AT LENGTH-Ask anyone who has ever had to deal with the City of Los Angeles, they will tell you that it takes “forever” to get anything done. Be it building and safety, the Department of Transportation or the Port of Los Angeles. And it doesn’t matter the size of the project, either. I still remember how it took seven years from concept to completion to finish the little parking lot on 6th and Mesa streets.
The bigger the bureaucracy, the longer it takes to get it approved.
This is the obvious problem Mayor Eric Garcetti has in his “back to basics” approach to fixing Los Angeles City Hall. Upgrading the technology only goes so far in solving what’s wrong with Los Angeles. You still have to have people who make the system work and who can make a reasoned decision in something less than seven months or seven years.
Former Mayor James Hahn once had a cure for this, but it seems to have been forgotten. He called on all department heads to hold monthly meetings in each council district and committed them to group problem-solving. It seems a bit quaint these days to actually get everyone around the table to solve problems, but it still works when the directive is clear.
The problem is that Los Angeles is a top-down organization, and the top, for most of us, is a distant 20-mile trek up the 110 Freeway that gets more congested with traffic the closer you get to City Hall. It would be far easier if City Hall was open for business on Sundays.
The one unfulfilled Mayor Hahn promise was to bring City Hall to the people. What an amazing concept—a local office for every department with which a citizen has to conduct business. I personally know people who have had to go to the Van Nuys Building and Safety office for a specific “plan check” because the San Pedro office couldn’t handle it.
In the sage words of former State Sen. Tom Hayden, “the only problem with fighting City Hall in Los Angeles is finding City Hall!”
Yes, it’s time to actually bring our city government back to the districts with fully functioning department offices. And it wouldn’t be too much to ask for the entire city council to have at least one meeting annually in each of the 15 council districts.
If the mayor and the city’s leaders desire to have more civic engagement by its stakeholders, they should be more willing to decamp from City Hall more often, and gain a little perspective on how things look from a distance. Yet, even so, this is only a partial cure for what makes this city so unmanageable.
The amount of time it takes to get projects of almost any size finished makes Los Angeles the city in which many avoid doing business, because time equals money. Unless, that is, you are the billion-dollar developer who pays for “fast-tracking” and there is a perceived economic imperative to what you do—think LA Live, think the film industry and think global trade at the Port of Los Angeles.
The case in point in the Harbor Area is the contrast between moving forward with the waterfront developments, commonly referred to as “bridge to breakwater,” and the Port of Los Angeles’ current drive to keep pace with the global shipping industry.
The Ports O’ Call development plan has been in exclusive, closed-door negotiations for I forget how long, and the Yusen terminal expansion contract has just been announced at a cost of $42 million, with an expected total of $64 million, and an uncertain commitment from Yusen on spending a similar amount. The Ports O’ Call deal is dragging its feet over terms and conditions, while Yusen will be built at breakneck speed. But why?
The Yusen terminal will accommodate larger super-container ships, capable of carrying up to 22,000 TEUs under the Vincent Thomas Bridge. The ships are so big that they may not be able to use the turning basin in the West Basin. This is one of many terminals that are slated for expansion as POLA’s response to the Panama Canal expansion and its fear other ports are siphoning off cargo container traffic from the Pacific Rim.
Trade that brings $415 billion worth of cargo into this port and provides $400 million in revenues and reportedly creates 1.1 million jobs in California is what I call an “economic imperative.” The twin-port complex is nationally significant, since some 45 percent of all imports are brought to the Los Angeles and Long Beach docks and then transported to Chicago and beyond.
While these numbers seem impressive, they do little for the local economy as the investments in terminals chase dwindling employment, caused by automation and smaller tax revenues into the city’s general fund. The San Pedro waterfront developments are but a footnote to these much grander enterprises, and yet, as impressed as we are with wealth and jobs created, much of that wealth and the majority of those jobs are not left here.
The communities surrounding the two ports have for a long time suffered the effects of global expansion of industrial trade, but have seen few of the jobs created by this expansion. In fact, as many as 35,000 of those jobs created evaporated with the NAFTA free trade treaty during the 1980s and 1990s.
The Ports O’ Call waterfront development, such as it has been presented, is at best a poor trade-off for the loss of those jobs, and in the real world of global capitalism, small change for paying back this area of Los Angeles for this great economic injustice.
We will be lucky if the Bridge to Breakwater gets built within 7 years.
(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy- Don't listen to that man with the white cap on he might say something that you agree with!" He was elected to the presidency of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council in 2014 and been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen … and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com where this column was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 56
Pub: Jul 10, 2015
