Public Access

Mar Vista residents have a bone to pick with Santa Monica. Under the Santa Monica city code, only dogs with tags from that city are allowed in the off-leash area of the new Santa Monica Airport Park, which opened Sunday at the northwest corner of Bundy Drive and Airport Avenue. The situation has prompted howls of protest from indignant Angelenos, including Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who noted in a statement that L.A.

For the last six months, the road to Paradise has been eerily quiet. The most popular destination in Mt. Rainier National Park has been closed since epic rains in November devastated the area. Today, after a $5-million effort to repair the damage, the park reopens. But rangers say visitors will find a markedly different place, one with new landscapes and vistas -- and new dangers. "This is the day we have been working towards since November," says park Supt. Dave Uberuaga.

In a victory for the disabled rights movement, a federal judge Wednesday ordered Riverside to pay a wheelchair-bound man $221,000 damages and to fix 189 curb ramps within four months. The award is the largest in a state case involving disabled access. U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson granted the award to John Lonberg, 69, who has battled the city for almost two decades to improve hundreds of curbs, sidewalks and driveways. "It couldn't get much better than this," Lonberg said.

The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday moved to possibly reopen a program suspended during the state's energy crisis in 2001 that lets consumers buy electricity from independent suppliers rather than from utilities. The PUC's decision, made on a 4-1 vote, opens a three-phase process to decide whether "direct access" can be reinstated in the state's retail electricity market. The process could take more than 18 months.

An audit of the Los Angeles Unified School District's progress in building and remodeling schools to make them accessible to the disabled found chronic problems in the design of parking, restrooms, ramps and drinking water fountains, as well as a troubling lack of documentation and misstatements of accomplishments.

The California Supreme Court suggested Wednesday that state law gives the public the right to know the names and salaries of government employees, including police officers. During two hours of oral argument, the state high court reviewed cases brought by two newspapers, the Contra Costa Times and the Los Angeles Times, seeking access to information about public employees. In the Contra Costa Times case, the newspaper sought the names and pay of Oakland employees earning $100,000 or more.

People who can't get enough C-SPAN are getting more chances to watch legislative coverage from the comfort of their couches. At a time when news media coverage of most state legislatures is increasingly sparse, there are now more than 20 stations across the country offering gavel-to-gavel legislative coverage. That's up from a handful in the 1990s. Only about a dozen offer full broadcast slates. Others offer limited, part-time programming.

Los Angeles County supervisors acknowledged Tuesday that they had discussed plans for the embattled Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in closed-door sessions, in what a good-government expert called a violation of the state's open-meeting law. The discussion, which the county's top lawyer defended, is the latest example of questions arising over the supervisors' handling of meetings about the Willowbrook hospital.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Thursday.

Two workers who provide wheelchair assistance to disabled travelers at Los Angeles International Airport filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S. Department of Transportation, alleging that their employer has failed to provide legally mandated training and properly maintain wheelchairs.