Welcome to Hollywood Secession Watch, the site for those opposed to Hollywood Independence. For pro-secession arguments, go to http://hollywoodindependenceforum.blogspot.com.

This site, Hollywood Secession Watch, is a one-stop source for balanced and intelligent information on the proposed new City of Hollywood, which would transform a small, run-down, dirty and crime-ridden area of Los Angeles into the most famous city in the world. What's wrong with that? Well, read on.

Parking Lot owners would suffer

Among those most affected by a new City of Hollywood would be the operators of dozens of Hollywood Blvd. parking lots, such as Grant Parking, because one of the strongest and most immediate priorities after crime control for the new Hollywood City Council will be the creation of ample free parking to serve both the millions of tourists and the city's residents and the 800 small businesses that form 80 percent of the membership of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and now must rely on expensive parking for their customers.

Who wants to be a new Beverly Hills?

Parking lot owners have nightmares when they contemplate the possibility that Beverly Hills-style free parking lots will rise in place of their own.

Beverly Hills built its parking over the opposition of the private lots, and now makes available more than 1,000 free 3-hour parking spaces all located in the heart of the city's ritzy Golden Triangle.

The lots were a product of the vision of an unusual man, the late Beverly Hills Mayor Ben Stansbury, elected in 1980. Stansbury, an engineer who built his own successful firm, rerouted the chaotic traffic patterns of downtown Beverly Hills, built the garages and led a renaissance of Rodeo Drive as a result.

Hollywood parking lot operators will do anything to prevent that. Look for generous contributions to Mayor Hahn's campaign from 5-Star Parking, Grant Parking and other big-bucks contributors as the Hollywood's cityhood drive gets up to speed after the High Holidays.

And the Trizec-Hahn development known as Hollywood & Highland was built by the City of Los Angeles CRA. It is having problems with parking already!

Yes, that's yet another great reason to climb aboard the bandwagon of developers and construction "fat cats" who are bankrolling the anti-secession movement. Hollywood & Highland's $75-million garage was built by the CRA to support their giant white elephants (who literally operch atop of the shopping mall). Unfortunately, the extremely high parking rates discouraged hundreds of thousands of local shoppers almost immediately, and they promptly fled to The Grove at the Farmer's Market, where the City of Los Angeles cut a more attractive deal for local developer Tom Gilmore. To make sure Hollywood sees things his way, the Canadian developer's point man is chairman of the board of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, whose board voted to oppose secession based on a $20,000 report from MuniFincancial, which runs the Chamber's Business Improvement District surrounding Hollywood & Highland.

Gene La Pietra, the founder of Hollywood VOTE and a candidate for Hollywood City Council, has said that the new City of Hollywood would pay off the cost of the CRA effort within a few years to help restart the development engine that can transform Hollywood Blvd. into a sales tax generator par excellence, cutting the new city's dependence on permit fees, business taxes and other barriers to managed growth.

Where will the City of Hollywood get the money? From a city budget much stronger than neighboring Glendale's. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is neutral on the cityhood issue but voted to put it on the ballot, says that after three years Hollywood will have a "very robust" 10.1 percent budget reserve, or approximately $19 million dollars.

It's taken years for these political fat cats to build strong relationships with City Hall. What will happen to them?

Sadly, not everyone will really be a winner in the new Hollywood. Among them are the cable companies like Adelphia, AT&T and AOL-Time Warner, for instance. The City Ethics Commission reported that they spent more than $6 million in the past few years to get their franchises renewed despite their monopoly status, high rates and lousy service. Now, they will have to approach the City of Hollywood - where many Council members support very strict limits on political contributions - without the grease that has endeared them to politicians like Councilman Alex Padilla and made their contracts so easy to win downtown. They may well be losers to upstart companies like RCN and others who "overbuild" the incumbent systems and can offer bundled service -- long distance, cable, high-speed Internet and local telephone -- at far cheaper rates to the new city.

Billboard owners bought the election for LA City Attorney Rockard Delgadillo. Will they be hurt, too?

Yes, they may well suffer as a new planning department serving the new City of Hollywood takes a fresh approach to billboards and other kinds of cheap, loud, garish, overdone, oversized and offensive signage. Hollywood City Council candidate Keith Stephens actually has his own billboard firm and until last year was with Regal billboards, one of the giants. But architect Paul Ramsey, head of one of the largest Hollywood Hills homeowner associations, has a strong planning aesthetic that will mitigate against any billboard explosion.

But City of Hollywood opponents can rest easy -- the same huge billboards that helped Rockard Delgadillo beat former Counciilman Mike Feuer for the City Attorney's job will also help the anti-cityhood proponents with big billboards opposed to independence. They're coming to your corner soon!

The 18th Street Gang has made a public claim to the "turf' of the Hollywood-Highland area. Won't they be against the crimefighters who lead the independence movement?

That's a given. The 18th Street Gang is backing the anti-cityhood movement with all the force they can muster. The last thing they want is for Ivar Hawks leader Joe Shea and Hollywood Sentinels leader Ferris Wehbe and United Streets of Hollywood leader Jon Jay to lead a crackdown on the gang and their open, lucrative drug-dealing on Hollywood Blvd.

These community leaders and their neighborhoods took on half a dozen gangs to clean up the most heavily-impacted neighborhoods, including the Yucca Corridor, the Delongpre-Fountain area, and the area near Western Blvd. In fact, according to LAPD Lt. Anthony Finchey, Joe Shea got six of them arrested just last month as they bought and sold drugs in the block behind the Hollywood Chamber of of Commerce building (next to the Hollywood Roosevelt), next to Hollywood High School.

Ferris Wehbe, the first president of Hollywood VOTE, with his wife Debbie and Hollywood Sentinels leader Rosa Martinez just shut down the City Hall gang's curbside needle exchange close to the Wehbe's famous Little Red School House day care center at Highland and DeLongpre.

Although supported by the City of Los Angeles and a key profit center for the 18th Street Gang, Debbie and Rosa's leadership of the Central Hollywood Neighborhood Council proved to be the critical element in getting the needle exchange moved inside to a safe and clean location where there were not hundreds of kids passing by on a daily basis.

The 18th Street Gang now has to improve their drug sales on Hollywood Blvd. to make up for the busy marketplace in Rosa's neighborhood. Rosa is a candidate for the Hollywood City Council, so she can expect opposition to her candidacy from the 18th Street Gang. Be sure to join the 18th Street Gang in their fight against cityhood!

But where are we going to get cheap labor if, as they say, the new City of Hollywood forms a new school district to educate our children?

The Los Angeles Times reported today the latest dismal figures for Hollywood Senior High, and it's clear from the numbers that employers have nothing to worry about when it comes to cheap labor so long as the Hollywood independence movement fails. Hollywood Senior High is faithfully turning out a bumper crop of burger-flippers, french-fry cutters, laundry-room attendants and other adult children to exploit. Out of a possible 100, Hollywood High scored a whopping 17 on reading comprehension, so rest assured your workers won't be able to read those long-winded labor law notices those pesky state regulators make you post. Sure, the best and brightest will be able to read "Wash your hands before leaving the restroom," but that can only help you avoid Health Dept. fines!

As employers, your problems will really begin when the City of Hollywood, like Beverly Hills High (grade 62), Santa Monica High (grade 48), Culver City High (41), Burbank High (37) and Glendale High (28), starts improving city schools under the scrutiny of parents who know their councilmembers and can go to Hollywood City Council meetings a few blocks away.

To keep your children ignorant and to make sure their schools are unsafe, crime-ridden, run-down wrecks that supply plenty of cheap, unskilled labor to Hollywood's fast-food chains, hotels and restaurants, support Marlene Cantor and other LAUSD board members who are working hard to prevent change.

Cantor has a full-time aide who is working on the Hollywood anti-secession movement (they call it HALO, because they're angels!), who made sure Hollywood Star Lanes got torn down so they can build a school by the freeway. Now he's running the Hollywood United Neighborhood Council - even though he doesn't live there! Is that dedication, or what?

You can only imagine what might happen if the City of Hollywood formed its own school district and started paying teachers based on awful things like classroom performance - how could they get through all the newspapers and watch their favorite soap operas if they had to teach all day?

And imagine what it would cost you in taxes to actually educate other people's children! Better to take your chances of being mugged, raped or killed by one of them a few years from now than worrying about whether they get an education today.

How can we make sure the the rents keep going up if the new City of Hollywood is going to enact tougher rent control ordinances?

Well, there you go - another problem. Landlords are happy with the L.A. Rent control ordinance as it stands - they wrote it - because it gives them lots of loopholes to raise their rents through the roof. Candidates for the new Hollywood City Council have all pledged in writing to strengthen the L.A. rent control ordinance as soon as the new council takes office.

That can only mean trouble for rent-gouging landlords, who are happily renting some 100,000 rat-infested apartments to Angelenos now, according to Larry Gross, another stalwart defender of the anti-secession movement. Gross says the old Los Angeles tears down 10 units of affordable housing for every three it builds. He's head of the Coalition for Economic Survival, who knows where its bread is buttered because he's fighting Hollywood independence tooth-and-nail to hand on to the status quo.

The worst problem for landlords in the new Hollywood is that City of Hollywood proponents have proposed changing state law to allow apartments to become vacant up to three times before rent control limits are lifted.

That bill would allow some of the unskilled, barely literate graduates of Hollywood High to actually live in Hollywood, close to the burger joints and cheap hotels where they'll be going to work. The Canadian developer who now chairs the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce can read that writing on the wall! Who's going to shop at Hollywood & Highland beneath its symbolic white elephants and buy $14 movie tickets at the Arclight Cinerama Dome or spend mopney on kotchkes at Magic Johnson's new mall at Sunset and Vine if Hollywood is full of affordable housing for the people who work here?

The City of Los Angeles, in the form of Mayor Jim Hahn and Councilman Eric Garcetti, promised to use their proposed $100 million Housing Trust Fund to build 500 affordable housing units for Hollywood's poor when they visited Blessed Sacrament Church in July to speak out - in Spanish, of course - against secession. He appointed Secession 101 host Ken Bernstein and Councilman Mike Feuer (who never built a single unit of affordable housing in Hollywood while he represented it) to his advisory committee in May.

The audience of 600 Latinos cheered for the proposals - not knowing, of course, that the fund will be divided among all 465 square miles of Los Angeles, not just the 15-square-mile City of Hollywood, and only has $42 million! But it seemed to be clear who will be in the apartments they build.

But making a promise they can't keep is another great way anti-independence folks can get votes against Hollywood cityhood in exchange for things that don't have to be delivered until long after Nov. 5, 2002. Fortunately, Mayor Hahn only signed the Spanish-language promise at the church, so it's not binding in the least.

FIGHT FOR IGNORANCE! JOIN THE 18TH STREET GANG, JOHN WALSH (ANGELYNE'S POLITICAL RABBI), MARLENE CANTOR AND OTHERS IN KEEPING HOLLYWOOD FROM BECOMING THE BEST AND MOST FAMOUS CITY IN THE WORLD!