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6/5/07
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Will we have to choose between bus service and light rail? What if we can afford only one?
Eric Mann>> "Well, why can't we have it all? Why can't we have bus and rail?"
Toni Guinyard>> Why can't we?
Eric Mann>> Well, the reason is because there's a finite budget.
Val Zavala>> And then, she's a music lover with a penchant for the unconventional and she puts her philanthropic dollars where her taste is.
It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> Southern California transit officials have big dreams. They want to build light rail to LAX, Ontario Airport and even down to Chatsworth. But these dreams may exceed their means and, as Toni Guinyard tells us, even a bus fare hike in the millions won't be enough to cover the cost of these billion dollar projects.
Toni Guinyard>> More than twenty-five hundred Metro buses criss-cross Los Angeles County serving hundreds of thousands of riders on any given day.
Elizabeth Goodwin>> I rode the bus a lot. Well, actually, I'd ride the Metro bus, the Metro Red Line and then the Gold Line to go back to Pasadena.
Toni Guinyard>> Elizabeth was making the most of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's system, a system operating on a deficit.
Roger Snoble>> "We have a great system. We just can't pay for it. So if we are to continue down this path of success, we must address Metro's financial instability."
Toni Guinyard>> In what was described as a compromise, the MTA Board voted to raise bus fares, but not as much as was initially proposed. The increase is the first across the board fare hike in twelve years, but it still doesn't resolve the budget shortfall.
Marc Littman>> It's not going away. I mean, you've got to deal with it. It's a $1.8 billion dollar projected deficit on the next ten years. That's huge.
Toni Guinyard>> And that means other transportation projects could be in jeopardy. What projects could potentially be impacted by this?
Marc Littman>> The extension of the Gold Line to East Los Angeles or Expo to Culver City and eventually Santa Monica, dealing with the truck traffic on the 710 Freeway, closing the gap between the 210 and the 710 Freeways, maybe for a tunnel underground, regional connectors so that you can go from Long Beach on the Blue Line all the way to Pasadena, the subway extension on Wilshire Boulevard.
All these projects that people are talking about, streets and highways and public transit and bus projects too, they're not going to happen.
Toni Guinyard>> And if the projects happen, they could take much longer to complete, all because of a limited amount of funds available to operate the transportation projects.
Marc Littman>> The state and feds don't really give us monies very much for operating. They give us monies to build street and highway systems, to buy buses, but not to operate them. It costs us more than a billion dollars a year to operate the buses and trains.
Toni Guinyard>> So in many ways, this becomes a fight over the future of mass transit in the city of Los Angeles pitting bus against rail and all of the other transportation projects currently on the drawing board.
Eric Mann>> They're going to build more rail projects if we don't stop them. They're going to bankrupt this agency if we don't stop them. They're going to kill public transportation in the city if we don't stop them. They're going to bring on the advent of more autos in the auto capital of the world. So this is a war for the heart and soul of this city.
Toni Guinyard>> Eric Mann is Director of the Labor Community Strategy Center and a planning committee member of the politically powerful Bus Riders Union. It sued the MTA before.
Eric Mann>> We made tremendous improvements in the bus system under a court order that was literally around their throat.
Toni Guinyard>> And is taking legal action again, this time citing environmental issues. They claim the fare hike will result in more cars on the road and is racist, discriminating against poor and minority passengers in part by supporting rail at the expense of the bus system.
Eric Mann>> You have the MTA trying to build rail with money they don't have and it's a racist backlash against the urban poor that's just trying to go to work.
Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke>> Will it affect minorities greater than the general population that is riding on the freeway in their car? Yes, but is it aimed at trying to hurt them or is it providing to those people who have to use the system a better ride, a better opportunity for transportation?
Toni Guinyard>> Los Angeles County Supervisor and MTA Board member, Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke.
Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke>> You know that we cannot stop the Blue Line. We cannot stop the Red Line, the subway, and it would be devastating to the people, the low income people, who at present are having to pay high gasoline prices if we don't go forward with the Exposition Line.
Eric Mann>> Up until recently, a lot of people in the city have been sort of ignorantly agnostic. "Well, why can't we have it all? Why can't we have bus and rail?"
Toni Guinyard>> Why can't we?
Eric Mann>> Well, the reason is because there's a finite budget of three billion dollars a year, much of which is already being strangled by debt service on prior rail projects.
Toni Guinyard>> Metro spokesman, Marc Littman, has a different view and it all goes back to the 1996 Consent Decree between the Bus Riders Union and MTA.
Marc Littman>> On the one hand, we were restricted in raising fares. On the other hand, we were told to put out more and more service that we couldn't afford to operate. So what we did was, we just drew down our reserves, but we don't have a bottomless cauldron of money we can ladle out. So that's where we are now.
Toni Guinyard>> The Bus Riders Union is appealing to the court to extend the Consent Decree. It expired October 2006, paving the way for outcry from passengers.
Alvin Collins>> There are people that's really struggling and that's a pretty big mountain to climb.
Toni Guinyard>> And the Bus Riders Union.
Eric Mann>> They know us. When we walk around with our yellow shirts, every elected official like this are looking out there and they go, "Well, I want to say the Bus Riders Union is doing a great job." It's like we just scare them just being in the room.
Toni Guinyard>> Scary or not, members of the Bus Riders Union chanted and clapped in the lobby of Metro headquarters the day the Board voted to increase fares. Their voices could be heard three floors up inside the Boardroom where there was standing room only.
Marc Littman>> When you're confronted with angry bus riders and senior citizens and people in wheelchairs saying, "Don't raise our fares", it's tough.
Toni Guinyard>> It was a meeting Jack Spiegelman considered going to had he not been working. Spiegelman is an ESL teacher, a writer and artist. He's also an atypical bus and subway rider.
Jack Spiegelman>> I have money, you know. I don't ride the bus because I can't afford a car. I ride the bus because, one, I got tired of driving in Los Angeles traffic after thirty years of driving in Los Angeles. I had an old car. I was having problems. It was costing me money.
I had to make the classic decision to buy a new car or to buy another used car. Finally, I said, you know, there is a third option: the bus. You know, I said I'll do it for a year just as an experiment. If nothing else, I'd get a good story out of it, you know.
Toni Guinyard>> That was in 2003. The bus has been his primary way of getting around town ever since.
Jack Spiegelman>> I started doing things that I would never have done when I had the car. Like the first couple of weeks, I went to the library downtown which I never did before because there's no parking. You know, there's no place to park down there. And I wouldn't take the bus because I had a car.
Toni Guinyard>> And even though the fare increases won't break his budget -- he's eligible for the senior rate -- Spiegelman isn't exactly pleased that the fare is being increased at all.
Jack Spiegelman>> Let somebody subsidize the bus system besides the people that have to take the bus because they're the people that can least afford it.
Toni Guinyard>> And for bus passengers, that's what it comes down to: money. Who can afford to ride and who can't? Would it be a hardship for you to pay two dollars more?
Elizabeth Goodwin>> Yeah, it would, I think because it's just those two dollars could be used for a meal or something like that.
Eric Mann>> I don't like when people with money say this is a small amount of money for somebody who has no money.
Toni Guinyard>> And on the other end of the spectrum is the MTA.
Marc Littman>> The more monies we put into the subsidies for bus and rail riders, the less money available for street and highway improvements.
Toni Guinyard>> Which leaves Metro in the middle of a balancing act to keep buses on the road while keeping other transportation projects on track. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> So what do you think? Are all these mass transit projects worth the billions it will take to build them? You can post your opinion. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> Should punishment for a crime be based on where you live? Well, that's what's happening in California with juvenile offenders. In fact, if you're a minor who commits a serious crime, you're much more likely to get a longer sentence in Orange County than any other place. And why is that? Roger Cooper went to The Orange County Register to find out.
Roger Cooper>> Jenifer McKim, investigative reporter for The Orange County Register, you and a colleague, Monica Rhor, did a long investigation looking into the juvenile justice system. Why did your paper want to take a look at this area?
Jenifer McKim>> Well, we decided that we wanted to look at this issue because in 2000 a law was passed, Proposition 21, which allowed prosecutors to charge youths as adults without passing through the juvenile court, so it made it easier for prosecutors to charge youths as adults. When that law was passed, there was a lot of concern that this would be difficult and that it would send a lot of kids into the state prison system. So we decided seven years later to look and see what had happened.
Roger Cooper>> Well, approved by a pretty good margin, Proposition 21 basically is a direct file, they call it, which means that a juvenile judge doesn't even look at this case if the prosecutor, in their discretion, decides to send it to the adult system, right?
Jenifer McKim>> That's right. Sixty-two percent of the voters approved this law because they were really afraid at that time that juveniles were dangerous and that they wanted to put a stop to crime involving juveniles. It was a new way to make it a fast-track to adult court without having a juvenile judge look at a kid and say, "Is this a kid who can be rehabilitated? Is this a kid who we should basically just punish and send to the state system?"
Roger Cooper>> And basically, you found some geographical disparity in the way this law is being carried out. Orange County uses it a lot.
Jenifer McKim>> Absolutely. We received data from the State Department of Justice looking at the county by county data from 2003 to 2005. We found that some counties didn't use it at all. For example, San Francisco and Fresno did not use it at all, but Orange County used it more than anybody else.
Roger Cooper>> Can you help me understand, compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco again, just how much it is used here in Orange County?
Jenifer McKim>> Sure. We looked at felony crimes per county and realized that Los Angeles, which has a lot more felony crimes, still in numbers did less direct files. But if you consider the amount of felony crime, Orange County was nine times more likely to charge a youth as an adult as Los Angeles. San Francisco didn't charge any.
Roger Cooper>> What has been the impact that you found of this disparity in a way this law is used or not used to go to the adult courts?
Jenifer McKim>> Well, what we found is that you can have kids in different counties who commit pretty much the exact same crime that will really end up with completely different sentences because of how the prosecutors want to treat youth. Where you have here, they really believe in many cases that you should use this waiver and send kids directly to the adult court, some other counties don't think so. So they'll stay in the juvenile court which is much more focused on rehabilitation for kids.
So you'll find a kid in two different counties committing the same crime and one will end up with a long sentence in adult court and another one will be in juvenile court which is more focused on rehabilitation and also they will be released at least by their twenty-fifth birthday.
Roger Cooper>> You have a major example. I believe it involves San Jose and Garden Grove. Shootings in each town, an entirely different approach.
Jenifer McKim>> Yes, exactly. We found that, in a lot of cases, you have prosecutors in different counties who will find a case where a kid gets involved in some kind of gang fight, but is not the one who is the shooter. He's not the one that shoots someone, but gets involved. The one in San Jose was charged as a juvenile and he was sentenced to the California Youth Authority and will be released at least before his twenty-fifth birthday.
The boy here who we were talking about was fourteen years -- they were both fourteen. He's awaiting trial in adult court and could be sentenced for the rest of his life.
Roger Cooper>> How is this viewed in the legal community? There are those who think it's a bad thing and others think it's enforcing the law?
Jenifer McKim>> I think a lot of the people -- the reason that it was approved by the major district attorneys associations, they said that it basically saves a step for a lot of cases that would go directly to adult court anyway. But juvenile advocates and public defenders say that this step that goes to the juvenile court with a juvenile judge who's used to looking at these cases is an important step. We found that, in about a third of the cases where they went to what they call a fitness hearing in front of a juvenile judge, the case stayed in juvenile court.
Roger Cooper>> You interviewed District Attorney Tony Rackauckas who is a big advocate of this. What does he tell you about why he uses it so much in Orange County, the direct file?
Jenifer McKim>> Tony Rackauckas believes that it's a useful tool to, as I said, bypass a step in cases that they firmly believe should be going to adult court anyway, cases of homicides and gang crimes and sexual assaults, rather than passing through a fitness hearing, so he thinks that's a good thing. He also believes that a lot of these kids really are adult crimes and they should be in the adult system.
Roger Cooper>> On the other hand, some advocates and defense attorneys think this is causing some big injustices among some of these young people.
Jenifer McKim>> Exactly. I think when people think about adult crimes in adult court, you're thinking about the youth who really did take the trigger and kill somebody. But when you look at these cases where you have kids who are standing around, considered aiding and abetting legal felony murder, some people would think maybe that's not the kid who belongs in state prison for the rest of their lives. So a lot of the public defenders are saying that some of this initiative is ensnaring youth who would be better served in juvenile court.
Roger Cooper>> While there are those in the system who think some injustice is being done, there are some victims who think quite differently.
Jenifer McKim>> Absolutely. You have prosecutors and victims associations who say that these youth may be being sent away for ten, twelve, twenty years, but their family member is dead, so that this is fair justice for kids and they believe that this should be done more often than less.
Roger Cooper>> Is there any move to change this back, to alter or to modify this effective Proposition 21?
Jenifer McKim>> In California, there hasn't been a move to deal with Proposition 21. But right now in the legislature, there's a law to eliminate life without parole for juveniles, for example. So there are definitely moves around the country and people saying that this is really not helping. Also, there was a recent study by the CDC that just came out last month that said that juveniles who go to adult court are thirty-four percent more likely to commit crimes when they get out.
Roger Cooper>> Where does the overcrowding of institutions come into this?
Jenifer McKim>> There's also that issue, that we have a state that is struggling with overcrowded prisons and we have youths being sent there for decades. Some lawmakers say that that does not make sense, but on the other side, the legislature who really feels that they can't appear soft on crime. So no one at this point is looking at changing these laws.
Roger Cooper>> Jenifer McKim, investigative reporter for The Orange County Register, thanks for sharing what you've learned over the past year.
Jenifer McKim>> Thank you very much for having me.
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Val Zavala>> It's not often that you encounter an eighty-six year old patron of the arts who supports contemporary music, music that would perplex most young audiences. But then Betty Freeman is not your typical philanthropist. Vicki Curry talked with Betty Freeman, who is a supporter of the upcoming Ojai Music Festival.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> This piece of music is named "Freeman Etudes". Composer John Cage wrote it for one of the most influential people in music you've never heard of, Betty Freeman. She's a patron of contemporary music and, over the past forty years, she's made more than four hundred grants and commissions to at least eighty musicians.
Betty Freeman>> Oh, I support it, but I also love it and I don't understand why everybody doesn't. Everybody that I read about or that I know about is an avid collector of contemporary art, but very few people have that same response to contemporary music. Now why is it, I can't figure out.
Vicki Curry>> Betty Freeman has always loved music. She studied classical piano as a child, but it was the music she heard in college that changed her life.
Betty Freeman>> I went to school in Boston and I went to all the Koussevitzky concerts at the Boston Symphony and he played a lot of contemporary music. I went in every Friday. Tickets for students were seventy-five cents, I can remember. I became passionate about contemporary music.
Vicki Curry>> It was a private passion at first. Freeman used her family money to collect art. Artist David Hockney even captured her image in the painting, "Beverly Hills Housewife". Then one day in 1961, a friend in the art world asked her to contribute to the legal defense of a composer named LaMonte Young.
Betty Freeman>> So I sent a hundred dollars and in return when he got out, he sent me a collection of his records which I listened to and was fascinated. He's somebody who can play one note for four hours, but it's what he does with this one note, with the overtones and the undertones and how he combines it. I became a fan and I'm still a fan all these years.
Vicki Curry>> She started working on a concert series at the Pasadena Art Museum and met the composer, Harry Partch.
Betty Freeman>> So for the next ten years, I worked almost exclusively with Partch until 1974. I made a movie on Partch.
[Film Clip]
Betty Freeman>> I got his opera produced at UCLA. It took two years to push that through. I bought his house with him in Encinitas. I loved him and loved his music.
Vicki Curry>> It was through Harry Partch that Betty Freeman discovered another passion: photography.
Betty Freeman>> There was nobody to take still photographs and I'd never taken any, so Partch's assistant, Danny Mitchell, had a camera. He'd set it for me and he'd focus for me on the stage on Partch and on the players and all I had to do was push the button. The pictures came out wonderful. I still use them for exhibit, they're so good, so that started me off. Then I started photographing the composers whose music I liked.
[Film Clip]
Betty Freeman>> I never asked them to smile because it's very artificial because, when somebody takes my photograph, I put on a smile. I really do, but what I'm really searching for in a photograph is something inward, their inward personality as I sense it to be, and I usually try and wait for that. Usually it happens when they're talking to somebody else or when they're working at their desk and they get that expression when they do go inward and that's when I photograph them.
Vicki Curry>> But her love of photography never took away from her support for contemporary music.
Betty Freeman>> All my favorite composers were poor. All of them were poor. Steve Reich was driving a taxi for a living. So was Philip Glass in New York driving a taxi. They all were teaching or struggling. Cage was terribly poor. Everybody was in need of money, so I gave just money grants. Then in the 1980s, it changed because they began to get performances and get paid a little bit.
They didn't need the money for a living, but what they needed it for, which I realized, one thing was for performances that had to be subsidized, which I did whenever I could, and CDs. As their records went out, they got more performances from the records. That's when I began to commission pieces.
Vicki Curry>> Freeman has supported almost everyone of note in the new music world. John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle, Virgil Thomson, Lou Harrison and, one of her favorites, Helmet Lachemann.
Betty Freeman>> He's a very difficult composer. He's actually involved in the spaces between notes, not the notes themselves.
[Film Clip]
Betty Freeman>> I never asked them what they were going to write. I just gave the commission on what I heard that they were planning to write something, but I never asked them what it was for or how long it was for or what instruments it was for or whether it was going to be -- it was completely up to them. I never entered into that ever. So I didn't have many masterpieces, but that didn't matter. That wasn't the purpose of it. The purpose was to keep things going in the contemporary music world wherever I could.
Vicki Curry>> And she sure kept things going not only with her grants, but with a series of musicales she hosted in her Beverly Hills home.
Betty Freeman>> I remember walking in here in this living room and saying to myself, "Gee, I wish there was someplace I could hear some good contemporary music" because there wasn't any for me in those days. I looked at this living room and said, "Well, I'm the logical person to do it because I have the means to do it and the desire to do it."
We had five or six or seven every year with two composers always. Always an established composer and an upcoming composer, not a known composer, but a young composer, and we did that for ten years. People were exposed to contemporary music for the first time, to really good contemporary music.
I'm absolutely convinced and have absolutely no doubts about it that, in fifty years, people won't talk about the three B's as Beethoven, Bach and Brahms. They'll talk about the three B's as the great composers today, a Birtwistle, a Boulez and a Beriot.
Vicki Curry>> With a champion like Betty Freeman, the contemporary music of today will be the classical music of tomorrow. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> The Ojai Music Festival runs this week from June 7 through June 10. For details, you can go to their website at ojaifestival.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Sponsored in part by:
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