"Odd Couple: Why Fed-Up LA Needs Mayor Rick Caruso and Controller Kenneth Mejia" by Daniel Guss

@TheGussReport - Good news! Regardless of how the elections go a week from tomorrow, Eric Garcetti, aka Mayor Yoga Pants, the conniving and neurotic Mayor of Los Angeles, will wrap up more than 21 disastrous years in City Hall without even getting a senate vote on his nomination to become Ambassador to India; a job for which Garcetti is qualified, but spectacularly un-deserving.

Mortifyingly, his parents — his dad is Gil Garcetti, the former District Attorney who singlehandedly blew the O.J. Simpson murder trial before it even began — hired a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm to manipulate the senate into that vote, but failed.

Namaste, bruh.

So LA is about to choose a Garcetti successor, which will be an upgrade regardless of who wins the job next week.

Government, now more than ever, fails us across the board, whether federal, state, county, city or all of its bureaucratic subsets. Its genuine successes are stunningly rare; rarely complete; and defined by waste, corruption, nepotism and sloth.

This column can go on ad nauseum why YES ON 27, the online sports betting initiative, is better than the anti-competitive 26, which deserves a No. Or why you should vote No if Luis Lavin is on your ballot for the California Courts of Appeal. But there’s no point in this column publishing a last-minute voter guide to address every mind-numbing choice, especially in the arcane races that almost always go to political relatives and flunkies.

Los Angeles County has 88 cities, and the miserably failing City of Los Angeles has an outsized influence on the other 87. Predictably, when last month’s racism scandal rocked City Hall, its irrational and kneejerk response was let’s create more elected City Council positions! That would only make matters worse because the local political machine would help to elect more people from within the same failed and corrupt system.

We don’t need more LA City Council. We need a smaller Los Angeles.

In 1984, West Hollywood (as opposed to North Hollywood and Hollywood) broke away from City Hall and has thrived as an independent city ever since, just as Glendale, Burbank and Pasadena do. If City Hall really wanted to help the people of Los Angeles, it would let the San Fernando Valley do the same.

But since that won’t happen any time soon, LA City Council needs to be flanked by grown-ups from somewhere other than the government to serve as a check and balance to its immense failures, corruption, waste and now-exposed deeply rooted racism. (SIDEBAR: Don’t for one second believe that the scandal’s tribalism and loathing were only embodied in disgraced Councilmembers Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León. It is endemic throughout the city bureaucracy.)

So let’s get down to it: The job of LA’s mayor is extraordinarily complex. But the choice between its remaining candidates Rick Caruso and Karen Bass is stunningly clear, regardless of which way you lean.

If you think the City of Los Angeles is doing well or even on a path toward improvement, then political careerists Karen Bass for mayor and Paul Koretz for controller, are your best options.

But by what imaginable measure could anyone think LA is heading in the right direction?

Opposite as they may seem at first, the better options, by far, are Rick Caruso for mayor and Kenneth Mejia for controller. My reasoning is simple: they come from somewhere other than the government, and none of what ails Los Angeles has their fingerprints — or votes — on them.

Caruso became fabulously wealthy because he is a leader who, like any successful executive, has an eye for opportunity and potential where others either saw none or failed to act on it first. He is, in essence, cut from the same bolt of cloth as LA’s last successful mayor, Richard Riordan, who served from 1993-2001, and who brilliantly led LA through the ruins of the Northridge earthquake that shook the entire region exactly 200 days into his first term.

Caruso has pumped millions of dollars into the economy every single week for decades and created countless thousands of jobs, from construction to retail and beyond. Businesses that opened in the shadow of his developments prospered, as did local governments that simultaneously improved their communities and reaped mountains of direct and indirect tax revenue. Caruso improved and modernized swaths of tired communities by capably navigating complex government regulations. He served as a commissioner of the city’s LADWP, the Coliseum and the LAPD, where he was its panel’s president through thick and thin. Caruso didn’t just spend $100 million running for a job that won’t pay him a dime; he and his wife Tina gave away vastly more philanthropically. His résumé is thick with private, public and non-profit success, with extraordinary challenges and crises at those junctures. So it should come as no surprise that the “Caruso Can” message aspirationally resonates, alarmingly so to establishment types, with the people who will have the biggest collective say in the mayor’s race: first- and second-generation working-class Latinos.

Bass, who didn’t renounce her affinity for Fidel Castro and the Church of Scientology until she decided to run for mayor, has only once held a leadership role over a diverse body, as Speaker of the California State Assembly, for a grand total of 425 days between 2008 and 2010. That doesn’t mean Bass isn’t an impressive and good person. She simply isn’t the best-prepared person for this job, at this time. And if it matters (it does), her name reportedly keeps coming up as the Mark Ridley-Thomas corruption trial inches forward.

Being mayor is an extraordinarily complex job. The choice between Caruso and Bass is not: either LA takes a significantly different path or it embraces more of the same.

Fun Fact: Don’t buy media hints that Caruso and Bass aren’t friends or that they are frenemies. It’s what the media do to stir up attention among a largely detached citizenry.

That said, the other most consequential vote Angelenos will cast next week is in the race for city controller between CPA Kenneth Mejia and Councilmember Paul Koretz.

One of them scares the crap out of the corrupt establishment. I will explain why that’s a great, and long-overdue, thing in my next column.

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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He has contributed to Mayor Sam, CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)