Is Antonio Villaraigosa really fundraising for the governor’s race instead of his mayoral re-election? Are gay Republicans really trying to get the California Supreme Court to remove the same-sex marriage ban from the November ballot? Did Zev Yaroslavsky actually demand to know whether Dean Logan and the other candidates to be county registrar underwent criminal background checks? Who is Joe Canciamilla and why should you care? When does Jamiel’s law go to voters?

The summer is moving quickly and there has been a lot of election news — not just for November 9, but for next year's mayoral election and the 2010 race for governor (already?) as well. Find it all here, and keep up to date on the facts — with an opinionated twist — on Los Angeles' (and California's) perpetual election at Vote-O-Rama.

First things first. November 4: There’s a chance that your roster of 11 California propositions will get shorter, and you may have a gay Republican research attorney to thank.

Legal experts call it a long-shot, but on June 20, several petitioners asked the state Supreme Court to toss Proposition 8, the initiative to restrict marriage to a man and a woman (find a the one-line text of the initiative in pdf, plus the attorney general documents, here). The justices, fresh from their 4-3 ruling that same-sex couples in this state have an equal right to marry (see a pdf of the opinion here), will now have to decide whether their decision turns the ballot measure from a constitutional amendment into a constitutional revision.

Huh?

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and William J. Perry say John McCain is wrong to suggest throwing Russia out of G-8. Author Jennifer Block pushes home births to the medical establishment. Columnist Tim Rutten offers a requiem for L.A.'s one-time status as a boxing town, and former "Tonight Show" writer Brad Dickson imagines L.A. as run by The Grove creator Rick Caruso:

Transit: Several MTA buses are replaced with streetcars on faux cobblestone roads going nowhere. After a near-catastrophic collision, Caruso deflects criticism by asserting that the fake roads are, statistically, still safer than the Orange Line.

Economy: Caruso balances the city budget. He accomplishes this in part by eliminating all street parking and building city-owned parking structures that charge $8 for the first hour and $6 for each subsequent 15 minutes, with a maximum rate of $179 a day for a lost ticket.

The editorial board says good riddance to the anti-gang program L.A. Bridges, reminds educators to focus on learning, not testing, if they decide to OK a statewide algebra test, and urges SAG to start negotiating so that the industry can start working again.

On the letters page, readers discuss Colombia's hostage rescue operation, which had government operatives posing as NGO officials. Long Beach's James L. Kilgore doesn't think it was so great a move:

In creating a fake nongovernmental organization, it has given license to insurgents and rogue governments all over the world to treat humanitarian aid workers as enemy combatants. In simpler terms, which the editorial board might understand, it is as though it distributed maps of Doctors Without Borders clinics in the Democratic Republic of Congo marked "bomb them."

*Cartoon by Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate

Q: Who is the most controversial elections official in the Western United States?

A: Dean C. Logan.

Q: What is the largest elections jurisdiction in the United States?

A: Los Angeles County.

Q: Who is Los Angeles County hiring Tuesday as its permanent elections director?

A: Dean C. Logan.

The Board of Supervisors has been discussing the position in closed session for several weeks, but made clear on the agenda it has posted for its Tuesday, July 8 meeting that it has decided to keep Logan, the interim registrar-recorder/county clerk since the end of last year, and make his appointment permanent. But at-will.

Salary is $195,000 [pdf].

Logan was vilified in 2004 by Washington state Republicans, who accused him of stealing the election of Dino Rossi as governor and handing it to Democrat Christine Gregoire. He was the director of elections for King County, which includes Seattle.

That experience did not save Logan from being vilified by Democrats for his choice of voting software and equipment.

This year, he was vilified by voter advocates after the Feb. 5 presidential primary, in which the ballots of several thousand independent (“decline-to-state”) Los Angeles County voters initially went uncounted in the notorious “double bubble” mess. A majority of those ballots ultimately were counted, and Logan won grudging praise from some of his detractors.

Logan’s name was not mentioned in open session at last week’s board meeting, but Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky went to unusual lengths to prepare critics for the appointment, praising election watchdogs, especially those from his liberal Westside/Valley district, for their vigilance. He also made a point to get on the record that the search firm hired by the county wasn’t really a shill for some voting equipment company. Like Diebold. But there was more.

“Were the candidates vetted for their criminal records?” he asked. Just in case anyone was wondering. And yes, they were. Civil cases? Judgments filed against them? Bankruptcies? Yes, the personnel team responded, they checked into all that.

Yaroslavsky also asked that the contract for Lo—I mean, for whoever they hire as recorder-registrar/clerk include language forbidding the use of his or her image on any vendor’s promotional material. That’s kind of a no-brainer – except that a picture of and quote from the last registrar, Conny McCormack, ended up on a Diebold brochure.

There also was mention of “desirable” qualifications, including a college degree. That’s something Logan reportedly does not have.

The relationship between McCormack and California Secretary of State Debra Bowen was strained, in part over different levels of confidence in the county’s voting equipment. In her “top-to-bottom review” of equipment throughout California, Bowen decertified Los Angeles County’s touch-screen equipment, which was used for early voting and was in line for eventual use in election-day balloting as well.

On Feb. 5 the county used the double-bubble stamp cards, together with the InkaVote scanner system that alerts voters if they improperly voted twice in the same race or did anything else that would invalidate the ballot. The actual ballots were updated for the June 3 election. InkaVote equipment has been recertified for the limited purpose of scanning ballots at the polling place. It is in line to be used in the Nov. 4 presidential election as well.

To count ballots, the county has scrapped plans to use Diebold GEMS 2 equipment, since it failed to win certification because of security concerns. In its place, the registrar is using a proprietary “legacy” system – in other words something that is rapidly aging – known as MTS. It has been certified, with conditions.

Logan said his department plans to use MTS through the 2010 statewide election and, in the meantime, go through a strategic planning process to figure out how to eventually replace it.

The city of Los Angeles is also without a permanent elections official. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Karen Kalfayan as interim city clerk in March on the retirement of Frank Martinez. His action is required to make Kalfayan permanent, or to pick a replacement, subject to approval of the City Council

Philly Daily News columnist Elmer Smith proves yet again that anybody who starts off by saying he supports free speech will end up calling for some limitation or other on somebody's right to talk. The  issue this time? Licensing of downtown tour guides in Philadelphia, which is due to begin this fall and may eventually apply to all tour guides in the City of Brotherly Love. The license will require a test of Philadelphia history (and possibly parapsychology). If you're leading a tour without a license, you could be fined $300.

It turns out there;s a loophole in the U.S. Constitution allows people to say stuff without government permission. (That seems to be news to many philly.com commenters, including one who believes newspapers need government licenses to publish.) Philly tour guides have been using this loophole to tell lies about history. Worse still, they're telling the wrong lies about history. Mayor Michael Nutter has signed licensing legislation designed to protect the city's tourists from misinformation.

The Institute for Justice is taking the matter to court, saying it aims to vindicate citizens' "right to speak freely and to earn their living by speaking, without first having to ask the government's permission." I'd say an even more disturbing part of this news-of-the-weird story is the prospect of a city bureaucracy set up to decide what true history is. That's more troubling than a tour guide telling you the (factually accurate!) story that Ben Franklin married Betsy Ross.

Courtesy of Kerry Howley.

Actually, we have 11 of them so far, all on the November 4 ballot. The deadline has passed for initiative measures put on the ballot by voter petition, but the Legislature still has time to add a few more. Secretary of State Debra Bowen assigned numbers to those already lined up, starting with Proposition 1.

But wait, you say. If we just voted on Propositions 98 and 99 on June 3, why don't we get Proposition 100 in November?

Ballot measure numbering runs on a 10-year cycle, and that cycle began in November 1998, so it just ran out and is starting over. If the Legislature adds more propositions, lawmakers can decide whether to add them to the end (Propositions 12, 13, etc.) or to the beginning (Proposition 1A, 1B, etc.).

Those are just the statewide measures. We could still get an MTA sales tax from the county, and on Tuesday the City Council could add a parcel tax to fight gang violence.

What will those be called on the ballot? We don't yet know. They are lettered instead of numbered, and are designated by the registrar-recorder.

Backers of tax measures believe the November election is their best shot at victory. The thinking goes like this: Los Angeles voters will be coming out in droves to vote for Barack Obama, or against a Republican of any stripe, and against the ban on gay marriage (Proposition 8).

The ballot is still growing. To keep up, check in regularly at www.latimes.com/elections.

The construction of the Los Angeles Police Department's new headquarters, across Spring Street from the L.A. Times, has been a constant source of argument in downtown circles. Is it moving too slow or too fast? Is it a prime example of runaway costs or a model of smart architecture?

For me, the LAPD's next building has special meaning, because it was instrumental in the creation of our Blowback feature. Though we had used the web once before to get a response to an Opinion piece from the late Jack Valenti (the last true gentleman), it was the brouhaha between L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez and LAPD HQ contractor Ron Tutor that really proved the feature could work. After Lopez penned a column (now disappeared from the site) criticizing the project's leisurely pace, standing-around workers and rising expenses, I figured Tutor — who blew up on the phone with Lopez but seemed to have a coherent critique of the media that he was on the verge of expressing —  would be interested in replying. He delivered, a new feature was born, and you can judge for yourself how well Tutor acquitted himself.

I'm no fan of big, taxpayer-funded buildings under any circumstances, and I've seen a few workers standing around doing nothing (though no more than I see at any workplace, including my own), but I do have to say that for a building that's not scheduled to open until 2009, the LAPD headquarters already looks pretty impressive.

In fact, the only cause for alarm I found while skulking around the project and photographing odds and ends recently was that I briefly got a strong  sense of: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not Greg!"

Then again, don't we all (except for the Gregs among us) get that feeling from time to time?

I'm not sure what the standard of success is when measuring massive public construction projects paid for through our taxes in a city where even the dogs and cats are unionized. I'm not sure there can even be a standard of success in that environment. And I guess anybody would view with dismay a building that will end up blotting out the sun in your second-floor office. But from what I can see, when (or if) the LAPD building gets completed, it will be a pretty nice place to be a cop:

The California Supreme Court got a lot of love at this weekend's Pride Parade in West Hollywood, but UCLA deserves at least a peck on the cheek, too. As The Times' Alana Semuels recently reported, the university released a study last week (pdf) that shows, "Same-sex unions could provide a $370-million shot in the arm to the state economy over the next three years." (Guess Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't kidding, after all.) But BusinessWeek warns:

Gay couples are projected to spend $684 million on flowers, cakes, hotels, photographers and other wedding services over the next three years -- so long as voters don't put a halt to the same-sex marriage spree, according to a study by the Williams Institute at University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

That's a pretty sizable caveat -- and that's assuming that many same-sex couples themselves will sign on. Take the Opinion section's own Robin Rauzi, who's not so sure that "until death do us part" will last this time:

It may seem surprising that we'd hesitate at all. But would you want your marriage put to a statewide popular vote?

You can't be a gay person in America, even in California, and be a complete stranger to discrimination. But this is different. This is the state -- my state, my government -- throwing open one arm to us, yet holding the other poised to slap us hard.

After all, as Rick Wartzman points out in today's Op-Ed section, California is a land of ideological extremes -- and some more conservative counties are taking matters into their own hands. Besides, some Californians may already be shooting themselves in the financial foot. While business is booming in West Hollywood, says NPR, it could be partly because other areas are rejecting gay couples:

[Boutique bakery] Cake and Art has also gotten business from couples who encountered problems with companies closer to home. [Employee Cody Christensen] cites a lesbian couple who drove more than an hour to order a cake from the bakery.

"They went to bakeries in their area, and they were actually turned away. So they drove two hours to here, from San Bernardino, and we were happy to help them."

Time to pull out your Magic-8 Ball:

*Photo: David McNew / Getty Images

The teachers' walkout is going on all over town. I saw walkers at three schools on my way in, including my own kid's school.

These pictures barely suggest so, but there are a suspicious number of kids on the picket line. I counted at least a dozen kids walking the line at Rosewood Ave. Elementary, but did not have my camera. (Which is mine, btw, not the L.A. Time', so you can't blame Sam Zell for the horrible picture quality.) 

As this was a one-hour walkout and it's now 10:20, it may be winding down. Here's how the ed board thought of the strike yesterday:

The district's argument doesn't wash. With some planning, the schools should be able to keep students safe for one hour. Even so, while respecting the teachers' right to stage a high-profile protest, we wish they wouldn't do it in this particular way. The morning walkout likely will result in a lost school day for many students while making little difference to the lawmakers who hold the schools' fates in the balance.

As it is with Catholics and their local priest, as it is with Americans and their local politician, so I have little sympathy with teachers as a group but am fond of my own kid's in loco, who is far from perfect but kept good order during a chaotic morning at the school and even went ahead with a planned field trip. To where I have no idea, because that's the kind of involved dad I am.

Somebody -- anybody -- please just get 50% plus one tonight. Otherwise, like the folktale of the political consultant who comes out of his hole on election day but doesn't see his shadow (that's how the story goes, right?) we have five more months of campaigning.

But it's looking grim in these early hours. With a still-paltry 1.35% of precincts reporting, Mark Ridley-Thomas has a comfortable lead over Bernard C. Parks in the race for Los Angeles county supervisor in the Second District. But it's not comfortable enough. Ridley-Thomas has 47.12% of the vote to Parks' 35.57%, but he needs 50% to avoid a runoff.

That might be tough. There are seven other candidates in this race, and even if none of them captures more than a few thousand votes, it could be enough to prevent anyone getting a majority. As it stands now, even Morris "Big Money" Griffin, the man who came up with the idea of an "ethnic lottery" so that winnings would only go to people of the same ethnic group as those who bought tickets, has 2% of the early vote.

So if the campaign ending now was all about Ridley-Thomas and Parks, the next five months will be, well, more Ridley-Thomas and Parks.

It's that way in any non-partisan race with more than two candidates. There will likely be at least a couple judicial runoffs in November.

It's a good opportunity for the New America Foundation to move forward with its plan for instant runoff voting, in which the runoff takes place simultaneously with the election. San Francisco currently uses IRV, as the insiders call it. Hear KPCC's Frank Stoltze report on New America's presentation yesterday at Los Angeles City Hall.

By the way, this 50% plus one issue doesn't apply to partisan primaries, like state Senate and Assembly. A Democrat just needs one more vote than his or her competitors -- same for Republicans -- to win the primary. There is a general election between party winners in November, but most districts are virtually owned by one party or the other, so it's really all being decided today.

California Progress Report posts a jeremiad called "What’s the matter with Los Angeles When It Comes to Elections?" and it doesn't even mention that there's an election today! But if you've had trouble voting today, you still might want to take a look:

With the largest concentration of voters in the State, 18 Congressional Districts are partly or wholly contained in the County, along with 14 State Senators and 26 Assembly-members.

(The L.A. Times is not responsible for unattached participles in sentences written by other publications.) The Report cites a host of troubles, and lays the blame for most of them on former Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack, who has "close ties to Diebold," and on her sucessor Dean Logan, who "has no college education." (If true, that should be considered a point in his favor.) I think it's time to let up on McCormack and give Logan a chance. They're like Boris and Natasha to Southern California fraudsters.

Still, vote-count enthusiasts have a point. I find Diebold somewhat like Freddy Kruger: scary the first few times but now so familiar as to be little more than a wisecracking old pal. But it's jarring to consider that we accept in voting an ambient level of inaccuracy that would never be allowed in a banking software, a weapons system or any other product the public actually cared about.

You will be propositioned at least eight times on November 4, so you might want to carry a can of mace. Oh, and you'll be needing your wallet, as well.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said today that she has certified four new ballot measures for the presidential ballot. There's one (number five) to revamp sentencing for drug and other nonviolent offenders; it would cost more than $1 billion a year. Ah, but it would also save more than $1 billion a year. Or so the attorney general speculates.

And there's measure number six, state Sen. George Runner's anti-gang initiative. It would increase penalties for some crimes, and deny bail to illegal immigrants who also are members of gangs. This one would run the state about half a billion dollars a year, not including the extra costs for county jails, prosecutors, etc. Just a quick reminder: the state will likely have to add $7 billion to the $17.2 billion deficit that (today, anyway) already is going to mean deep cuts and/or tax increases. Why? We already can't manage our overcrowded prisons, and an overseer appointed by the federal court is empowered to take that $7 billion off the top of the state treasury. So how are we going to pay up? A bond -- a ballot measure -- is expected to come before voters. In November. So make that nine propositions. Now where were we?

Oh, yeah, number seven: A renewable energy mandate. It would require utilities to generate 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010. And 40% by 2020. And 50% by 2025. This one would cost a relatively paltry $3.4 million a year, paid for by fees. But rate payers would get off cheap, because it would require all the costs to be borne by fat-cat utility executives! OK, just kidding about that last part.

Number eight: You were expecting this one -- it would amend the state constitution to provide that the only kind of "marriage" recognized in California is one between a man and a woman. Cost: nothing! Except our humanity. Come to think of it, both sides will probably make that argument.

Did I say nine? Make that 10. In addition to the likely prison bond, there is also a very likely redistricting revamp. Also bubbling under: a victims' rights initiative and an alternative fuels bond. So make that 12 ballot measures.

In case you forgot, measures one through four deal with a high-speed rail bond, a humane treatment of farm animals law, a children's hospital bond, and parental notification for minors' abortions.

But that's just State of California. The City of Los Angeles may have a parcel tax for anti-gang programs and an instant-runoff voting measure. The county and/or the city may have a transportation tax. The deadline for the city to act is July 2, so in theory we could get even more.

If you're keeping track -- and of course you are -- you'll find conflicting theories about What It All Means. Democrats will come out in droves to vote for president, so now is the time to get a new tax on the ballot. Or, Republicans and John McCain have an outside shot at California's electoral vote, so now is the time for a law-and-order measure, abortion notification and anti-gay-marriage to keep their interest up.

Get ready for fund-raising pitches. Wealthy Republicans, expect to be asked to pay out for those three conservative measures just mentioned. High-flying Democrats, plan to be called to help fund the sentencing, renewable energy and farm animals initiatives.

If campaign consulting firms and the companies that produce political mail were publicly traded, brokers would be recommending a strong "buy" order right about now. Alas, they're not publicly traded. Yet.

Los Angeles County's clerk — the guy who handles marriages, among other things, in the nation's biggest county — told the Times in a story Saturday that he might find a way to let staff who feel, uh, uncomfortable performing a same-sex ceremony to opt out.

No way, says Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. In a letter today to county Board of Supervisors chair Yvonne B. Burke, Delgadillo wrote:

Mr. Logan has no legal standing to grant County employees the authority or ability to choose which marriages they wish to officiate at based upon official views regarding an applicant's sexual orientation.

He wrote a similar letter to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

Of course, Delgadillo is the city's lawyer and has no authority or ability to tell Dean Logan or any other county employee what he can or cannot do. Expect a long, delayed and secret memo on the issue to come Logan's way from the county counsel at some undetermined time in the future.

Mayoral candidate Walter Moore said Thursday he has begun a drive to put "Jamiel's Law" on the March 2009 Los Angeles city ballot — the same one in which he is trying to unseat Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

If adopted, the law would permit Los Angeles police officers to arrest gang members for breaking U.S. immigration law. It would supersede Special Order 40, a 29-year-old LAPD policy that bars officers from arresting or questioning people solely on suspicion of being in the country illegally. Moore told a crowd of about 200 people — gathered at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre to hear about his proposal — that he decided on an initiative after hearing no response from City Council members to his request for an ordinance.

Jamiel's Law is named for Jamiel Shaw II, 17, who was shot to death by suspected gang members on March 2 close to his Arlington Heights home. Police arrested Pedro Espinoza, 19, who reportedly entered the U.S. illegally at age 4. Police say Espinoza is a member of the 18th Street Gang. He was released from jail, where he was being held on a weapons charge, a day before the killing.

Espinoza had been arrested by Culver City police and jailed and released by the Sheriff's Department, so the LAPD and Special Order 40 did not come into play. But Moore has dismissed that point, saying, in effect, that if his law had been in place, LAPD officers at some point prior to his weapons arrest would have seen Espinoza, identified him as a gang member, and arrested him on immigration charges.

The killing of Jamiel Shaw II, and Moore's advocacy for the change in the law, has united some black and white illegal immigration opponents, threatened to widen a gulf between African Americans and Latino immigrants, and forced city officials to refocus on Special Order 40. At least some LAPD officers appear to believe, incorrectly, that the policy prevents them from cooperating or even communicating with immigration authorities. A senior lead officer who misquoted Special Order 40 in a March newsletter, adding in anti-cooperation language, acknowledged that he got the wording not from the LAPD manual but from the American Patrol anti-illegal-immigration web site.

LAPD Chief William J. Bratton said he would clarify the policy for his officers. He also told the Times editorial board that he would make no changes to the order.

Moore repeated his assertion that the Times caters to Latino illegal immigrants because its parent company, Tribune, also owns the Spanish-language paper Hoy.

"The mayor, the City Council, and L.A. Times/Hoy won't take action," Moore said. "It's up to you."

Also speaking at the event were KRLA radio personality Kevin James and the young victim's father, Jamiel Shaw Sr.

James called for audience members to support Moore's campaign financially. "It's really expensive to run for mayor of Los Angeles against a former gang member who is the incumbent," James said.

Villaraigosa was not a gang member, but the claim that he was has become popular among illegal immigration opponents.

Shaw criticized the deputy district attorney prosecuting Espinoza, saying he worried she would try to portray his son as a gang member because he was carrying a red Spiderman backpack. "I want everybody to know," he said, "the fix is in."

Either that or nobody can afford to take a day off in this economy. The May Day march is a total bust. People are finally starting to arrive (police estimate 8,500), but for most of the day It looked like Omega Man outside the L.A. Times building this afternoon.

Well, maybe it looked like Omega Man would have looked if Matthias and his followers had a Latin band and sold hot dogs wrapped in bacon. In fact, if you're around downtown, you may want to try and bargain down the price on some unsold bacon dogs. No matter how much you pay, you'll be participating in a crime, as this fairly stunning Drew Carey video about the war on bacon dogs makes clear.

Tomorrow's May Day march may not draw record-setting numbers, but it could see the first large-scale deployment of the LAPD's newest psi-ops gadgets. Captain Dennis H. Kato of the 77th Street Area explains that the police will be keeping in multilingual communication with crowds through the department's new Critical Incident Utility Vehicle, or "Polaris," a sort of souped-up golf cart that will patrol the streets dispensing helpful phrases.

Even more intriguing is the handheld "Phraselator," which will provide English, Spanish, Korean and Mandarin broadcasts of more than 100 useful phrases, with a range of about half a mile. That includes not only old favorites like "Hands behind your back" but some of the following:

Welcome to this event. We are here to help facilitate your First Amendment rights.

If you need medical attention see a police officer.

Please stay up on sidewalk. Please stay off streets.

Please stay out of the trees.

Please do not climb on the poles.

You are on private property. Please move back into this area.

All the phraselators are in the field at the moment, but I'm hoping to get a complete list of the phrases after the march is over. Meanwhile, if you really start trouble tomorrow you may get to hear the full Dispersal Order (text available on Page 53 of this PDF), which combines the urgent, the ominous and the legalistic in a frothy brew of police power. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Further reading:

"You're under arrest you have the right to make one phone call or remain silent so you better shut up," arguably the worst Miles Davis album of all time.

Photos and information about the universal translator from the Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki.

Does Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo have too many non-lawyers on staff? The question is at the center of a verbal and email budget squabble between the city attorney and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office, which is backing the mayor's proposed 60-person reduction of Delgadillo's non-attorney staff of 497 (the office has 556 lawyers). That amounts to a budget reduction of close to 5%.

After releasing his proposed 2008-09 budget last week, Villaraigosa visited the Times Editorial Board and had this to say about Delgadillo's office:

By the way, just so you know, they're about a 1,000-member department; only 500 are lawyers. What we're proposing to cut is administrative staff. They have administrative staff ratios, you do the research on it to confirm it, but as I understand it, they have administrative staff ratios that are greater than Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, O'Melveny & Myers, and some of the biggest law firms, which are basically three lawyers for each administrative position.

Well — not quite. Not even close, actually. Law firms have become notoriously tight with what many call proprietary figures, but several of the largest firms confirmed that the numbers published in an annual survey by the Downtown News are just about right. If you take a look at the survey and do a little simple math, you'll see that the ratio generally is the other way around: most large firms have at least twice as many non-lawyer staff as attorneys.

Delgadillo's office jumped on the Downtown News figures and argued that in fact, he's quite thinly staffed in comparison with law firms in the private sector. On Monday, Delgadillo's budget chief, Jennifer Roth Krieger, sent an email to the mayor's budget chief, Sally Choi, asking for the "source data for the information your office has put out (which shows that our office has a higher percentage of support staff than law offices in the public or private sector)." Choi responded by email that the only information the mayor's office put out was the 1:1 ratio of attorneys to non-attorneys; both emails were attached to a letter to the City Council's budget committee from top Delgadillo deputy Richard H. Llewellyn Jr.

Time to pull over and figure out what "staff" means. Law firms have in fact moved to a ratio of about three lawyers for every secretary, in part because lawyers with computers on their desks now do much of the document drafting that they used to dictate, and that their secretaries used to type up back, say, in the 1980s. But the mayor wasn't talking about the city attorney's lawyer-secretary ratio, but rather lawyers to staff.

Private firms have bulked up on paralegals, tech support, billing, marketing, and even complementary professional services like accounting. They are all administrative or support staff, and most large L.A. firms have two or three such non-lawyers for every lawyer. Delgadillo may not need a lot of that work done in-house, but he does need people to back up misdemeanor prosecutions and other functions that private firms don't have to worry about.

The comparison of city attorney and private firm staffing figures actually tells us very little, except that Villaraigosa and Delgadillo are spoiling for a fight. The city attorney told the budget committee that his staff is needed to make the mayor's LAPD build-up work. "But, without prosecution and resulting jail time," Delgadillo said, "an arrest is meaningless."

To interpret: Moving money from the city attorney to the police doesn't accomplish much.

Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo said the staffing ratio was a "tangential issue." "We actually have to make real cuts to save real dollars," Szabo said.

By the way, here's something else Villaraigosa told the Editorial Board about Delgadillo:

"One council member said that if he doesn't agree to a 5% cut, maybe we ought to make it 10."

Time to turn the page on April, which means no more gazing at the standout photo in this year's Tom LaBonge calendar.

You know LaBonge, of course, the Los Angeles city councilman for portions of Hollywood, North Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Hancock Park and Toluca Lake. And Griffith Park, of course, where the councilman took this photo of the Observatory, with downtown's two tallest buildings poking through the low cloud layer. LaBonge is a veritable Mr. Los Angeles, so he would probably bristle at this notion, but you could almost mistake this photo for something in San Francisco.

Now get ready to flip your Tom LaBonge calendars to May, where you will be greeted with a very different photo of Griffith Park — one with flames from last year's fire climbing the ridge and consuming Dante's View.

Columnist Rosa Brooks plays Hillary Clinton:

Thank you, Pennsylvania! What an incredible margin of victory you gave me! Ten percentage points over Barack Obama. Count 'em! Ten!

All right, 9.2 points if you insist on actually counting. But they said I had to win by double digits to keep my campaign alive, and I think 9.2 points counts as double digits. And I am alive! And kicking! And punching and biting and kneeing my opponent in the groin!

Contributing editor Arianna Huffington says only a media filled with self-loathing could hire the likes of former Bush rep Tony Snow. USC emeritus professor Robert E. Tranquada argues for an independent authority to oversea L.A. county health services. And columnist Patt Morrison reveals what she and other Angelenos would do with the city budget if they had their way. (Coffee poured by the mayor at the Getty House Bed and Breakfast, anyone?)

The editorial board praises three African countries that stopped a Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe, looks to a 1983 report on education for present-day advice, and looks beyond the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania:

The Democratic race only seems interminable; there will be a winner, and he or she will reconcile with the loser and call for party unity. If Republicans can withstand the abrupt alliance of Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, why shouldn't Democrats be united by an enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton by Obama, or vice versa? After all, for all the attacks, the two Democrats aren't far apart on policy.

On the letters page, readers take on the race, as well. Valley Village's Larry Margo has this to say to Clinton-bashers: "Quick! Stop her! Force her out before she wins again!"

New Republic executive editor J. Peter Scoblic says if you like George W. Bush's foreign policy, you'll love John McCain's:

Weaned by a military family on the lessons of that most classically Manichaean of modern conflicts, World War II, and psychologically defined by his own maverick streak, McCain's worldview may be more instinctual than intellectual. But it doesn't matter. Like Cold War conservatives, McCain has taken a moral observation that the United States is a force for good battling the forces of evil and turned it into a strategic guide.

Thus, he rejects negotiation with our enemies in favor of "rogue state rollback," repeatedly deriding as "appeasement" the 1994 deal that froze North Korea's plutonium program and mocking calls for unconditional talks with Iran....

Columnist Tim Rutten argues that immigrant bashers weren't right to rough up the pope. And author John M. Barry thinks paying for New Orleans should be the federal government's responsibility.

The editorial board urges Congress to pass a bill that would make it easier to assert pay discrimination in the work place, and analyzes Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's new budget. Finally, the board tells the Writers Guild of America to stop chastising the few members who broke ranks.

On the letters page readers discuss Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas. San Francisco's Joanne Minsky says, "I proudly voted for him twice, but his failure of memory and judgment calls into question the value of his forays into international politics. It is time to retire, Mr. President."

People are talking about Special Order 40. Take a dip in the hard water of post-modernity, find out what 40 prominent Angelenos are saying on immigration and law enforcement, and please leave a comment. It's 40 on 40, but we're not going to rest until we get all 4 million or so opinions in L.A. You can comment below as well.

If you have read my Op-Ed on the Vermont/Manchester project (and of course, if you have not, what are you waiting for?), you may be interested in seeing just what the two-block battlefield looks like. The project area today is smaller by about 30% than what it was back in the 1996, when the Community Redevelopment Agency was given its mandate to develop the area. At the time, the project area included the 8300, 8400 and 8500 east-side blocks of Vermont Ave. Most of this area remains unbuilt since 1992, though there are a few strip-mall-type buildings in the area, and a much larger develoment on the 8300 block, about which more in a moment.

This is the view facing southeast from the corner of 84th and Vermont. The vacant lot and the strip mall to the right are now owned by Eli Sasson, who gained virtual control of the 8400 and 8500 blocks in 2005 and 2006.

If we turn slightly to the left, we see the L.A. County Department of Public Social Services building that now takes up the entire 8300 block. It was completed last fall. The L.A. Times' Roger Vincent had that story on September 28, though it has since disappeared from our site. (It's called "In South L.A., hope rises along with concrete, steel" if you want to look it up at your local public library.)

The DPSS building generated enormous controversy when it was being built: Local residents had long been agitating for a large retail development featuring a supermarket, a sit-down restaurant and chain stores. The news that one block of the site would be devoted to a welfare office (leaving two blocks that wouldn't support a very grand development) hit with a resounding thud. Community Coalition executive director Marqueece Harris-Dawson described the building to me as having been "shoved down the throats" of the community.

Nevertheless, L.A. leaders promised that giving this piece of the project over to the county building would be a catalyst for retail development, on the logic that it would bring free-spending county employees into the area during work hours. Vincent's story, for example, quotes Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., calling the building "a magnet for potential customers" that should "provide a solid customer base." Councilman Bernard Parks has made similar suggestions, and the building has definitely increased foot traffic in the area.

Elie Sasson played a supporting role in the DPSS saga too, which didn't endear him to the retail advocates. He sold off four lots on the 8300 block to ICO Development, helping give ICO site control of that block while buying out a handful of other owners in the other two blocks and getting site control (less his brother Joseph's lot) on those.

Sasson says that he too heard a lot of catalyst talk and made his series of sales and purchases only on the promise of CRA assistance with his development. He did enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the agency in 2006, but that expired last year without success. At the time, the CRA's regional administrator Ricardo Nogera minimized the expiration of the ENA, telling me the agency was close to moving toward a Disposition and Development Agreement with Sasson. Nogera left the agency shortly afterward, and his replacement Carolyn Hull would not characterize her predecessor's talks other than to say that they failed to produce a development.

The area already boasts a public building, the Constituent Service Center on the other side of Vermont. This picture shows the service center from across Sasson's lot. I was standing along some parking lots the CRA owns when I took this. These lots have factored into the story as well, since higher parking density allows more ambitious retail development. Sasson negotiated to buy the lots from the CRA, and he claims that he had an agreed-to deal with Nogera that fell through due to a technical snafu -- amusingly enough claiming the CRA failed to take out an ad in the Los Angeles Times in fulfillment of some open-bidding rule. CRA officials refuse to comment. For what it's worth, Nogera did tell me last year that he intended to "contribute" both lots to the project.

This 1992 photo by Robert Rubin, used here with his permission, shows the 8500 block being burned down in the rioting. 

Here's a view of the same block today. The corner lot, closest to us still belongs to Joseph Sasson, the brother with whom Eli Sasson has been in a long-standing disagreement.

The excitement never ends in the Opinion L.A. Quiz. You'll recall that last week we had a holdover trivia stumper on L.A. mayoral history. We finally have a winner, but first, let's take a look at our Multiple Choice results from this week's quiz:

1. The foreclosure-relief bill proposed in the Senate last week would do all of the following except: 
Correct answer: Allow mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy court. (A mere 45% of you got this one right, our worst performance of the week.)

2. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors enacted a 40-hour moratorium on what this past weekend? 
Correct answer: Homicide. (58% right)

3. President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin got into a public Dust-Up last week over: 
Correct answer: Bush's support for admitting Ukraine and George into NATO. (76% right)

4. Joe Torre coached his first regular-season game as the Dodgers' manager. Which Dodgers manager did he replace? 
Correct answer: Grady Little. (60% right)

5. On April 6, the United States celebrated Tartan Day to commemorate which inspiration for the U.S. Declaration of Independence? 
Correct answer: The 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath. (61% right)
 
6. Bankrupt airline ATA ceased operations Thursday. Which other U.S. airline also stopped flying last week? 
Correct answer: Aloha Airlines. (76% right)

Limerick honors this week go to Santa Monica's own Roger Allers, who ends his writeup of the latest torture memo story with an unexpected line of heptameter:

There once was a lawyer named Yoo
Whose ethical burdens were few.
Asked if torture offends
He replied, "It depends,
If it's you doing me or me doing you."

Loyd Dillon of Charlotte, NC takes home our caption contest prize with the following:

We both want to announce publicly that we still want a ban on gay marriage.

Now for our extra-innings mayoral stumper. Once again, the question was:

Before 1993, when L.A. voters adopted term limits and Mayor Tom Bradley decided not to run for a sixth term, who was the last L.A. mayor to have retired voluntarily, without being defeated for re-election, recalled, or otherwise trying to regain the seat?

Many tried, but only one succeeded. All the way from Lenexa, Kansas (you just never know where you'll find L.A. mayoral expertise), Eric Shaw sends in the following:

I believe the answer is Henry R Rose who served as mayor from 1913 to 1915. 

That is correct, Eric. You'll be receiving top-quality L.A. Times swag for this answer, though we should not that his actual name was Henry H. Rose: His middle initial was botched in some long-lost transcription error, which appears destined to follow him through history.

However, we have an interesting result in place and show, where Charles E. Sebastian turned out to be a popular answer. It's true that Sebastian resigned rather than being recalled or defeated, but he did so under threat of a recall. Thus, the answer fits the specifications in all but one point: Sebastian can't be said to have left office "voluntarily." Honorable mention, and slightly less top-notch snag, go to Nancy Anne Nuno, Mark G Majewski, Nathan Deer, Richard Fisher. 

Thanks a lot, and look for upcoming Opinion L.A. quizzes.

Voters in Culver City, Malibu and Sierra Madre decided (by fairly wide margins) to ratify their utility user taxes and extend them to "new" technologies, like cell phones. Malibu did it the L.A. way: lower the tax from 5% to 4.5% while broadening it, to call it a tax reduction. Culver City followed the more straightforward Pasadena model: just keep the tax at the same 11% rate while making clear it applies to more than just land lines. Sierra Madre went further, permitting the tax to be doubled to up to 12%.

For all the gory details on phone taxes, including why all of a sudden so many cities are putting them on their ballots now, check out our exhaustive (and exhausting?) previous discussions. Bottom line: cities have gotten used to the revenue, lawsuits threaten to take it away.

For more on ballot measures and the place of initiatives in American Democracy, check out Joe Mathews' Blockbuster Democracy blog. Good stuff. If you want to zero in on yesterday's election in Sierra Madre -- and Arcadia -- take a look at the Foothill Cities Blog. More good stuff.

So you want to know more about yesterday's in-between election in 14 L.A. County cities? We've got it right here. Know that Antelope Valley attorney and powerbroker R. Rex Parris ran out of people to back for mayor of Lancaster and this time got himself elected. Check out the details in the Antelope Valley Press, and don't miss the nasty words about neighboring Palmdale. Sounds like there's a border skirmish brewing.

The biggest election yesterday was in Long Beach. The Press-Telegram has the details.

In Avalon, they rejected a measure to increase the tax on attractions. For the results you must take the curious step of bypassing Avalon's official web site and instead going to the Catalina Chamber of Commerce. Hmmm....

Here are your results for Arcadia, El Segundo, Santa Clarita, Walnut and Whittier. Bradbury, where it is said that the horses outnumber the people, didn't have its results online so I did the work for you: D. Montgomery Lewis was elected to the City Council with 40 votes out of 71 cast. By the way, bears may outnumber people in Bradbury too. Helpful hints for residents include: Freeze meat bones or other smelly items until pick-up day; Be sure to keep barbecue grills clean; Pick up fallen tree fruit, and put away pet food and bird feeders at night; Close windows at night on accessible ground floors and decks; Don't leave food in or near a windowsill or on a counter near an open window; Securely block access to potential hibernation sites, such as crawl spaces under decks or buildings.

In Vernon, the city motto is: "Exclusively industrial since 1905." Which is another way of saying they don't bother with that voting nonsense. They were supposed to vote yesterday, but the government canceled the election since no one filed to challenge the incumbents.

For Lawndale, live coverage was available on local channel 22, but I missed it and am inconsolable. You're on your own.

Special Order 40 was issued on Nov. 27, 1979 by then-Chief Daryl Gates. The order was then divided into several parts so that they could be inserted into the proper parts of the LAPD manual. To see a facsimile of the order as it was adopted, you must check with sources outside the LAPD, like this one.

To find the order as it currently applies to the LAPD, you must first go to the manual here.

Next, in the second light blue bar near the top of the page, click on Volume 1. Now scroll down to section 390 to find portions of a policy statement on immigration status adopted by the Police Commission in March 1979. Section 390 reads:

Undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action. It is, therefore, incumbent upon all employees of this Department to make a personal commitment to equal enforcement of the law and service to the public regardless of alien status. In addition, the Department will provide special assistance to persons, groups, communities and businesses who, by the nature of the crimes being committed upon them, require individualized services. Since undocumented aliens, because of their status, are often more vulnerable to victimization, crime prevention assistance will be offered to assist them in safeguarding their property and to lessen their potential to be crime victims.

Now return to the top of the LAPD Manual and click on Volume 4. Now scroll down to section 264.50. This is the procedural portion of Special Order 40 that in the original order was labeled part I. It reads as follows:

264.50 ENFORCEMENT OF UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION LAWS. Officers shall not initiate police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person.  Officers shall neither arrest nor book persons for violation of Title 8, Section 1325 of the United States Immigration Code (Illegal Entry).

...in Arcadia, Avalon, Bradbury, Culver City, El Segundo, Lancaster, Lawndale, Long Beach, Malibu, Santa Clarita, Sierra Madre, Vernon (sort of), Walnut and Whittier. Most links take you directly to election information; a few take you to election data on city homepages. It's only sort of election day in Vernon because, gosh, no one wanted to run against the incumbents so the election was canceled. Again.

Most of these cities are electing members to their city councils; Lancaster and Lawndale are electing mayors. Long Beach is electing members to its school board and community college board, along with the city council. Sierra Madre is adding city clerk and treasurer to the mix.

As we noted previously, Culver City, Sierra Madre and Malibu are considering updating their utility user taxes, also known as phone taxes, much as Los Angeles voters did on Feb. 5. Avalon is also mulling raising its tax on admission to the Catalina town's attractions.

We have results in this week's Opinion L.A. News Quiz: One slam dunk, one squeaker and one stalemate.

Limerick honors easily go to Mariposa's own Bob Arbogast, who provided the following succinct description of Detroit's mayoral controversy:

There once was a mayor named Kilpatrick   
Who tried a political hat trick.
Two cops got nine mil
(Detroit paid the bill)
And Christine is now known as THAT trick.

Competition in our caption contest was fiercer, but Pilar Mendoza takes the prize with the following:

I can't believe you walk in LA!  My administration could use someone like you...

Finally, the trivia question resulted in a no-correct-answer draw. To repeat the question: "Before 1993, when L.A. voters adopted term limits and Mayor Tom Bradley decided not to run for a sixth term, who was the last L.A. mayor to have retired voluntarily, without being defeated for re-election, recalled, or otherwise trying to regain the seat?"

We had one guess for Mayor Frank L. Shaw, but that is incorrect, since Shaw was recalled from office in 1938. Coming slightly closer to the mark was a reader who went with George E. Cryer. However, as the editorial board's own Robert Greene explains, this one just barely misses:

Good guess -- but wrong -- on George Cryer. Sure, he left office in 1929 without trying to get re-elected that year, so he left office voluntarily. No recall, no defeat, no shooting himself to death in the council chambers (that was another mayor some years earlier). He was in the clear, retiring gracefully and without regret. For a few minutes. The guy just couldn't get being mayor of L.A. out of his system. In order to qualify under our question, the mayor must have never again tried to regain office, and in 1933 Cryer tried to unseat John Porter, the man who succeeded him. Poor George didn't even make the runoff. His best years as a cop, lawyer and elected official behind him, he remained in the background for nearly 30 years before dying in 1961 after an unfortunate encounter with a garden hose.

Our practice so far in the none-too-long history of the Opinion L.A. Quiz has been to eschew prizes for the trivia question, on the logic that it's possible to Google the answer. But Greene assures us that the answer to this question is not Google-able, and the results so far seem to support his claim. So we're holding this question out there, and the first caller with the correct answer will be receiving L.A. Times swag!

Again, here's the question:

Before 1993, when L.A. voters adopted term limits and Mayor Tom Bradley decided not to run for a sixth term, who was the last L.A. mayor to have retired voluntarily, without being defeated for re-election, recalled, or otherwise trying to regain the seat?

If you've got the answer, send it to opinionla@latimes.com and you may be a winner.

Thanks to everybody for playing and we'll see you next week.

If the June 3 election is the Stealth Primary, what do you call the election coming up on April 8?

Next Tuesday, voters in 14 Los Angeles County cities will go to the polls to elect city council and school board members. Or they were supposed to, anyway. Our good friends in Vernon (population 90, or thereabouts) canceled their election because they just couldn't get anyone to challenge the two councilmen who are running for re-election. Of course they couldn't. The last time someone challenged an incumbent, the city cut off their power and declared their home unfit for habitation.

There are elections in some democratically run cities as well, such as Avalon, which was featured in the Times on Saturday and in the March Los Angeles Magazine. In addition to city council candidates, the ballot in the small city on Catalina includes a measure to raise a tax on admissions to city attractions from 4% to 6%.

Three cities — Culver City, Malibu and Sierra Madre — are asking voters to sustain, increase or otherwise update their utility users tax, more commonly called the phone tax. This is the same move that the cities of Los Angeles, Pasadena and Huntington Park took on Feb. 5, for the same reasons: lawsuits and changes in federal law have called into question the application of these taxes to cell phones and other more modern communications devices, so in order to keep the taxes the cities must get the voters to ratify or change the laws.

Culver City's Measure W (pdf) would keep the rate at 11%, relatively high in the world of municipal phone taxes. It follows the lead of Pasadena, which called on voters to keep the tax at the existing rate. In Malibu, Measure D follows the Los Angeles model, lowering the tax — in this case, from 5% to 4.5% — while broadening it to new technologies. The Sierra Madre ballot has two measures: Measure U (pdf) would allow the current 6% tax to increase to up to 12%, while Measure UA would require all such revenues raised to go to police and other public safety functions. Very clever — U could be safely passed by a majority vote as a general tax, while UA, as a special tax, must get 2/3 to pass but carries the appeal of public safety.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently passed on the chance to update the county's phone tax, and may revisit the issue in November.

To keep up to date on the region's head-spinning array of elections — April 8, June 3, November 4 and next March — check in frequently at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

California may be one of the world's biggest economies, and Los Angeles may be the global city of the future, but compared with the rest of the country this place is second class in political sex scandals. Move over, Gavin Newsom. Sit down, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Back of the line, Antonio Villaraigosa.

Check out Detroit. Now, that's a town that knows how to have a scandal. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former aide, Christine Beatty, are both out on bail after entering not guilty pleas yesterday on perjury, obstruction of justice and other charges. They allegedly lied under oath about having an affair, in a lawsuit brought by police officers who claimed they were being punished for trying to investigate Kilpatrick's misdeeds. Go beyond the confines of the charges to the broader scandal, and you've got everything: sexually explicit text messages (on city equipment, no less), a supposedly "lewd party" at the mayor's mansion, strippers, even a murdered stripper, claims of racial bigotry. But the bottom line: not just sex, but up to 90 years in prison.

In New York, of course, they know what they're doing; Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace not just for an extramarital affair, but for allegedly paying call girls for sex -- in other words, for breaking the law.

How tame we seem in comparison. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's political career supposedly was at an end a year ago when he admitted having an affair with an underling who just happened to be the wife of his good friend and political aide. But no laws were broken, and yesterday hardly anyone batted an eye when Newsom said that, yes, he's interested in running for governor in 2010. The affair rated a low mention in the San Francisco Chronicle story, taking a backseat to Newsom's proclamation honoring a gay porn studio.

And Villaraigosa? Please. So he had an affair and his marriage broke up. Ho hum. Last summer it was common knowledge that his relationship with newscaster Mirthala Salinas meant the end of his political ambitions. That now seems quaint. If Newsom is still a potential candidate for governor, so is Villaraigosa.

And the Los Angeles Times stories on Arnold Schwarzenegger's on-set groping of women seem almost child's play. Not only no crime, but no actual sex.

There are plenty who argue that it's all our fault here at the Times. If we were looking for political sex scandals, we'd find them. Don't forget the whole Bonaventure episode of 2006, for example. Surely there is plenty more of that kind of thing out there. It could be that we just don't have the hunger for dirt, so we don't go after it. Well, Kilpatrick and Spitzer -- and the example set by persistent journalists at the New York Times and in Detroit -- should provide some inspiration. But it's also entirely possible that California's politicians are just not as cutting-edge as we'd like to believe.

Whoops, different  Fabian — not current speaker Fabian Nunez, but Fabian Wesson, wife of former speaker and current Los Angeles City Councilman Herb Wesson, has opened a committee to explore a 2010 run for the 47th Assembly District seat of speaker-elect Karen Bass, when Bass is termed out. Bass took the seat after Herb Wesson was termed out. All are Democrats.

Fabian Wesson is no stranger to Sacramento or Los Angeles politics. She is a consultant to Mervyn Dymally, the assemblyman-turned-senator-turned-lieutenant-governor-turned-congressman who is now back in the Assembly and running to go back to the Senate. Wesson also is a member of the Coliseum Commission and the California Science Center board.

Fabian (pronounce it FAY-bee-an, like the teen idol of the 1950s and '60s, not FAH-bee-an, like the current speaker) Wesson said she's still thinking over whether to pursue the seat, especially since she now has Herb home full-time after his six years of jetting to Sacramento and back.

So where is the 47th Assembly District? Take your pick — it covers Westside communities like Century City and Westwood but stretches east to take in the Miracle Mile and South Carthay and south to Culver City, Ladera Heights, Hyde Park and Crenshaw.

Top of the Ticket reports that former ambassador Roland Arnall has died at UCLA Medical Center.

Arnall's Ameriquest was a leader in subprime mortgage loans and was variously depicted as a predator on low-to-moderate income home buyers and the deliverer of the American dream to people otherwise priced out of the housing market. In 2006 the company paid millions of dollars to resolve investigations by 49 states, including California.

Arnall was a major donor to Republican candidates and causes, including President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But he and his wife, Dawn, also gave lavishly to Democrats, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, and City Council members Bernard Parks, Wendy Greuel, Jose Huizar and Jack Weiss.

Villaraigosa borrowed the Ameriquest jet in November 2005 to fly to the Detroit funeral of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. He was heavily criticized for his ride, and ultimately paid $438 to cover the cost of the flight. Critics persisted, saying the cost was much higher than the equivalent price of a round-trip commercial air ticket.

Arnall helped found the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

He became U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands two years ago.

Because the news out of South L.A. often is of crime and poverty, it's easy for those who don't live there to forget that these are neighborhoods, and often beloved neighborhoods. Nothing brings that home faster or more painfully than seeing residents pleading not to have a new school built at a certain location because, through eminent domain, it would displace so many of them. That was the scene at part of Tuesday's school board meeting for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The message, delivered by a parade of older African American residents with strong ties to the neighborhood, was unwavering: We love schools, we support schools, but many of these people are elderly, we are all friends, we are connected, please don't disrupt our lives. The story of one 72-year-old woman, especially, made listeners wince with sympathy. She had been a longtime teacher in LAUSD and had lived in her home for 30 years. Her community was there. Her friends were there. Everyone she interacted with on a day-to-day basis was there.

The change confronting this community was made all the more obvious by the sole speaker in favor of the school — a young Latino woman, holding a preschooler and speaking through an interpreter. The school was necessary, she said. Nearby elementaries couldn't follow normal two-semester schedules because of overcrowding.

There wasn't much the board could do for the first group. It already had delayed its decision to see if there were options. There were no options; no one had been able to locate another suitable piece of land in the neighborhood. If overcrowding weren't reason enough, the district is under a consent decree to restore normal academic calendars to all its schools. The school would be built.

Neighborhoods of older, settled people give way to the future. But then there's that 72-year-old woman. She was probably certain that at this point in her life, after having given years of service to young people in the city, she was settled down to quiet golden years in her neighborhood, with everyone familiar.  Chances are it won't be that way, and it's not easy to chase away imagined images of her in a disorienting new setting, searching for familiar faces.