September 25, 2025 • 28 mins
The John Kobylt Show Hour 2 (09/25) - Angela McGregor comes on the show to talk about the Ramada Inn homeless project in Marina Del Rey that has seen zero progress. Recapping the interview from yesterday with Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete. A Downtown LA business man is fed up with a nearby homeless encampment that is impacting business. The multi-billion dollar Ivanpah Solar Facility is going to be shut down.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can't.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I am six forty.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobel podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
There's some kind of news conference being held by the
county supervisors over this after action report about the county's
response to the bad fires and if we find out anything,
we will tell you. And the report did not cover
(00:23):
the city's response. So we still don't know why the
Palisades Reservoir was empty, why it was missing one hundred
and seventeen million gallons of water, And we still don't
know why Genie Canonia still gets to run the DWP,
among other things.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
But we'll get to more of that later.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Right now, you know the big You know, we don't
have enough money for the fire department. We only funded
at a fifty percent rate, But god, do we have
the money to blow on stupid homeless housing ideas. Back with,
Mike Bonnen was still a councilman on the west side
(01:01):
of La There he had a project to convert a
Ramada in in It was called the Marina Delway RAMAA
converted to low income housing. So far, the city has
spent over twenty million dollars and nothing's been done. And
we're going to talk to Angela McGregor from Westside Current
(01:24):
dot com because she's been poking around trying to see
I guess what Bonding thinks of all this. Angela McGregor,
how are you.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm good, Thank you, thanks for having me so.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, you talked to Mike Bonning about this disaster of
a project.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I mean this was his baby.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Oh no, didn't talk to him. He won't talk to us,
but we he did tweet about our article or post
on X. Someone asked him if he took responsibility for it,
given that it was his baby. As you say, he
got it built with no community quote whatsoever, got the
mortgage approved. And also, and I think this is important too,
(02:07):
after it had been opened at transitional housing for about
fourteen months, he allowed it to be vacated to be
quote unquote renovated quote unquote immediately. That was three years ago.
It's still empty and there's been no work done. But
when someone asked him on X if he took responsibility
for the fact that it's been sitting empty at a
(02:29):
total cost of nineteen and a half million dollars, he
said no, that would be my successor. Her candency was
born out of her opposition to the project in her neighborhood,
and the project has languished unempty. I have no idea
what he means by that. During the entirety of her tenure. Meanwhile,
she's been shutting down shelters and blocking housing. So I
(02:53):
picked up on that for an off ed I published yesterday.
And obviously she's living rent free in his head, and
he's not going to take responsibility for her.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
No, for this, he did. He never did for anything.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
But but it made me think about, well, okay, what
is the real cause of this. I mean, I don't
think it's honestly, I don't think it's any one council member.
He obviously played a role in initiating the project Tracy
has for Tracy Park, to her credit, has you know,
(03:32):
she actually extended the tenure of the Venice Bridge housing
for six months in order to have someplace to put
the people that were being cleared off the streets. And
she's been I've actually spoken to developers who talked about
how she's really championed their projects and got help to
get them built. So I think it's a little disingenuous
to blame her for hating all housing or whatever it is.
(03:56):
But what I went into in detail in my off
ed was the idea that it's not any one person,
it's it's just a really sick culture. It's it's a
really dysfunctional system where these not for profits, like the
one that's supposed to be building the remote, instead of
(04:17):
collecting tax dollars for god knows what, they're holding all
the cards. If you look at the email exchange between
the developer and the city administrator's office, what you see
is the city administrator is the one who's coming up
with new ways to more funding, new sources of funding,
(04:38):
and the developers saying, well, now we need more money.
We need more money. By the way, we need more money.
I'm not sure we can do this for twenty million dollars, right,
and there's nobody pushing back. It gets to me this
Ramode is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Oh well, I know, I know there's lots of Ramada
style projects, But just to focus on one of them,
I think we'll give the listeners the idea of just
how insane it is. I mean, just take this Romanta
project and multiply it by any number you want, and
that's where the billions of dollars are going for nothing,
go night. So this sounds like massive corruption that everybody's
(05:22):
in on.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Well, we've had two audits, two really actually very interesting,
very good audits, once the county and one from the
la Alliance lawsuit, and both of them revealed a culture
of just total lack of accountability, the account no accounting standards,
money flying out the window with no expectation of it
(05:46):
coming back. There's no no enumeration of anything that's actually
getting done.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
The the head of LASS rather famously, well, she she resigned,
but I think she would have been fired. She kept
signing off on multimillion dollar contracts to her husband's not
for profit, to the one that he worked for. She
did it once, she got caught by la Is doing it,
(06:18):
and they swore up and down and she'll never do
it again, it was an honest mistake. And then she
did it again.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah Alicia Adams and.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, Alicia, doctor Alicia Adams Kellum. And then and this
was really to me, really infuriating. There were a couple
of whistle blowers who who were unceremoniously let go by
by Lasha who preceded predated her, and they filed and
(06:46):
it's it's public now. But they filed these just hair
raising complaints about her behavior, about the way she was
bringing unqualified people on into positions there that she had
sort of created for them. I think the accusation that
(07:07):
really got the most pressed was that she was pressuring
the data guy to fudge the numbers because it would
make maribeths look good.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yes on our inside safe on her safe inside safe numbers.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
And these two women who were let go sued and
rather than taking it to court, where their accusations would
be public, not only public, but also they would have
had to have testified under oath, the lawship paid them
eight hundred thousand dollars basically to make this thing go away.
(07:43):
And that's the culture we're talking about here. I mean,
it's it's there's no accountability, there's no you know, the
people who are getting the taxpayer dollars are telling the
city what to do, and it's chaos.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It's just chaos.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And Ramata is kind of like a oh, monument to
that level of Nettinos.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Bratically this motel Angela, thank you for coming on, excellent report,
and everybody should read the column she wrote in Westside
Current dot com bonding points fingers. Yet the Ramata boondoggle
began on his watch. Angela McGregor, thank you very much
for coming on. Who's who's going to bust this corruption
(08:28):
ring up here in Los Angeles? Who does the investigating? Uhen?
When do people start getting charged with crimes? There's crimes
going on here? This is this is the two billion
dollars I keep telling you about that they can't account
for more coming up.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
M six forty.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock and
then after four o'clock John Cobelt Show on demand. And
you know when you go to looking for the podcast,
you can always pick other days. Today I listened to
that three o'clock hour yesterday with the Santa Monica Bear
because she was on for almost the whole hour.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
What you think of her? Coming on?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
She?
Speaker 5 (09:10):
What did I think of her? I mean, I thought
she was brave to take on you.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
But were you satisfied with any of her answers?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Not really?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
But I don't know, I don't know. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
I found that she blamed everybody else and that she
and the city council there aren't taking responsibility.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
I'm not exactly sure what you can do to clean
up to clean up Santa Monica at this point, I mean,
you have to do something very very drastic, and I
don't know if anybody is going to do that because
because right, I mean so, And when she gave it,
(09:54):
she gave reasons why Santa Monica has issues. When remember
you were talking about Manhattan Beach and she was explaining
just the different reasons why Santa Monica is vulnerable to crime.
So it's it's almost like, well, okay, if you can't
prevent those things, then what can you do or what
(10:15):
are you going to do?
Speaker 1 (10:16):
The one thing she circled back to a couple of
times was there is a metro train. I think it's
the E Line used to be the Expo Line. The
train and it dumps in a large number of homeless
people every night, like the last train of the night
or all the evening trains. They end in Santa Monica.
The vagrants come from skid Row and all the other
(10:36):
downtown encampments and now they're in Santa Monica. And she goes,
that's what's created the she goes as soon as they
brought the train into Santa Monica and I go, so,
I'm thinking, this is what we played paid billions of
dollars for to bring in skid row to Santa Monica
and destroy that Like that's what the government did. And
(10:57):
I said, well, why don't you've got it? That's got
to be stopped and everybody should be in on it
to stop it. Lindsay Horvath is the county supervisor, She's
a piece of work, and it's like, why would you
create a train line to spread mental patients and drug
addicts to a beautiful town like Santa Monica. Skid Row
(11:21):
is bad enough, but you're always gonna have a skid
row in a big city and we always had one,
Or why would you poison Santa Monica with all that?
Speaker 5 (11:28):
But the reality is that's happened. So then what are
you gonna do about it?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Now? Stop the train service? I think, I mean you could.
I think they should. They should stop it, But who's
gonna do that?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Or that's what the county supervisors, the ones who have
influence on the metro board, all the governments, Metro board,
county city, everybody say we're gonna stop the vagrant train.
We're gonna stop a train full of mental patients and
drug addicts from being dumped into Santa Monica every night.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Isn't that obvious? You just stop it.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
I don't think are going to do that, even though
I agree with what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
That's a solution, But Santa Monica is doomed. But they
don't ever come back.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
If nobody goes and dines in Santa Monica and shops
in Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Then it's over. Then it's over.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
It's over flat because she kept going back, and I've
heard she's not the first person to come on the
show and talk about that. Many people privately have told
me that as soon as that that train line came
to town.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
Well what about the third Street Praminade that you're allowed
to now walk around with drinks? I mean, how is
that helpful?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, as they were enforcing the alcohol law among the
vagrants all these years.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's a joke. The whole thing is a joke. And
you know what, That's what we said at the end
of the show yesterday. My city. I don't live there,
we used to do a lot there. I guess we're
just not going.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
To anymore, which is so disappointing because you guys loved it,
and I loved it too. I mean I did go
there a few weeks. I told you I went to
a restaurant. Now the restaurant that I went to is
it was packed? It was, but that was it.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, today it's packed in the in the shopping.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Two years ago, the promenade was packed, and the Santa
Monica play small was packed. They're packed, and then one
day they're not anymore, as the rot creeps up tyr credit.
She did not deny what was going on.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
Well, that's why I was saying. I mean, she was
brave to go on with you because she knew exactly
how you felt, and she agreed.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
With much of it, right, But I got to said
that she's powerless. The city council chooses to be powerless
because they're mostly progressive except for her. And it's like, okay,
you're all progressive, wonderful, You've destroyed the city. I'm not
coming anymore. You're not coming anymore. What are you gaining here?
Speaker 5 (13:48):
Well, the homeowners have to do something because I mean,
it's not cheap to live in Santa Monica. I mean,
maybe it's cheaper now because of all the issues, but
Santa Monica's never been inexpensive place.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Well, it's the vote, it's the voters, because she said
that most of the city council votes are six to
one and she's the one no vote on most of
the stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And and Phil Brock who was the previous mayor and
also in the same camp, and the mayor's name is
escaping me lanty landa no Gretty. So Lenin Gretti was
on yesterday. Phil Brock was the previous mayor. He's been
on the show a number of times. And what did
he get for it? He lost to his city council
person race. He was the only other voice. So I
(14:30):
guess those even Santa Monica, this is what you want. Fine,
you're free, but we're not coming anymore. It's too scary there.
And she pointed fingers at a lot of people. And
maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong that that training thing
is very valid. Oh yeah, and setting up all the
(14:53):
all the treatment centers and homeless.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Are yeah, well that's a bad idea.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And Manhattan Beach doesn't have them. Well, good for them.
They kept them out. They fought and kept them out.
Why should one city accept all these homeless shelters and
all this other progressive crap.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So I'll go to Benet.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Well, you know, when it's when it's Saturday night and
we want to go to a beach town and go
to a nice restaurant and walk around on the strand,
we're going to Manhattan Beach, not Santa Monica anymore. Be
easier to go to Santa Mona.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
Say it's much closer.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's you know, I can get there in
five minutes. Santa Monica. It's you know, it's going to
be a lot longer than that too.
Speaker 5 (15:37):
I have an idea, since Newsom is running for president,
somebody needs to talk to him about cleaning up Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
You want to do it, news Lady.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
Sure, absolutely, I'm not afraid of any of these people.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
All right, you're deputized. Go to it.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI A six.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Forty after four o'clock. John Cobelt's show on demand on
the iHeart app. Just just one more thought. I mentioned
before that my wife and I we've been going to
Manhattan Beach more frequently because it's really nice there. There's
no mental patients and drug addicts, and there's very little crime,
and there's no fear, and it's a much more pleasant
(16:25):
beach town. Then Santa Monica is now a disaster. It's
Santa Monica maroon yesday. And you know it's the thing
you don't have to do, like official boycotts.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Everybody's into light. Well, let's do an online boycott. You
know what. The market takes care of things.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Santa Monica is so found now that there's now thousands
of people that are just not going anymore, and their
tax revenues are way down, and tourism is way down,
and restaurants are closing and shops are closing, and they're
getting exactly what they deserve.
Speaker 5 (16:55):
You know what really sucks also about that, just because
I have gone there and I've shot there, and I've
gone to restaurants there. The parking structures where you can
park are not expensive compared to other places in LA
So that that was one of the things that I
actually liked. I can go to great restaurants and I
can shop, and I don't have to pay a fortune
for parking.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
But they had the mental patients and the drug addicts
living there right in the Steroi Rights.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
It wasn't always like that.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
The stairwells smell like a feces urine.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
I told you I was there a few weeks ago
and I parked one of those structures.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And if at one time I poked my head and
there's there's bedding all over the place. And so they
actively live there and know the police don't come and
take those people away. They just let them live in there.
So I you know, there's no woman wants to get
raped in a stairwell by a crazed drug addict. So
you can't go into the Santa Monica parking garage, and
(17:48):
that's what's going to happen. And that's what's happened to
some women. They've gotten they've gotten physically attacked in Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's just a now, you know, And I'm going to
keep pointing this.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Out because I've had it up to up to here
with Karen Bass's stupid fake press conferences about her inside
safe garbage and the success of her homeless programs. Now
they're a tremendous failure. And here's an example. I want
to play cut number of four in just a second,
(18:21):
Channel four. This is the real story when you hear
her carrying on about the inside safe hoax. Robert Lipkin
owns warehouses in downtown LA and listen to what he's
had to go through, and listen to how Karen Bass
and the rest of the city bureaucracy does not respond.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
It has become a site that is all too familiar
in parts of downtown Los Angeles. The sidewalks barely visible,
covered by homeless encampments, tents, furniture and broken appliances piled high,
and motor homes parked along the street for months on end.
Speaker 7 (18:57):
I just don't know how this can allow to continue.
Speaker 6 (19:00):
Robert Lipkin owns two warehouses on Fourteenth Street and leases
them out to produce distributors. But the situation with the encampments,
Robert says, has gotten so bad it's affecting business and safety.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
There's raw sewage being dumped on the streets. They steal
water from the fire hydrants, and they crawl up the
holes and have wires and get electricity. One fella had
a gun one day waving at this tenant. The police
arrested him and it was back here in a couple
of days, the same manner.
Speaker 6 (19:32):
NBC Four reached out to Councilwoman Isabelle Herado, who represents
this district, and received an email from her office that reads,
in part, sanitation crews have conducted multiple cleanups at these
locations in recent months to address ongoing health and safety concerns,
but according to Robert, this hasn't happened.
Speaker 7 (19:51):
I'll come down here and wait for them on the
given day and they never show. Then when I do
get a hold of them and they say, oh sorry,
we just couldn't make it.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Robert shared several emails he sent to Herado's office in
recent weeks. He says no one has come to clean
the area all year. Robert says one of his tenants
is leaving and now he's worried about the building stained vacant,
and if this happens, he says, he won't be able
to financially stay afloat.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
I tried to sell the property. I couldn't handle it
any longer. I almost went broke when this was vacant
for two years. I couldn't even find anybody that would
want to even buy it. My broker brought people over
and they would just leave Vivan Right now, he's bringing
people to try to take this space here, and he's
(20:39):
had several people that are very interested, and as soon
as they come around the corner, they go, no, I
don't want to do this.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
And Carolyn, Robert says, this truck was intact just a
few days ago and since then it's been stripped down,
taken apart, and he says sold four parts. We're still
waiting to confirm these details, but Robert's says he's really
at a loss and wants the city again to do something.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That's NBC four Darsha Phillips reporting on that one. Well,
Robert Lipkin is stuck down with warehouses that nobody's gonna
buy because the rest of us are sane, you see,
and Karen Bass is insane and Isabel Herado is insane,
and they are not going to fix the situation because
(21:26):
they don't care, and they're just they're gonna lie from
sunrise to sunset, and.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
The news media is going to print their lies.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
And you're stuck with warehouses that are unusable because what
did he say? As soon as potential buyers see the neighborhood,
it's like, oh no, no, that's how bad it is.
In seconds, Oh no, I can't do this isabel Herado
is a completely useless city council person. She's on the
(21:56):
side of the drug addicts and the viagrants. Those that's nobility.
Same thing with Karen Bass. They don't care. The belief
system of progressives are you divide the world into oppressors
and the oppressed. The drug addicts and the mental patients
and the vagrants are the oppressed. Business owners and residents.
(22:17):
We're the oppressors, so we have to concede the land,
the neighborhoods to the oppressed. That's what Isabelle Herado lead
and it is insane. That's what she believes. That's what
Karen Pass believes. There's no getting through to them or
to their staffs. They'll just lie to the reporters. They'll
(22:38):
say what they have to say. They'll do a cleanup
once in a while that everybody comes back. Same thing
in Santa Monica. It's the same philosophy. They are among
six out of the seven city council people. This is
an impenetrable philosophy. There's nothing you can You can vote
them out, but most of the public is too stupid
and too ignorant to do so. Apparently, big cities in
(23:01):
southern California have a preponderance of the stupid. And then
you go to other towns. I mentioned the Manhattan Beach.
Here in Burbank where we work, there's no problems. I
was in Orange County over the weekend. There's no problems,
and not no problems. But you know, you go to
the cities along the beach there and everything's beautiful. They
(23:22):
had these problems in Santa Monica and in downtown LA
because you have a progressive philosophy that embraces the drug
addicts and the mental patients and the vagrants. Those in
their pyramid, those people are the ones that they want
to protect from us, the oppressors. That's their philosophy. I'm
(23:47):
not making this up. That's what they say, that's what
they believe. Just look around. Karen Bass is going to
lie till the day she dies about this. There is
no inside safe program that works. It's a load of crap.
Her statistic sticks or a load of crap. The people
at LASA wanted a buster over her stupid statistics. The
(24:08):
whistleblowers they used to work at LASA and they were
shut down. So unfortunately, it's nice to have that one
report from NBC four. But all the TV stations could
be doing this all day, every day, and maybe if
there was a sustained attack on this corrupt administration and
(24:28):
the corrupt city council, maybe there'd be some changes.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock. Oh Moistline.
If you're really good, you can still get on the
moist Line eight seven seven moist eighty six. You can
be a part of things. You just have to bring
the goods eight seven seven moist eighty six. Or use
the talkback feature on the iHeartRadio app. Gavin Newsom has
(24:58):
wasted a trem mendous amount of money, so has the
federal government on green energy. And I'm going to give
you an example. A lot of people don't want to
believe this, but if you go out in the Jave Desert,
there is something called the ivan Pah or the Ivanpah
Solar Power Facility. It has three four hundred and fifty
(25:22):
nine foot towers, thousands of computer controlled mirrors. They're called heliostats,
and these mirrors collect the heat on these towers the
sunlight rather and it eventually it transmits solar energy. It
(25:44):
cost over two billion dollars to build. They started constructing
in twenty ten, completed in twenty fourteen. It's now going
to be closing. You believe this two billion dollars. Its closing.
It was it failed to efficiently generate solar energy. Obama
(26:13):
in twenty eleven issued a billion and a half dollars
in three federal loan guarantees for the project. The Secretary
of Energy at the time, Ernest Monies, said it was
an example of how America is becoming a world leader
in solar energy, and now it's closing up. Jason Isaac
(26:38):
is CEO of the American Energy Institute, and he says
Ivanpah or Ivan Pah stands as a testament to the
waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes. It never
lived up to its promises, produced less electricity than expected,
and relied on natural gas to stay in opera. It
(27:01):
was the world's largest solar plant in twenty fourteen, and
it seemed like this was the big wet dream that
Jerry Brown and Gavenuso had. It's near the California Nevada border,
about an hour out of Las Vegas. And I guess
I guess you could. You can see this. I've never
(27:21):
really noticed it. They have one hundred and seventy three
thousand of these mirrors adjusted by a computer to catch
the maximum sun rays, and the temperatures can reach a
thousand degrees because of all the concentrated heat. And they
thought they could use the sun to produce a heat source.
(27:42):
The mirrors reflect the heat from the sun to a receiver,
and that heat's a fluid. It creates steam that spins
a turbine. It's complicated and the whole process didn't produce
much energy, and now they're shutting it down just but hey,
you know the guys who built it, they all got rich.
(28:04):
They got a lot of money out of it. That
was our tax money. Another big green energy scam. And
when Trump says this, everybody scoffs at him and mocks him.
It's like right here in California, largest solar energy plant
in the world and big loser getting shut down. Didn't
make energy. Deborah arc live in the KFI twenty four
hour newsroom. Hey, you've been listening to the John Cobalt
(28:26):
Show podcast. You can always hear the show live on
KFI Am six forty from one to four pm every
Monday through Friday, and of course anytime on demand on
the iHeartRadio app
Can't.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I am six forty.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobel podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
There's some kind of news conference being held by the
county supervisors over this after action report about the county's
response to the bad fires and if we find out anything,
we will tell you. And the report did not cover
(00:23):
the city's response. So we still don't know why the
Palisades Reservoir was empty, why it was missing one hundred
and seventeen million gallons of water, And we still don't
know why Genie Canonia still gets to run the DWP,
among other things.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
But we'll get to more of that later.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Right now, you know the big You know, we don't
have enough money for the fire department. We only funded
at a fifty percent rate, But god, do we have
the money to blow on stupid homeless housing ideas. Back with,
Mike Bonnen was still a councilman on the west side
(01:01):
of La There he had a project to convert a
Ramada in in It was called the Marina Delway RAMAA
converted to low income housing. So far, the city has
spent over twenty million dollars and nothing's been done. And
we're going to talk to Angela McGregor from Westside Current
(01:24):
dot com because she's been poking around trying to see
I guess what Bonding thinks of all this. Angela McGregor,
how are you.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm good, Thank you, thanks for having me so.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, you talked to Mike Bonning about this disaster of
a project.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I mean this was his baby.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Oh no, didn't talk to him. He won't talk to us,
but we he did tweet about our article or post
on X. Someone asked him if he took responsibility for it,
given that it was his baby. As you say, he
got it built with no community quote whatsoever, got the
mortgage approved. And also, and I think this is important too,
(02:07):
after it had been opened at transitional housing for about
fourteen months, he allowed it to be vacated to be
quote unquote renovated quote unquote immediately. That was three years ago.
It's still empty and there's been no work done. But
when someone asked him on X if he took responsibility
for the fact that it's been sitting empty at a
(02:29):
total cost of nineteen and a half million dollars, he
said no, that would be my successor. Her candency was
born out of her opposition to the project in her neighborhood,
and the project has languished unempty. I have no idea
what he means by that. During the entirety of her tenure. Meanwhile,
she's been shutting down shelters and blocking housing. So I
(02:53):
picked up on that for an off ed I published yesterday.
And obviously she's living rent free in his head, and
he's not going to take responsibility for her.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
No, for this, he did. He never did for anything.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
But but it made me think about, well, okay, what
is the real cause of this. I mean, I don't
think it's honestly, I don't think it's any one council member.
He obviously played a role in initiating the project Tracy
has for Tracy Park, to her credit, has you know,
(03:32):
she actually extended the tenure of the Venice Bridge housing
for six months in order to have someplace to put
the people that were being cleared off the streets. And
she's been I've actually spoken to developers who talked about
how she's really championed their projects and got help to
get them built. So I think it's a little disingenuous
to blame her for hating all housing or whatever it is.
(03:56):
But what I went into in detail in my off
ed was the idea that it's not any one person,
it's it's just a really sick culture. It's it's a
really dysfunctional system where these not for profits, like the
one that's supposed to be building the remote, instead of
(04:17):
collecting tax dollars for god knows what, they're holding all
the cards. If you look at the email exchange between
the developer and the city administrator's office, what you see
is the city administrator is the one who's coming up
with new ways to more funding, new sources of funding,
(04:38):
and the developers saying, well, now we need more money.
We need more money. By the way, we need more money.
I'm not sure we can do this for twenty million dollars, right,
and there's nobody pushing back. It gets to me this
Ramode is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Oh well, I know, I know there's lots of Ramada
style projects, But just to focus on one of them,
I think we'll give the listeners the idea of just
how insane it is. I mean, just take this Romanta
project and multiply it by any number you want, and
that's where the billions of dollars are going for nothing,
go night. So this sounds like massive corruption that everybody's
(05:22):
in on.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Well, we've had two audits, two really actually very interesting,
very good audits, once the county and one from the
la Alliance lawsuit, and both of them revealed a culture
of just total lack of accountability, the account no accounting standards,
money flying out the window with no expectation of it
(05:46):
coming back. There's no no enumeration of anything that's actually
getting done.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
The the head of LASS rather famously, well, she she resigned,
but I think she would have been fired. She kept
signing off on multimillion dollar contracts to her husband's not
for profit, to the one that he worked for. She
did it once, she got caught by la Is doing it,
(06:18):
and they swore up and down and she'll never do
it again, it was an honest mistake. And then she
did it again.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah Alicia Adams and.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, Alicia, doctor Alicia Adams Kellum. And then and this
was really to me, really infuriating. There were a couple
of whistle blowers who who were unceremoniously let go by
by Lasha who preceded predated her, and they filed and
(06:46):
it's it's public now. But they filed these just hair
raising complaints about her behavior, about the way she was
bringing unqualified people on into positions there that she had
sort of created for them. I think the accusation that
(07:07):
really got the most pressed was that she was pressuring
the data guy to fudge the numbers because it would
make maribeths look good.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yes on our inside safe on her safe inside safe numbers.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
And these two women who were let go sued and
rather than taking it to court, where their accusations would
be public, not only public, but also they would have
had to have testified under oath, the lawship paid them
eight hundred thousand dollars basically to make this thing go away.
(07:43):
And that's the culture we're talking about here. I mean,
it's it's there's no accountability, there's no you know, the
people who are getting the taxpayer dollars are telling the
city what to do, and it's chaos.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It's just chaos.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And Ramata is kind of like a oh, monument to
that level of Nettinos.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Bratically this motel Angela, thank you for coming on, excellent report,
and everybody should read the column she wrote in Westside
Current dot com bonding points fingers. Yet the Ramata boondoggle
began on his watch. Angela McGregor, thank you very much
for coming on. Who's who's going to bust this corruption
(08:28):
ring up here in Los Angeles? Who does the investigating? Uhen?
When do people start getting charged with crimes? There's crimes
going on here? This is this is the two billion
dollars I keep telling you about that they can't account
for more coming up.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
M six forty.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock and
then after four o'clock John Cobelt Show on demand. And
you know when you go to looking for the podcast,
you can always pick other days. Today I listened to
that three o'clock hour yesterday with the Santa Monica Bear
because she was on for almost the whole hour.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
What you think of her? Coming on?
Speaker 1 (09:10):
She?
Speaker 5 (09:10):
What did I think of her? I mean, I thought
she was brave to take on you.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
But were you satisfied with any of her answers?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Not really?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
But I don't know, I don't know. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
I found that she blamed everybody else and that she
and the city council there aren't taking responsibility.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
I'm not exactly sure what you can do to clean
up to clean up Santa Monica at this point, I mean,
you have to do something very very drastic, and I
don't know if anybody is going to do that because
because right, I mean so, And when she gave it,
(09:54):
she gave reasons why Santa Monica has issues. When remember
you were talking about Manhattan Beach and she was explaining
just the different reasons why Santa Monica is vulnerable to crime.
So it's it's almost like, well, okay, if you can't
prevent those things, then what can you do or what
(10:15):
are you going to do?
Speaker 1 (10:16):
The one thing she circled back to a couple of
times was there is a metro train. I think it's
the E Line used to be the Expo Line. The
train and it dumps in a large number of homeless
people every night, like the last train of the night
or all the evening trains. They end in Santa Monica.
The vagrants come from skid Row and all the other
(10:36):
downtown encampments and now they're in Santa Monica. And she goes,
that's what's created the she goes as soon as they
brought the train into Santa Monica and I go, so,
I'm thinking, this is what we played paid billions of
dollars for to bring in skid row to Santa Monica
and destroy that Like that's what the government did. And
(10:57):
I said, well, why don't you've got it? That's got
to be stopped and everybody should be in on it
to stop it. Lindsay Horvath is the county supervisor, She's
a piece of work, and it's like, why would you
create a train line to spread mental patients and drug
addicts to a beautiful town like Santa Monica. Skid Row
(11:21):
is bad enough, but you're always gonna have a skid
row in a big city and we always had one,
Or why would you poison Santa Monica with all that?
Speaker 5 (11:28):
But the reality is that's happened. So then what are
you gonna do about it?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Now? Stop the train service? I think, I mean you could.
I think they should. They should stop it, But who's
gonna do that?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Or that's what the county supervisors, the ones who have
influence on the metro board, all the governments, Metro board,
county city, everybody say we're gonna stop the vagrant train.
We're gonna stop a train full of mental patients and
drug addicts from being dumped into Santa Monica every night.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Isn't that obvious? You just stop it.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
I don't think are going to do that, even though
I agree with what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
That's a solution, But Santa Monica is doomed. But they
don't ever come back.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
If nobody goes and dines in Santa Monica and shops
in Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Then it's over. Then it's over.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
It's over flat because she kept going back, and I've
heard she's not the first person to come on the
show and talk about that. Many people privately have told
me that as soon as that that train line came
to town.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
Well what about the third Street Praminade that you're allowed
to now walk around with drinks? I mean, how is
that helpful?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, as they were enforcing the alcohol law among the
vagrants all these years.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's a joke. The whole thing is a joke. And
you know what, That's what we said at the end
of the show yesterday. My city. I don't live there,
we used to do a lot there. I guess we're
just not going.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
To anymore, which is so disappointing because you guys loved it,
and I loved it too. I mean I did go
there a few weeks. I told you I went to
a restaurant. Now the restaurant that I went to is
it was packed? It was, but that was it.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, today it's packed in the in the shopping.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Two years ago, the promenade was packed, and the Santa
Monica play small was packed. They're packed, and then one
day they're not anymore, as the rot creeps up tyr credit.
She did not deny what was going on.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
Well, that's why I was saying. I mean, she was
brave to go on with you because she knew exactly
how you felt, and she agreed.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
With much of it, right, But I got to said
that she's powerless. The city council chooses to be powerless
because they're mostly progressive except for her. And it's like, okay,
you're all progressive, wonderful, You've destroyed the city. I'm not
coming anymore. You're not coming anymore. What are you gaining here?
Speaker 5 (13:48):
Well, the homeowners have to do something because I mean,
it's not cheap to live in Santa Monica. I mean,
maybe it's cheaper now because of all the issues, but
Santa Monica's never been inexpensive place.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Well, it's the vote, it's the voters, because she said
that most of the city council votes are six to
one and she's the one no vote on most of
the stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And and Phil Brock who was the previous mayor and
also in the same camp, and the mayor's name is
escaping me lanty landa no Gretty. So Lenin Gretti was
on yesterday. Phil Brock was the previous mayor. He's been
on the show a number of times. And what did
he get for it? He lost to his city council
person race. He was the only other voice. So I
(14:30):
guess those even Santa Monica, this is what you want. Fine,
you're free, but we're not coming anymore. It's too scary there.
And she pointed fingers at a lot of people. And
maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong that that training thing
is very valid. Oh yeah, and setting up all the
(14:53):
all the treatment centers and homeless.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Are yeah, well that's a bad idea.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And Manhattan Beach doesn't have them. Well, good for them.
They kept them out. They fought and kept them out.
Why should one city accept all these homeless shelters and
all this other progressive crap.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So I'll go to Benet.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Well, you know, when it's when it's Saturday night and
we want to go to a beach town and go
to a nice restaurant and walk around on the strand,
we're going to Manhattan Beach, not Santa Monica anymore. Be
easier to go to Santa Mona.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
Say it's much closer.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's you know, I can get there in
five minutes. Santa Monica. It's you know, it's going to
be a lot longer than that too.
Speaker 5 (15:37):
I have an idea, since Newsom is running for president,
somebody needs to talk to him about cleaning up Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
You want to do it, news Lady.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
Sure, absolutely, I'm not afraid of any of these people.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
All right, you're deputized. Go to it.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI A six.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Forty after four o'clock. John Cobelt's show on demand on
the iHeart app. Just just one more thought. I mentioned
before that my wife and I we've been going to
Manhattan Beach more frequently because it's really nice there. There's
no mental patients and drug addicts, and there's very little crime,
and there's no fear, and it's a much more pleasant
(16:25):
beach town. Then Santa Monica is now a disaster. It's
Santa Monica maroon yesday. And you know it's the thing
you don't have to do, like official boycotts.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Everybody's into light. Well, let's do an online boycott. You
know what. The market takes care of things.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Santa Monica is so found now that there's now thousands
of people that are just not going anymore, and their
tax revenues are way down, and tourism is way down,
and restaurants are closing and shops are closing, and they're
getting exactly what they deserve.
Speaker 5 (16:55):
You know what really sucks also about that, just because
I have gone there and I've shot there, and I've
gone to restaurants there. The parking structures where you can
park are not expensive compared to other places in LA
So that that was one of the things that I
actually liked. I can go to great restaurants and I
can shop, and I don't have to pay a fortune
for parking.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
But they had the mental patients and the drug addicts
living there right in the Steroi Rights.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
It wasn't always like that.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
The stairwells smell like a feces urine.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
I told you I was there a few weeks ago
and I parked one of those structures.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And if at one time I poked my head and
there's there's bedding all over the place. And so they
actively live there and know the police don't come and
take those people away. They just let them live in there.
So I you know, there's no woman wants to get
raped in a stairwell by a crazed drug addict. So
you can't go into the Santa Monica parking garage, and
(17:48):
that's what's going to happen. And that's what's happened to
some women. They've gotten they've gotten physically attacked in Santa Monica.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's just a now, you know, And I'm going to
keep pointing this.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Out because I've had it up to up to here
with Karen Bass's stupid fake press conferences about her inside
safe garbage and the success of her homeless programs. Now
they're a tremendous failure. And here's an example. I want
to play cut number of four in just a second,
(18:21):
Channel four. This is the real story when you hear
her carrying on about the inside safe hoax. Robert Lipkin
owns warehouses in downtown LA and listen to what he's
had to go through, and listen to how Karen Bass
and the rest of the city bureaucracy does not respond.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
It has become a site that is all too familiar
in parts of downtown Los Angeles. The sidewalks barely visible,
covered by homeless encampments, tents, furniture and broken appliances piled high,
and motor homes parked along the street for months on end.
Speaker 7 (18:57):
I just don't know how this can allow to continue.
Speaker 6 (19:00):
Robert Lipkin owns two warehouses on Fourteenth Street and leases
them out to produce distributors. But the situation with the encampments,
Robert says, has gotten so bad it's affecting business and safety.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
There's raw sewage being dumped on the streets. They steal
water from the fire hydrants, and they crawl up the
holes and have wires and get electricity. One fella had
a gun one day waving at this tenant. The police
arrested him and it was back here in a couple
of days, the same manner.
Speaker 6 (19:32):
NBC Four reached out to Councilwoman Isabelle Herado, who represents
this district, and received an email from her office that reads,
in part, sanitation crews have conducted multiple cleanups at these
locations in recent months to address ongoing health and safety concerns,
but according to Robert, this hasn't happened.
Speaker 7 (19:51):
I'll come down here and wait for them on the
given day and they never show. Then when I do
get a hold of them and they say, oh sorry,
we just couldn't make it.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Robert shared several emails he sent to Herado's office in
recent weeks. He says no one has come to clean
the area all year. Robert says one of his tenants
is leaving and now he's worried about the building stained vacant,
and if this happens, he says, he won't be able
to financially stay afloat.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
I tried to sell the property. I couldn't handle it
any longer. I almost went broke when this was vacant
for two years. I couldn't even find anybody that would
want to even buy it. My broker brought people over
and they would just leave Vivan Right now, he's bringing
people to try to take this space here, and he's
(20:39):
had several people that are very interested, and as soon
as they come around the corner, they go, no, I
don't want to do this.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
And Carolyn, Robert says, this truck was intact just a
few days ago and since then it's been stripped down,
taken apart, and he says sold four parts. We're still
waiting to confirm these details, but Robert's says he's really
at a loss and wants the city again to do something.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That's NBC four Darsha Phillips reporting on that one. Well,
Robert Lipkin is stuck down with warehouses that nobody's gonna
buy because the rest of us are sane, you see,
and Karen Bass is insane and Isabel Herado is insane,
and they are not going to fix the situation because
(21:26):
they don't care, and they're just they're gonna lie from
sunrise to sunset, and.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
The news media is going to print their lies.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
And you're stuck with warehouses that are unusable because what
did he say? As soon as potential buyers see the neighborhood,
it's like, oh no, no, that's how bad it is.
In seconds, Oh no, I can't do this isabel Herado
is a completely useless city council person. She's on the
(21:56):
side of the drug addicts and the viagrants. Those that's nobility.
Same thing with Karen Bass. They don't care. The belief
system of progressives are you divide the world into oppressors
and the oppressed. The drug addicts and the mental patients
and the vagrants are the oppressed. Business owners and residents.
(22:17):
We're the oppressors, so we have to concede the land,
the neighborhoods to the oppressed. That's what Isabelle Herado lead
and it is insane. That's what she believes. That's what
Karen Pass believes. There's no getting through to them or
to their staffs. They'll just lie to the reporters. They'll
(22:38):
say what they have to say. They'll do a cleanup
once in a while that everybody comes back. Same thing
in Santa Monica. It's the same philosophy. They are among
six out of the seven city council people. This is
an impenetrable philosophy. There's nothing you can You can vote
them out, but most of the public is too stupid
and too ignorant to do so. Apparently, big cities in
(23:01):
southern California have a preponderance of the stupid. And then
you go to other towns. I mentioned the Manhattan Beach.
Here in Burbank where we work, there's no problems. I
was in Orange County over the weekend. There's no problems,
and not no problems. But you know, you go to
the cities along the beach there and everything's beautiful. They
(23:22):
had these problems in Santa Monica and in downtown LA
because you have a progressive philosophy that embraces the drug
addicts and the mental patients and the vagrants. Those in
their pyramid, those people are the ones that they want
to protect from us, the oppressors. That's their philosophy. I'm
(23:47):
not making this up. That's what they say, that's what
they believe. Just look around. Karen Bass is going to
lie till the day she dies about this. There is
no inside safe program that works. It's a load of crap.
Her statistic sticks or a load of crap. The people
at LASA wanted a buster over her stupid statistics. The
(24:08):
whistleblowers they used to work at LASA and they were
shut down. So unfortunately, it's nice to have that one
report from NBC four. But all the TV stations could
be doing this all day, every day, and maybe if
there was a sustained attack on this corrupt administration and
(24:28):
the corrupt city council, maybe there'd be some changes.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock. Oh Moistline.
If you're really good, you can still get on the
moist Line eight seven seven moist eighty six. You can
be a part of things. You just have to bring
the goods eight seven seven moist eighty six. Or use
the talkback feature on the iHeartRadio app. Gavin Newsom has
(24:58):
wasted a trem mendous amount of money, so has the
federal government on green energy. And I'm going to give
you an example. A lot of people don't want to
believe this, but if you go out in the Jave Desert,
there is something called the ivan Pah or the Ivanpah
Solar Power Facility. It has three four hundred and fifty
(25:22):
nine foot towers, thousands of computer controlled mirrors. They're called heliostats,
and these mirrors collect the heat on these towers the
sunlight rather and it eventually it transmits solar energy. It
(25:44):
cost over two billion dollars to build. They started constructing
in twenty ten, completed in twenty fourteen. It's now going
to be closing. You believe this two billion dollars. Its closing.
It was it failed to efficiently generate solar energy. Obama
(26:13):
in twenty eleven issued a billion and a half dollars
in three federal loan guarantees for the project. The Secretary
of Energy at the time, Ernest Monies, said it was
an example of how America is becoming a world leader
in solar energy, and now it's closing up. Jason Isaac
(26:38):
is CEO of the American Energy Institute, and he says
Ivanpah or Ivan Pah stands as a testament to the
waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes. It never
lived up to its promises, produced less electricity than expected,
and relied on natural gas to stay in opera. It
(27:01):
was the world's largest solar plant in twenty fourteen, and
it seemed like this was the big wet dream that
Jerry Brown and Gavenuso had. It's near the California Nevada border,
about an hour out of Las Vegas. And I guess
I guess you could. You can see this. I've never
(27:21):
really noticed it. They have one hundred and seventy three
thousand of these mirrors adjusted by a computer to catch
the maximum sun rays, and the temperatures can reach a
thousand degrees because of all the concentrated heat. And they
thought they could use the sun to produce a heat source.
(27:42):
The mirrors reflect the heat from the sun to a receiver,
and that heat's a fluid. It creates steam that spins
a turbine. It's complicated and the whole process didn't produce
much energy, and now they're shutting it down just but hey,
you know the guys who built it, they all got rich.
(28:04):
They got a lot of money out of it. That
was our tax money. Another big green energy scam. And
when Trump says this, everybody scoffs at him and mocks him.
It's like right here in California, largest solar energy plant
in the world and big loser getting shut down. Didn't
make energy. Deborah arc live in the KFI twenty four
hour newsroom. Hey, you've been listening to the John Cobalt
(28:26):
Show podcast. You can always hear the show live on
KFI Am six forty from one to four pm every
Monday through Friday, and of course anytime on demand on
the iHeartRadio app
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