You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six FORTYFI AM six forty. This is the Bill Handle Show.
I'm o Kelly. Yeah, it just did kind of say that. I'm O Kelly and for Bill. On this fabulous Friday. We're getting closer and closer to the weekend. You probably know that's the Olympic March and the Olympics, Yes, are coming here to Los Angeles again in twenty twenty eight.
I'm old enough to remember the Games of nineteen eighty four, but as fate would have it, I was actually visiting on vacation place called Clear Lake in northern California with friends and wasn't in Los Angeles for the Games in eighty four. God willing, I'll still be alive in twenty twenty eight and hope to be able to enjoy the Los Angeles Games. But it's very different circumstances, very different
feeling of the Games in twenty twenty eight. Presumably America is very very different, and you can attribute some of that to President Trump and his policies. But I think we as people, how we relate as Americans to one another, how we relate as Americans to the rest of the world.
It's just a very different time, and there are.
Questions of how well or how prepared Los Angeles is as a city, how well we're going to be able to conduct these games. Those are real concerns. We know that Mayor Bass has said that it's supposed to be a car free Olympics, utilizing public transportation to get to all of the venues for all of the events. I don't know how feasible that is, but we know that is a goal of this mayor. And along those lines, there are other concerns about what will travel be like.
Will it be easy, going back to the story about the German citizens, Will it be easy to come in and out of the country, not just for athletes, but also for tourists and people who want to see the games from neighboring countries or anywhere from around the world. Casey Wasserman recently has assured the IOC, the International Olympic.
Committee, that visa issues.
Won't plague the twenty twenty eight Olympics, and in an address to the IOC in Greece, Wasserman addressed these concerns over visas and intra requirements to the US for athletes and delegations hoping to take part in the Games. Wasserman is chairman of the Games Organizing Committee and assured, and I wanted to.
Drill down on that word.
Assured assured the one hundred and five active IOC members that quote, irrespective of politics, today, America will be open and accepting to all two hundred and nine countries for the Olympics. LA is the most diverse city in the history of humanity, and we will welcome the people from around the world and give them all a great time.
Close quote.
I understand how you want to give a positive spin on these issues. I understand why you want to say that LA will be the most diverse and welcoming city. But there's some things which are outside the control of Casey Wasserman. There's some things which are outside the control of basically anyone.
We have some world issues going on.
We have a relatively new president with a very very particular and specific outlook and viewpoint when it comes to people who are coming in the country and going out of the country. We know that the Olympics historically has been a place for protests, either during the Games or
surrounding the Games. You have the world stage there are plenty of historical examples where people would use the Olympic Games to have their grievances heard, their messages seen, and somehow elevating them to a level that you can't get any other time of the year. And since the Olympics are every four years, the likelihood of there being some level of protest, be it what's going on in the Middle East, be it what's going on in Ukraine and Russia.
Right now, we don't know where those these situations are going to be in two and a half years or so, but we can assume that there will be world issues which will be front and center in a general sense. And we know, well, if there's anything we know about Donald Trump the man and President Trump the politician, it's this he will always change his mind as circumstances dictate. We can point to tariffs and see his past history
on that. He may have one stance on Tuesday and a different stance on Wednesday.
And when it comes to those people.
Who are coming into the and those who may be allowed to stay in the country, those who may be protesting while in the country, or may take a stance which is opposite that of the administration. Right now, or may take a stance which is not necessarily as popular with the administration. You can't imagine a scenario where Donald Trump would possibly push back against that. And we may have some people, we may have some delegations, we may
have some athletes pushed out of the country. I wouldn't say deported, but maybe refused visa access into the country. And that's something which is very real, very very real. We should not somehow limit or somehow believe that Donald Trump, the politician, the person, and also the president would be any different in two and a half years than he
is right now. Wasserman put another way, cannot make this assurance in the way that mayor Ban cannot promise to us that we're going to have a car free Olympics. It's more aspirational than anything. Yes, we would like to believe that there will be no issues with visas or entry requirements into the US for athletes and delegations taking
part in the twenty twenty eight Olympics. And yes, if you're speaking to the rest of the world, if you're speaking to the International Olympic Committee, there's only one answer you can give. The only thing you can say is, hey, it's going to be all good. We're not going to have any problems whatsoever. Yes, we know that President Trump has been a little bit sensitive, my word, regarding protests.
He's been very strict as it relates to visas and people who may overstay their visas or may make public comments in opposition to the Trump administration. Yes, we know that President Trump has been very sensitive to those issues.
But don't worry about it. Everything's going to be just fine.
No, Casey Wasson cannot, in could faith make that argument because nobody can predict what President Trump is going to do. I don't know if President Trump can predict what President Trump is going to do. This is something we're going to have to watch day by day, week by week, month by month.
We have a year and a half or.
Two years before we'll have a better sense of what the climate is going to be with people coming in and staying in the United States. We don't know what is going to happen in the Middle East. It could be a completely different scenario. It could have evolved into something much more tragic, much more widespread. We don't know if Iran is going to somehow involve themselves. We don't know what Israel is going to do with respect to Hamas.
We don't know if that ceasefire will continue where or whether it will be resolved.
The world will have a say.
Donald Trump, the President, will have a say, and hopefully we'll be at a place where there is more peace and there'll be more certainty as far as people entering the United States. But we don't know that now, and we can't make any promises, especially the ones that we cannot keep. Yes, I love La, and I'm not blind to all of its problems, blind to all of its warts, blind to all the things which need to be improved. I love La, but I'm not ignorant of the issues
in and around La. Because it's home, Home will always be home. I was born in La, raised in La. I've lived ninety eight percent of my life in LA, with exception of the time I was in college in Washington, DC. So La is something which is near and dear to my heart. But there are some things, even after all this time that I've spent here, I don't understand about La. And this is one of the things that I think people get wrong. Some people, not you in your car,
not you listening on iHeartRadio, You know better. But some people I'm talking about other people. Some people believe that radio hosts are always trying to be know it all. They know everything about every subject, they opine about all things both big and small. They know everything, or at least they present themselves as knowing everything. Now, I will be the first person to tell you I don't know everything.
I try to offer as an informed opinion as possible about a lot of subjects, but there's some things that I don't know, and there's some things I just don't understand. And when I tell you that LA has a parking enforcement problem, a huge one. When it comes down to the amount of money that it is spending and the amount of money that it is bringing in, which is well short of the money that it's spending, I'm here
to tell you I don't understand it. I know a little bit about math, in sort of a fifth grader sort of way, addition, subtraction of maybe some multiplication and division,
the simple stuff. But I don't understand this. And according to a recent report from independent news organization Crosstown, LA, the city as a LA City is fighting this losing war over parking and parking enforcement data has been analyzed, and it shows that LA is spending tens of millions of dollars more on parking enforcement than it is receiving from parking tickets. I had no idea that parking enforcement
had such a high overhead. In the fiscal year that just ended in June of twenty twenty four, LA gave out two million parking tickets.
That much.
I believe the city collected about one hundred and ten million dollars in parking fines.
I damn sure believe that. But also LA was spending.
Eighty eight million on parking enforcement expenses like salaries and equipment, and when you add in the cost of pensions and other obligations and liabilities, that figure jumped to more than one hundred and seventy six million.
So let's quickly review.
The city collected about one hundred and ten million in parking fines, but the city was spending about one hundred and seventy six million dollars during that same time. That is a sixty five million dollars shortfall. How do you come out sixty five million dollars short in parking enforcement?
I don't know.
I don't have a reasonable answer for you. I can tell you about some of the contributing factors. I can say confidently and people would understand if I told you the COVID nineteen pandemic in a general sense made bad matters worse because we weren't driving during the pandemic, or fewer.
People are actually going to work.
So revenue in the fiscal year that ended in June twenty twenty one was down thirty seven percent from the prior year. But that's just the pandemic that was a good four years ago. But the figures I just told you about was for fiscal year twenty twenty four. I don't get it. Here's something else to consider post pandemic.
Fewer people are commuting, Okay, that makes sense. Fewer people are filling city centers, and fewer cars are on their road overstaying their parking location or parking where they should.
Okay, that makes sense on some level, But.
That only speaks to a decrease in parking revenue. I don't understand what parking enforcement is doing, which necessitates the exorbitant costs of salaries and also equipment. I'm thinking about that subcompact car that parking enforcement people will drive around the city.
You know what they are.
You're looking out for them when you're parking illegally, or you're parking you haven't fed the meter. You know, you're looking for that car. I look at that, and I look at the person getting out of the car, and I got it. Okay, that is a tangible expense that you and I can understand. We see the car, we see the person, we see the person. We know there is an associated salary. That makes sense. Okay, Maybe that little thing they're holding in their hand which they're using
to write the ticket, that makes sense. But I can't think of anything else. Clearly there is something else. But I can't think of anything else which actually costs millions and millions of dollars. They said the pensions, All right, then what else are they using? What else are they needing? What else are they spending millions and millions of dollars on? You would think you would think that parking enforcement would be a cash cow for the city, not a loss leader.
You wouldn't think that parking enforcement alone would lead to sixty five million dollars in a shortfall. You would be able to then argue that, well, if we stopped enforcement of parking, we would at least cut out some of the loss that were incurring every single year. Just stop trying to enforce parking. We know about they have this new system, this AI technology which will detect your car if it's in a bus lane.
Is that some of the expense.
I don't know, but you would think that anything which is costing you sixty five million dollars more than what you're bringing in probably needs to be amended on the budget.
I don't know. I don't remember the last time I received a parking ticket.
I am fortunate enough to have a garage to park my car in and a garage at which to park my car at work, and I understand not everyone has that luxury. And if you've driven through Hollywood and tried to park in Hollywood at night, there's a good chance, and that's considered a part of the city of LA there's a good chance that you may get a parking ticket and or get your car Toad. I've only been
Toad once. Emmi King, have you ever been Toad? And I know I ask you this only because you are you're not an La native, so you may not have known the racket which is LA parking.
Over the previous decades.
I have not been told, but every time I go to Pasadena, I get a parking ticket.
Okay, Pasadena, all right, you're really good about nailing you conor Have you.
Ever had a problem with parking and parking tickets in and around Los Angeles?
Parking, yes, parking tickets no.
I don't see how given the amount of tickets that they're willing to give out that we as the City of Los Angeles would be sixty five million dollars short, how does it get to that point? Where is that money being spent? And I'm not one of those people look waste, fraud and abuse. I just have a genuine question, because I have a genuine lack of understanding. You would
think a reasonable person. I would like to think I'm reasonable, but a reasonable person would question how parking enforcement costs so damn much, given that the tickets usually are so oppressive. It's not like we're talking about a twenty five or thirty dollars ticket. You can easily see an eighty five dollars ticket. And that's assuming you're paying it on time. And if you're like me back in the day, I
never paid a parking ticket on time. It was just never a priority, and then the penalties and fees rack up, and all of a sudden, it's double that amount. How is it we're losing money on parking enforcement? I would love someone to tell me, but right now all we know is we are losing money and there's no reasonable explanation for it. And then when you look at the bigger picture, how the city has a billion dollars shortfall.
Don't think I'd forgotten about that, and you realize that something fundamentally is a miss in how the city of Los Angeles is being run. This is just one example of clearly many examples of LA not being able to do the right thing.
It's a Bill Handle show.
I'm o Kelly and for Bill, We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. But there are Democratic town halls going on all around the country. You know that the Democrats have had a bad goal of it. As of late, they've received the lowest approval ratings, and I would say in the past thirty forty years at least, what is going on inside the party? They've been mad at Chuck Schumer for going along with Republicans for the Continuing Resolution, What the hell is going on? And joining us right now.
To help us sort it out, is Alicia Mieva's News Nation reporter, Alicia, what is going on?
I think what we're seeing right now is the Democratic Party trying to seize the moment with these town halls, trying to come up with a new identity in this new age, something they have been criticized for as of late, and this is clearly their strategy to make that happen these people's town halls or fight for all our fight
against all our gurchy tour. That is something that is happening now with the townholes coast to coast, I mean everywhere from Pennsylvania to Arizona, and they're mostly happening in Republican strongholds of the DNC, saying they pick these areas because they say vulnerable GOP house members are and this
is a quote, running scared from their constituents. You know, the party at this point believe that it has an opportunity to reach conservative voters who are frustrated in this moment on how the Trump administration is carrying out its agenda, a certain policies that are hitting their wallets when they voted for him to do the opposite, you know, there are points of things like Elon Musk's chains off of bureaucracy.
We won't forget that moment at seapac a last month, and really everything that he's done with Doge to slash government waste but at the same time layoff tens of
thousands of people. So you're seeing Dems like Tim Wall's AOC Bernie Sanders, hoping that their message at these town hall you know, turns Republican voters that anger they're having right now potentially into action aka votes coming to the Dems come this next election cycle, which is about a year and a half away from now, but certainly something on the minds of Democrats right now.
I think objectively speaking, we can agree that there's a problem not only with the Democrats in elections vis a v with against Republicans, but also internally in the Democratic Party. What is it with the democratics in Democrats internally in which they are unable to find a cohesive strategy in which to fight Republicans.
It seems Yeah, you.
Know, I think you've been up a great point that actually reflected in these town halls, right you know, these hot town halls haven't been just rallies for Democrats. They've actually been Democratic voters saying the exact same thing, saying the old guard, if you will, clearly hasn't worked, right. It's part of the reason why Trump is now in office and they lost the election, you know, last year, and so one of the things again we're hearing in these town halls is people asking for them to find
a new identity. That may be AOC, that may be Bernie Sanders, or that may be someone completely new and different. You know, we're even hearing in these town halls. You know, Democrats are having to deal with calls for Senator Schumer to kind of step down to no longer be the leader of the party, especially after he, you know, backed Trump's government funding bill to a shutdown. They feel like they need a party that's willing to fight with the Republicans,
who were clearly up to the fight, right. They have kind of had this revolution, if you will, over the last two months sixty days that Trump has been in office, and they're wanting the Democrats to match that. It will yet to be seen if that's actually what ends up happening here. But again these town halls are Democrats saying they're up for the challenge and people saying you need to be because we're going to vote based on that. If you actually are willing to stand up to the Republican Party.
Before I let you go, I have a philosophical question and hopefully you can help me out with it. I remember after Mitt Romney lost against Barack Obama in twenty sixteen, that the Republican Party was lost in the wilderness, not unlike what the Democrats are right now.
A lot can happen in two years and four years.
Has there been any thought to, hey, Democrats, just stop panicking. We can't lose or win any elections until twenty twenty six. Let's be sure that we take our time and get the right strategy, the right message, and we can be back on top again.
You know, I think from my vantage point, unfortunately that's not the case. I think even when you point to Mitt Romney, you point to Barack Obama, I think Republicans did well in play the long game. And that's something that Democrats are struggling with because while they can't win you know, the White House until you know, mid terms, at least until twenty twenty six, and certainly the White House, you know two years after that they're under this immense
amount of pressure to do something. Now, that's part of what we're hearing at the town hall. So on one hand, you want them to come up with a long vision, or they certainly want to come with a long vision, but they have to have some short term success, whether it be just ideologically, and I think that's what these town halls are. They're, you know, an image of what could come in twenty twenty six, what could come in
twenty twenty eight. But the long game, they have not telegraphed any of that, and from my vantage point, you know, I haven't seen it. So that's something that obviously is concerning for Democratic voters.
Alisa and Naevia's News Nation reporter. Thank you so much for checking in with us.
Of course, you've been listening to the Bill Handles Show.
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