It’s Time for West Hollywood Residents to Set the Council Campaign Agenda

Prospective candidates are hurriedly filing papers (the deadline is Wednesday) for the March 3 West Hollywood City Council election, and the already announced are already hosting events to raise money to fund their campaigns.

So now it’s time for West Hollywood residents (rather than campaign consultants and major donors) to set the agenda for the 2015 race.

WEHOville wants to know what questions you think candidates for the three seats on the Council should address in their campaigns. What matters to you? What matters to the future of our city?

Please email me at [email protected] with your ideas about what the candidates should be addressing if they want to get your vote. (Next Monday we’ll post on WEHOville a list of the most frequently mentioned issues.)

Here are a few issues that are clear, given the events of the past year:

PLUMMER PARK. Candidates are likely to take positions supporting more community involvement in the Plummer Park master plan and seeking more study of some of the current plan’s proposals. But if we want to get down to brass tacks (something the West Hollywood City Council rarely does), the question is this: Do you support moving Great Hall / Long Hall from its current location or do you support leaving it where it is?

8899 BEVERLY. The immediate issue is whether the Council, some of whose members have received major financial support from the 8899 Beverly developer, will vote to amend the city’s three-year-old General Plan and zoning ordinance to permit construction of a project that already doesn’t meet the standards of the General Plan and the zoning ordinance (it was grandfathered in.) That’s a decision that’s likely to be made before the election.

But going forward, should a developer have to make an exceptional case for the Council to grant such an exception? And what should that case be? Creation of a certain number of new jobs? Provision of a certain number of low-income housing units? In other words, if we’re going to let someone break the rules, why?

TRAFFIC. It’s clear from the comments on WEHOville that you, our readers, have differing opinions on this issue. Managing traffic in a densely populated city that sits in a major urban area and is crossed by several major thoroughfares is not easy. But as the future Council considers traffic issues, do you want the newly elected members to lean towards expediting east/west traffic flow or lean towards making West Hollywood a more walkable city (even if that means it takes longer to get from East Los Angeles to Beverly Hills?)

ETHICS. The West Hollywood City Council pats itself on the back, and thumps itself on its collective chest, when it comes to taking stands on ethical and human rights issues across the nation and the world. But when it comes to its own campaign finance issues and conflicts of interest, the Council’s approach is duck and cover.

As WEHOville has documented, some of our Council members feel no shame in hiring someone to raise money to get them elected, and then letting that campaign manager show up before the Council with a client seeking the city’s largess. Most of our Council members get most of their campaign contributions from developers based outside the city and from vendors who seek or have city contracts. Not a pretty picture.

Here are some questions we’d like to see Council candidates answer on campaign finance and ethics issues:

1) Should the City Council bar campaign managers from lobbying the Council?

2) Should a Council member recuse himself from discussing or voting on an issue brought before the Council by a company or organization that has donated (either through the company or its senior executives and their immediate family members) more than $2,000 to that member’s campaign for City Council or any other office within the previous 24 months? By the way, we’d include donations to so-called “independent campaign committees,” the GOP’s end run of choice around national campaign finance laws.

3) Should a Council member be able to get campaign contributions, a job or donations to a non-profit organization on whose board he sits (or which he or she runs) from someone he’s voted to give a city contract or a land use benefit worth more than $25,000? (In Santa Monica, that’s been against the law for 14 years).

Of course there are many other issues candidates should address: The parking situation, the city’s expensive subsidy of financially troubled events such as L.A. Pride and the Sunset Strip Music Festival, the construction of so-called “big box” houses, to name a few.

Let us know your thoughts, written in the form of a question you’d like to see WEHOville put to a candidate. And please frame that question so the candidate is required to give a “yes” or “no” answer — no “if’s,” “ands,” or “buts.”