PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

By Dick Platkin* City employees and members off the public who follow city planning issues in Los Angeles were sending emails hot and heavy on Wednesday, June 30, in response to the announcement of the Director of Planning, Gail Goldberg that her last day of work would be July 16. Her bomb shell was paired with a similar announcement from the Mayor’s office, indicating that one of Gail Goldberg’s deputies, Vince Bertoni, would become the acting Director of Planning though late August. Those who think that Gail Goldberg’s departure will usher in new planning policies or procedures in Los Angeles are well meaning, but engaged in wishful thinking. In reality, changes in the management of the Department of City Planning are highly unlikely to affect any planning policies and practices. If there is any rift between the Planning Department and the city’s elected officials, it is not over policies, but only over the speed at which discretionary actions can be processed...

By Dick Platkin* City employees and members off the public who follow city planning issues in Los Angeles were sending emails hot and heavy on Wednesday, June 30, in response to the announcement of the Director of Planning, Gail Goldberg that her last day of work would be July 16. Her bomb shell was paired with a similar announcement from the Mayor’s office, indicating that one of Gail Goldberg’s deputies, Vince Bertoni, would become the acting Director of Planning though late August. Those who think that Gail Goldberg’s departure will usher in new planning policies or procedures in Los Angeles are well meaning, but engaged in wishful thinking. In reality, changes in the management of the Department of City Planning are highly unlikely to affect any planning policies and practices. If there is any rift between the Planning Department and the city’s elected officials, it is not over policies, but only over the speed at which discretionary actions can be processe...

AS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS DEEPENS, LOS ANGELES THROWS ITS GENERAL PLAN OVERBOARD Toward a Just Metropolis: From Crises to Opportunities Annual conference of the Planners Network Berkeley, California, Saturday, June 19, 2010 By Richard Platkin Tierra Concepts, Inc. 6400 W. 5th Street, L.A., CA 90048 rhplatkin@yahoo.com, 213-308-6354 Questions, comments, and corrections welcomed. The Los Angeles Times (March 1 and March 14, 2010), Southern California’s rapidly shrinking, former newspaper of record, repeatedly complains that Los Angeles’s elected officials, primarily Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the 15 members of the Los Angeles 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 the fees they charge the public 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 offici...

As reported by CNN Money, the Center for State and Local Government Excellence looked at 20 years of data compiled by the National Labor Bureau (NLB) to fact check the pervasive belief that government salaries are unsustainable because they are out of line with private sector salaries. This belief is based on anecdotal evidence and cherry-picked data. The results of the study have been published as “Out of Balance? Comparing Public and Private Sector Compensation over 20 Years.” Bullet points from the report’s Executive Summary: Jobs in the public sector typically require more education than private sector positions. Thus, state and local employees are twice as likely to hold a college degree or higher as compared to private sector employees. Only 23% of private sector employees have completed college as compared to about 48% in the public sector. Wages and salaries of state and local employees are lower than those for private sector employees with comparable earnings determinants suc...

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...