Record and Issues
Healthcare; Schools; Environment; Affordable Housing; Transportation; Public Safety; Social Justice; Labor; Animal Rights; Reproductive Rights
Abbe Land is a life-long community activist. She is a visionary leader who is deeply committed to essential issues of human dignity.
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Because of of her leadership experience in West Hollywood, Abbe was invited as a guest panelist for a discussion on “Race, Class and Education.” The event, presented on Wednesday May 31st, also included Chief William Bratton, Alfre Woodard, Cathy Schulman, and leaders of various organizations (such as the NAACP). Reveta Bowers (Head of the Center for Early Education) hosted the forum. Ms. Schulman, producer of the film CRASH, had used the film as a touchstone for discussion.
Healthcare is one of Abbe Land’s most important priorities. While working in the Los Angeles Free Clinic, Abbe Land has seen daily the struggles Americans face with healthcare availability, rising prescription drug costs and the insurance converage of their children. It is a national priority of which the State of California can be a leader. Abbe Land has been developing a plan for what California can do to tackle the current health care debacle:
- Support the California Health Insurance Reliability Act (SB840). This single-payer program would cover all Californians and let each of us choose our own physician. An in-depth discussion of the bill can be found at: http://www.healthcareforall.org/blog/?p=4.
- Allow the State of California to purchase prescription drugs in bulk for residents. The state already does this with Medi-Cal; it is estimated that drug costs could be reduced as much as 50%. A variety of states have successfully enacted this type of bill with substantial savings, but it has been repeatedly vetoed in California, presumably because of the influence of campaign contributions.
- Require large employers to offer reasonable healthcare options. Our healthcare system is based upon the assumption that employers will help provide healthcare coverage. Employers are increasingly refusing to provide these types of benefits; in fact, eighty percent of the state’s uninsured have full-time jobs.
- Provide healthcare to all children. Right now, over 1 million children in the State of California are not covered.
- Protect consumers from abusive HMO practices. To protect record profits, HMO’s have a history of refusing badly needed care. The HMO Patient’s Bill of Rights has helped thwart this type of behavior, but it must be continually enforced and does not protect patients with “pre-existing conditions.”
- Provide parity for mental health coverage. While HMO’s and insurance companies are now legally required to give “parity” to mental health, it remains a costly and tangled issue. Substance abuse is not covered, and many patients, especially those with complex medical, financial and personal issues, have been dumped on the streets.
- Provide quality long term and hospice care. Currently, nursing homes are financially reasonable for only the most wealthy. Long-term-care insurance policies are fraught with high costs and difficult-to-attain benefits. We need to help people continue to live at home, which keeps people healthier for longer and reduces costs.
- Use information technology to improve healthcare quality. The computer age is here. Doctors need the most up-to-date information that is available. With a patients permission, a doctor could receive instantaneous access to their medical history, helping the doctor make the fastest and most accurate recommendation possible.
Abbe Land is comm-itted to ensuring the best education for children. West Holly-wood children are primarily served by schools in the LAUSD. As Mayor and City Councilmember, Abbe Land forged a relationship between the schools, the school board members and parents to create partnerships that make a difference in children’s lives.
Through Abbe Land’s leadership, support and collaboration the following have been initiated:
- The Children’s Roundtable which brings schools, local service providers, law enforcement and the City together to coordinate community resources available for children and families.
- Programs designed specifically for the city’s teens.
- Saturdays in the Park, an informal gathering of families with young children where parents can meet each other and find out about the local public schools.
- Efforts with West Hollywood Elementary school to bring families back to public school. This year, the school has two kindergarten classes made up of local families.
- City funded Pre-School and After-school programs.
- An annual Kid’s Fair which features free health screenings and links families to social services and services and local schools.
- A City Grants in the Schools program that provides funding to local schools for special projects, academic enhancements, materials, or campus beautification.
- The award-winning Light up a Library program which stocks schools libraries with new books and provides trained volunteers to work with students during and after school. An annual Book Fair is also sponsored by the city.
- Funding for enrichment field trips for local schools.
- Work to help the Chamber of Commerce become more involved with the schools.
- Project YES, which helps high school students with job placement.
- Establishment of a Computer Lab in Plummer Park to improve the computer literacy of West Hollywood teens.
Abbe Land is keenly aware of the host of environmental issues faced by our society, and the unique role the State of California often plays in the debate. She fully supports the State’s move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (such as AB32) and looks to promote efforts to reduce our nation’s dependence on oil, become more energy efficient, protect our country’s irreplaceable natural heritage, produce less garbage and waste, and defend everyone’s right to clean air and water and a clean environment.
Abbe has demonstrated her leadership by:
- Sponsoring a resolution requiring West Hollywood to meet or surpass emissions standards set by the Kyoto Protocol.
- Leading a city that is a strong regional voice for increasing public transit in LA County, including extending the Red Line.
- Leading a city that is purchasing electric bikes for parking enforcement and hybrid Civics for city fleet autos.
- Authoring West Hollywood’s ban on polystyrene products.
- Initiating West Hollywood’s cutting-edge curbside recycling program to include small unit buildings. The City’s current trash hauling contract also includes an award-winning restaurant-recycling program that sorts all restaurant food waste and recyclables.
- Developing a “City Hall” recycling program for paper, aluminum, glass, plastics and office equipment.
- Initiating West Hollywood’s oil recycling program.
- Allocating resources for E-Waste round ups.
- Co-sponsoring an initiative for the City to develop a Green Building Program.
- Ensuring that the new West Hollywood Library will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified.
- Spearheading the City’s efforts for mixed-use developments and other smart growth policies by co-sponsoring the Mixed Use Task Force.
- Helping start a model water reduction ordinance.
- Co-sponsoring a Heritage Tree Preservation Program to increase the City’s urban canopy and protect old growth trees.
- Supporting SB1 to encourage the use of solar power.
- Opposing President Bush’s attempts to roll back the Clinton Administration’s mercury reduction plan and Roadless Initiative.
- Requiring alternative fuel vehicles for trash collection.
- Leading adoption an extensive Bike and Pedestrian Mobility Plan for the City, which is tripling the number of bike routes in the city and creating the infrastructure to support bike commuting. This has included creating bike lanes and wider sidewalks as part of the city’s substantial redesign of Santa Monica Blvd.
- Sponsoring legislation to promote roof top gardens in city owned buildings
Abbe Land and residents, in front of an affordable housing complex in West Hollywood.
For 20 years, Abbe Land has led the fight for affordable housing.
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Abbe has demonstrated her leadership by:
- Helping create one of the strongest rent control and eviction protection laws in the country.
- Creating a non-profit housing corporation to buy, rehabilitate and preserve affordable housing.
- Adopting one of California’s first inclusionary zoning laws to require new developments to include affordable housing.
- Supporting new and rehabilitated housing for people with disabilities, those with HIV/AIDS, seniors and low-income families.
In Abbe Land’s 17 years of city council service, she has fought to improve transportation mobility by fixing existing roads, adding transportation safety services and creating more travel options in West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Sherman Oaks and North and West Hollywood.
Her list of accomplishments include:
- Collaborating with regional leaders to plan and construct 367 miles of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in Los Angeles County, which include completion of carpool lanes through the Sepulveda Pass and on Highway 134.
- Helping establish the highly successful CityLine bus service connecting West Hollywood with Los Angeles. Since start-up in 1992, ridership has grown an impressive 66%.
- Leading a redesign project for Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood (like what is being done in Beverly Hills to relieve traffic congestion and imporve pedestrian safety) and securing “bike highway” designation on the same route.
- Overseeing Rapid Bus service deployment on Wilshire and Ventura Boulevards with additional lines serving La Cienega, Fairfax and Robertson Boulevards.
- Leading coordination of Dial-A-Shuttle and taxi coupon programs for seniors in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, resulting in expanded service areas and reduced overhead costs.
Because the commu-nities of AD42 experience some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation, Abbe Land has four immediate transportation goals:
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- Protecting Proposition 42 gas tax monies so that funding can be restored for priority projects such as completing the 405-101 interchange.
- Creating new laws that encourage appealing and practical alternatives to driving, such as transit hubs, where people can live and shop within walking distance of public transportation stations.
- Ensuring that our transportation network fully utilizes new technologies that improve mobility, like traffic signal synchronization and real-time motorist parking information systems.
- Extending both the Red Line and the proposed Exposition Blvd. Line trains all the way to the beach.
As Mayor and Councilmember for almost 13 years, Abbe Land has taken a leadership role in improving public safety. By focusing on common-sense approaches that emphasize partnerships between police departments and public interest groups, she has repeatedly made West Hollywood a model to be emulated by other cities and states across the nation.
Some of her efforts include:
- Leading the LA County Sheriff’s Department to become more culturally sensitive to LGBT non-discrimination issues. This collaborative relationship has become a national model.
- Forming a governmental task force to examine issues of same-gender domestic violence.
- Authoring legislation that created West Hollywood’s Spring Into Action for women’s safety, an outreach and education program that partners with the Sheriff’s department and the city’s advisory boards and commissions to help educate the community on how to prevent violence and sexual assault.
- Initiating and co-authoring an ordinance to ban the sale of junk guns commonly known as ‘Saturday Night Specials’. After a successful defense of the ordinance before the United States Supreme court, 31 other California cities passed similar legislation. The California State Legislature, along with a number of other states, followed her lead in 1999 and passed their own bans.
- Serving on the advisory board of Women Against Gun Violence.
As said by Richard Ryan, member of the West Hollywood community and Public Safety Commission,: “Abbe Land is the rare breed of a straight politician who has ALWAYS been on the cutting edge of LGBT civil rights, leading the way on issues of importance to the LGBT Community.” Social justice for Abbe Land is not an issue of political expediency or calculated logic. Whether it be related to race, gender or sexual orientation, she has always, and will always, simply believed that freedom from persecution and discrimination is a basic human right.
Some of her activities around the LGBT community have included:
- Leading the City of West Hollywood to create the first Domestic Partnership registration program in the country – years before any other city followed suit. Same-sex couples across the country have benefited from this early action because the City of West Hollywood has always allowed and encouraged gay and lesbian folks to register from other jurisdictions throughout the U.S.
- Leading the way for other cities in America by making West Hollywood one of the first providers of early and cutting-edge funding for AIDS-related services. These have included assistance with food, lodging, and medical and dental care for people physically and financially devastated by the pandemic.
- Writing the City Council resolution by which West Hollywood became the first city in the United States to declare itself a PRO-CHOICE CITY.
- Urging California to allow local governments to provide equal treatment in insurance and other benefits for workers with same-sex partners. This is a fight she began years before the concept received state approval.
- Helping the City of West Hollywood to become the FIRST government agency in the United States to provide healthcare coverage for domestic partners.
- Supporting the first transgender non-discrimination ordinance in the country.
- Creating the City of West Hollywood’s visionary Lesbian Visibility Program, which provided funding for lesbian arts, literature and mentoring support programs.
- Sponsoring the City’s Lesbian Heath Month program, which provided funding for education and outreach information campaigns targeting the Lesbian Community.
- Starting the City’s Transgender clothing voucher program, which provides business clothing to Transgender men and women who are attempting to enter the job market.
- Fighting for housing and rent stabilization legislation that guaranteed that Registered Domestic Partners could not be evicted upon the death of a partner.
- Forming a governmental task force to examine issues of same-gender domestic violence (the first elected official to do so in the country).
Abbe Land is proven friend of Labor and recognizes the difficulties that many in our society confront. Besides her interest in healthcare, transportation, education and other issues that we face daily, Abbe is dedicated to making sure that people are paid fair wages and work in safe environments.
Her labor record includes:
- Volunteered at the Alliance for a Better California and did extensive voter contact to help defeat Governor Schwartzenegger’s Propositions 74, 75 and 76. Working families would directly suffered had these propositions been passed in the 2005 Special Election.
- Strong support by the local representing West Hollywood City employees, AFSCME 3339.
- Assisting UNITE HERE in their successful hotel organizing effort in West Hollywood. She put the City Council on record as supporting the drive and fought for card check elections at new hotels.
- Putting the Council in support of the UFW in their Gallo boycott.
- Supporting grocery workers during their protracted Southern California strike.
- Standing behind home health care workers in their struggle for a living wage.
- Endorsement by UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta and the California Nurses Association.
Abbe Land believes in the importance of humane treatment for all animals. She considers this to be especially true for animals held in the care of public services and animal shelters. To Abbe, elective surgeries, such as the de-clawing of cats, are difficult to reconcile morally.
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Her efforts include:
- Supporting an “anti-declawing ordinance”, which formally banned the medical procedure of removing cats’ claws. Although the ordinance affects only veterinary centers within the City of West Hollywood, it has become a model for other governments examining the possibility of adopting similar measures.
- Authoring an emergency moratorium on the use of “cage dryers” after the deaths of two dogs in West Hollywood. One of the dog’s body temperature had risen above 109 degrees.
- Helping to pass a headline-grabbing law in West Hollywood that replaced the term “owner” with “guardian” in all city ordinances relating to pets.
- Supporting a measure (that did not pass) banning ear cropping, tail docking and other cosmetic procedures on pets in West Hollywood.
