DEATON CITY'S GO-TO GUY, PERK-WISE.Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View I didn't think this day would ever come. Ron Deaton is about to leave his job as chief legislative analyst for the Los Angeles City Council  The Los Angeles City Council is the governing body of the City of Los Angeles, California, United States. . I wonder if the council will shut down early on his last day and have a little coffee and cake. Or perhaps members will serve caviar and champagne. As chief legislative analyst, Deaton performed a pretty straightforward task: First and foremost, keeping the council members from looking like jackasses. If they were about to propose something stupid and unconstitutional, Ron Deaton would quietly speak to them. If they were about to suggest something that would anger the bureaucracy, Ron would gently steer them to a safer course, and then he would speak to them. And when Ron spoke, the politicians listened. Why? Well, Ron was the bespectacled gatekeeper. To get a corner office in City Hall, council members had to speak to Ron. If they wanted new carpet in their office, they had to speak to Ron. If they needed more file cabinets, more space, more staff, more cooperation from the bureaucracy, if they needed more phone lines, if they wanted oak paneling, a bigger chair, if they wanted a stained-glass window Noun 1. stained-glass window - a window made of stained glass window - a framework of wood or metal that contains a glass windowpane and is built into a wall or roof to admit light or air in their private bathroom, heck, if they wanted a private bathroom, they had to speak to Ron. And if there is one thing every politician needs, it's a private bathroom. That is how you control politicians, not by throwing a lariat lariat: see lasso. around their necks and wrestling them to the ground, but by gently tugging on their perks. All fifteen council members are paid the same salary, $160,000 a year. So the way they measure their relative importance is not by the size of their checks, but by the size of their perks. You get a lot more compliance from politicians with a little honey and perks than you do with just honey. And all perks spring from Ron. But speaking of checks, Ron's check was much, much bigger than that of the politicians who were nominally his bosses. As he moved into the twilight of his City Hall career, Ron was paid almost twice what the politicians on the City Council paid themselves. He made more than $120,000 a year more than the chief legislative analyst for New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . Was Ron actually worth over $282,000 a year? He must have been to somebody. It was Ron who once told his bosses, ``Just because you vote on it, doesn't make it so.'' Ron made it so, or he made it un-so. Ron decided what was knowable and what was not to be known. When the city commissioned a study of the services and savings that might spring from an independent Valley Transit Valley Transit is a city bus and paratransit commission operated by the city government of Appleton, Wisconsin. The system operates across the Fox Cities and serves the cities of Appleton, Kaukauna, Menasha and Neenah, as well as the towns of Buchanan, Grand Chute and District, Ron managed to misplace mis·place tr.v. mis·placed, mis·plac·ing, mis·plac·es 1. a. To put into a wrong place: misplace punctuation in a sentence. b. the final report for over a year. His office did not release it to the MTA (1) (Message Transfer Agent or Mail Transfer Agent) The store and forward part of a messaging system. See messaging system. (2) See M Technology Association. 1. (messaging) MTA - Message Transfer Agent. board until after the transit strike had squeezed a promise from Gov. Gray Davis for no more independent transit districts. Only then did the highly favorable report get released, once it didn't matter anymore. If you work for the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, then Ron helped secure your salary and pension. And if you happen to be a developer looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. public money to make your dreams come true, then Ron is your buddy as well, since he facilitated redevelopment plan after redevelopment plan for downtown, fast-tracking taxpayer investment where some suggested caution was called for. And it was Ron who helped get Browning Ferris Industries a 25-year extension on operations at its then-closed city side of the Sunshine Canyon landfill. It was Ron who issued dire warnings of economic collapse should noisy private jets be excluded from Van Nuys airport Van Nuys Airport (IATA: VNY, ICAO: KVNY, FAA LID: VNY) is a public airport located in Van Nuys, California in the San Fernando Valley, within the Los Angeles city limits. . Under Ron, City Hall ran like a well-oiled, badly assembled clock. Sometimes it ran fast and sometimes it ran slow. But no matter how many taxpayer dollars it wasted, City Hall still managed to tell the right time twice a day. You can thank Ron for that, too. Now, it is the end of the Ron Deaton era. Are Ron and his pension headed for retirement in Arizona? Oh, no. Ron is Mayor James Hahn's nominee to head the Department of Water and Power. City Hall insiders are delighted with the choice. They can trust Ron. And Ron gets yet another raise to over $300,000 a year. As for the rest of us (abuse) for The Rest Of Us - (From the Macintosh slogan "The computer for the rest of us") 1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products. 2. , I can only offer these parting words - caveat Lector Caveat lector is a Latin phrase meaning "Let the reader beware." The phrase is used in written English in two distinct ways.
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