PARKS’S PENSION — Ever since he was police chief, Bernard Parks has never failed to piss people off. While everybody else is struggling to keep a job and/or keep a pension, the L.A. Times revealed that this “public servant” is taking home $22,000 a month in city retirement benefits from his 38 years as a cop, plus $178,789 in annual salary as a city councilman. That’s a total of $443,789 a year in city money that, as chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, he is trying desperately to keep out of the pockets of other city employees and retirees. Parks is sitting up there forecasting gloom and doom over the cost of city employees’ retirement benefits and asserting that “we have reached the breaking point. If significant structural changes are not implemented quickly, the city’s financial solvency is at significant risk,” yet he is collecting one of the city’s biggest pensions.

Officials say city civilian retirees average $3,319 a month in pension benefits and police and fire personnel average $4,486 in monthly pension payments. Parks seems to be suggesting, then, that “structural changes” need to be implemented on the backs of these people to save the city’s “solvency,” rather than on his — he who has fed from the public trough all his life and is amassing from it more money than God. When the Times’ writer sought to question Parks about the ironic financial position he is in, Parks curtly and characteristically, snapped: “I don’t discuss my salary or my pension and I earn both of them.” Oh, really?!

How is he earning $443,789 a year? Name something he did so far this year that’s worth that kind of money. What did he do last year? What has he done since we’ve known him? Nothing but demean and disregard the interests of his constituents, wage war against the people’s struggle for empowerment, undermine the labor unions that seek to improve the lives of people who actually work for a living, suffer a sound whipping in an ill-conceived attempt to gain higher office, and resurrect the evil specter of Chief William F. Parker.
I agree, the pension system could use some “structural changes” and they should start with his pension, alone, which, if it was restructured, could provide average monthly pension payments to 80 civilian city retirees or 59 police and fire pensioners. 

HAVE WE OVERCOME YET? — When Barack Obama was elected president we thought we’d made it to the mountain top that Martin Luther King preached about. When the euphoria wore off, we concluded, naw, we took a significant step, but we’re still striving upward.

But here lately, we’ve taken a bunch of steps that make me to believe that we just might be overcoming after all. Check this out:
James Young, an African-American, was elected mayor of Philadelphia, Miss.! Imagine that: Philadelphia, Miss., the quintessential racist redneck Southern town where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 for trying to register Blacks to vote. We can never forget James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who gave their lives there so Blacks could vote. Philadelphia, Miss. is still a predominantly White town, yet it elected a Black man as mayor. Mercy!

Walter Massey, president emeritus of Morehouse College, was elected chairman of the board of directors of Bank of America, the first African-American in that powerful post. Prior to serving as Morehouse’s president for 12 years, Massey was the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of California.

Then, Ursula Burns became the first Black woman to head a Fortune 500 company when she was named last week as the CEO of Xerox, a company at which she was second in command for several years.

Comes now astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr., who is expected to be named NASA administrator by President Obama, and if confirmed by the Senate, the Marine Corps general will become the first African-American to head the space agency.

We’re cracking the White ceiling and movin’ on up anyhow.

BYE-BYE, WEISS — As 5th District Councilman Jack Weiss is being termed-out of one office and has been turned away from another office, the major bone of contention between him and his constituents came to a head Tuesday: The council’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee unanimously approved that the massive LaBrea Gateway Project be constructed along two blocks of LaBrea Avenue near the sleepy Westside Willoughby neighborhood. The neighbors have been fighting Weiss against this seven-story, 219-unit housing complex for almost four years. They’ve been fighting to get the project scaled down, as the owners of single and two-story homes, the residents are loathe to find themselves sitting in the shadow of a seven-story behemoth, stuck on gridlocked streets caused by 500 additional cars in an already congested area, crowded out by yet another retail outlet and overpriced apartments and robbed of an important light industry area and the many jobs it creates.

Long regarded as being “too cozy with developers,” Weiss was targeted for recall by his constituents over the LaBrea Gateway Project in 2007 but they fell a couple of thousand short of the 23,000 signatures they needed to get the recall on the ballot. In lieu of that, they made sure he lost the May 19 election when he ran for city attorney. And he can’t leave the City Council fast enough to suit them. (Sounds like somebody else I know.)

DATEBOOK — The Essence K. Coprich Library/Media Center will be dedicated Friday at 10 a.m. on the campus of the 116th Street Elementary School, 11610 Stanford Ave. The center is named in honor of Essence Coprich, who was a student of 116th Street School and was killed in an auto accident on Aug. 3, 1996 at the age of 7. She was the daughter of community activist Jeffrey Coprich, founder and director of the Los Angeles Inner City Mass Choir. Despite her young age, Essence left her mark on the school, where she won several awards for academic achievement. She loved to read and write and do math and her dream was to become a doctor. A host of community organizations and elected officials are expected to attend the dedication.

Community leaders and groups and elected officials will come together again Saturday to honor longtime activist Roland Betts on the occasion of his recent retirement and to pay tribute to his many years of community service. The event will be held at the WLCAC’s Phoenix Hall, 10950 S. Central Ave. from 2 to 5 p.m.

AROUND THE TOWN — Supervisor and Mrs. Mark Ridley-Thomas hosted a commencement reception Sunday in honor of their twin sons’ graduation the week before from Morehouse College. It’s hard to believe that those little boys  — Sebastian and Sinclair — are officially signed, sealed and certified Morehouse Men. The lovely outdoor reception was held in a new place — the one-month-old county-owned Baldwin Hills Scenic Outlook in Culver City, which is a park and hiking ground located way, way, way up high in the Baldwin Hills, from which you can see the entire region below. I’m afraid of heights and I won’t be going there again.

AND FINALLY — How ‘bout the June issue of Los Angeles magazine? I love that thing! Kit Rachlis has always been my favorite editor. (Present one excluded, of course.)