Tony Strikes Again and Scapegoats Gloria Jeff for His Transportation Failure
Tony strikes again. This time it’s the firing of Gloria Jeff. Jeff is the well-respected African-American transportation planner and administrator that Tony lured out here from Michigan with much fanfare (and of course the obligatory trademark Tony centered press conference) and promised that she’d be the answer to L.A.’s nightmare, sometimes called road gridlock. Such a promise, of course, could not be kept, especially since Tony has not put forth an aggressive, comprehensive plan to tackle the city’s traffic horror.
That takes quiet, patient, hard work to secure funding and the cooperation of other cities, and regional planning and transportation agencies to put a plan into play and make it work. So what does Tony do. As always, he engages in the eternal hunt for scapegoats and Jeff was the unfortunate prey. But Tony did get one thing right. Los Angeles’s monumental traffic and transportation problems are due to the failure of one person. But that person is not named Jeff. The name is Tony. Jeff deserved better.
Earl-
You have a remarkable record of being half right. If you could extract race from your calculation of every equation, you'd be much better at this game.
Ms. Jeff might have come to LA highly recommended. She might have sterling credentials. And, yes, as in all things Tony does, he was front and center of the announcement.
But this morning's news that the trafic department doesn't store data on traffic patterns is the 1200 pound gorilla in the room. That alone is grounds to fire her.
The woman's race had nothing to do with her firing. Her apparrent failure to grasp a rather basic fact did.
Unless you think a white man who ran the department in that manner also would deserve to remain employed, your injection of race into the question is baseless.
So, let's ask this question: How is it that Tony managed to hire someone who failed in such a basic manner? and how is it that it took 18 months to figure out that nobody was tracking traffic historically?
Gloria Jeff was wrong, and Tony was wrong. We'll get a clean re-start on the first matter, but it willnot be done right unless we can also fix the second. No matter what the skin color of any of the players might be.
What the entire press missed is that it took the the governor of Michigan a full six months to get Gloria Jeff to 'resign' from her previous job and she only 'resigned' after she finally found someone stupid enough - us - to hire her without talking to anyone who actually worked with her in any of her previous jobs. And during much of that six months, she refused to even show up for work due to a simple one day knee surgery, but still collected her check. And it only took me 24 hours on the phone to discover dozens of horror stories from throughout her entire job history.
...and Don Antonio, strikes again! This time he is preaching the benefit of a 9 percent tax to go on the ballot next February, replacing the current 10 percent tax that is expected to be voted out soon. This new 1 percent saving tax is going to be declared an "emergency".
Well, Don Antonio, how long is going to be this "emergency"? If you spell clearly what this "emergency" is, perhaps,(and don't hold your breath) perhaps we say, once we understand where this money is going to go, we, the taxpayers, could possibly vote in this 1 percent new saving tax. Tell us in Spanish, English, Korean and Latin
Ciao.