Yaroslavsky

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky's not so hidden ambitions to vacate his job so he can become Los Angeles mayor in 1989 has given rise to a likely-to-grow list of possible successors. First out of the blocks is community activist and slow-growth advocate Laura Lake, who helped another slow-growth partisan, Ruth Galanter, defeat Yaroslavsky ally Pat Russell for reelection earlier this year.

Los Angeles City Councilmen Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael Woo, saying that city leaders failed to aggressively pursue suspected misconduct by a departmental manager, called Thursday for the creation of a new watchdog group to investigate official wrongdoing. They said that the series of allegations that unfolded through the news media about Sylvia Cunliffe, head of the city's Department of General Services, convinced them of the need for a Los Angeles version of the state Little Hoover Commission.

The federal Department of Veterans Affairs has approved $20 million in funding to convert a little-used building at the West Los Angeles VA campus into therapeutic housing for chronically homeless veterans — a plan that has been years in the making. The action was jointly announced Monday by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Yaroslavsky said the commitment marked a milestone that "has been a long time coming."

It was most distressing to be misquoted in the article on Center West (Feb. 7). The reference to having to "battle local homeowners, an ambiguous councilman and a host of architectural preservationists. . . ." can only be attributed to the reporter, not me. Throughout the planning and approval process, our viewpoints were given courteous and reasoned consideration by both Councilman (Zev) Yaroslavsky and the Friends of Westwood. What Center West really symbolizes--how a developer and the community can work together--is unhappily distorted by this erroneous reporting.

If there is trouble to be found in county finances, officials have worried it would be in the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement system -- which has some 92,000 employees paying into the program and more than 50,000 benefit recipients. But so far, years of good economic times are keeping trouble low, the system's manager said Tuesday. Since the county's contribution to the pension fund is based on the fiscal year, officials will have to wait until June to determine whether losses from the current global financial crisis will require the county to make up significant shortfalls to the $38-billion investment portfolio.

Re "Don't be dense," Opinion, April 13 I was by turns offended, disturbed, amused and saddened by Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's article. Why offended? Because he insults our intelligence by quoting one isolated statistic, that 76,000 new residential units were built in L.A. between 2001 and 2007. This number by itself means absolutely nothing. I suspect that, in those six years, the population has increased by hundreds of thousands, in which case the 76,000 new units mean nada.

WASHINGTON - Few regions will absorb the impact of future immigration reforms more than Los Angeles County, home to an estimated 1.1 million people in the country illegally, one-tenth of the nation's total. As the Senate Judiciary Committee began debating the bipartisan immigration bill last week, county officials voiced concerns that local taxpayers will be "left holding the bag" to pay for the brunt of healthcare and other services for multitudes of immigrants who apply for citizenship.

Supervisors in Los Angeles and Orange counties moved in sync Tuesday to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated territories. The bans, affecting an area with 1.5 million people in L.A. County and 120,000 in Orange County, were approved in 4-1 votes in both counties. "Attracting crime and other nuisances, these facilities have a negative impact on the communities where they've operated ? leading more than 100 cities and nine counties in California to pass similar ordinances," said Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who wrote L.A. County's provision.