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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

Elections are next week! Over a hundred local elections within Los Angeles County are scheduled for November 8th, 2011. There are about 80 school district elections ranging from Antelope Valley Joint Union High and Whittier Union High to Santa Clarita Community College and Cerritos Community College to Beverly Hills Unified and Torrance Unified. More than a dozen bodies that deal with water are going to have elections as well, from Newhall County Water District to San Gabriel… Separate from that are 6 Irrigation districts including Palmdale Water that are going to be electing representatives. Altadena and Palos Verdes Library Districts and a couple of Recreation and Parks boards will have elections as well. Beyond those there are over 50 general and municipal elections in cities around Los Angeles County. That is the kind of election we are generally familiar with… elections for city council members, mayors, and local ballot initiatives… considering there are 88 cities in Los Angeles County, chances are you should be at the poles next Tuesday unless you have already mailed in your ballot. I wish I could get into every single one of these elections and break it down for you, but that could take hours. However, we know that most of these local politicians are content with 15% voter turnout rates as long as it keeps them in public seats spending millions and sometimes billions of taxpayer dollars.
Most of these smaller seats aren’t very powerful… but there seems to be a general strategy to divide and conquer: “Keep us from knowing that there is an election, and if we do happen to find out, make sure the candidates are city hall insiders.” To focus on just one crucial race, in Los Angeles City, there will be a special election for the seat vacated by now Congresswoman Janice Hahn. That is the 15th district of Los Angeles City which includes the Port of Los Angeles. The port does fall under city jurisdiction, even though it is its own proprietary department, much like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Los Angeles World Airports which includes Los Angeles International Airport. Council District 15’s seat is one of the most powerful city council seats in the entire country, as the port saw $200,000,000,000 in cargo in 2008, but the fact that the likely winner will have less than 10,000 votes is embarrassing. Let me repeat that, in some of these local elections 1 vote is worth $20,000,000 — now that is slightly exaggerated, but these local officials control and oversee vast sums of money after winning elected office with a few votes. The same to those of you in Lynwood, in Agoura Hills, in Diamond Bar City, in Montebello and too many other cities to name here. Now, if you think you could just go to your city’s web page and find out about the election, you would be mistaken. Remember these guys don’t want high voter turnout…. Instead, you should go to http://www.lavote.net/LOCATOR/… Plug in your address and see if there is an election in your area… the good part about that site, again http://www.lavote.net/LOCATOR/, is that you can download a sample ballot if there is in fact an election at the address you plug in. Democracy is worthless if you don’t know what you are voting for, that is how we end up with a circus at city hall, please go out and vote in your local election next Tuesday November 8th, 2011.