City Council candidates vying for the 11th District seat on March 5 were questioned about their stances on group homes, zoning and unions at a Valentine’s Day meeting hosted by the Pacific Palisades Community Council. The candidates, who included Mike Bonin, Tina Hess, Frederick Sutton, Odysseus Bostick and write-in candidate Brian Selem, addressed nearly 40 audience members at the Palisades Branch Library community room. ’I support the Community Care Facilities Ordinance [CCFO],’ said Hess, a 25-year City prosecutor who views public safety as one of her main campaign priorities. ‘I actually worked in a unit more than 10 years ago’the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program’we actually called for this ordinance [then].’ According to the City Attorney’s Office, the ordinance seeks to add clearer language to the City’s current zoning code and requires single-family homes with four or more leases to obtain a state license. This would also define these facilities as boarding homes and require them to abide by certain conditions, such as parking requirements and no disruptions. If passed, the ordinance would also increase oversight of homes with seven or more occupants.’ Hess said the City needs the ordinance in order to preserve the ‘character and integrity’ of single-family neighborhoods. ‘I think preserving R-1 zones is critical.’ ’Some 60 percent of Los Angeles is covered by different regulations where you could kind of build whatever you want,’ said Sutton, who grew up in Brentwood and the Palisades, and served on the West L.A. neighborhood council. ‘We need to protect the integrity of our neighborhoods… the CCFO is long overdue.’ ’The Palisades is a special place,’ Bostick told the audience, which included residents from Venice and Brentwood. ‘You treasure your R1-zones and you’ve paid a lot of money to live here.’ Ultimately, the CCFO is a ‘moral issue,’ Bostick said. ‘It’s a question of whether we want to warehouse people or provide them with quality services. Those quality services will cost more but the human beings we are dealing with will blossom more.’ While supporters of the CCFO say it will lead to an increase in housing opportunities by allowing more state license facilities to exist ‘by right’ in R-1 zones, its opponents, which include the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, say it will make thousands of vulnerable people homeless and prevent many more from finding homes. ’I think all of us agree that we need to protect the integrity of single-family neighborhoods,’ said Bonin, who is currently Councilman Bill Rosendahl’s chief of staff. ‘I think all of us agree that we need to crack down on nuisance properties, but I also think that we all agree that we don’t want to do anything that is harmful to people that are vulnerable.’ Bonin said there is a lot of ‘common ground’ and that a lot of what the CCFO tries to do is appropriate. However, he stressed to the audience that the ordinance as written goes overboard. ’There shouldn’t be an over-saturation of them in any neighborhood. There shouldn’t be big warehouses full of people providing services for fees but the ordinance also covers shared housing.’ The ordinance would also prohibit a senior citizen on a fixed income ‘from taking in boarders so she could make her mortgage,’ Bonin said. Also, the ordinance would prohibit victims of domestic violence, going through a crisis intervention center, from ‘sharing house and living together as a family.’ ’I think there is a way to draft an ordinance that addresses our values, protects the integrity of single-family neighborhoods and tracks down nuisance properties, but doesn’t do that harm,’ Bonin said. On the issue of addressing the City’s current financial crisis by dealing with unions and the rising cost of pensions, the candidates seemed to find only one piece of common ground’attack the status quo, which some of them equated with Bonin. ’I think we need independence in the City Council,’ said Bostick, a former eighth-grade science and history teacher. ‘Too many of the people who get elected were the Chief of Staff’no offense to the people present. Too many of the people who are elected come up within the broken political arm of the union system accruing debt for decades so that when they get into the position of power they have to pay that debt off.’ Hess said she is not ‘beholden to anyone and is not taking any union money. ‘I believe my job as your representative will be to sit down with the unions and make those demands [such as pension cuts].’ ’Seventy percent of the City’s general fund goes to public safety: the fire department and police department,’ Hess said. ‘These contracts need to be on the table too: they are kind of sacrosanct in the City. We don’t really ask the police department or the fire department to make those concessions when it comes down to negotiations and we must.’ Similarly, the City’s proprietary departments, such as the courts and L.A. Department of Water and Power, ‘must step up to the table, too,’ Hess said. ’Folks seemed to imply that because I have the backing of labor I am beholden to them,’ Bonin retorted. ‘The number-one priority for organized labor’which has endorsed me’is moving the runway north at LAX and I have stood up to them and said ‘I do not support that because it hurts our constituents in Westchester.” ’I am not beholden to anybody and I will stand up to anybody regardless of the issue,’ Bonin fired back. Additionally, all of the candidates present at the meeting expressed the need for greater fire and police presence in the Palisades and said they would oppose the building of LADWP’s proposed substation (DS-104) on the empty parcel next to Marquez Charter Elementary.
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