LOS ANGELES

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE-Friday, September 30, the LA City Council will convene to either place the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative on the March 7, 2017 ballot — or immediately adopt this citizen initiative word-for word, as required by law. 

Since the measure is an historic and fundamental reform of a City Council that has grown transfixed by cutting multimillion-dollar backroom real estate deals, we'll be at City Hall with a careful eye to possible political mischief aimed at keeping it off the ballot. 

“We” is the Coalition to Preserve LA, which has had a good month despite a bizarre opposition campaign, funded by three global billionaires, one from Australia and one from Miami, who had hoped to convince voters that we somehow plan to end rent control and “halt all development,” and other absurd conspiracy theories.

(Note: On Friday the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to place the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative on the March 7, 2017 ballot. Read that update here.)  

Ironic, then, to see the City Council schedule yet another backroom meeting for Friday, an “executive session,” to discuss possibly suing our movement. Such a bone-headed action would serve to further anger residents sick of surface street gridlock, destruction of neighborhood character, displacement of the working class and poor, and Wild West gentrification fueled by land speculators and skyscraper flippers. 

More likely, the City Council is not going to make such a mistake, and is merely holding yet another illegal backroom meeting, an “executive session” where no litigation is seriously discussed (the City Council is allowed to meet as a full body in private only to discuss lawsuits, nothing else). 

It's far more likely that any “executive session” held Friday will simply be another Brown Act violation, an illegal meeting at which much hand-wringing unfolds among City Council members concerning “what to do about” the tens of thousands of LA residents who say their communities are being paved over to provide skyrocketing profits to developers. 

The Coalition to Preserve LA will be just outside their door, to watchdog things — people like Jay Beeber, the folk hero who got rid of LA's hated red-light cameras. This San Fernando Valley resident proved that City Hall was lying when it said that the universally hated $465 red light camera tickets were reducing accidents. That was a lie. Beeber proved it — not one of the city's 50,000 municipal employees — by delving into the accident data itself. 

Also present on Friday will be attorney Grace Yoo, who has stared down well-connected political forces in Koreatown, where the pressure is on from City Hall to wipe out affordable neighborhoods because luxury skyscrapers are “inevitable.” The developer of one proposed 27-story edifice has already destroyed several affordable rentals and will wipe out even more if the City Council votes to approve his utterly illegal plan. 

This lack of planning — top city officials openly admit that their “customer” is developers, not city residents — has brought us predictable results: a steep vacancy rate of about 15% in all luxury housing built in the past 10 years, and skyrocketing homelessness fed by the loss of 22,000 affordable rent-stabilized rental units since 2000, now demolished or converted to condos. 

And endless gridlock on streets that cannot absorb the giant glass boxes marching across Los Angeles. 

It's no wonder that volunteers who support the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative hail from the Westside, Eastside, South LA, Wilshire District, Hollywood, West Adams, East and West Valley, San Pedro, Westchester, Northeast LA and scores of other communities. 

Naturally, I will be there on Friday, having been accused by our three billionaire opponents of personally promoting a “housing ban” — yet another conspiracy theory by the anti-campaign, which cannot beat us on the merits next March, and so has resorted to ridiculousness. 

Earlier this week, in an exchange on the NextDoor social media messaging system, I explained to West Valley residents that the busy U.S. Post Office in Woodland Hills is set for destruction. But even worse, after months of backdoor meetings with key City Council members, the developers had announced plans to build a massive 335-unit luxury housing project just a stone's throw from the 101 Freeway. In the works for a long time, this distinctly awful development was finally being sprung on the unpleasantly surprised neighborhood.

What makes freeway-adjacent housing bad development? We call them “Black Lung Lofts” at the Coalition, based on an LA Weekly cover story several years ago that delved into USC's landmark Children's Health Study into thousands of children who lived within two blocks of a freeway, or about 500 to 550 feet. USC researchers definitively showed that children's still-developing lungs (they develop until age 18) suffered high levels of permanent lung damage. 

The suffering and millions of dollars in medical care due to Black Lung Lofts will be vast, but at least we know about the threat to children now, and we can stop jamming children into housing within two blocks of freeways. 

But the City Council won't stop. Children suffering from millions of dollars in health damages must be weighed against their desires to run for higher office, after all. 

In Los Angeles, by the time a bad development like the Post Office luxury rental blob is unveiled to the neighbors, the deal has been cut in City Hall backroom meetings, the political palms greased. By the time such a project is publicly announced, the developer is all but assured a huge profit by being allowed to ignore the zoning to build as big as he wants. 

Our measure puts an end to these backroom deals, in which City Council members get rolled by developers, time and again — and LA residents suffer for it. 

But far more important than the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative's timeout on City Council backroom deals is the work we force them to proactively undertake. Our citizen intiative forces the City Council to, in essence, eat its vegetables rather than grab for the dessert: Come up with an actual General Plan — an integrated and interwoven plan for LA's parks, streets, sewers, housing, open space, safety services. 

That is actually the City Council's core job, to write one every five years. Yet it is a job they have refused to do since 2005, when they very quietly voted never to have to write another General Plan for Los Angeles.

True story: Members of our Coalition found the one-page document in which the City Council — the nation's highest-paid City Council with salaries of $189,041 a year — relieved itself of its fundamental duty of writing a General Plan. One City Hall elected official insisted to me recently that, “We had to do suspend writing a General Plan because it was during the Recession, and we had to put planning aside” to cope with other troubles. 

Interesting, how lying works — or doesn't work quite as well, lately — at City Hall. After all, the Recession was not yet upon us in 2005. In fact. 2005 saw a booming economy and an LA development frenzy similar to the one unfolding today. 

But City Hall elected leaders love their dessert — high-end wining and dining by the developers and their lobbyists — and hate eating their vegetables. Nobody is going to hand $100,000 to an LA politician's favorite charity or pet project because that Council member finally decided to lead an update of LA's cracking ancient water mains, or an effort to identify the water source that's going to feed City Hall's thirsty skyscrapers. 

So we'll be there on Friday, as the Los Angeles City Council undertakes a required, and some say historic, vote. To put a citizen initiative on the ballot measure that lets LA residents fix a broken system at City Hall.

(Jill Stewart, a former journalist,  is campaign director for the Coalition to Preserve LA, sponsor of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.)

-cw

PERSPECTIVE-Both the New York Times and LA Times have recently published informative articles about the status of public pensions, particularly Calpers. LA Times’ Jack Dolan and James Koren have provided sober analysis in recent weeks. 

The reporters have echoed the same concerns that I, Jack Humphreville, respected members of academia and many in other publications have been sounding for years – concerns over the diminishing sustainability of the defined benefit plans that almost every politician at the state and local government levels have ignored. A few, including Governor Brown and former Governor Schwarzenegger, have attempted modest reforms and failed, because of the death-grip public unions have on our elected officials. 

The NY Times article, by Mary Williams Walsh, is particularly interesting because it reads like a case study. For all intents and purposes, it is one. It deals with a small fund managed by Calpers. Since this particular fund is so small, it is easier for readers to wrap their heads around the math. But it is the same math behind every other defined benefit plan, large and small. Just as a lab experiment on a single cancerous cell can speak volumes about the greater disease, so can this case shed light on the cancer of public pensions. 

Basically, the problem boils down to using aggressive favorable assumptions to gauge the financial health of plans, plans which are required to fully guarantee the promises made to their members. The assumptions have masked the weakness of the underlying numbers. 

The important difference between a market vs actuarial approach to funding defined benefit plans is critical, as the article suggests. As the small pension unit in the article learned, Calpers charged them the market rate to liquidate the plan, which was a sum far greater than the actuarial value Calpers uses to assess the health of any plan. 

Quite a shock to the participants who assumed things were just peachy. 

Calpers wants it both ways: use the blue-sky view for public disclosure, but penalize participants based on reality. It’s called “having your cake and eating it too” (a few of my colleagues at CityWatch know how much I detest that expression, but it applies here.) 

The truth is, Calpers should not be hanging its hat on one approach vs the other. A range of values needs to be shared with the public, and funding should be based on at least a blend of outcomes.

That means either taxpayers fork over more money, or the participating employees contribute more. The taxpayers are already covering too much, not to mention bearing the risk if there are insufficient funds to pay participants. 

How much more participants should pay is arguable, but it would cause some degree of pain in any event – manageable pain. 

In the private sector, typical employees pay 6.2% for SSA retirement and contribute at least 6% into a 401K. State employees contribute anywhere from 5% to 11.5% of their salaries. Pretty good compared to the 12.2% absorbed by their counterparts. Safety workers are at the higher end, but can retire much earlier and collect up to 90% of their salaries. 

A private-sector worker would pay $1 million to purchase an annuity comparable to an average CalPERS’ benefit starting at age 60. A state employee earning an average of $100,000 and contributing 10% would pay in $300,000 over 30 years in gross terms. Obviously, discounting the amount would lower it considerably. 

That’s a pretty large gap. In any event, Calpers would still be a good deal for employees if their contribution rates doubled. 

And why not? 

Investors pay more, in the form of a lower yield, for less exposure to risk. Why shouldn’t public employees pay a premium for what is a risk-free, lifetime benefit? 

The system is not going to collapse tomorrow. It’s similar to a sinking ship, which takes on water but stays afloat … that is until buoyancy is lost. 

When that happens, it goes down faster than the Edmond Fitzgerald. 

Time to start pumping and sealing the leak.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ROAD DIET RAGE--I have had the misfortune to be elected to the board of my local Neighborhood Council, which is involved in promoting a road diet for the Miracle Mile’s Sixth Street, a one-mile stretch of roadway that saw 135 recorded collisions between 2011 and 2015, including one death, and several more deaths since then. Note that many minor crashes are not reported to the CHP’s database.

Naturally, a handful of particularly blustery sorts are aghast that traffic might actually be slowed down by a road diet, and predict every sort of calamity to ensue should it be approved. Of course, they ignore the very real blood-and-bones calamities that occur nearly every month on this stretch. So I shall reprint for you the letter I just sent to our Nextdoor group, where the self-righteously indignant have been raging.

When you look at ACTUAL road diet implementations, you find that they do not increase congestion–in fact, they often alleviate it slightly. I have previously posted links to the dozens of studies from all over the US and the world that support this assertion. The intuitive is rarely related to actuality. The Federal Highway Administration recommends road diets for streets such as Sixth as “a proven safety countermeasure.” Bike lanes are often used, as I have mentioned several times, as techniques for creating road diets, but, although several of you would “never ride” your bikes on Sixth, I do, every day, and so do many dozens of others. It is a major bicycle commuting corridor.

Convenient tax-subsidized parking and saving a few seconds on a one-mile passage are not valid justifications for terrorizing all the pedestrians and cyclists who use the street, as well as the many motorists (and even building owners) who have suffered property damage and injuries, including severe ones, caused by Sixth Street’s “dangerous by design” configuration,.

Barbara G. presented her proposal, and went far over the time allotted for comments, getting more of her say in than anyone else, including board members, but the majority of the attendance was not convinced.

I have been studying road diets and related interventions for twenty years, and I am convinced that it is right for Sixth Street. I have lived near Burnside and Sixth for sixteen years now, and I have personally seen the carnage.

Listen, if you hate the road diet, write Ryu. If you support the road diet, write Ryu. His email is [email protected].

I have seen the bodies. I have heard the testimonies of fear. Neighbors are afraid to walk on the sidewalks–on the sidewalks! A handful of people shouldn’t have the power to condemn their neighbors to death and terror for the sake of a few seconds’ “convenience.”

And for your further delectation, this all-too-appropriate comment from Minnesota, entitled, “A Cure for Fear of Parking Loss.” 

(Richard Risemberg is a writer. His current professional activities are focused on sustainable development and lifestyle. This column was posted first at Flying Pigeon. ) 

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY--Metro’s Measure M on the November ballot adds LA County’s fourth half-cent transportation sales tax increase since 1980, and gives Metro two full cents in “forever” sales taxes. But, is Metro’s Plan as advanced in Measure M really perfect enough to cast in concrete for perpetuity? The Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association has studied Metro’s transportation plan for more than two years and wanted to support it. Unfortunately, we believe the plan is flawed by five inherent weaknesses and we must recommend a NO vote. Let’s give Metro a couple of years to perfect their plan for the 2018 ballot. 

We agree that Los Angeles County desperately needs better transportation solutions – to move people more effectively on streets, freeways and in public transportation. 

Taxpayers have been contributing to Metro’s coffers since 1980 when they approved Measure A, Metro’s first half-cent forever sales tax. They again ponied up in 1990 with Measure C, Metro’s second half-cent forever sales tax. In 2008, they passed Measure R, Metro’s third half-cent sales tax, which was not forever but expires in 2037. As a result, we are currently paying a 1-1/2 cent sales tax to Metro, which brought them about $2.3 billion in FY2014. 

And now, we are being asked to pass Measure M, adding a fourth half-cent forever sales tax. It also removes the expiration date from Measure R to make it a forever tax as well. So, if taxpayers pass Measure M, we will all be paying a two-cent transportation sales tax in perpetuity. For example, LA City’s sales tax will rise to 9 1/2 percent – and stay at least that high forever! Is Metro’s plan really perfected enough to warrant this? 

We give Metro credit for working hard on the plan -- with the County, its 83 cities and its unincorporated areas, looking at hundreds of projects across nine subregions. Using a bottom-up selection process, Metro used local input to focus on the 39 major highway and transit projects listed in their August 2016 Measure M Flyer – “Facts About The Los Angeles County Traffic Improvement Plan.” 

The key questions are whether these projects are good enough to truly improve the County’s traffic gridlock and whether we can be sure the projects get built as promised. We think the answer to both questions is no, because Metro’s plan is flawed by five weaknesses: 

• Guarantees are weak; 

• Parking plan is weak; 

• Management capability is weak; 

• Route implementation is weak; and 

• Long-term public commitment is weak. 

Guarantees are Weak 

Measure M does not include strong guarantees that promised projects will really be built – and as we know, Metro has reneged on promises before. 

Look at Metro’s 1980 ballot measure brochure transit route map on the left. This was Metro’s promise for its first half-cent transportation sales tax. There’s a line from Sylmar to Long Beach. There’s another line from El Monte to San Pedro. And another from Burbank Airport to Canoga Park. But none of these were ever built. 

Oh yes, the Orange Line busway in the Valley is similar to the Canoga Park route, but it was not built with Metro funds (former Assembly Speaker, now Senator Bob Hertzberg found the funds.) 

The Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association was worried about promised projects being built and identified this as a key concern in our March recommendations letter to Metro. We told them that ironclad written guarantees are absolutely necessary for Measure M’s success. 

Measure M does include some new provisions that help ensure that projects will be built. For example, paragraph 11.a of Measure M’s implementing ordinance provides that “the Metro Board of Directors may amend the ‘Schedule of Funds Available’ … to accelerate a project, provided that any such amendments shall not reduce the amount of funds assigned to any other project or program … or delay the Schedule of Funds Available for any other project or program.” 

In other words, you can’t rob one project to pay for another. This is good. But, when Metro CEO Phil Washington spoke at our August Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting, we asked him a question about guarantees – expecting him to quote this paragraph. 

Inexplicably, he instead talked about the Measure’s Independent Taxpayer Oversight Committee and how they would ensure projects are built. How does a seven-member committee of technical specialists hired and fired by Metro ensure taxpayers that their projects are built? No way! It seems that Metro is planning for flexibility to do what it wants rather than what the public wants. Maybe the committee should be nine members from the public – one for each of the nine subregions that Metro used to develop its bottom-up plan? 

Vote NO – Give Metro two years to develop ironclad guarantees. 

Parking Plan Is Weak 

The key to any public transportation system is strong ridership – make it easy for people to get to stations. Unfortunately, Metro’s Measure M includes no parking plan. In fact, Metro’s proposed Measure M Ordinance includes the word “parking” only once, and then it’s about bicycle parking, not car parking. And, Metro’s April 2016 Active Transportation Strategic Plan also only addresses bicycle parking. So, why is Metro ignoring parking? 

We met with Metro’s new Director of Parking Management and know that Metro is beginning to work on a parking plan. But, it is not ready yet – and shouldn’t a parking plan be part of Measure M right now – not later? Other transportation systems in major metropolitan areas have learned that parking is necessary to secure ridership. In fact, the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association sent Metro a detailed letter in June explaining how Washington DC had drastically increased automobile parking to improve ridership. And, we don’t even have a parking plan? Are we supposed to walk or ride our bikes to a station four miles away? 

Vote NO – Give Metro two years to include a detailed parking plan in their ballot measure. 

Management Capability Is Weak 

Metro doesn’t have a good track record managing large transportation projects. A few examples are the original tunneling problems on the Red and Purple subway lines, the lack of sufficient rail cars on the brand new Expo Line, and the massive overruns and schedule delays on the recent I-405 improvement project, including a $400 million lawsuit against Metro by the project contractor. 

Now Metro is asking voters to approve a massive transportation plan where multiple huge projects will be built at the same time. Are we to expect that Metro’s management capability has so improved over the last few years? The answer is very probably no. At our August Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting, Metro CEO Phil Washington told us that he is working on a detailed program management plan. But working on a plan and having a complete management capability are two different things. Is Metro really ready? We don’t think so. 

Vote NO – Give Metro two years to prove they have a strong management capability in place. 

Route Implementation Is Weak 

Rapid transit must have effective routes and fast vehicles. You can have a great route, but implement it with a slow bus or tram and ridership will not materialize. We fear that Metro’s plan suffers weak route implementation. Let’s look at some illustrative examples in the San Fernando Valley. 

There are seven major Valley projects in Metro’s plan, as listed here by opening year. Together, they form a rectangular route from Van Nuys to Warner Center to Canoga Park to Sylmar and back to Van Nuys, with offshoot lines through the Sepulveda Pass and to the Red/Gold Lines. But while the routes look effective, their implementation does not. It raises some serious questions about Metro’s plan for the Valley – and the entire County. 

Why, for instance, are the first four Valley projects all busways? Probably because busways are cheap and quicker to build. But, they are slow and lack the capacity of rail. We know – the Valley’s Orange Line is a dedicated busway that was over-capacity on the day it opened. But, not to worry, the Orange Line is being improved by Project 4 – except that this project simply adds a very few grade separations to the existing busway – and still leaves many street crossings. 

Again, not to worry, the Orange Line is converted to light rail with Project 7. But, it will still have many at-grade street crossings. And, this project does not open until 2057 – one of the very last Measure M projects completed. Even when the project is complete, the Valley route rectangle will only have rail on two of its four sides, and busways on the other two. And we all know that once these busways are in place, it will be decades before they might be upgraded. So, expect to be stuck with the projects we start with. 

Yes, this is bad implementation. Metro is telling the Valley that we should be happy with slower, less-efficient transit. Metro’s Red and Purple Lines are light-rail subways operating in downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the Westside. Metro’s Blue, Gold, and Expo Lines are ground-level rail running from downtown to Long Beach, Santa Monica, and Azusa, with a few routes even having dedicated rights-of-way. And, the Valley is supposed to be thrilled with slow busways running through busy intersections. We’re not. And, neither are other parts of the County that Measure M is shortchanging. 

Vote NO – Give Metro two years to fix the implementation problems in their plan. 

Long-Term Pubic Commitment Is Weak 

When Metro began planning for Measure M many years ago, they started with a 40-year sales tax increase built around a 40-year bottom-up plan. The tax would generate more than $120 billion over the plan’s 40-year period, and Metro would spend this on critical highway and transit projects. So far, so good! But, in July, when Metro realized that they needed to accelerate many project schedules to attract voters, Measure M became a forever tax that never ends. Here’s the catch: Metro changed to a forever tax but didn’t commit to a future bottom-up public planning process once their 40-year plan is finished. 

The Measure M Ordinance – the document that implements the ballot measure – has no specific provisions for detailed public involvement in another bottom-up process to select the next set of projects after 2057. Sure, that seems like a long time from now for some of us, but not for our children and grandchildren. Don’t they deserve a commitment that Metro will keep them involved? Metro is committing taxpayers to a forever tax without a forever plan – and that’s a serious flaw. 

Decisions about public funding of projects should be made by the public, not politicians. 

Vote NO – Give Metro two years to develop a commitment to public participation in future planning and correct the other weaknesses in their plan.

(Bob Anderson is a board member of the Sherman Oaks Homeowner Association. He can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Tags: Bob Anderson, Sherman Oaks Homeowner Association, Measure M, Metro, SF Valley transportation

ELECTION 2016--There are a few obvious truths in our 21st Century, "small world after all" nation and globe.  One is that speaking only one language is a surefire way to limit your financial future.  Another is that being illiterate in any language, particularly English (our current global scientific/financial "lingua franca"), is a surefire way to limit your financial future.  Which is why Latino children are again being attacked. 

Latino children, like any children, deserve to have as bright a future as any of us.  Hence, when Proposition 227 passed in 1998, it should be remembered that much of the start of this effort to End Bilingual Education came from Latino families in Santa Ana--some who predominantly spoke Spanish--who wanted their children to achieve the American Dream and who valued their children's education. 

Much of the "bilingual education" had to do with either political correctness or just a nice, fat, financial bonus ($5000/year, approximately) for teachers certified as bilingual.  English-speaking children with Latino last names were being yanked out of normal classes and slammed into "bilingual" classes that scored horribly on standardized tests in either English OR Spanish. 

It was terrible, and the Latino parents in Santa Ana (who clearly love their children) wanted a choice. Proposition 227 passed, and English immersion was required.  Bilingual education was limited only to those parents who specifically made the choice to enter those classes (and who usually had children scoring high in either language, and in schools who focused on the well-being of the students, and not teachers' salaries). 

And students test scores throughout the state, including Latino student scores, then went up significantly. 

So Proposition 58, in an attempt to repeal Proposition 227, is rightfully viewed as a dangerous threat to Latino students, and which is being promoted by the same politically-correct (and financially-focused, to be sure!) lobbies that really don't give a hoot, and won't be there to help, the children that they hurt. 

For those of us not aware of Latino culture and its very close ties to the Spanish language, it should be pointed out that there is an emotional, and often painfully-important tie of Spanish to many Latinos (particularly those who are ambivalent of which identity should be first and foremost in their hearts and minds ... American, Latino, or both?).  Asking Asians and Europeans to switch to English is not nearly so hard as it is to many Latinos. 

Yet Latinos who never learn English, or at least become bilingual, have a horrid future in that they lose access to higher-paying jobs in a nation where blacks, Asians, and most Latinos do speak English in their everyday and financial transactions. 

And Latinos who grabbed the American Dream (let's keep the illegal/legal immigration out of the picture for the time being ... but both have benefited) either by supporting Proposition 227 or throwing out the corrupt rascals that led the City of Bell into the financial toilet have almost universally enjoyed financial and political benefit. 

Would anyone reasonable recommend that Latinos forsake the Spanish language?  Certainly not--in our international society, mastery of multiple languages is as beneficial as being computer-literate, or fiscally-literate. Whether it is Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, or any other major language of the world, it is vital to hold onto any form of multilingual capability available. 

But the bilingual education lobbies are dangerous--they seek to balkanize, they seek to profiteer, and they seek to control any group of individuals possible while claiming they "speak for them".  Hence the Useful Idiots at the LA Times who are promoting Proposition 58 are as dangerous as they've always been. 

And, of course, the LA Times and other typical knee-jerk liberal newspapers have almost never been on the side of Latinos, African-Americans, and other under-represented minorities...although it's to be presumed the "wizards of smart" at the Times probably think that they've got the backs of the Latino children they're sending to Poverty Purgatory by ignoring the dreadful history of bilingual education. 

We've too much to gain by being able to communicate with each other, and too much to lose by not communicating with each other, to let the Politically-Correct-But-Factually-Incorrect-And-Financially-Compromised creepies try to balkanize California yet again. 

Let's keep our students' test scores high, and let's demand our children be exposed (and, if possible, master more than one language) to English so that ALL students, including and especially Latino students, can enjoy the bright future that only the United States of America has to offer. 

Vote NO on Prop 58. Vote yes on a brighter future for all of our children.

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

EASTSIDER-It’s not often that the great State of California intrudes in the LA City Council’s wholesale slaughter of our neighborhoods, particularly by way of land use regulation. So it was a great surprise to our elected officials when not one, but two, Granny Unit (also known as accessory dwelling units and granny flats) bills, passed the legislature and are sitting on Governor Brown’s desk: AB 2299, and a companion bill, SB1069. 

I won’t get into the details of the bills here, since they are designed to work together and are technical, but if you want to track their histories, there is a great (free) resource available to all of us at the California Legislature’s bill tracking website here.      

Anyhow, back to the plot. A few months ago, I wrote in CityWatch about some of the 15 LA Planning Department proposed ordinances, particularly the emergency repeal of the City’s existing granny unit policy, as well as the grandfathering in of all existing illegal granny units. 

Clearly the Planning Department’s proposal to simply repeal the existing rules was a pretext to let the loose default State rules apply, and allow virtually everyone in LA to build up to a 1200 foot “auxiliary dwelling unit.” And, since we know that no one in LA City Planning can even put finger to keyboard without orders from the Council, the proposed emergency ordinance represented City Hall’s desire to simply bring in a Wild West Show of building -- even if the character and infrastructure of our residential neighborhoods go down the toilet. 

Step one was for the Council to “grandfather” in all of the existing granny units, proving that it does indeed pay to break the law. If you read the exact language of the new ordinance (Council File 14-0057-S8), it even includes anyone who has a building permit, or for that matter, even proposed plans. All this was authored by none other than our own Mitch O’Farrell. We in northeast LA thank you bunches, Mitch. The term “grandfather” now has new meaning. 

These events provoked a huge pushback from owners of single family homes in most neighborhoods, so the Council tried to finesse matters by approving the grandfathering first, and then putting the rest on hold while they tried to figure out rules that would mirror the loose state regulations -- all while appearing that they were saving us from those incompetent planners who wanted to simply repeal all the rules. Sure. 

Then along came Assembly Bill 2299 (Bloom D-Santa Monica) and Senate Bill 1069 (Wieckowski D-Fremont), both making substantive amendments to the very loose default State law regarding the permitting of granny units. This “affordable housing” adjunct is of huge statewide concern. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think there is any affordable housing in California, unless you want to live in the San Joaquin Valley.

This was one of those “while Rome burns” moments. While the LA City Council fiddled, both bills passed the state legislature and are currently sitting in front of Governor Brown waiting for his signatures. And all this because of the hastily rammed through motions of opposition by the LA City Council. 

Suddenly, the LA City Council wasn’t so sure about defaulting to state rules in the face of substantial changes to those rules. 

UPDATE! As I was writing this article, Jerry Brown signed both bills on Tuesday of this week. So much for the clout of LA in Sacramento. To give you a taste of what’s in store for us state wide, I can do no better than quote from the two bills’ authors. 

Wieckowski’s statement says in part: 

“Removing the most egregious obstacles to building these units will help to increase the supply of affordable housing in California and allow more people to remain in the communities they call home,” said Wieckowski, a member of the Senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee. “SB 1069 returns more power to homeowners and reins in some of the enormous fees and requirements levied by local agencies. Governor Brown’s action will lead to more housing, more jobs and shorter commutes.”  

And from Bloom’s announcement upon signature of AB 2299: 

“AB 2299 requires local governments to adopt accessory dwelling unit ordinances. Also known as second units or “granny flats”, ADUs are a creative affordable housing option often used by college students, elderly parents, or disabled individuals who need to live close to their families. Unfortunately, individuals who want to build these units are often caught in a web of cost-prohibitive local regulations that discourage the construction of ADUs. AB 2299 will ease and streamline current statewide regulations for ADUs by permitting local governments to adopt ADU ordinances and by adding specifications for what is required of those ordinances. These specifications include prohibiting the need for a passageway, increasing the permissible size of the units, and eliminating some parking requirements.” 

Now What? 

It seems pretty clear that Los Angeles has lost much of its ability to regulate granny units at all, and the Council is going to have to go back to the drawing board over the entire issue of what, if any, authority they have left. 

The actions of the City Council demonstrate what I am forced to call legislative incompetence. They had literally years of opportunity to sit down and adopt reasonable rules and regulations for the building of granny units in LA City. You know, balancing the integrity of residential neighborhoods with homeowners’ rights to maximize the use of their property and make a few bucks. 

Yet they did little until faced with an adverse court decision. They were ready to just pass the buck in favor of the State of California’s regulations, evidently unaware that the State has the same ability to legislate changes to their granny unit regulations that the City does -- and preemptive ones at that. 

Whether these bills help or hurt our local neighborhoods is a largely unanswered question. There is no doubt that both bills make absolutely clear that the ability to build granny units is a legislative priority in the State of California. Furthermore, the bills are designed specifically to limit local governments’ ability to restrict accessory dwelling unit construction. 

It seems to me that by being cute, by fooling around while there was still an opportunity to come up with reasonable regulations before the State stepped in, our glorious City Council has once again shot itself in the foot. And it is not clear how preemptive legislation is going to work in LA, an area that comprises close to 40% of the population of the State of California, an area suffering from crumbling infrastructure, densification and the rapid transformation of the very character of its neighborhoods. 

Stay tuned.

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-According to the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles still has the worst traffic congestion of any major city in the United States. This is old news to most of us (see photo above), but to finally address this gridlock, we need to better understand it. 

LA’s horrible traffic congestion does not result from a handful of poor decisions made by a few bad apples at City Hall. Rather, LA’s gridlock results from thousands of short-term transportation and land use decisions, some going back many decades. Most of these decisions appeared to be minor at the time, although, in retrospect at least one turned out to be momentous, the dismantling of the Red and Yellow Cars, the largest trolley system in the United States until the 1950s.

Furthermore, the culprits are not just elected officials. They also include the private sector. In their successful pursuit of a handsome rate of return on private investment, the real estate and transportation sectors built a car-oriented city and life style. But its downside, gridlock and smog, had already become a problem by WWII. This successful business model also had another downside; it habituated most Angelinos to two bad habits. One is our imposed dependence on private cars for personal mobility, and the other is the California dream – also largely imposed -- of a single-family home with a big garage. 

Unfortunately, many decades later we have woken up to harsh reality. Once people become used to the comfort and ease of cars and private homes, it is nearly impossible to change their transportation and housing habits. Furthermore, even if they try, Angelinos soon discover that Los Angeles has been methodically re-engineered to make driving cars and living in single-family homes transparently easy. The alternatives of taking the bus, walking, and living in an apartment remains a great personal challenge. In this world, harangues about personal responsibility, traffic congestion, air pollution, and climate change rarely work. Instead, we need to hold our tongue and, instead, re-engineer LA’s built environment. 

If you doubt the power of these thousands of small decisions to create an addictive life style based on cars and houses, just eyeball the weekend Los Angeles Times. About half of the paper is devoted to advertising inserts for cars and single-family homes. This successful promotion of driving and dispersed residential patterns leads to a number of unintended consequences, including traffic gridlock. 

Taking on Gridlock: This knowledge means that the only way to address LA’s chronic gridlock is to reinvent the city’s transportation and land use systems. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that can cure gridlock on the transportation end alone, such as flexible work hours, carpooling, HOV lanes, street widening, self-driving cars, or timed lights, called ATSAC (Automatic Traffic Surveillance and Control System) in Los Angeles. 

Likewise, it impossible to only address gridlock through better land use decisions. While the City should obviously dump laws that promote automobile driving, such as excluding the square footage of attached garages in McMansions, this is only part of the picture. We also need to make walking more appealing in residential and mixed-use areas through a major program to repair LA’s cracked sidewalks, install ADA curb cuts and mid-block cross walks, and plant a drought tolerant urban forest to form a tree canopy over pedestrian areas. 

What else needs to be done? 

Transportation: At the transportation end, we need to end auto-dependency by building a multi-modal city, already envisioned by California’s Complete Streets Act, as well as the new Mobility Element of the Los Angeles General Plan and several ballot measures. For example, at a projected cost of $5,000,000 million per mile, the $1.4 billion CalTrans program to widen the I-405 freeway could have re-engineered nearly 300 miles of surface streets in Los Angeles. All of the major east-west corridors linking the downtown and the ocean, such as Pico Boulevard, could have become multi-modal corridors. They could all become variations of the My Figueroa project. Only now breaking ground, this project will radically alter Figueroa between downtown and USC by incentivizing transit, bicycling and walking. 

This infrastructure approach is based on the premise that to change human transportation behavior, cities need to change their built environment. While this is an expensive proposition, we know that it can be done because other cities provide us with successful models. For example, in London, busses and subway trains run every few minutes. Furthermore, every Londoner in their 60s or older rides busses and the subway for free, while fares on interurban trains, including high speed rail, are heavily subsidized for seniors. This combination of first-rate engineering, reliable service, and attractive pricing results in high ridership rates and plays a major role in reducing the city’s gridlock.

Furthermore, London’s sidewalks are wide, well maintained, with a tree canopy, directional signs, many crosswalks and street level destinations, such as snack bars and coffee shops. 

Land-Use: In CityWatch, I regularly take aim at City Hall for poor land use decisions that contribute to gridlock. Unfortunately, City Hall is so bewitched by real estate speculation that any significant improvement in this area will come after a knockdown, drag out fight, such as the AB 283 zoning consistency program of the 1980s, and the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative on the March 2017 ballot. 

Our challenge is to end City Hall’s glaring double standard when it comes to land use. When existing land use laws prohibit the construction of car-oriented mega-projects, the City Council readily revokes those irksome laws through spot-zoning and spot-planning ordinances. But in the opposite situation, when existing land use laws allow real estate speculation and auto-centric buildings by-right, such as McMansions, there are no administrative or legislative options for neighbors to seek relief. 

For now it is heads they win, tails you lose, but this rigged game would change with voter approval of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative next year. Those too-tall, high-end, automobile intensive projects proposed for already congested neighborhoods require special legislative intervention, such as zone changes, from the City Council. They also almost always require an Environmental Impact Report, and each of these EIRs presents the City Council with an environmentally-preferred alternative that would minimize increases in traffic congestion. Yet, in case after case, LA’s elected and appointed decision makers approve the most environmentally damaging alternative. They then adopt a Statement of Overriding Consideration to dispose of those inconvenient EIR findings with a flick of the pen. Voila, they whisk away gridlock by referencing the developers’ unverified promises of a jobs and transit ridership bonanza once their project is completed. 

The Lesson: To deal with standstill traffic, we need to pay full attention to the thousands of small decisions that eventually lead to gridlock, such as spot-zoning for luxury buildings and loopholes for McMansions. At the same time, we need to support LA’s transition from an automobile-centered transportation system to the multi-modal one envisioned by the Mobility Element and to a lesser extent by Measure M. 

Finally, we need to remember the obvious, the transportation system and other infrastructure and services categories must be re-engineered prior to land use changes. If we reverse the sequence and permit denser land uses before the City’s infrastructure and service systems are substantially upgraded, we perpetuate LA’s endless gridlock.

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He also serves on the boards of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Planning Committee. Please send comments and corrections to [email protected].)

MY TURN-I approached the 6th Annual 2016 Congress of Neighborhoods with a certain amount of skepticism. I had been to the five previous ones, and had been a speaker and co-program chair, so I found myself rather irritable about giving up a Saturday to drive downtown to Los Angeles City Hall. 

As a cheerleader as well as a critic at large, today's article allows me to wear both hats. There was an awful lot of good at this year’s Congress and admittedly I was surprised. I expected it to be the same BS from the Mayor and Politicos; the same workshops presented by speakers, some of whom are very good, but most are mediocre or poor. This time, I didn't attend enough of the workshops and seminars to determine the ratio of good and bad. Evaluations were given by participants but who knows if they will be shared. (Photo above: participants look through information and maps and provide park priorities for their neighborhoods.) 

I'm not going to discuss the logistics of the event other than to say there was plenty of excellent graphic signage showing you how to navigate the labyrinth of corridors and elevators. And there were plenty of volunteers giving directions to the mobs of people. No matter how many times you go there, the Los Angeles City Hall location is impressive. 

The first time I visited City Hall for an event, I was a senior in High School and we were participating in a "student congress." That is when I decided to become the first Lady Mayor of the City of Los Angeles. Meanwhile... life happened and we still haven't had a Lady Mayor. But I don’t stop hoping!

This was a massive undertaking by volunteers. Grayce Liu, General Manager of EmpowerLA, the City agency which has operational responsibility for the Neighborhood Council (NC) system and its 96 neighborhoods, provided some help but the bulk of the work was done by NC volunteers from throughout the City. 

The Los Angeles Police Department Cadet Program provided much of the onsite support staff.

There is something about seeing these fresh faced young men and women in their white uniforms that creates a sense of optimism. Here is proof that the Police Department, in addition to serving as a deterrent against crime, also invests in programs to help these young people improve relations with law enforcement, to take advantage of their physical and academic programs, and to get involved in community service. 

Ms. Cindy Cleghorn, Sunland Tujunga NC, has served as Chair of this annual event since its inception. She is either a masochist or deserves "sainthood" for marshaling all of the various resources and people together. 

I asked her about the standout features of this Congress. She said it was the enthusiastic energy of both the volunteer host committee and the attendees. Just about every workshop was filled to capacity. Over fifty per cent of the attendees were first-timers. 

The Congress had been stuck for the last couple of years at 700 attendees representing about 80 percent of the ninety-six Neighborhood Councils. This time there were over 800 attendees from ninety-four NCs. Since this is pre-registration data and 150 people registered on site, the statistics will probably end up higher. It was a well done, professional event and they deserve a lot of credit. 

For those of you unfamiliar with your own NC, here is a brief description. Because NCs are under the City Charter, there are lots of rules and regulations governing what can and cannot be done. Basically, they have some influence but no real power. Usually, the City Council members who view their relationship with the NCs in their district as important show up to this event and offer a few words of encouragement in an informal “meet and greet.” 

The councilmembers who don't show up are, for the most part, the ones who find their NCs a thorn in their sides; they have no interest in partnering on community projects. Several Department heads came, as well as City Controller, Ron Galperin; also, Public Works Manager, Kevin James; Planning Director for the City of Los Angeles, Vince Bertoni; Code Enforcement Bureau Acting Chief, John Biezins; as well as other City Department Heads who were active in the panel discussions concerning their areas of responsibility. Among other speakers and panelists were a wide variety of NC board members and community experts. 

NC board members are elected by their neighborhoods, so to have that many different board members and other stakeholders under one roof at a time provides a chance to find consensus on important issues. It’s not binding, but it can encourage the individual NCs to report back to their communities for feedback and influence. Not to do this is a lost opportunity! 

There was one particular panel I was interested in attending: "The Future of the Neighborhood Council Movement: New Faces, New ideas." I have been greatly concerned about the future of this exercise in democracy. As one of the City’s “gurus” pointed out, how can you have a democracy when the majority of the NC Boards of Directors make decisions on behalf of their neighborhoods without consulting them? 

When you consider that the City Attorney shoots down most of the good ideas; the Mayor's office quietly discourages the idea that NCs should have any influence; the "Board of Neighborhood Commissioners” is appointed by the Mayor and it could be disbanded without being missed; and the DONE staff can't handle the day-to-day operations of the 96 councils … the NC system is in danger of slowly disappearing. 

Add to that, the fact that the almost 1800 elected representatives are divided into groups: 25% doing a great job; 35% an average job; 30% have their funds frozen or do not have enough directors attending to form a quorum; and then another 20% who have operated the same way with the same people for the last fifteen years. Some fall into more than one category, making totaling up to more than 100%. 

Imagine my surprise then, to find that the panel consisted of mostly new faces. They represented most of the City and all of them were actively involved in reaching out to the stakeholders in their respective neighborhoods. 

My only criticism of the make-up of the panel I attended was that there was only one San Fernando Valley representative. The Valley is 220 square miles and it has almost half of the NCs in its geographical area. It can easily be divided into four separate sections...all with different challenges. 

This panel was organized by Rhonda L. Spires, Canoga Park NC; the Moderator was Michael Newhouse Esq. of the Venice NC. 

Panelists included: Nick Greif, Palms NC; Andrew Jhun, Mid City West Community Council; Saaliha Khan, Canoga Park NC; Danielle Sandoval, Central San Pedro NC; and Bonnie Strong, Olympic Park NC. 

It looked like a microcosm of Los Angeles. They gave the audience a good glimpse into how they were orchestrating their NCs and reaching out to their stakeholders. I noticed Grayce Liu was taking a lot of notes. All of them stressed the importance of social media and were proud of their websites. If you live in any of their neighborhoods, or just want to get some great ideas on how to engage various groups, I urge you to check out their various sites, found at Empowerla.org. 

I also took notes and hopefully the session was recorded. I am curious to see where this goes and if Empower LA (otherwise known as Department of Neighborhood Empowerment -- DONE) will do anything with the ideas and suggestions. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention City Council President, Herb Wesson who opened the event with his usual enthusiasm. This time it was more than just words. A little over a year ago, the Councilman took the responsibility of the Neighborhood Councils into his rules committee. I thought it would be the usual political empty promises. 

Surprise...surprise! He has taken his interaction with the various NCs seriously. He announced at the inaugural general session that the Sunland Tujunga NC, kicked out of its long time office almost a year ago by EX-Councilmember Felipe Fuentes (I love saying EX,) will be moving back in to the municipal facility. Rather than appointing a legislative analyst to represent the EX-Councilman's District 7, he is assuming that responsibility. There are currently 21 people running for the EX- Councilmember's seat. The election will not be held until next March. District 7 is NOT a walk in the park. 

To conclude, I am pleased that I was wrong in anticipating a mediocre Neighborhood Congress. I still think it should be held more often than once a year. In my not so humble opinion -- after fifteen years, the entire NC system should be re-evaluated and the group should collectively come up with a strategic plan to meet the needs of the City today and into the future. 

Power to the People! 

As always comments welcome.

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.  

STREETSBLOG LA ENDORSES-There is a lot to like about Measure M, the Los Angeles County sales tax that would fund a mix of transit and other transportation projects throughout the county. For all of the transit, mobility, walkability, bikeability benefits – not to mention health, environmental, and job benefits – across the region, Streetsblog Los Angeles endorses Measure M. 

Start by taking a look at the fully-built-out transit map that SBLA reader Adam Linder created based on Measure M’s expenditure plan. This is huge. This rail and rapid bus network would change the way that LA County moves. Frequent, high quality transit would extend to the San Fernando Valley, Pomona, the South Bay, the Sepulveda Pass, West Hollywood, Glendale, and to the edges of San Bernardino and Orange Counties. 

There is plenty more for livability in Measure M’s expenditure plan: bicycling and walking especially for the first/last mile connection to transit, Metrolink, complete streets, fare subsidies for those in need, ADA paratransit, and hard-to-come-by maintenance funding to keep Metro’s facilities in a state of good repair. 

Measure M is not perfect. 

State law makes it nearly impossible to pass a ballot measure with any sort of tax except a sales tax. This means that despite the best intentions of the authors of the initiative, the funding mechanism for this revolutionary proposal is still a regressive sales tax. Distressingly, it offers the least promise to the lower-income residents of LA who will be disproportionately impacted by the sales tax and who rely on bus service the most. 

Measure M would also fund outdated freeway and road projects. We can look past this spending as a pragmatic move to appease the voting public to get the measure passed. Among the early opposition to Measure M, though, are groups that find the measure’s highway funding to be insufficient. These backward-looking interests want to see more freeway widening sooner, no doubt continuing Southern California’s sad expensive spiral of more widening and more congestion. 

Outdated highway projects are unsustainable in many ways, including fiscally. With state and federal gas tax revenues failing to cover ongoing transportation expenditures, it is a critical time for Los Angeles County to continue to step up and fund our own transportation future. Measure M would create an indefinite funding stream that gives LA County control of our future spending. Local control helps ensure that spending prioritizes local needs, even as those needs change and grow. 

In 2008 and 2012, Streetsblog LA and our parent non-profit the Southern California Streets Initiative did not formally endorse or oppose Measure R or Measure J. Measure M is significantly better and more holistic than either of those prior propositions. 

Lastly, the leadership of Metro, with CEO Phil Washington at the helm, gives us greater confidence in supporting Measure M. Washington, his team, and plenty of continuing dedicated Metro staff, are taking strides to ensure that Metro is well-managed, fiscally prudent, and responsive to its riders and their communities. With the significant changes that transit and transit-oriented development are already bringing to many areas, Washington’s Metro will need to prioritize building stronger relationships with affected communities as it continues to build its networks. 

Metro needs be proactive in ensuring that all communities benefit from this growth, especially lower-income communities of color that continue to be the core of Metro’s ridership. 

Streetsblog strongly endorses Measure M, and urges all of our readers to vote yes on M on November 8.

(Streetsblog LA is a daily news source connecting people to information about sustainable transportation and livable communities.) Map: Measure M rail and BRT network map by Adam Linder. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ALPERN AT LARGE-This is an ugly article to write … and to read … but we're dealing with the aftermath of the City Council approval of the Martin Expo development in the Westside, and I'm in an ugly mood. In a nutshell: this project was too large, but it was mitigated, and it was NO repeat of the Casden Sepulveda nightmare. 

For starters, let repeat my vigorous support for the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative to be voted on next spring as much as I have come to favor and support Measure M for more transportation funding while recommending a NO on just about every other city, county and state tax measure. 

Because our taxes are being spent horribly, and being used to paper over a festering Pension Crisis that Paul Hatfield, Jack Humphreville, and just about every honest CityWatch and newspaper writer are rightfully raising the alarm about while most of us are more interested in Dancing With the Stars, Kim Kardashian, Kaley Cuoco, and their favorite superhero movie or TV show. 

So California is well on its way to becoming the next Greece (huh? what? Greece? Is that a musical or something?), and yet we need to create a transportation infrastructure to allow our economy to survive. 

And perhaps when this current governor is out of office we can focus on (a start to) fixing the Pension Crisis, limit-setting with teachers and other public sector unions that are destroying this state, spending transportation funding on freeway and rail projects and not a lopsided approach to the High-Speed Rail Initiative, and creating an atmosphere more suitable to business. 

But in the meantime we had a Martin Expo Project adjacent to the Bundy/Olympic Expo Line station that was too big by many standards, and will violate a host of CEQA and other environmental laws by building a project that the LADOT and Caltrans stated was unable to be mitigated ... yet was not big ENOUGH according to the agenda-driven, Rasputin-like, wild-eyed miscreants at the leadership of our City of LA Planning Politburo. 

The Bundy/Olympic Expo Line station, as with the Exposition/Sepulveda Expo Line station, is a perfect draw for some densification commensurate with a transit hub.  Both were and are ripe for appropriate development. 

Not OVERDEVELOPMENT, but APPROPRIATE development. 

Fortunately, the Bundy/Olympic station, and the Martin Expo project, was in a CD11 district run by Councilmember Mike Bonin, who demanded a reduction in commercial space, and a less car-oriented use of commercial space, that would be reduced and more transit-oriented than that originally pursued by the developer.  More affordable housing, transit-oriented mitigation and amenities, and other mitigations for car traffic were similarly demanded. 

This is in stark contrast with the Casden Sepulveda project at Exposition/Sepulveda, which was by far too enabled by CD5 Councilmember Paul Koretz (and who feeds on developer money by far too much for my tastes, to be blunt--which has led to the rise in popularity of his future opponent, Jesse Creed). 

Mike Bonin and his Planning deputies worked hand in hand with regional leaders to push for the mitigations that would make Martin Expo more palatable and appropriate for the region, but it's safe to say this project is larger than the majority of us would want at this or any other Westside region surrounded by roads and intersections which are rated "F" and clogged with traffic as it already is. 

So this project was not the stuff of nightmares that we see elsewhere throughout the City, which continues to be at war with its serfs and peasants ... er, make that voters and residents ... who are left without any real voice in these matters.  After all, Mike Bonin is the exception, and not the rule, at City Hall. 

So what to do now? 

The pragmatic, ugly, UGLY answer is that this project can and must be mitigated and fought legally to ensure it best fits in with the neighborhood ... but who has the big buck$ to do this? Most of us recognize that while Expo Line stations are perfect spots for projects like Martin Expo they must be kept at a reasonable scale.   

We also have to stop Sacramento from gutting CEQA, and we have to have a City Attorney with either an altered job description or a City Legal Advocate elected by neighborhood councils to be able to sue the City or even Sacramento if laws are violated.  And so long as voters and leaders roll their eyes at such an idea, you/we will have to get our own lawyers with money we really don't have. 

And it bears repeating that the job description of the City Attorney is to defend and represent City Hall, and NOT you and me.  If you don't know that UGLY fact, you may be part of the problem. 

Imagine if Neighborhood Councils could run to a City Legal Advocate, which was tasked with upholding the laws and upholding the will of Neighborhood Councils if Downtown and Sacramento violated the law (and/or its own bylaws).   

If Martin Expo or any other project violated CEQA, this office could threaten legal action by lawyers paid for with our taxpayer dollars in the same way that our City Attorney's lawyers do when they enforce laws or "variances" or City ordinances that don't make environmental or legal sense.  Imagine if we had the legal juice to access a judge to weigh in on a nonsensical EIR and had the ability to find an unmitigable project illegal. 

Whether it's scofflaw RV and oversized vehicles parking on streets illegally or developers paying their way through Planning, a City Legal Advocate could bring this matter to a judge and make it clear that these projects would have to have more than just a rubberstamp from our Planning Politburo. 

Only then will developers, and the next Casden or Martin Expo project, be brought to bear. 

And that's the ugly, UGLY truth.

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY--The state cannot continue to ignore the fact that homelessness in Los Angeles has reached critical mass. 

Growing public attention to the issue has prompted city leaders to ramp up efforts to address it; but without immediate support, homeless Angelenos are unlikely to experience much-needed relief. The state government, however, has been reluctant to dole out the money needed to kickstart substantive efforts for short-term housing and assistance despite repeated overtures from city and county leaders. 

The most recent count of Los Angeles’ homeless population in May found almost 47,000 people in the county without permanent residence, an 11 percent increase since 2015. Of those counted, 74 percent were unsheltered. The situation is so severe that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors urged Gov. Jerry Brown in June to declare homelessness a statewide emergency – the Los Angeles City Council did the same last month.  

Brown’s declaration would unlock up to $500 million in emergency funds, but the governor’s office has insisted that homelessness is a local problem for local government to address. 

While local government should be responsible for implementing long-term solutions, such as permanent supportive housing, the state must use its emergency monies to address the current, real crisis. 

[Related: LA should fulfill its budget proposal to fight homelessness]  

So far, city leaders have been doing their part by approving Proposition H, a $1.2 billion bond measure designed to spur construction of housing for homeless Angelenos, to appear in the ballot this November. If passed, the bond would focus on permanent housing and in-house social services. 

But the cost of homelessness in the interim is high. The hospitalization, police intervention or incarceration of each homeless person can cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per year. 

Meanwhile, homeless people still struggle to find short-term housing and, for those who have simply fallen on hard times, assistance to help them get back on their feet. The Los Angeles Times noted that transitional housing establishments have seen their funding cut as the focus shifts toward permanent solutions, leaving their clients with nowhere to go. This not only prevents the unemployed or economically pressed from having the time or resources to hold them over, but it denies those with substance abuse issues or mental illness much-needed treatment, and instead, leaves them on the street. 

It’s clear the state must declare a homelessness emergency. Local officials have extended their resources toward developing longer-term solutions, but the state needs to help address the current emergency and help cover the costs for shorter-term efforts to keep homeless people off the streets and get them the help they need while permanent housing and services are developed.

(This editorial appeared in UCLA’s Daily Bruin.)   Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

COUNCIL POWER CREEP-Notwithstanding Herb Wesson’s pledge to keep a watchful eye over District 7’s “purse strings” and his claim to “love the Valley too much to let its residents go without representation,” the LA City Council President’s recent self-appointment to the Council seat just vacated by Felipe Fuentes violates both the spirit and the letter of the LA City Charter.  

LATINO PERSPECTIVE--Should we have a Latino Smithsonian museum? Some think so some others don’t. Congressman Xavier Becerra from Los Angeles said last week that American Latinos aren't reflected in the country's most well known museums. He wants a museum. 

Becerra (D-Los Angeles), joined by Rep. Ileana Ros-Leighten (R-Fla.), reintroduced a bill Tuesday — they've now sponsored it three times — to create a National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) sponsored the Senate version. 

"It's bad enough that we're missing from television, we're missing from the books that we read in school, that in so many ways we're missing from the things that people in America see day to day," Becerra said. "The more that we give people a chance to see the full depth and dimension of what it means to be an American, I think the better off we all are." 

The proposed museum would be inside the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, which reopened as a special events space this year after extensive renovation. 

The bill would start the planning process. But that doesn't mean the museum would open quickly: The African American museum was approved in 2003 and opens next week. It would be built with a combination of federal and private funds, as other museums and memorials on the Mall have been. 

But others don’t think we need a museum. Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation said that it’s an idea that sounds good — until you think about it for about three seconds. 

He argues that this is not just because museums are for dead things (“The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends,” the French artist Jean Cocteau famously complained), but because it would breathe life into concepts from which we need to move away. 

Becerra told the Post that “It provides inspiration, and it really does give you locomotion to try to move this forward. So many [of the African American Museum’s supporters] have come to me and said, ‘You’re next.’ It pumps you up.” 

Gonzalez asks if that is really the only reason for a Latin Museum. If so, the idea is in trouble. We can start, Gonzalez thinks, with the fact that the experiences of African Americans cannot be compared to those of any other group — especially immigrants and their descendants. 

That would include the vast majority of the 56 million people the Census Bureau instructs to identify themselves as “Hispanic” — who can’t all be descended from the estimated 100,000 people who chose to remain in the Southwest at the conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848. 

The notion that they constitute an ethno-racial pentagon along with African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and non-Latino whites is a dubious social construct of very recent pedigree. That a museum would help perpetuate this division — literally cement it — is a second reason to oppose it. 

Gonzalez continues, “dividing the country along these cleavages — an official policy that began only in the late 1970s and quickly migrated to the academy, the labor market and the culture — has contributed to a degree of social fragmentation that is only now becoming apparent.” 

As a Latino-American, agree with Gonzalez assessment. There is no need for a museum for an ethnicity created by 1970s federal bureaucrats. Defenders of immigration make the case that today’s immigrants will assimilate as members of previous surges did — which is what undoubtedly will happen, but only if they are treated as those earlier arrivals were. 

That is, as immigrants on their way to being Americans, not as members of a permanent national minority. We don’t need a museum. 

What do you all think?

(Fred Mariscal came to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 1992 to study at the University of Southern California and has been in LA ever since. He is a community leader and was a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 4. Fred writes Latino Perspective for CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected].)

-cw

DEEGAN ON LA-Rick Caruso has a long and sentimental history with his property at 333 S. La Cienega Boulevard (currently the site of the shuttered Loehmann's department store.) It’s the first property he owned. It’s where he washed cars as a kid at his dad's dollar-a-day car rental business. And, it’s where he dreams of building his newest project that will make a statement about contemporary high-end housing by including an affordable housing component that could make it a landmark building in more ways than one. (See above photo of rendering.) 

Rarely have developers allowed low income housing units to be part of the mix in their high-end luxury buildings, preferring to subsidize affordable housing at off-site locations in return for the zoning variances they receive. But Rick Caruso, founder and chief executive officer for Caruso Affiliated, has a new take on that. 

Already a pioneer in trend-setting, open-air shopping experiences like the Grove and the Americana, Caruso could become a leading figure in egalitarian housing if he’s able to deliver on a pledge he made to a community group a few weeks ago, when he went on public record at the Mid City West Community Council's land use committee meeting, stating, “The affordable units will be treated like all other units, and serviced like all other units. There will be a lot of pride about the project, a lot of dignity and respect for the affordable housing tenants that will be interspersed throughout the building. They’re going to be just like everybody else. The same level of service, for free.” 

He’s a man with a dream to have his luxury housing tower shared by all walks of life -- rich and poor – in a residence building that is both elegant and equitable, where the 1% and the 99% come together. If Rick Caruso pulls this off, it will be groundbreaking; it will change the development and affordable housing paradigm, and could make him the very first billionaire-populist in the city. 

Caruso’s struggle to bring the community along into his over-scale dreamscape, that will make his tower one of the tallest buildings in sight, was evident at Mid City West Community Council’s recent land use committee meeting. 

As democratic-sounding as this may be -- housing the rich and the poor in the same building, with equality of service for all -- there’s a big downside: Caruso wants to build a 240 foot tall building in a zone that has a maximum height of 40 feet (see graphic, left.) That’s a huge increase in what’s permitted, which has many asking how much is too much? It requires a “spot zoning” variance which is anathema to many. In fact, “spot zoning” is one of the key reasons the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is on the March 2017 ballot, having qualified with more than one and a half times as many signatures as necessary, illustrating the public’s hunger for zoning redress that has tapped the very nerve that Caruso is trying to soothe. 

There’s a very good reason he must go up: he cannot go down. As he told the community meeting, “I cannot go underground with parking because of a massive storm drain. That forces parking to go above ground, and increases the height of the project. The parking will be three floors above grade and two floors below grade,” explained Caruso as the reason he is proposing a twenty floor building in an area that is zoned for four floors. And, he says, he cannot lose units. “I need the height because it’s very expensive to build there. I need 145 units. It’s already down from 165 units.” 

“The way to bring the building down [in height] is to use more of the site, but lose setbacks,” said Caruso. “The alternative would be to make an office building, taking the existing building and re-leasing it, or taking it down and making a new building.” 

“I would be disingenuous to say there is no leeway [on the height.] My strong preference is for 20 stories. I can’t lose units. When I lose floors I lose units. Then I’d have to decide not to build the building. There are ten units per floor. I can make the height of the floors less high.” 

How the community reacted to this, and how much of a gap between what he wants and what they will be comfortable with came out in over three hours of presentations, deliberations and a full court press by Caruso himself, who faced a sharply divided community audience. It took an hour just to hear all the public comment for and against the project. It was a passionate exchange, with Caruso spending lots of time at the microphone answering questions and putting forth his case. Questions keyed mostly to the height of the building and how Caruso would accommodate affordable housing. 

In the end, the gap between what he wants, and how much the committee is willing to give, was mostly about the height question, although the on-site affordable housing element was also subject of much debate. 

When the committee finally took a vote, it was deadlocked on a motion that would have advanced the project. Key elements of that motion were: 

Height:

• The building should be ten stories maximum (currently projected at 20 stories.)
• The maximum height should be 120-125 feet (not the projected 240 feet.)
• The floor to area ratio should be doubled from 1.5:1 to 3:1. Floor area ratio (FAR) is the ratio of a building's total floor area (gross floor area) to the size of the piece of land upon which it is built.
• It should be zoned “general commercial” instead of “regional commercial.” 

Affordable housing:

• Should be consistent with SB1818 type conditions.
• Should be mixed-income community of 50% very low and 50% low, representing 15% of total units in building.
• Units should be on site, not off-site or a payment to the housing fund.
• Affordable housing should be run as affordable by LA Housing Department.
• A 55-year commitment to affordable units.
• Parking included in rent, not a separate charge. 

The land use committee vote was a deadlock and the matter was tabled. The next scheduled meeting is on October 6, when a motion can be created to send to the full board for its October meeting. Not reaching consensus at this meeting squeezed the window for community review. At least two more sessions (another land use committee meeting and then a full neighborhood council board meeting) will be required before Caruso knows how much support he will receive from the neighborhood council. And, he must play Beat-the-Clock with the March 7 vote date for the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative which, if passed by voters, will result in a moratorium on “spot zoning.” 

A few weeks after that community meeting, Rick Caruso met with CityWatch to present some new information that specifically addresses some of the concerns raised in the deadlocked motion at Mid City, especially the affordable housing element. This may go a long way toward helping him align with the community -- that is, if he and the community can ultimately agree on height. 

He began by revealing a change in plans: “In response to community input, two years ago, we cut the retail square footage in half and reduced the number of proposed apartments from 162 to 145. In addition, we committed to creating new open space, building new crosswalks and bike lanes, and landscaping and maintaining the city medians. We are planning for a neighborhood-serving restaurant and market, ensuring community use of 333’s board room, and making a 55-year commitment to affordable housing. We also changed our entitlements to eliminate the Regional Center issue and become an SB 1818 project.” 

CW - Why are you dropping the “Regional Center” designation? 

R.C. - “The 333 La Cienega parcel is a unique island surrounded by four major streets (San Vicente, La Cienega, Burton Way, and 3rd Street) and is immediately adjacent to Cedars Sinai Hospital and the Beverly Center. It was logical to extend their Regional Commercial designation to the 333 parcel without negatively impacting single family residences or setting a new precedent. However, we take community stakeholder recommendations seriously. They asked how we could both build this project without the Regional Center zoning and ensure that the affordable housing would be monitored as if it were an SB 1818 project. The new entitlements accomplish both.”

CW – Are you changing the zoning so it will match that of your Burton Way building? 

R.C. - “We seek to extend the zoning for 8500 Burton Way to its sister property across the street, 333 La Cienega. Instead of a GPA to Regional Commercial, the project would be amended to “General Commercial” which is consistent with nearly every other adjacent property on 3rd Street and San Vicente. The result is no new precedent for zoning, the entitlements simply bring 333’s zoning up to that of its neighbors. As with 8500 Burton Way, 333’s [zoning] will be height district 2.” 

CW - Are you switching to SB 1818 (the state's density bonus law) status? How will that impact the number of affordable units? 

R.C. - “Yes, the change is to both enshrine the affordable housing as an SB 1818 project and allow for the number of units needed to make the project work. This includes funding millions of dollars in street and safety improvements as well as building the new open space. 

The SB 1818 calculations are 5% “very low income” housing as seven (7) units. However, we have already committed to eight (8) units and that will be in our agreement with the City. These units will then be monitored by the City’s Housing and Community Investment Department (HCID) to ensure public oversight.”

CW - Why is there no affordable housing at 8500 Burton Way? 

R.C. - “8500 Burton Way was entitled years ago. Our region now has a significant housing crisis. Thus, changing times led us to include those units in this project.” 

CW - How important has been community feedback to your plans? 

R.C. - “This world-class project will be one that the community is proud of and the market-rate for building units allows us to provide millions of dollars of public improvements and the ability to have affordable housing. Furthermore, I believe 333 La Cienega will set the new standard where these types of public commitments and community collaborations are the norm rather than the exception.” 

“I want the buildings (at 333 La Cienega and 8500 Burton Way) to be a brother and sister -- sympathetic to each other,” concluded Caruso. 

The dreamer-developer had one final word about the project: “I want to make it work for everybody.” 

Caruso will find out if that dream can come true in the next few weeks, as the neighborhood council again weighs in on his plans.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Graphic: Rosalie Wayne. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-In any political campaign, there are legions of highly paid professionals who know every nuanced rule about campaign finance, and it is their job to maximize that knowledge for their clients.

Sometimes, this political set makes patently absurd interpretations of those rules to give their clients an unfair and sometimes illegal advantage. When they do, the local elections arbiter is supposed to enforce the rules and rectify the transgression. 

Welcome to the Los Angeles County 4th District Supervisor’s race between Republican Steve Napolitano and Democrat Janice Hahn, both of whom seek to replace incumbent Don Knabe, Napolitano’s former boss who has endorsed Napolitano, a former Manhattan Beach Councilman, in the race. 

The story goes like this. For the primary season, Napolitano chose the “unlimited personal funds” option to fund his campaign, while Hahn chose the “$50,000 personal funds limit.” In Napolitano making that choice, it lifted the $1,500 limit for donations from individuals to Hahn’s campaign for the primary only. That limit would be reinstated if and when her campaign continued toward the November 8th General Election, which it has, and in which she will face Napolitano. The details were outlined in a March 16, 2016 letter from Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/LA County Clerk, the subject of which was revisited in a July 12 communique from Logan’s office.

When Hahn’s fundraising update was filed on August 1, it showed hundreds of thousands of dollars raised from political action committees (PAC) beyond the limit of $150,000 for the primary and $150,000 for the General Election. Napolitano’s campaign immediately jumped on the issue and, on August 10, Logan’s office advised the Hahn team that the aforementioned removal of the $1,500 individual donation limit did not lift the $150,000 PAC limits. Logan’s letter added that the Hahn campaign would not be penalized for this campaign finance violation if those funds were returned within 30 days, which was September 9. The penalty for not honoring the 30-day deadline could be triple the amount of funds raised illegally.

Since Logan’s August letter and with the November 8 General Election rapidly approaching, the Hahn campaign (which has not responded to CityWatch requests for comment for this article) has employed pretzel logic to hold on to these excess funds … apparently okay with the penalties they would face should their client win the runoff. 

These campaign finance rules were established in 1996’s Proposition B, the details of which can be found in Logan’s January 2016 updated pamphlet to candidates on the subject. 

“The rules are the rules, the Hahn people know them, refuse to honor them, and are way past the deadline to return these illegally raised funds,” says Napolitano. 

In an August 31, 2016 LA Times article, Hahn campaign spokesman John Shallman stated that Logan’s earlier letters about the lifting of personal donation limits also applied to the $150,000 PAC limit, a sentiment that was refuted in Logan’s September 19 reply to Hahn’s people.

“While we recognize that the letters sent on March 16, 2016 or July 12, 2016 do not specifically state that the aggregate PAC limit in 2.190.040 C remained in place,” Logan’s letter stated, “the letters describe the intent of LACC section 2.190.070 D, which is to remove the $1,500 individual contribution limits only.” 

In other words, the Hahn campaign says that because Logan’s earlier letters did not specifically state that the $150,000 PAC limit remained, they were free to raise as much PAC money as they wish.

But by that tortured perspective from the Hahn campaign, none of the other campaign finance rules should apply either, since none of them were addressed in Logan’s letters. 

In fact, there do not appear to be any circumstances which would lift the $150,000 PAC limits, a rule that may irk Hahn’s people, but that they no doubt have long since known. 

Napolitano points out his frustration that Logan’s September 19 letter gives the Hahn campaign even more time to cure the violation, 30 days from that date, which is 40 days past the originally established repayment date. “I am running to represent everyone in this District, regardless of whether they donated to my campaign, the Hahn campaign, someone else, or nobody at all. But we all must live by the same set of rules. Right now, those rules are not being enforced,” he said. 

That lack of enforcement and extended deadlines might be due to pressure from some of Logan’s other bosses, the other County Supervisors, some of whom have endorsed Hahn in the race, showing once again that in politics, the rules don’t always apply and that influence (a friendly way to say corruption) almost always rules the day.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a writer who contributes to CityWatchLA, Huffington Post and KFI AM-640. He blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His views do not necessarily reflect those of CityWatch) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LABOR AND ECONOMIC POLITICS-If you’ve been paying attention to the news in California at all for the last year or so, you could be forgiven for mistaking the left wing of the California Democratic Party as a pro-labor institution. 

In the summer of 2015, the City of Los Angeles passed a groundbreaking phased $15 minimum wage, to be implemented by 2020. As the most recent legislative session closed, a whole raft of workplace protection legislation was passed. And most recently and memorably, Governor Jerry Brown signed landmark farmworker overtime protections into law, correcting the eight-decade-old exclusion of farmworkers from standards enjoyed by industrial and white-collar laborers. 

All of these initiatives have been spearheaded by California Democrats, against heavy opposition by Republicans and their big and small business backers. All this is exemplary of what might be termed the “wage strategy,” the effort to reduce poverty and inequality by artificially raising the wages of California’s poorest and most vulnerable laborers. 

Business interests deride the wage strategy for slowing job growth, arguing that it increases costs for both small and large businesses. This critique has merit, but the unspoken reality behind it is that if labor acts as a free and fluid market where employers can adjust costs solely based on market forces, rather than a protected or unionized force unto its own, there is nothing guaranteeing a basic standard of living and pay for workers, who are not mere economic forces but living, breathing human beings with needs and passions of their own. 

So the wage strategy of artificially inflating workers’ wages and adding worker protections, while harmful to businesses, is conducive to income stability if properly executed. 

We could argue until the cows come home as to whether or not a $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles or an 8-hour workday in the Central Valley is the best way of doing that, or whether market-based measures like the Earned-Income Tax Credit and agricultural sector-specific labor policies would be better alternatives. But sometimes in legislation, establishing the principle is more important than perfecting the administration of policy; and as of September 2016, the principle that the state of California ought to guarantee laborers a decent wage has generally been secured. 

But that is not enough, and indeed, that can be harmful in the long run if pursued on its own, without addressing other economic factors. The most pressing of these other factors is the skyscraping California cost of living, in all its forms -- high energy prices, high housing prices, high costs of doing business, and the rest. 

The California Democratic Party, while adamantly pursuing the wage strategy, has done nothing to pursue a “cost strategy” of reducing the cost of living across the board. Absent a cost strategy that makes business and overall living easier in the state, pursuing a wage strategy alone is tantamount to progressive self-congratulatory backscratching. 

Democratic elites can make themselves feel like they’re doing good for the working class, without doing anything significant to reduce the cost of living for the working class, and let workers keep more money in their pockets. Pursuing one strategy is not enough -- both must be pursued in tandem, or the state risks becoming either a low-job wasteland or a low-wage serfdom. 

But not only have left-leaning Democrats failed to pursue the cost strategy -- they have in many cases impeded and even reversed its advancement by Mod Caucus Democrats. Shortly after farmworker protection measures were passed, other measures were instated to divert more water to fish, and thus away from farms. 

Generally agricultural interests -- both management and labor -- are better off and more productive with more water flowing to the farms, and diverting water for conservation purposes raises the cost of doing agricultural business and productivity, thus making life harder for farmers and their employees. 

This glaring hypocrisy -- raising farmworkers’ wages while increasing their cost of doing business -- is a drop in the bucket compared to other Golden State cost-of-living stories. 

One particularly egregious example is the Brown regime’s relentless pursuit of climate legislation to increase the percentage of energy California derives from green, renewable, unreliable sources like wind and solar. This emphasis on low-productivity fuel-less energy sources, coupled with the planned closure of reliable energy producers like the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, only raises the cost of electricity for every Californian, impacting the poor and working classes the most. 

Democratic proposals to increase the gas tax to pay for much-needed road infrastructure, rather than repurposing transit funds to repave the roads, has a similar impact on transportation costs for drivers -- who disproportionately come from lower-income backgrounds. 

Another beast the California Democratic elite refuses to tackle is the cost of land and housing, which is largely buttressed by abuses of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and general NIMBYism on the part of wealthy coastal homeowners who like seeing their homes increase in value, at the expense of less well-off newcomers. 

Study after study across the board suggests that the best solution to the price of housing is not rent control, but increasing supply -- building more houses to lower prices for more people. But draconian regulations and NIMBY activism preclude this from becoming reality, and as such, the people of California remain hitched to high housing costs. 

Thus, regardless of the increases in real income for workers that the California Democrats have been advocating, the California working class will continue to labor under relatively low profits simply due to the high cost of living and doing business which is buttressed by California’s high costs of housing and energy, which are largely influenced by its regulatory code. 

Elite coastal Democrats can congratulate themselves all they want for being a “party of the people” and “supporting workers;” but it certainly is a uniquely Californian way of supporting workers, barely increasing their pay without decreasing their costs. Then again, the Golden State has never been known for its consistency.

(Luke Phillips is a political activist and writer in California state politics. His work has been published in a variety of publications, including CityWatch, Fox&Hounds, NewGeography, and The American Interest. He is a Research Assistant to Joel Kotkin at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams

ANIMAL WATCH--Everyone in America has a coyote story. Or if you don’t, give it time. You will.

The tawny, golden-eyed, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our backyard predator, everywhere from Miami to Toronto and San Diego to Seattle.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Earlier this month, I wrote in CityWatch about two bills that would have improved transparency at the Coastal Commission failed to pass, paving the way for more pay to play between commissioners, developers, business interests, labor unions, lobbyists, environmentalists and anyone that might benefit from the commission’s decisions.

Senate Bill 1190, sponsored by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), would have banned ex-parte contacts between commissioners and developers, lobbyists, environmentalists and others with an interest in the commission’s decisions. 

Assembly Bill 2002, sponsored by Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) and Assemblyman Mark Stone (D-Monterey Bay), would have required anyone who lobbies the Coastal Commission to register with the state and to disclose clients with business before the commission. The bill would also have fast-tracked reporting of ex-parte meetings and made the disclosures more accessible to the public.

But the buck does not stop here. This past August, Spotlight on Coastal Corruption, a nonprofit formed to pursue allegations, filed a suit in San Diego County Superior Court against Commissioners Erik Howell, Martha McClure, Wendy Mitchell, Mark Vargas and chairman Steve Kinsey in what seems to be the new game plan for grassroots activists.

If the suit prevails, each of these five commissioners could be faced with millions in civil penalties for alleged transparency violations. The suit, served at the panel’s September 7 Newport Beach meeting, points fingers at the commissioners for 590 counts of violating disclosure laws for ex-parte communications. Yes, that’s right. 590 counts over the past two years.

This lawsuit is just one of at least four questioning coastal development permits charging commissioners failed to properly disclose their contacts in a timely manner or that the commissioners used communication to hold behind doors meetings prior to voting. Tsk Tsk.

Case in point. Chairman Kinsey withheld his vote on a controversial proposal that would permit hundreds of new homes on land overlooking the Newport and Huntington Beach coastline on September 7. The chairman had two ex-parte communications about the proposal. Commissioner Vargas consulted with the Commissions general counsel before voting in favor of development.

It would seem these communications should be verboten and in fact, they are. Communications that fall under ex-parte communications include phone calls, meetings, emails, and other written material concerning the issue at hand conducted outside of public hearings.

Here’s where it gets fun. Commissioners under state law must report these interactions in writing within seven days. If these private pow wows happen within a week before the topic at hand will be on the commission’s agenda, the commissioners are charged with disclosing the communication from the dais at the hearing.

The devil’s in the details. The commissioners must disclose the date, time, type and location, as well as who initiated in and participated in the ex-parte, as well as a comprehensive description, including text and any graphic material presented. And all of this must appear in the commission’s official record, which the public can review.

Believe it or not, the commissioners aren’t allowed to influence peddle by knowingly keeping ex-parte contacts off record. Each time a commission violates the disclosure requirement, he or she can face a maximum fine of $7,500. The Spotlight suit tags on additional fines of $30K for each violation, considered separate offenses under the Public Resources Code.

How did Spotlight choose which lucky commissioners to target? Spotlight’s attorney Cory Briggs says the group looked at all written and oral ex-parte reports from January 2015 through August of this year. The five defendants appeared to have the greatest number of violations with Vargas coming in at 150 violations; Kinsey,140 times; Mitchell, 120; Howell, 96; and McClure, 82.

Pending the outcome, here’s the tally of fines. Vargas, up to $5,625,000; Kinsey, up to $5,250,00; Mitchell, $4,500,00; Howell, $3,600,00; and McClue, $3,150,000, hardly chump change.

We applaud the efforts of the Spotlight’s lawsuit to reign in what is an out of control scenario in which the Coastal Commission serves special interests instead of the tasks they are charged with, which is protecting our coastline and serving Californians.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)

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GUEST WORDS, ELECTION 2016--After years of dysfunction from the billing fiasco to mismanagement of our precious water during the drought, Angelenos are understandably concerned about the failures of the Department of Water and Power. As such, this mishandled department is in serious need of real, meaningful and lasting reform. Here’s the problem. The status quo clearly isn’t working, but the proposed Los Angeles Charter Amendment RRR, a so-called “reform” measure, is in fact counterproductive and dangerous, making the utility less responsive, accountable and transparent to voters, and at the same time will increase the likelihood of corruption within the DWP. 

Although proponents of the misleading measure claim it would make the DWP more accountable and halt rate increases, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead of bringing the real and transparent change we need, Charter Amendment RRR is in fact a power grab by DWP insiders that paves the way for deregulation of the nation’s largest municipal utility, nearly eliminating the oversight by ratepayers while giving enormous, unprecedented power to the DWP’s faceless and unelected bureaucrats. 

The suggested measure proposes to have the City Council and the Mayor virtually relinquish their oversight over the DWP’s Board of Commissioners and the department’s General Manager outside of approving a “strategic plan” every four years. Once the plan is approved, the DWP General Manager and Commissioners will be able to unilaterally implement rate hikes without any checks and balances from the City Council or the Mayor, an extraordinary power for any unelected official who isn’t held accountable to the voters. 

Charter Amendment RRR would also give the new seven member Board the authority to enter into a contract with any corporation to share in ownership, operation, and the maintenance of the facility for the generation, transformation, and transmission of electric energy for up to 30 years without notifying the city council or the Mayor. Additionally, the DWP Board would be able to approve multi-million dollar contracts without Council oversight. These disastrous changes to the charter would help open the door to deregulating the people’s owned utility, the DWP, by providing an unchecked path for massive privatized facilities. 

These proposals aren’t necessarily new, but they have proven to be destructive. Soon after the state’s energy industry deregulated about 15 years ago, cities throughout California began experiencing rate hikes, power shortages, and blackouts due to the cost cutting nature of private utilities like Southern California Edison and PG&E. However, the DWP was spared from the crisis because it did not opt into the state’s deregulation program and instead produced surplus energy during this time that helped the state and other municipalities. 

Passing RRR would repeat the state’s mistake and virtually guarantee that rates will rise and power outages will be more frequent. LA residents need to avoid this path. Instead, we must preserve the checks and balances in place to ensure that the nation’s largest municipal public utility is accountable to the residents that use its services. The way to accomplish this is to ensure that LA City Council and the Mayor maintain full, unhampered oversight over the DWP. 

Beyond rate hikes and contracts, Charter Amendment RRR also enables the DWP to opt out of the civil service system, which is a recipe for disaster. The system requires merit-based hiring and has assured women and people of color equal opportunity in applying for city jobs. It also prioritizes veterans and provides transparency to the public about hiring practices. Removing these requirements for DWP employees would eliminate vital protections against corruption that all other city agencies have in their employment process, and could lead to unethical, politicized hiring. 

Although the DWP certainly needs to be significantly overhauled and reformed, Charter Amendment RRR is a wrongheaded measure. It destroys existing checks and balances and puts residents at risk of rate hikes and shady contracts that will lead to deregulation, without genuine recourse. If we go down the path of deregulation, voters should expect more blackouts and brownouts in addition to greater rate hikes. 

Voters shouldn’t be fooled by the so-called DWP “reform” measure and elect to give their decision-making power to unelected bureaucrats. While DWP is in desperate need of major structural changes, this isn’t the change we need. These structural changes should be done by ordinance. A charter amendment is not the answer! That’s why I and many other former LA City Council members are urging voters to reject Charter Amendment RRR, the DWP power grab.

(Nathaniel N."Nate" Holden served four years in the California State Senate and 16 years on the Los Angeles City Council.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE PLANNING REPORT INTERVIEW--Cecilia Estolano,  co-founder of Estolano LeSar Perez Advisors, advises public & private sector clients as well as foundations and urban stakeholders on how to build thriving, healthy and vibrant communities. Prior to this, Estolano both led the city of LA's Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA/LA) and practiced land-use law at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. In this TPR interview, Estolano draws on her nationally recognized real estate and community engagement expertise to opine on the City of LA’s historically flawed planning and development process, and to diagnose the current policy landscape in Metro Los Angeles and state that inhibits the production of workforce housing. She also expands upon her personal mission to address inequitable economic development.

"Los Angeles is not a city that actually believes in planning. It doesn't respect community plans ... Comprehensive planning around a district or a community area is what it’s going to take to achieve our sustainability goals in Los Angeles." —Cecilia Estolano

As someone with nearly unequalled experience in inner-city housing and city building, what public policies—accepting the disappearance of redevelopment—are currently depressing the supply of new affordable housing?

Cecilia Estolano: Number one: We need a permanent source of money to help fill the gap for low-income housing, specifically.

Number two: We need a much easier process for doing infill housing. Folks have been talking about this for years; The Planning Report has certainly followed it.

I think one of the most exciting prospects right now is the state legislation that was just approved for accessory dwelling units (ADUs). It’s really the easiest and least painful way to increase our supply of workforce housing, and it might be a way to fill in that middle gap that nobody’s addressing right now.

Why wasn’t the production of more workforce and affordable housing addressed when Community Redevelopment Agencies (CRAs) dominated urban planning and reinvestment?

From the CRA’s perspective, we were trying to get our money out the door for low-income housing. Our mandate was to fill that gap, and we had a fantastic track record: We built something close to 30,000 units over the lifetime of the agency.

But now, with those sources gone, local government—and frankly, state government—have to be a lot more creative about the land-use strategies available to increase the supply of housing in the low-to-moderate-to-workforce levels.

That’s why you see legislation like the ADU bill coming out of the Legislature: because at some point, we have to get local government to move quickly on making it possible to do things like accessory dwelling units.

To the chagrin of affordable housing advocates and developers, much of the housing built in our metropolis since the 2008 economic collapse has been high-rise and expensive. What explains the paucity of affordable housing being built since CRAs were dissolved?   

It’s expensive to build in California, so if there are no subsidies and no mandate to build workforce or affordable housing, the market will go to high-end housing.

The entitlement process, particularly in the city of Los Angeles, is quite complex, and it requires a lot of predevelopment costs, lawyers, and folks at City Hall to help you lobby to get your project through. That adds a lot of cost, so to get your rate of return from your investors, you’re going to go to the luxury side.

Given the costs of LA’s entitlement process, why, in your opinion, has the city’s uniquely uncertain planning approval process not been reformed to offer more certainty—such as building by-right—to those wishing to build workforce and affordable housing?

Candidly, I don’t think there’s the will among the elected officials in the city of Los Angeles to take that seriously. This is not a city that actually believes in planning. It doesn’t respect community plans.

But Los Angeles is not the only city in the county of Los Angeles. Other cities and jurisdictions can and have led the way in showing how to facilitate the production of workforce-level housing.

I look, in some ways, to the county of Los Angeles. Regional Planning Director Richard Bruckner, and leadership on the Board of Supervisors, are looking at innovative things like getting a few model types of accessory dwelling units preapproved—so that if you used one of these set floor plans, you could get free approvals and not have to go through any kind of discretionary approval process. The county is right on board with trying to make it easier to generate these units.

That’s not the case in the city of Los Angeles, however. The city’s having a very difficult time getting out of the way of this source—notwithstanding Mayor Garcetti’s interest in piloting some of these approaches with the Innovation Team. It’s been unfortunate to watch the city of Los Angeles create roadblocks.

When you were the executive officer of the LA City redevelopment agency and Gail Goldberg was the city’s Director of Planning, you both collaborated to save industrial land and to update the city’s zoning and community plans. What have you learned since then about the challenges of land-use reform in the city of LA? 

It’s such a different landscape now.

When Gail proposed updating 10 community plans right out of the gate, we at the redevelopment agency actually provided the funding to ensure that the three plans in South Los Angeles—which had not been updated for 20+ years—would receive the same amount of attention as, say, Hollywood. But that was a different era, when we had more resources and more flexibility in the use of those resources.

There are still tools available for cities to use, but it takes some bold thinking. Some cities have looked at Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts or the Community Revitalization Investment Authority as potential sources of funding for things like housing, or even the LA River Revitalization. But I think what we need is a source of money for planning. 

Comprehensive planning around a district or a community area is what it’s going to take to achieve our sustainability goals in Los Angeles. In fact, those two tools can be used for this type of planning, which Gail and I were trying to do.

One example of a place where I think we need to apply this kind of thinking is the area right around Union Station. ELP Advisors is working on a feasibility plan for the Park 101 project, which would cap three blocks of the 101 Freeway as it goes through Downtown Los Angeles.

That investment would create an amazing amenity: parkland right in the middle of the city. It would also knit together the Historic Core, the Civic Center, and the largest transportation hub in the region.

As we look at that, we also have to look at other investments going on in the area, including the Union Station Master Plan; the eventual advent of high-speed rail; the Regional Connector; and private investment going on in Chinatown. Altogether, we can see that this is a district that needs to be comprehensively planned.

It might be a great place to implement an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District. We’re investing a lot in the public realm that will create value for private property owners. We should be able to capture that value and use the proceeds to fund benefits like affordable housing.

Let’s put that EIFD in place now and begin to do integrated planning among the county, the city, Metro, Caltrans—and together, make that one of the most sustainable portions of the region. We could pull that off—but it would require big thinking beyond just little fixes at the level of the corridor or the intersection.

I think people are ready for this vision. There’s interest at Metro, at the county and in the city. People are ready to think big again in Los Angeles, and we finally have some tools to do it. So let’s apply them in a way that addresses our need for housing of all types, new visions of sustainability, and new connections for bike and pedestrian modes of transportation.

This is the place to do it, and it could become a showcase for the region.

Could you elaborate on the contrasting approaches that local jurisdictions other than the city of LA have taken to encourage the building more housing—for example, in Santa Monica, Pasadena, or Culver City?

ELP serves as the executive director of the Westside Cities Council of Governments, so we have familiarity with the work happening in Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. Those cities have had a very strong commitment to the production of affordable housing.

We went through a planning process with a team at the Westside Cities COG, and found that the No. 1 priority for those cities is to address the issue of homelessness. In a few days, our Board of Directors will get a presentation from the regional representative for the county’s homelessness initiative to see how the Westside cities, as a sub-region, might work to address homelessness issues. Some of those cities are already digging in. They’re working on rapid rehousing and vouchers. They want very practical solutions.

It’s certainly easier to work at a smaller scale than that of the city of Los Angeles, but there’s also a strong commitment to addressing the need for housing at all income scales, and not just at the luxury level.

But let’s also give the city of LA credit—particularly CAO Miguel Santana—in proposing Prop HHH as a way to fund the production of housing to accompany the county’s enhanced services effort. We’ve seen an unprecedented level of coordination and cooperation between the city and county on homelessness. That gives us the best hope for a comprehensive approach than we’ve seen in many years.

 What reforms need to happen in the city of LA, in your opinion, to meet and surpass what Santa Monica and West Hollywood are doing to encourage the building of more affordable housing?

It comes down to leadership and building a constituency for support for affordable housing policy. We just haven’t seen that in a consistent way over the last few years.

There have certainly been efforts to address the homelessness issue, but in terms of using any of the tools still available to the city related to affordable housing —even land-use tools—there’s been a pretty laggard response.

There’s also been talk about having a fee associated with new development. But it’s probably the third time in my career that I’ve seen the city of Los Angeles debate this, and I just don’t know what the prospects are for success.

 Clearly, a strong commitment to city planning has not interfered with Santa Monica and West Hollywood’s ability to encourage the building of affordable and workforce housing. Some critics have suggested that the motto in the city of LA seems to be: “We don’t need planning; planning gets in the way of building.” What’s your take on this argument?

 The issue is: What is your vision for the city? What is your vision for how it will look and what we expect of development in the city?

The cities we’ve mentioned on the Westside have a very clear vision. They have high expectations of the quality of life that they want to achieve and maintain in their cities, and they use planning to do that.

They go through a rigorous process of community planning with deep, extensive community engagement. These are difficult battles at the time. But once that plan has been adopted—precisely because of that rigorous process and community engagement, and because it’s a process that everyone has agreed on—they stick to it. That planning document becomes the guidepost, and city councilmembers defer to it.

That is not at all what happens in the city of Los Angeles. Here, there’s a much more politicized approach. Councilmembers zealously protect the extraordinary discretion that they have over how developments will move forward.

Los Angeles is a city that grew on real-estate speculation. It’s always been a source of quite a bit of power for councilmembers, and they haven’t been willing to give it up.

In an interview with The Planning Report last month, Bill Witte of Related—the largest developer of affordable housing in the region—dismissed the Build Better LA ballot measure, which is touted by labor as a solution to growing the supply and affordable housing. What are your thoughts on this ballot measure?

I think it’s a very Los Angeles approach to force this issue by putting it on the ballot.

It’s interesting to see labor unions—which are probably one of the strongest constituencies outside of developers—come together with some aspects of the business community and the affordable housing community to take this approach.

Certainly, it’s a response to the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative—the potential March ballot measure that would put a two-year moratorium on development in the way the city of Los Angeles does it.

It’s not nuanced. But it’s born out of a sense of desperation that if someone doesn’t move forward with an idea that’s better than zero growth, the council won’t come up with an alternative.

Of course, there’s desperation on both sides. There’s a sense that the city on its own just can’t find ways to use their planning tools effectively, and to respect those tools.

These initiatives are a reaction to generations of dysfunction in Los Angeles. We’ve had the greatest run-up, and one of the greatest real estate builds in the last few years, after one of the greatest crashes. Yet we’ve had no appreciable increase in the amount of affordable or workforce housing—because of complete paralysis by the city council and the mayor.

I am not a proponent of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative; I think it’s the absolutely wrong approach. But it certainly has focused the mind of the elected officials.

Mayor Garcetti has now proposed banning ex parte communications from the Planning Commission. Sadly, that would not have happened but for the threat of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.

Cecilia, if someday you were to seek to be LA’s mayor, what would you do over the course of four years to create a planning process in the city that would bring relief to those who are exasperated?

You’d have to build a broad political movement that could transcend city council boundaries.

You’d have to spend a lot of time building an enduring coalition of labor, affordable housing advocates, and some of the reasonable elements of the development community, and make the case that Los Angeles cannot prosper without a balanced economy and a balanced residential population.

You’d have to outline a plan to construct, not just low-income housing, but workforce housing.

You’d have to combine regulatory reform, entitlement-processing reform, and a genuine community planning process—and it would have to be accelerated. We can’t take 10 or 15 years to do community plan updates; that’s exactly the problem we’re in right now.

I think you have to do all of the updates within five years. Otherwise, there’s no legitimacy to the process.

That may seem like a Herculean and impossible effort. But that is what it will take to tackle this. Otherwise, why would anyone lend any credibility to the city’s commitment to planning?

Before closing: TPR covered community planning and wealth-building in East LA in our last issue. You’ve been working on a bioscience hub in East LA; talk about what motivates you to be involved in this project. 

The vision for a bioscience or biomedical hub in the area has been there for at least 15 years. We looked at it when I was at the redevelopment agency. We combined two project areas—the county’s and the city’s—to create it, and then redevelopment went away. But we never lost that commitment.

There’s a clear concentration of uses in the area: the LAC+USC General Hospital, the Keck Medical Center, the USC Health Sciences Campus, Cal State LA, which has a terrific STEM program, and Grifols, which is an international biopharmaceutical company. Those are the makings of what ought to be an industry cluster.

During the recession, while private industry and other sectors were declining, biotech actually gained jobs. It has strength in this region, but it could be stronger. It’s a sector that could grow and create jobs—and more importantly, create an avenue of opportunity for folks on the Eastside.

We partnered with East LA College this year on a program called the Biotech Leaders Academy. We were very fortunate to get an LA2050 challenge grant to fund it. We placed 10 East LA College students in industry internships in the bioscience sector, many in startup companies. We also gave them training on entrepreneurship—what it takes to start a biotech company. This fundamentally transformed these students’ views of their careers and what they could do with the degrees they were attaining.

This is the nuts and bolts of equitable economic development: hitching the economic opportunity of disadvantaged communities to the rising tide of a growing industry from the start.

These companies now see East LA College and Cal State LA as sources of talent. They typically recruit from graduate programs at UCLA, USC, or Caltech. But after the program, employers told us that these students were focused, mature, and motivated—some of the best interns they’ve ever had—and that they would consider taking future interns from East LA College.

That is equitable economic development, and that’s the kind of work we need to continue to do if we want Los Angeles to thrive throughout the region and not just in pockets on the Westside.

(This article was posted originally at the excellent Planning Report. CityWatch is reposting it because The Planning Report does exceptional work and because few things affect the lives of Angelenos or dominate the city conversation as thoroughly and dramatically today as passionately debated planning future of Los Angeles.)

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EDITOR’S PICK--The powerful economic resurgence that has swept Southern California is on display almost everywhere here, visible in the construction cranes towering on the skyline and the gush of applications to build luxury hotels, shopping centers, high-rise condominiums and acres of apartment complexes from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.

But it can also be seen in a battle that has broken out about the fundamental nature of this distinctively low-lying and spread-out city. The conflict has pitted developers and some government officials against neighborhood organizations and preservationists. It is a debate about height and neighborhood character; the influence of big-money developers on City Hall; and, most of all, what Los Angeles should look like a generation from now.

This is a city that has long defied easy definition — at once urban, suburban and even rural — filled with people who live in homes with year-round gardens and open skies dotted by swaying palm trees, often blocks away from gritty boulevards, highways and clusters of office buildings. And it is no stranger to battles between entrenched neighborhood groups and well-financed developers seeing opportunity in a wealthy market; the slow-growth movement thrived here during the 1990s.

But the debate this time has reached a particularly pitched level, fueled by a severe shortage of affordable housing, an influx of people moving back into the city center and the perception that a Southern California city that once seemed to have unlimited space for growth has run out of track. “What’s that old cliché?” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti said in an interview. “The sprawl has hit the wall in LA” (Read the rest.) 

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