transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] It is The News Blitz with Randy Wang on Talk Radio 790 KABC. Let's get into today's California report at randywangradio.substack.com. This is a visual version of the show prep that I do every single day. I look at what's going on in all the local stations in Southern California, the Bay Area, Sacramento, San Diego and the Central Valley. And the ones that I think are worth talking about, I put on this list. We cover a few of them when we get a chance to on the John Phillips Show. And I have this space right here every single day at 5 o'clock to give you my rundown of all the stuff that I learned today that was going on in the state of California, which if you're only paying attention to what's on social media, you might be missing a lot because social media tends to focus on one or two very distracting things. So let's start with California's film industry, specifically Los Angeles' film industry. Karen Bass is having a whole lot of press conferences lately. Gee, I wonder if it's because she's running for re-election. And she announced a brand new pilot program that's supposed to support film production in LA. Sounds great, but here's the issue. We've had a lot of these proclamations from Karen Bass over the last four years, and saying that you want to help out the film industry is one thing. The results, and she can't be to blame for all of it. Some of it has to do with the state tax credit, but the stuff that she is in charge of is making it easier and cheaper to film here in LA, and incremental change is not what's needed right now. So what is this pilot program? For micro productions, productions that have under 30 cast and crew that shoot in under three locations. Their permit fees, instead of $1,000, will be $300. That's it. That's your big... You know what this is? This is the Gavin Newsom thing. She needs to have some big proclamation about something that's really not going to move the needle whatsoever. For as much as Karen Bass likes to talk about how she has all these relationships in Sacramento and with the federal government, she hasn't used them to advance a tax credit that is actually competitive with the other states. And it may be way too little, way too late. You know, when you started seeing runaway production, you may have been able to put a lid on it when it comes to having a tax credit and a tax advantage that is as attractive as places like New York or Atlanta or now the other countries that we're competing with like Canada and the UK. But here's the issue with that. It's been so long now that you can't even make the argument anymore that, oh, you need to shoot here because all the talent is here, all the crew is here. You have entire workforces that have been working in places like Georgia for over a decade. So if you do want to shoot something there, you don't even have to fly all of your people out. They have local grips. They have local PAs and production managers and camera people. So we need to be even more aggressive in trying to keep the business here, but the current people in charge are not thinking big enough and it's so short-sighted because we know how much money and how much business of everything, to use a labored term, trickles down when you keep production in LA because not only is it the jobs of the people that are on the production, it's the catering, it's the dry cleaning, it's all the support services. And we're just, we're seeing a 30% vacancy rate in sound stages in Los Angeles. So that tells you right there that we need to be making it even easier. And I don't think the current mayor really has, she doesn't care enough about this issue. She sure wants to act like it right before the election. Nithya puts out a video saying that she cares because her husband's in the industry, but she's been on the city council. What's she doing about it? Spencer Pratt says, would you just be free to film in Los Angeles? And wouldn't that be interesting? Also, this is an interesting idea, this pilot program, but it only goes after, you know, certain kinds of productions. And part of the problem with our tax credit is it only goes after certain kinds of productions. There is so much interference with how these things are crafted because we want to cut certain people out of the pie, whether it be that we only want scripted, we don't want reality or we only want small movies, we don't want big movies. We cut so many people out of it that it doesn't seem to be attractive for anybody. And it's not just Atlanta that we're fighting against, and New York and Toronto and Vancouver and the UK. There are so many other states that now have emerging film programs. They are building studios. I was just in Santa Fe. They are building an entire media village, an old college being turned into a bunch of sound stages. They have very attractive tax credits. And well, New Mexico kind of got put on the map for filming because of a certain show called Breaking Bad, which I don't know if you know this. Breaking Bad was originally supposed to be shot in Los Angeles, but it was too expensive, and so they decided to shoot it in Albuquerque, and that ended up being one of the most brilliant parts about it because one of the more interesting things about that show, among the fact that it's one of the greatest shows ever created on television, may be my favorite show of all time, is that the uniqueness of Albuquerque really played into that show. So, hey, I'm all for supporting the LA film industry. I think the current people in charge, they're not going to get anywhere with it. And again, this is a state issue as much as it is as a local issue. And unless we're going to play on the same field as the other places, we're just going to keep losing. I mean, here's a situation that really drove me crazy when I'm listening to this story, because it starts off with Karen Bass at the groundbreaking of yet another new sound stage, this time in North Hollywood. And that's great, great that we're building new stages, but we have a 30% vacancy on the ones that we already have. So what are we doing? Why are we building more stages if we can't fill the ones that we already have? It's almost like the people in charge have no idea what they're doing. Now staying on Karen Bass, she spoke with NBC4 about her crackdown on the burglaries that are happening every single day in the San Fernando Valley. And what do you know? Her crackdown hasn't done a damn thing. And there's one specific point that I need to make sure you're aware of, because I don't know what we do here. I used to think that the percentage was that if you commit a home burglary where nobody's home, you have an 85% chance of getting away with it. According to the new LAPD statistics, it is now up to, you have a 7% chance of getting caught. So if you commit one of these burglaries, and we have dueling things going on, we have dueling local gangs and transnational gangs that are going up and down the valley to what they consider our expensive neighborhoods and ransacking the places. These things are highly organized, and they've taken the risk that, well, there's a 93% chance that I'm not going to get caught. And if that's the situation, sure, more police and more patrols sounds great, but LAPD is already short-staffed, and the valley always gets the short end of the stick when it comes to all kinds of deployment. We're very spread out, unlike the other part of the city. There's 2 million people in the San Fernando Valley. But hiring police officers takes a really long time. All she has in her budget for this year is 500 officers to meet up with attrition, which that might not even be enough. So I don't know what we do, but we've got to be thinking differently. I like what a lot of the other places are doing right now. We need to be investing in drones. We need to be investing in flock cameras. We need to have a real-time information center the way that cities like San Francisco and San Jose have right now. Because those have cut down on things like auto theft, and they could be cutting down. If we can track what the car is, and you've got the license plate readers, we can do some real investigating work. Because it's just very rare that a beat cop that's driving up and down the street is going to catch one of these things in progress. That does happen, but we have to think differently when the success rate is 93% of the time you commit one of these burglaries, you're not getting caught. Now, here is a piece of in overregulated California, a new regulation I am all for. You can call me an old coot at the age of 40. I don't care. I do not like e-bikes. Specifically, I do not like children riding e-bikes. If you are an adult, you can have one of these things. I think you should have insurance because they are motorcycles. Let's stop pretending that they're not motorcycles. They are motorcycles. They literally have an electric motor. A bicycle does not have a motor. In Newport Beach, a school district is considering banning e-bikes for all elementary school students and middle school students. I love that. I am here for that. I love that we are confiscating the bikes and making the kid with their parents go to a safety training course if they do something they're not supposed to do, but this technology is emerging faster than we can regulate it. They are not safe. Kids, you know, for all the arguments that we want to make about the criminal justice system, how children do not have developed brains, so we can't hold them accountable when they commit crimes. Let's also say that they don't have developed brains, and so they should not be on a motorcycle. So I'm all for that. In Pacoima, a plane crash happened near Whiteman Airport, actually crashed into some power lines, and apparently it is the 16th crash that Whiteman has had in 17 years. And of course, this is a small airport for just private planes, but the guy that was in the sky was 70. And I don't know what kind of testing you have to do. I'm sure there are plenty of elderly pilots out there who do not crash, except for Harrison Ford. But people in that neighborhood, after so many crashes over the last decade and a half, are starting to think, do we really want this airport in our neighborhood? You know, I live near an airport, the Van Nuys Airport. And there are some private planes that go out of there, but it's a lot of private jets. And how about this? LAUSD is looking to restrict screen time. They say that we are focusing way too much on having the kids look at their tablets, look at their laptops. Of course, they're looking at their phone, although we're banning that. And they really need to be paying more attention to physical books, to being outside, interacting with one another. And yeah, there's probably a healthy aspect of that, of a whole bunch of screen time isn't good, but also when we're talking about educating the children, most of what they do in the future is going to be attracted to a screen, unless, of course, you know, they become a plumber. But apparently even the standardized testing is all done on computers. So I don't know what the answer is for that. But is all the screen time bad for mental health? Yes. And look at this story. We are now hearing warnings from the union representing employees from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority that after the county broke up with the city, layoffs are being announced and the union representing the homeless service workers say, if we can't help these people, they're going to be homeless themselves. Most of them were homeless before this. And it just makes me think, what are we doing in the world of job training? This is true in the homeless world and the prison world. Why is it that we're not training people to do real jobs that they can make real money and sustain a life on? For instance, what did I just talk about? Plumbing, HVAC, there are so many skilled jobs, skilled trades that we should be training people in, including the homeless. But apparently, so many homeless end up becoming service providers for the homeless. And well, I don't know how you can really advocate for every employee at LAHSA to keep their job when LAHSA has a terrible, terrible track record. But let's end on a good note in Southern California. Did you know there's a new bill that was passed that allows churches and houses of worship to easily build housing projects on their property? Like they have a big parking lot that they want to convert into an affordable housing development that then they can manage and they can maybe put their parishioners in if they're down on hard times. We have made it easier to do that. And an Inglewood Church just broke down on that and that seems pretty great. And you know, churches that want to do that, of course, this is on their own dime. That's great. I think we should make that easier. San Francisco is continuing its bid to get rid of PG&E, something the city has been trying to do for 100 years. The city of San Francisco originally offered 2.5 billion to buy out PG&E and buy all their infrastructure in San Francisco. PG&E said no. So now San Francisco says, how about 3.4 billion? And PG&E says no, it's worth way more than that. And you have to take into account all the money we're going to lose by not being able to price gouge San Franciscans. Look, I'll tell you right now, I think Tom Steyer running for governor is a joke. I disagree with a majority of the things that he's promoting and I do not like him. That being said, I really do like that he wants to take on PG&E. And it is fair to say that he can because he's not bought and paid for by them. And the utility companies, just like the insurance companies, buy and pay for members of the legislature on both sides, Democrats and Republicans. PG&E has been a disaster, so Cal Edison is a disaster. I don't know if public utilities are the way to go for everywhere. Certainly have our problems here with LADWP, but SMUD seems to work pretty well. Burbank Water and Power seems to work pretty well. But at the very least, these companies should not be these massive behemoths. But I will say, staying on Tom Steyer, one of the things he said, because we'll get to it later in an interview, but he was interviewed by KTLA about how does this work? How will this plan work? And here's where he's not super educated on the issues. He says, well, we're just going to put up as many solar panels as possible, and then people can sell that solar back to the electric companies. And here's the problem. We're already in California generating more solar during the day than we know what to do with. We actually have to sell it, and it's such a low price that sometimes we're paying states like Arizona to buy our excess energy. It's nighttime that we have the problems with, and maybe, you know, we need a state program to put the backup battery in every single house. That'll be pretty expensive, but there are ways to think outside of the box. Microgrids, do we need these massive grids anymore? But of course, and I will say this, this is the truest thing about the utility companies. They do not have our interests at heart because it was the lobbyists for PG&E and their members of the legislature that decided to take away the incentives for solar rooftops on this nonsense claim that it wasn't equitable. And the only reason you do that is because you know that you're putting your own business model out of business. And so I'm not a fan of monopolies and I'm really not a fan of private energy monopolies, especially when they get a guaranteed rate of return. Uh-uh, I'm not a fan. OUSD is still broke and the superintendent says, hey, we're still not solving the budget crisis. So even though they just got out of receivership, they'll probably go back into receivership. San Francisco, Muni passed their new budget and they're actually going to increase fares. And people are freaking out because they're going to increase fares. 15 cents. And apparently, that's still not enough. So they still say even though they're going to increase the fares, if they don't get the two bailouts that are going towards Muni, which is the sales tax that's going to affect all five Bay Area counties, as well as a parcel tax in San Francisco, they're going to see major service cuts. And let's end on this story, because I love this story. We talked about how there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of real skilled training in the homeless industrial complex or the prison industrial complex. And I think there really should be. I can't stand the fact that so many people get out of prison and the only job they can get is an ambassador, which is just paying people not to commit crime. It's UBI for the unemployable. But there are real skills you can teach people, and there are things that you can do that not only will teach them skills, but can also completely change their life. And that's where KPIX has a story about a California prison that is taking part in this program where they take prisoners that don't have any big safety issues, and you can trust them to a point with training service dogs. And it is an incredibly successful program. Apparently, every single prisoner that has been in this program and eventually got paroled never reoffended, because having a dog in your life can completely change your life. And these service animals then go to the disabled. And I love that. Maybe some of these people end up getting into the dog grooming industry or the dog training industry. And that's a real life skill. That's a lovely nonprofit that I'm a huge fan of. In fact, my in-laws in Dallas, they adopted their dog, which is a terrier mixed with about 17 other things. She is a mutt, if there ever was a mutt. And they got her from a prison pets program. And we love that dog. It's the News Blitz with Randy Wang on KABC. The hands down strangest story in today's California report, the furry club at SDSU. Check it out, randywangradio.substack.com. It is the News Blitz with Randy Wang on Talk Radio 790 KABC. Make sure you subscribe to my daily rundown of all the stories you may have missed. It's called the California Report and you can get it for free at randywangradio.substack.com. Our next guest is running for LA. County Supervisor District 3. His website is tomas4la.com. That's four spelled out, not the number four. Tomas Sidenfaden, welcome to the News Blitz.

Speaker 2:
[20:34] How are you? Pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:
[20:36] Doing great. So let's start off with some quick information because you'd be surprised how many voters in this county don't even know what district they're in. What part of LA. County is District 3?

Speaker 2:
[20:49] So District 3 is most of the San Fernando Valley, all the way over to the county line, Pacoima, and then down into parts of Hollywood, West Hollywood, and across to the beaches, Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu.

Speaker 1:
[21:06] And now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's have you introduce yourself to the audience. Who are you and why are you wanting to run for LA. County Supervisor?

Speaker 2:
[21:17] Yeah, so my name is Tomas Sidenfaden. I've been an LA resident for almost 30 years now. About 25 of those have been on L.A.'s west side, and currently living in Century City, but I've been in Santa Monica and Culver City, commuting to West Lake Village through the valley. So, you know, I know this whole area intimately. I am also a new father. I have a four-month-old at home, and career-wise, a startup founder, software engineer. So, as far as why I'm running for office, you know, if you look at the state of LA. County, it's absolutely miserable. It's the worst I've seen it in my entire time living here. And the kind of policies we see coming out of county government, city government, are just continually making the problem worse. I don't think anyone's coming to save us. So, now is the time. So, that's why I'm here, particularly focusing on homelessness, which has gotten out of control, and we're just doing everything wrong there.

Speaker 1:
[22:26] Well, let's start with that, because I tell you, the first thing that I noticed when I checked out your website today is that you say we need to declare homelessness a public health emergency, and unless I'm mistaken, didn't Lindsay Horvath do that like four years ago?

Speaker 2:
[22:44] She did declare a local emergency, and you might be surprised to learn this as well. The Board of Supervisors also declared a public health emergency last week, but both of these declarations and motions just have no teeth. They have no implementation plan. They have no definition of success, and they basically delegate all the authority for determining what the plan is to other parties. And this is just one of the core problems with county governance generally, is that the Board of Supervisors never actually plans things. They just ask for other people to plan things. So, what my plan is, is this declaration of unsheltered homelessness as a public health emergency, specifically because we have over 2,000 people dying on streets of LA County every year from unsheltered homelessness. And it's the cause of now a typhus outbreak. Over 30 percent of calls from LA Fire Department are going to encampment fires. I was just in a Venice Neighborhood Council meeting yesterday. Up to 40 percent of the calls from LAPD there were for incidents related to homeless encampments. So, there's a huge knock on effect of all of these things. And specifically, a declaration about a public health emergency, I think is important because it allows the county to stop doing business as usual. One of the things that stops the county for actually addressing these kinds of problems is it gets stuck in this maze of bureaucracy through multiple levels of government, trying to coordinate together and nothing really gets done. What a public health emergency allows the county to do is say, hey, listen, this is a public health emergency. We're going to bypass our normal operating procedures, things like environmental reviews and doing studies and things of that nature. And specifically, my plan is spinning up emergency shelter rather than housing first. So a change in the policy, specifically to get people off of our streets as quickly as possible.

Speaker 1:
[25:02] I'm interested that you mentioned the phrase housing first because if you were elected to the Board of Supervisors, one of your colleagues would be Holly Mitchell, who when she was in the State Senate, authored California's Housing First Bill. And this changed the way that we deal with addiction and homelessness, where there can be no barrier of entry to shelter, which means that a lot of city and county run shelters have pretty much turned into subsidized drug debts, where we cannot tell people, you can't bring your drugs here, we cannot tell people, you cannot do your drugs here. And while we have seen over the last decade, the results of that policy.

Speaker 2:
[25:43] Yeah, it's one of the most persistent and frustrating myths out there amongst people that consider themselves homeless advocates, is that mental illness and specifically addiction are not a core driver of homelessness, and that it's really down to housing costs. And housing costs is a related problem, and it's definitely a problem that we need to address in LA County. But the primary driver, according to even the county's own numbers from the 2024 report, is 25 to 50 percent of the unsheltered in LA County are suffering from severe mental illness or addiction, sometimes both. And a lot of experts actually believe that that's undercounted. And you can also just see this walking around as a resident. You don't need these reports to tell you that our unsheltered population, a lot of them are deeply sick. The problem with our approach now with Housing First is that we're not treating the underlying issue that's driving homelessness, which is this addiction and mental illness. Instead, we're just moving that person to another location and hoping it gets better. And it doesn't. We have the numbers to show this as well. Of all the people that we put into permanent supportive housing, more than half of them just returned to the street. So we're paying exorbitant amounts to just cycle people in and out of permanent supportive housing without a clear solution to stop the crisis of addiction.

Speaker 1:
[27:15] We're speaking with Tomas Sidenfaden. He is running for LA County Supervisor District 3, which is the Lindsay Horvath District. His website is tomas4la.com. Now, one of the interesting things you get to do if you're a member of the Board of Supervisors is that means you were also automatically one of the directors of LA Metro. And LA Metro just celebrated a big victory where they got buy-in from the City of West Hollywood and approved this plan for the K-Line extension, the one that goes from the South Bay area to a plan that will take it all the way to West Hollywood and eventually the Hollywood Bowl. And everyone was applauding and cheering. And then they said, And this project will begin construction, begin construction in 2041. Is this a serious way to address the traffic issues that we have going on in the County of Los Angeles?

Speaker 2:
[28:15] No, this is really absolutely absurd. And it's a symptom of just poor governance. And that's one of the things I really want to attack as a county supervisor. They did this press conference essentially in congratulating themselves for passing this plan to build the K Line, extend the K Line, which ultimately, I'd like, I'd like there to be a lot more transit everywhere in LA. I'm a huge advocate of this. But they're again, not addressing the core problems that are making it so difficult to build transit and that is resulting in us paying over a billion dollars a mile to build a heavy rail. And by comparison, you look at other major metros and developed nations, Spain and others doing it for under Korea, doing it for under 100 million a mile and also bringing their expertise in house. One of the things that really drives up cost for LA. County and for the United States generally is that we're again, just delegating all of this work to consultants and to lawyers that are outside of the government who don't really have an incentive to do cost control, aren't given clear defined targets. And what you end up getting is something like the D line extension, which cost $10 billion dollars for like nine miles of subway and took, you know, it's way over times, way over budget. And by comparison, you look at, you know, nations like China and Shenzhen, who built over 300 mile network in the amount of time it took us to build nine miles. Like this is just not acceptable. Somebody has to be in charge that says, what is the problem here and how are we going to fix it? And that really means building state capacity and actually bringing that diligence and that experience in house and making sure that it's not just beholding to lawfare and special interests.

Speaker 1:
[30:18] And if you are on the Metro Board, what would be some of the changes you would make to how we're doing business as usual? Metro is not just in charge of the trains and the buses, they're also in charge of, you know, what we do with the freeways when it comes to expanding them. And we know that, you know, expanding the 405 sounded like a great idea, but it did not do a damn thing. I'm on that freeway every single day. You know, it's something that I feel like candidates and people in office don't talk about nearly enough where, yes, homelessness is a big issue and affordability is a big issue and crime is a big issue. For me as a voter, the issue that makes me want to rip my hair out every single day is our god-awful traffic. So what are your ideas to actually get this county moving?

Speaker 2:
[31:04] Yeah, great question. And you know, this actually also relates to homelessness. One of the biggest, there's a few things that when I talk to, you know, ordinary citizens out in LA about how they support transit or housing, the biggest drivers for them were the reason they opposed because there's a lot of opposition to these things, including transit, surprisingly, is that one, it's too expensive, right? So we have to address that. Two, and this is another one that we've just refused to address as a society, is that we're not focusing on actually making public transit safe. So I know a lot of people that are on, you know, their work is on one end of a heavy rail line and their home is on the other, and they choose not to take it because it's unsafe. So we're spending billions of dollars to build public transit that people don't want to ride. And at the same time, we're fighting this movement to, you know, make everything free. And you know, that attracts a certain type of element, ferovaters to the network, as well as homeless people. It moves homeless people and low-level criminals around the city, and people don't want that in their neighborhood. There was an interesting study recently about BART, which experimented with this, you know, this process of basically turning public transit into, you know, a network of homeless encampments and not ensuring that people are paying their fares. They finally decided a few years ago, they're gonna install fare gates, and the cost of maintenance and the number of, the cost of maintenance went down over 90%, and the number of violent incidents also went down significantly, and the revenue went up. So it's just this kind of magic button you can press that actually helps to heal transit and make it popular for riders. So, you know, one of my goals, certainly as a county supervisor, is ensuring safety on public transit so that when we announce that we want to expand it into your neighborhood, you're not thinking, oh God, you know, here comes the homeless people, here comes the open air drug market, here comes the vagrants, and rather you're like, oh great, I have a fast and inexpensive and clean way to get from one place to another.

Speaker 1:
[33:32] Well, and to that point, one of the cities that you would be representing is Santa Monica, and there are a lot of aspects that have led to what has happened in Santa Monica over the last 10 years, but I think a lot of people will point to the extension of the Expo line brought in a lot of problems that were in downtown LA, and the end of the line became Santa Monica, and that's when we started to see the downfall of the Third Street Promenade and the open air drug markets, and then Barbara Ferrer's needle exchange program certainly didn't help with that.

Speaker 2:
[34:04] Yeah, it's almost just too stupid to possibly imagine, some of these policies like harm reduction or safe injection sites. I lived in the Bay Area for a few years when they were trying all of this, and they basically were the pioneers in dysfunction, and they're slowly crawling their way out of that now. And it seems like we here in LA are teetering on the edge of, hey, maybe we should try that too. And we know how it's going to go, because we've already seen the map, we've got the news, we've got the history. It's personally frustrating for me, being a transit advocate and a long time resident, and also a former resident of Santa Monica. I still work there, right near 3rd Street Promenade. And it is just absolutely empty on a 75 degree day in the late afternoon. And that's just absolutely shameful. And a lot of that is due to tourist traffic being down. One of my favorite restaurants there, the Misfit Bar, just had its last day this past Saturday. And they cited, manager cited that, tourist traffic being down 80%, they just can no longer afford to stay there. And that process is going to continue if we don't address homelessness. So that's kind of a root cause of a whole lot of dysfunction in the city from transit, public safety, housing costs, opposition to public infrastructure. So that's why I'm so laser focused on that.

Speaker 1:
[35:40] If you want to check out more of his policies, there's details on every single thing that he cares about. Check out his website, tomas4la.com. That's Tomas, forla.com. Tomas Sidenfaden, running for LA County Supervisor District 3. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'm sure we'll be talking soon.

Speaker 2:
[36:01] Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Randy.

Speaker 1:
[36:04] It's The News Blitz with Randy Wang on KABC. It's Earth Day and CBS 8 in San Diego put together a piece in case you were confused about what goes in the recycling bin and what's not supposed to go in the recycling bin. And apparently, if your plastic or your paper products have any food residue on them, they don't go in the recycling. And you know what? I stopped caring about this a long time ago because it doesn't matter what I put in my blue bin. It doesn't matter what I put in my black bin. There's a guy in a shopping cart that goes around the neighborhood on Tuesday morning and takes out all the cans from every single one. So he can deal with it. Also, we stopped shipping our recycling to China, so most of the stuff gets burned anyway. It's the News Blitz with Randy Wang on Talk Radio 790 KABC.