Nithya Raman
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I think we can have a vision for Los Angeles where we are paying public sector employees what they deserve, giving them raises to be able to live in this city that is so extraordinarily expensive, but also negotiate adequately in order to make sure that we're also delivering basic services.
Inability to negotiate, that's what we're losing in a system which is so insular here in L.A., where the people who are really constituents of city hall politics are a very small group, as opposed to all of the residents of the city of Los Angeles for whom the decisions being made in city hall really matter.
Yeah, so there's been a proposal being kicked around for actually a decade to expand the convention center.
We have a convention center in downtown LA.
It's smaller than other convention centers.
And there's been kind of a discussion to see whether we should expand it and brighten it up.
Suddenly, just a few months after we had a billion dollar budget deficit, the convention center was back on the table.
And by this time, the costs had ballooned significantly.
Now the cost of rebuilding that convention center with...
debt service were going to be close to $6 billion.
That would mean that we were going to be paying out $100 million annually out of our general fund.
Those are our discretionary dollars that we use for providing basic services here in LA, everything from public safety to streetlights.
And that proposal was pushed through very, very quickly, despite the fact that we are in a fiscal crisis, despite the fact that we have the Olympics coming up, despite the fact that local and economic headwinds are very, very uncertain here in Los Angeles because a small cluster of downtown businesses who fund local elections really wanted to push it forward.
And for me, I represent a district right now that is very vocal about their views.
It's one of the relatively wealthier districts, and they know how to get in touch with City Hall and they care.