Hot Links for this week

Before I open up this week's Hot Links, I just have to note that this is our reality. In May. Just a few weeks before the World Cup is about to start. The Sandy Fire is churning through Simi Valley, 30 miles from my house; the Santa Rosa Island Fire is much farther away but already has charred over 12,000 acres. I can smell it, I can see it, I can breathe it. What if this fire is burning three weeks from now, when we're forced to fulfill the FIFA agenda? What's the plan if we can't, in fact, safely host the first U.S. match of the World Cup in 23 days?

Parks gore

LA's park system has dropped to 93 out of 100 U.S. cities — our worst-ever rankings in the Trust for Public Lands' ParkScore index. I've tracked our plummeting score for the past decade. I reached out to Jon Christensen, adjunct assistant professor at UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, who worked on LA's Park Needs Assessment, and offered this extremely dire outlook:

“Our dismal ranking and the tragic state of our park system in Los Angeles is entirely due to the lack of investment in parks. The Department of Recreation and Parks has essentially been flatlining since the Great Recession in 2008. Our spending on parks has not even kept up with inflation. If the city council, the mayor, and then the voters don’t approve increasing the department’s charter allocation, things will just keep getting worse. And I’m afraid parks will have to be shut down. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Park Needs Assessment identified a clear path forward for parks in Los Angeles.”

“City officials should not just heed the warning sign of our falling ParkScore, but also read TPL’s new economic analysis, “The Undeniable ROI of Parks,” which found that city parks deliver $3 in benefits for every $1 invested. That’s a good return on investment. We need to invest more in our parks — not less every year.”