Mixer: Murals, Millennium, Prisons and Porn

There’s nothing like a long holiday weekend. But the news knows no days off. So, we talk about the long week in LA on today’s Mixer.

Thanks to Dennis Romero from LA Weekly and Claudia Peschiutta from KNX Newsradio for our robust roundtable.

The LA City Council took a first step this week toward lifting a decade-long ban on murals on privately owned buildings. The measure must still come back for final council approval next week. Council members are looking at the possiblility of allowing single family homes to ‘opt-in’ to legal mural displays.

The Millennium Hollywood Project has gotten even shakier, with a coalition of neighborhood groups filing a lawsuit this week to stop the $654 million skyscraper project because of earthquake concerns.

But with faults all over greater LA, and skyscrapers built on some of them, is this more a tactic of finding any means posible to stop a project some deem over the top?

(Listen to the Mixer on Soundcloud, here.)

Governor Brown’s prison plan has been shackled in Sacramento. A few days after Brown came out with a proposal that would move prisoners (at a cost of more than $700 million over two years) in California lockups to private prisons and county jails, there’s new blowback from Democrats in the state Senate.

That wouldn’t be much of a problem for the typically-steamrolling governor, but the loads of cash to make the prisoner move would have to come from the legislature.

For his part – calling Brown’s plan without “hope”, Senate President Pro-Tem Darrel Steinberg (D-Sacramento), says the state should seek an extension of an end-of-the-year federal court order to reduce California’s prison population by 9,600 inmates.

Brown, and his prison plan ally, Assembly Speaker John Perez (D-Los Angeles), aren’t receptive to that idea.

An HIV scare had pornographic film production halted for about a week in LA. An actress had tested positive for HIV, but the virus apparently has not spread to anyone else, so the moratorium was lifted.

In our Mixer Elixir, Allstate Insurance says LA has the some of the worst drivers in the country. Just behind Washington DC, San Francisco and — surprisingly — Glendale (California).

Deserved? Our panelists believe so. Adamantly.