colleagues. He manages his district and votes along with his colleagues. But the president also has some additional power: He assigns members to committees and acts as the figurehead for the larger body. For years, John Ferraro used the position to establish himself as second only to the mayors with whom he served; more recently, Eric Garcetti has brought a lighter, more cerebral touch to the job and used it to launch his bid for mayor.

Fearing a new financial burden in a budget crisis, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday jettisoned its once-vaunted redevelopment agency, an entity that spent decades revitalizing downtown, Hollywood and other areas of the city. On a 9-3 vote, the council decided that it could not afford to take on the agency and its 192 employees as California's long era of redevelopment comes to a close. A new state law will eliminate 400 redevelopment agencies and shift billions of dollars in tax revenue to state, city and county agencies.

The Los Angeles City Council has given preliminary approval to a pioneering local government effort to require porn actors to wear condoms during film shoots. An ordinance tentatively approved Tuesday would mandate that those seeking permits to film adult movies in the city require the use of condoms on set and impose a fee to cover the costs of enforcement. It is the first ordinance of its kind for any city in the nation, supporters of the measure said. State law already requires adult actors to wear protection during filming, but safe-sex advocates say it is rarely enforced.

Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti announced Thursday he is backing Councilman Herb Wesson as his successor, a move that could pave the way for the council to elect its first African American president in its 161-year history. Garcetti, who is running for mayor, said he would introduce a motion Friday calling for Wesson to become president at the council's first meeting in January. Wesson, 60, has already signaled interest in the job, and supporters hope to put six other signatures on the motion — enough to show that a majority of the council supports him. The maneuvering comes two weeks after the abrupt resignation of the council's president pro tem, Jan Perry, who said she did not like behind-the-scenes negotiations over the presidency and the upcoming process for redrawing council district boundaries.

The 6th Street Bridge is history. The iconic structure, which stretches gracefully over the Los Angeles River, inspires rapturous words from poets and engineers. But it ails from a rare and incurable concrete cancer that is cracking and crumbling the monumental span. The doomed 1932 viaduct is the last built, the longest and — to many — the most iconic of the dozen historic bridges that vault the river east of downtown. It is a much-beloved and much-filmed symbol of a proud city that embraced elegance and the automobile.

In another move to privatize some longtime city functions, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to hand over management of a Mission Hills animal shelter to a nonprofit group. Under the plan, Best Friends Animal Society will provide adoption and spay and neuter services at the Northeast Valley Animal Care Center, built three years ago for more than $19 million but never fully staffed because of budget cuts. The deal with Best Friends costs the city nothing and will save the lives of thousands of animals that would otherwise be euthanized each year, according to Brenda Barnette, general manager of the Department of Animal Services.

The Los Angeles City Council has unanimously approved a resolution urging voters to approve Proposition 172, the November ballot measure that would extend a half-cent sales tax to pay for police service. Council members said passage of the proposition is critical to ensure that the city's services do not suffer further reductions, with a $200-million deficit already looming next year. Gov.

A funny thing has happened to L.A.'s redevelopment agency in the wake of the state's yearly budget meltdown. After months of serving as the ripest of targets for budget-cutting state officials, the Community Redevelopment Agency turns out not to be so dead after all. That news became official Wednesday, when the City Council voted 13 to 0 in favor of an urgency ordinance that keeps its redevelopment agency alive and intact — by moving roughly...

Every day, shoppers flock to downtown L.A.'s Fashion District for cheap fabric and knock-off jeans, purses and shoes. But on some street corners, vendors carrying small plastic cages hawk turtles, bunnies and birds. City officials say the sidewalk sale of animals is an underground economy that has gotten out of hand. In hopes of stopping it, they've passed a law that makes buying animals on public streets or sidewalks illegal. The ordinance approved preliminarily by the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday calls for penalties of $250 for the first violation, $500 for the second and $1,000 for the third.