Joe Buscaino Biography

Joe Buscaino is an American politician born in Los Angeles, California, United States. He is serving on the Los Angeles City Council for the 15th district. Buscaino is a member of the democratic party. He was elected on January to fill the vacancy left by Janice Hahn, following her successful bid for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Joe Buscaino has lived in the 15th Council District all his life. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Harbor Area, the San Pedro YWCA’s Racial Justice Committee and the Advisory Council for the Los Angeles Watts Summer Games. He is a member of Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church and is active in select Italian-American organizations

Joe Buscaino Age

His age is not indicated in his record.

Joe Buscaino Net worth

He has an estimated net worth of $6 million.

Joe Buscaino Family

Buscaino parents were Italians Immigrants, who emigrated from Italy over 40 years ago. He has not revealed more information regarding his family.

Joe Buscaino Wife

Buscaino married Geralyn Buscaino who is a teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District. The couples were blessed with two children.

Joe Buscaino Education

He graduated from cum laude, with a B.A. in communication and also from California State University,in Dominguez Hills.

Joe Buscaino City Council

He was appointed by the city council president to serve as chairman of the Public Works Committee. The committee has oversight of the Department of Public Works, and its Bureaus of Sanitation, Street Services, Street Lighting, Engineering, and Contract Administration.

The Department of Public Works is the city’s third-largest department and has a staff of more than 5,000 employees, who are responsible for the construction, renovation, and operation of City facilities and infrastructure.

The department also installs sewers, constructs storm drains, and builds the city’s streets, as well as public buildings, rights-of-way, and service facilities. His other committee include Public Safety, which includes the LAPD, LAFD and Emergency Management; Trade, Commerce & Tourism, which includes the Port of LA, Los Angeles World Airports and the LA Convention Center; and Information Technology and General Services, which includes the General Services Department, Information Technology Department and Los Angeles City Clerk’s office.

Joe Buscaino Committees

• Arts, Parks, Health, Aging & River
• Public Safety (Vice Chair)
• Public Works & Gang Reduction (Chair)
• Trade, Commerce & Tourism (Vice Chair)
• Ad Hoc on Special Olympics

Joe Buscaino League of Cities

On November 10, 2018 Joe Buscaino was named the First Vice President of National League of Cities after he was serving as the Second Vice President of NLC. In 2018, the annual NLC City Summit was held in Los Angeles, where he acted as the host of the event for over 5,000 mayors, city officials, and staff members. The City Summit is the National League of Cities’ conference for local leaders to convene and collaborate on solutions to the common challenges facing America’s cities. Each year, the conference is hosted in a different U.S. city – offering fresh and new best practices for government officials to improve the conditions back home. The National League of Cities (NLC) is an advocacy organization in the United States that represents the country’s 19,000 cities, towns, and villages along with 49 state municipal leagues. Created in 1924, it has evolved into a leading membership organization providing education, research, support, and advocacy to city leaders across America

Joe Buscaino Accomplishments

Joe Buscaino Basic Car Plan in the past 50 years, the LA’s population has grown by 25% while the LAPD has grown by 30%; however, the number of officers on the street has decreased in that time. Cognizant of the need for more officers patrolling the streets, Councilman Buscaino paired up with Councilman Bonin to produce the Back to Basic Car Plan, a 10 point plan that encourages the LAPD to return to their “Basic Car Plan,” a model implemented in 1969 that saw a 1% reduction in crime while nationwide crime rates soared by 55%. Under the Back to Basic Car Plan, the City will revisit the LAPD’s deployment formulas in order to establish reasonable minimum patrol staffing levels. The implementation of minimum patrol staff levels, along with other changes that encourage operational flexibility and integration with local communities, ensures that the Back to Basic Car Plan reflects a robust vision to combat crime and establish relationships between the LAPD and the constituents they serve. He has comprehensive plans to address homelessness, both the San Pedro and LA as whole.

The first step that he took was to plan the expansion of the LAHSA Emergency Response Team, which since 2015 has provided nearly 5,000 individuals with either referrals, direct services, or in the case of 235 constituents, a variety of housing placements. The new plan also includes the creation of a two-member Mental Health Team, who assist the Emergency Response Team. His second step in the plan was the creation of a LAPD footbeat patrol in downtown San Pedro and on Gaffey St. between 1st and 14th streets. The beat patrol has been in place since 2015. The third step in the homelessness plan was creating the South Bay Cities Homelessness Committee, which enables dialogue amongst the South Bay Cities, many of whom suffer from severe homelessness issues. The Committee provides a forum for collaboration, which is much-needed if we want to eliminate homelessness on a city-wide basis in LA.

His fourth step as councilman he planned to promote the permanent support in housing which the Councilman views as a viable means of drastically decreasing homelessness. By providing Section 8 Housing Vouchers, the city can not only relocate homeless constituents to housing, but moreover, can be proactive in preventing constituents from falling into homelessness. The most recent action regarding step four of the homelessness plan was the construction of the Vermont Villas, a 79-unit supportive housing project which primarily serves homeless veterans in the Harbor Gateway area. In the fifth step he was towards eliminating the homelessness and creating San Pedro to the Wilmington Homelessness and Taskforces. The decision to create the community-specific taskforces was partially influenced by the presence of 1200 constituents at a lively 2015 community forum on homelessness, held in San Pedro’s Warner Grand Theatre. The forum reinforced the idea that homelessness is a problem best solved by direct engagement with the local community; this is what the taskforces aim to accomplish.

In the sixth councilman his steps was towards reducing homelessness in LA is cleaning up homeless encampments around the district. This process—which happens every weekend—is done with the help of the City’s Bureau of Sanitation and Watershed Protection Unit. The goal of these clean-up projects, like the April 2015 clean-up outside of Ante’s Restaurant in San Pedro, is to respect the individual rights of the district’s homeless but ensure that their living areas are sanitary, safe, and not conducive to drug use or violence. The penultimate step in the Councilman’s homelessness plan was the creation and 2016 passage of the City’s Comprehensive Homeless Strategy (CHS). The CHS provides a road map of the City’s efforts to reduce homelessness over the next decade, which includes $100 million in funding.

This city-level funding comes in addition to $600,000 in South Bay-specific funding by the LA County. This combination of funding ensures that District 15 has proper and community-specific resources to combat its issues with homelessness. The final step in Councilman Buscaino’s strategy to eliminate homelessness is the promotion of Harbor Interfaith’s GoFundMe campaign; Harbor Interfaith are a team who provide services “including shelter, transitional housing, food, job placement, advocacy, child care, education and life skills training”. Their campaign has currently raised $5,200, funds which provide much-needed aid to the homeless community in San Pedro. By promoting their services in addition to the funding provided by the City and County, Buscaino hopes to address the issue of homelessness from all angles.

Joe Buscaino Watts

In 2015 Joe Buscaino successfully lobbied for the creation of Watts Serenity Park, a 1.13 acre parcel of land that was previously vacant and often crippled by drug use and violent crimes. A $5 million construction project, the land offers the Watts community a safe space for community recreation, complete with play equipment for kids, a Fitness Zone for exercising the area of adults, and skate park. He also pushed the renovation and re-opening the 109th Street Pool and Rec Center in July 2016. A $4 million project that created 18 jobs, the area now offers residents the option of using a baseball diamond, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, a children’s play area, tennis courts, a multipurpose sports field, and the 109th Street Pool, complete with a splash pad for younger childrens. In March he announced the 103rd Streetscape Improvement Project, which utilizes $1.25 million in METRO funding to ensure an improved experience for pedestrians using the 103rd St. blue line stop.

Improvements to the streetscape include: 5 irrigated landscaped median islands, a gateway monument, access ramps, trash receptacles, benches, bicycle racks, way-finding signage, high visibility crosswalks, and sidewalk improvements, all of which enable a better relationship between residents of 103rd St and their community. His improvements towards the 103rd plan, he planned to part $2million in Green Streets funding given to the 15th District to make improvements to the historic Watts Towers area. These improvements aim to revitalize the area by planting hundreds of new trees, repaving sidewalks, repairing and replacing lights, and investing in the development of the Watts Towers Cultural Crescent.  He was encouraged to improve the business to greater heights inorder to encourage the councils to involve themselves in the revitalization of Watts, and the most example to that is the Local, project of the renowned chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson.

Locol is a fresh take on fast food that offers healthy, affordable options to the Watts community—everything on the menu is priced under $8. In 2017, Locol was recognized as the LA Times Restaurant of the Year.  He was promoted to the community events of the Watts, which include the Winter Wonderland, Watts Cinco de Mayo, and Watts Dia de Los Muertos. The Winter Wonderland features food, crafts, a tree lighting ceremony, real snow, and sledding, and has had attendance in the thousands since its creation in 2014. The Cinco de Mayo and Dia de Los Muertos celebrations, meanwhile, were started as a way of celebrating the rich Mexican heritage found throughout Los Angeles; the events were highly popular in their first year (2016), and are expected to bring the Watts community together for years to come.

Joe Buscaino San Pedro

Joe Buscaino the Councilman had collaborated with the LA Great Streets Team and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative to produce the Gaffey Street Conceptual Plan, which outlines an estimated $7.2 million in improvements along the iconic entrance to San Pedro. The funding will allow for changes like landscaped medians, high visibility crosswalks, traffic signal of synchronization, coordinated street furniture, sidewalk repairs and street sweeping, a solar powered Soofa bench, landscape enhancements and public art. The Conceptual Plan will calm traffic, improve the Gaffey St. pedestrian experience, make the landscape more drought tolerant, and provide more public spaces for the San Pedro community. He helped in the creation and support of Clean San Pedro, a non-profit organization dedicated to cleaning and revitalizing the Pacific Corridor area of San Pedro. CSP was built by residents of San Pedro who were frustrated with the lack of beautification efforts in their city.

These activists now perform a variety of functions—daily litter and debris removals, reporting of graffiti, weekly sidewalk cleaning, with the purpose of preserving their city’s natural beauty. See cleansanpedro.net for more information. During further research it has been determined that the councilman did not have anything to do with the formation of Clean San Pedro, nor has he ever donated any monies to the 501c3 non-profit. The san pedro courthouse helped his office to oversee the search for a developer who could transform the space occupied by the now-closed San Pedro Courthouse. The courthouse closed in January 2013, and since then, the area has been the subject of frequent conversations, as its location in the heart of downtown San Pedro makes it lucrative property.

In November 2016, the LA County Board of Supervisors announced plans to team up with real estate firm Holland Partner Group to build a multi-use development in the 1.8 acre space. Past projections by the Supervisors indicated that the area could accommodate up to 250 residential apartments. The san pedro Waterfront helped in the Redevelopment of the project for four years, and san pedro ports helped in O’ Call fishing of the village that has undergone a steady decline in the revenues and community engagement. While busy on weekends, the market is often dull during the week, and as a result, roughly a fifth of the shops have been forced to close. That trend is about to change, however, thanks to the announcement of the San Pedro Waterfront Redevelopment Project. A $100 million dollar endeavor, the project will revitalize much of LA’s waterfront.

The Ports O’ Call village will be torn down and replaced with the San Pedro Public Market, a 16 acre development that will feature restaurants, markets, bars, shops, offices, a waterfront promenade, and an amphitheater for live entertainment. Construction on the project is set to begin in late 2017. The Push faster rescue boats helped in the April 2015 tragic accident that caused loss lives to many people. He has been so fast to help the rescuing of boats and people. His council helped in the continuity of advocating the purchase of new, faster response boats, a change that could potentially save lives. The current response boat for the Port of LA is Fireboat 2, which was acquired by the city Fire Department in 2003; Fireboat 2 is the largest boat of its kind west of the Mississippi, but with that size comes a tradeoff of speed. The addition of smaller, faster rescue boats could resolve that problem.

Joe Buscaino Prior service

Joe Buscaino successful elections to the City Council helped him to serve as a police for over 15 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. His assignments included the Office of the Chief of Police, West Traffic Division, Emergency Operations Division and senior lead officer for the Harbor area. He created the LAPD’s Teen Community Police Advisory Board, an organization that works with teens to problem solve and bridge the barriers between police and teenagers. The program was implemented citywide in 2011

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