More Hypocrisy from the LA City Council
Unless you’ve been off living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, you’ll remember that last month the L.A. City Council voted to boycott Arizona in protest of their crackdown on illegal immigration. The members of the council were so outraged at the behavior of Arizona’s elected officials that they enacted a ban on doing business with any company based in Arizona and suspended all city-related travel to the state.
Council Member Paul Koretz said that the passage of the Arizona laws was comparable to “the beginning of what went on in Nazi Germany” and that he believed that Arizona “needs to be stung in every possible way until they stop this behavior”.
Richard Alarcon was brought to tears and exclaimed that, “We’re fighting to preserve American democracy”.
Jose Huizar felt that, “We have to act strongly and quickly to put out this disease. This boycott will send that strong message. We must deal swiftly and strongly with this ill conceived law before it spreads anywhere else”.
Tony Cardenas declared, “We are standing here for what is right. We got elected to do what is right”. And then went on to say that Arizona was “acting un-American”.
Ed Reyes claimed that if he went to Arizona and met a police officer that was having a bad day, that he could be deported (totally untrue) and that it was “crucial for our great city to take a stand and …manage our assets in a way that upholds the principles of this great country”.
Janice Hahn implored the Council to “stand up today and say yes to what we all believe America should look like and behave like”. She then went on to paraphrase Edmund Burke: “there are few times in our lives when we have the opportunity to stand up and be counted… and we know bad things happen when good people do not stand up and say something.
Eric Garcetti and the rest of the City Hall crew also declared that they, too, wanted to “take a stand”.
So they adopted a resolution that directed:
…all City Departments, to the extent practicable, and in instances where there is no significant additional cost to the City nor conflict with the law, to refrain from entering into any new or amended contracts to purchase goods or services from any company that is headquartered in Arizona.
Pretty powerful stuff. Certainly nothing could make the City Council waiver from this self described principled stance.
Well… not so fast. Apparently the City Council, in enacting their little boycott, didn’t realize that the vendor for one of the LAPD’s pet projects is based in Arizona. American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the company that runs Los Angeles’ Automated Photo Red Light Enforcement Program is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and their contract expires on June 30, 2010. Of course, the Board of Police Commissioners wants to continue this program which issues over 40,000 citations per year and extracts around $20 million annually from Los Angeles drivers, 80% of whom were caught simply making a rolling right turn, not running through the intersection. But under the Council’s Arizona boycott, renewing the contract would be a big no no.
So what’s a cash strapped city to do? Why, enact an exemption for the Police Department to be able to extend the contract, of course. It’s that simple. And the proposal to do just that has recently passed the Council’s Safety Committee. Voting “yes” were Council Members Smith, Cardenas, and Perry; Reyes and Zine were absent. Only a passing mention was made of the fact that ATS is an Arizona based company, and that particular issue really didn’t seem to concern any of the three committee members. In fact, the balance of the discussion was over concerns of how the city could “improve the citation issuance rate”.
The proposal now goes before the entire Council this Tuesday, June 22nd. I guess we’ll see if any members of the full council, who were so eager to “take a stand” against a state they believe is “acting un-American” and “needs to be stung in every possible way”, will have any reservations about making this exception and continuing to do business with Arizona based ATS.
For the record, I don’t support this silly boycott, so it’s hard for me to argue that the city shouldn’t renew the contract for that reason. But I do believe that when city council members make such a grand show of their collective outrage against another jurisdiction, it’s ridiculously hypocritical for them to then turn around, less than a month later, and simply make an exemption just because it’s convenient for them to do so. Of course, hypocrisy runs deep in the LA City Council so we shouldn’t be surprised if this passes with a unanimous vote.
So much for “upholding the principles of this great country”.
If you want to let the City Council know your opinion on this. You can look up their contact info here.
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by David Boaz or 
by David Bergland, both excellent books on libertarian thought.
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