PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

The Los Angeles Department of City Planning has recently announced a reorganization plan which includes the following: 1) Assigning staff to four geographical teams in order to more efficiently process discretionary actions, such as variances, zone changes, conditional use permits, and subdivisions, from “cradle to grave.” 2) Reassigning remaining Zoning Administrators to the four geographical teams. 3) Expanding the Citywide Planning Division to include Historic Resources and the Urban Design Studio. To assess the impacts of these changes, we should consider the following. At this point there is little evidence that this reorganization plan can address three significant planning issues faced by Los Angeles: First, the Department of City Planning is painfully understaffed. City Planning’s long-term staffing trend has been downward for nearly 25 years. At the end of the Tom Bradley era, the Department of City Planning had 350 employees to serve a city of 3.2 million people. From th...

 

 

The Los Angeles Times (March 1, 2010), Southern California’s rapidly shrinking, former newspaper of record, complains that Los Angeles’s elected officials, primarily Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the 15 members of the LA City Council, do not have a plan to guide them in their massive, highly selective cutbacks in municipal services, layoffs of public employees, and increases in fees for city services. It is too bad that the editorial staff of the LA Times has not bothered to read its own newspaper. If they had, they would know that LA’s elected officials have two plans before them, and they are carefully following one of them. They would also know that similar plans are also being implemented at the LAUSD, not far down the street from City Hall. Its budget is as large as the city’s, and its budget deficit is even larger ($600 million vs. $450 million). Likewise, LA’s regional transit agency, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Los Angeles Community College District, are ...

By Dick Platkin* Councilperson Eric Garcetti has given four reasons for supporting cutbacks in municipal services and layoffs of Los Angeles city employees to balance the city’s budget. His reasons do not hold up to a careful analysis. Garcetti, “The City's work force has expanded by 4000 people since 1999.” This is misleading for several reasons. First, compared to the Tom Bradley era, the city's work force substantially declined under Mayor Riordan. For example, under Mayor Tom Bradley the Department of City Planning’s staffing levels peaked at about 350 employees in 1987, when LA had 3.2 million people. By the end of the 1990's, under Mayor Richard Riordan, the number of employees had dipped to about 250 even though LA’s population had grown by about 500,000 during that decade. Second, the subsequent hiring increase did not evenly apply to all city departments. For example, the LAPD has continued to grow through every Mayoral administration from Riordan onward. Ci...

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...