PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

The City of San Diego, like most California cities and other local agencies, such as the LAUSD, are facing the same financial crisis as the City of Los Angeles. In the case of San Diego, some uninformed people have proposed having the city declare bankruptcy as a device to cancel pension payments. The mayor of San Diego argues that this strategy will not work, and instead the city should pursue a combination of pay cuts for current employees with increased retirement deductions. The San Diego mayor's alternative to bankruptcy of reducing compensation to current employees while increasing their retirement deductions is already being pursued by the City of Los Angeles -- with disastrous results. But neither alternative -- bankruptcy or cutbacks -- is desirable or inevitable. The real thrust of labor should be: 1) Identifying financial resources which, if collected, would prevent cutbacks on public services through furloughs, layoffs, and increased deductions. The obvious sourc...

As a long-time analyst of the City of LA budget, community activist, former city employee and union officer, and now a private planning consultant, a few thoughts on the current chapter of the perennial city budget crisis in Los Angeles (as well as the LAUSD,MTA, and Community College District). 1) It is critical to never let the City Hall pols define the budget debate since it means they will limit it to alternative strategies for gouging employees, and by direct extension LA residents. In their shuttered universe their only choices are whether to cut employees and public services and infrastructure from the bottom or the top. 2) The pols' most basic argument is "there is just no money," and it is bogus to the core. It needs to be rigorously exposed as a lie since the pols hidden agenda is their skewed priorities, for which employees and residents rank extremely low. 3) The critical rebuttal points to the pols’ "no money" arguments need to be repeatedly raised:...

December 10, 2009 REGARDING THE PROPOSED COLUMBIA SQUARE PROJECT CPC-2007-9911-GPA-VZC-HD-CUB-CUX-VCU-SPR-DA A MIXED-USE PROJECT IN THE HOLLYWOOD COMMUNITY PLAN AREA I am Richard Platkin, a city planning consultant, presenting today on behalf of the La Mirada Avenue Neighborhood Association of Hollywood. I am offering testimony in support of their opposition to seven entitlements for the proposed Columbia Square project, including a plan amendment, zone change, and height district change Prior to becoming a planning consultant, I earned graduate degrees in city planning and sociology, worked for the City of Seattle, worked for non-profits and private firms in Los Angeles, and was a Los Angeles City planner from 1987 to 2007. During my 20 years in LA’s Department of City Planning most of my professional assignments dealt with long range planning, and I was, in fact, part of the team which prepared the General Plan Framework. I therefore think I can speak with some expertise on whet...

SIX FAILINGS AND SEVERAL REMEDIES FOR THE PLANNING PROCESS IN LOS ANGELES Los Angeles residents who follow local land use issues have a gut feeling that their city is poorly governed and poorly planned. Here is one effort to explain why these feelings are sound and to also offer potential solutions based on years of city planning experience in and out of City Hall. In a nutshell, the Los Angeles planning process, from the allocation of public resources to project level decisions, has stumbled badly. Its Achilles heal is its reluctance to carefully consider the capacity of local public services and infrastructure to meet the existing and future needs of the city’s residents, institutions, and businesses. Once this glaring defect can be remedied, then the city can begin fixing much of what is broken. More specifically, a careful examination of City Hall’s minimal efforts to address LA’s needs for infrastructure and public services reveals six related shortcomings. Furthermore, the on...

Enforcement of Conditions on City Planning Cases San Fernando Valley Regional Congress Panorama City High School -- May 29, 2009 Please send comments and corrections to : Dick Platkin E-mail: rhplatkin@yahoo.com 213-308-6354 cell, 323-938-7027 FAX Blog: www.plan-itlosangeles.blogspot.com Senior Planner and Policy Analyst, Tierra Concepts I have five major points to make today about the enforcement of conditions on approved City Planning discretionary actions: 1) The historic weakness of the overall planning process in Los Angeles has encouraged the proliferation of discretionary actions to side-step the city’s legally adopted zones and plan designations. 2) Few applications for discretionary actions are ever denied, and few are ever approved out-right. The Planning Department’s general approach to these applications for discretionary actions could be summarized as “Approve with conditions.” 3) The weakness of the Departments of B...

At L.A.'s City Hall, despite intense disagreements over the best way to make budget cutbacks, there is an implicit "we have no money" consensus among the Mayor, his supporters on the City Council, and his Council critics. As a result, they all sadly restrict their budget debate to the best way to reach bottom: Should we exempt or not exempt the LAPD from across-the-board staff reductions, even if results in 1,200 additional layoffs of civilians employees and up to 40 furlough days for the remaining civil servants. But, both sides in this debate are wrong. There clearly is money, as demonstrated by this recent article from the Huffington Post. In addition to the $95 billion supplemental budget allocation for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars requested by the Obama Administration and just approved by a Democratic-controlled Congress (Sound familiar?), there is another $108 billion being shunted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in this same legislation. So -- let us...

Jane Usher Slams Gail Goldberg A former commission president slams L.A.'s planning director as a developer sellout By Steven Leigh Morris published: April 30, 2009 * Kevin Scanlon Planning director Gail Goldberg Planning director Gail Goldberg It’s been a bad season for L.A.’s City Planning department. Recently, big sections of a city law to encourage density and affordable housing were struck down by Superior Court Judge Thomas McKnew. And now a leading civic figure is alleging that City Planning Director Gail Goldberg, who pushed the pro-developer law, is little more than a handmaiden to developers. The judge tossed out provisions of a controversial “bonus density” rule that lets developers build far bigger and taller projects than allowed by zoning if they agree to include a small number of cheap rental units. That ordinance “masquerades as an affordable-housing act, when it’s really a densification act that facilitates sprawl,” says departed City Hall insi...