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New federal legislation requires localities to undertake a real census of their homeless population in order to continue receiveing funds. I joined up with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to participate in the third night of the count at PATH in Hollywood. The census hired many homeless and formerly homeless people to undertake the count; Orange and Ventura counties performed their own simultaneously.
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Councilmember Eric Garcetti |
Hello, residents of the 13th District of the City of Los Angeles and visitors from around the city, the country and the globe. This is the first post on my CD13 weblog, or blog.
To those of you who are new to blogging, my blog is simply an online journal that I can use to put daily records of events on my web page. I read a few different blogs about politics and about life in Los Angeles, and I believe blogging can be an effective way to communicate with you about what's going in your neighborhood and in City Hall.
Those of you familiar with blogging may find that this blog has different features than other sites you enjoy. Please let me know what you want to see, and our very inventive Information Technology Agency will try to accomodate; they're excited about a Council-blog too.
To get things started, I've posted excerpts from the last e-news, which you can also find here. I'll be adding to the blog throughout the week, and there may be some format tweaks as the blog finds its feet.
I hope you enjoy the council-blog. Read on, and don't hesitate to let me know what you think at garcetti@council.lacity.org. If you would prefer to receive the updates I post here in monthly digests via the e-news, please subscribe here. And please explore the rest of the new CD13.com, redesigned courtesy of the ITA.
Yours truly,
Eric
President Bush's budget has been released, and, as I wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times [.pdf], the message to the nation's poor, its elderly, and its urban youth is clear: You're no longer our problem. Up until this year, the city's allocation of Community Development Block Grants, or CDBG, had been shrinking steadily: the national allocation had held steady, but the increase in poverty from city to city meant that Los Angeles's share dwindled. I was encouraged to see many of the people helped by CDBG show up up at a City Hall rally to oppose the cuts. Children from the Echo Park Silver Lake People's Childcare turned up, and a young man who had gone through the Aztec Firefighters gang intervention program—who had changed his life from being in a gang to fighting wildfires—spoke. Mayor Hahn is engaged on this issue and has rallied other California mayors to join the fight to keep this funding source of last resort for poor communities.
