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Former Officials Pitch Proposals to Stop City Hall Corruption in LA

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Former Officials Pitch Proposals to Stop City Hall Corruption in LA Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA , October 15, 2020 PLANNING WATCH -Three former city officials have offered a proposal to stop rampant City Hall corruption in Los Angeles. In The Planning Report and then in the Los Angeles Times , Gail Goldberg (former Los Angeles City Planning Director), Bud Ovrum (former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor and LADBS General Manager), Rick Cole (former Pasadena Mayor and Santa Monica City Manager), presented their suggestions.  The two articles were welcome, but, in my view, muddled. They called for updating LA’s aging Community Plans, but not the equally outdated citywide General Plan elements (e.g. Public Safety), or preparing a desperately needed Climate Change element . These General Plan elements are essential to the thorough updating of Community Plans. The two articles also overlooked systematic General Plan monitorin...
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Why LA Has Stopped Voting!

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              Why LA Has Stopped Voting! By Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA , October 8, 2020 PLANNING WATCH -In the 1960s, 75 percent of Angelenos voted in local elections. In the Villaraigosa-Garcetti era less than 20 percent of the electorate bothers to vote . In Los Angeles, a city of 4,000,000 people, a candidate can become mayor with 331,000 votes. In City Council Districts, that have on average 260,000 people, 7,000 to 31,000 votes are enough to win a Council election   These voting trends track the United States as a whole, where the 100 million non-voters are the largest political category, eclipsing those who identify as independents (38 %), Democrats (31%), Republicans (26 %), or Greens and other small parties (5 %).   But why are there so many no...
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LA's City Hall Could Write the Book on Inept Governance

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LA’s City Hall Could Write the Book on Inept Governance Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA , October 1, 2020   PLANNING WATCH -Robert Reich is a distinguished UC Berkeley professor of public policy, a former Secretary of Labor, and a frequent ed-op writer. I often admire his articles, but his recent essay , “The Real Difference Between Democrats and Republicans,” was only half-right.  “The Democratic Party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican Party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol.”   I don’t dispute Professor Reich’s claims that the Republicans have become an attack party, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s nonstop bullying and interruptions during Tuesday’s Presidential debate. But had ...
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LA’s City Hall Could Write the Book on Inept Governance Dick Platkin 01 October 2020 Previous Article The Art of the Spiel (A Review) Next Article Presidential Pity and Pathos Tools Print Email Facebook Twitter Share PLANNING WATCH-Robert Reich is a distinguished UC Berkeley professor of public policy, a former Secretary of Labor, and a frequent ed-op writer. I often admire his articles, but his recent essay, “The Real Difference Between Democrats and Republicans,” was only half-right. “The Democratic Party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican Party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol.” I don’t dispute Professor Reich’s claims that the Republicans have become an attack party, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s nonstop bullying and interruptions during Tuesday’s Presidential debate. But had the distinguished professor looked south to LA’s deep blue City Hall, his argument that the Democrats are the party of good governance would collapse. He would see a city that is falling apart at the seams. Its streets and sidewalks are crumbling. LA’s air pollution and traffic congestion is the worst in the nation. Its homeless population grows larger, year-by-year. Its water mains and sewer lines regularly burst. Its urban forest is shrinking, a consequence of real estate development. Out-of-character, out-of-scale cracker box apartments and McMansions have blighted its neighborhoods. Its municipalized electrical grid suffers from frequent blackouts. Its City Council regularly pays out millions in LAPD lawsuits for repeated violations of Angelenos’ civil liberties. At the same time, the LAPD consumes over half of the City’s discretionary budget, despite massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the alternative Peoples Budget. While the Federal government’s stinginess has made some of these problems worse, especially homelessness, it is not the primary cause. A change in Federal policy, such as bailing out local governments during the Pandemic, would help, but it would not reverse a long list of inept City Hall practices. As a result, Los Angeles has become a corrupt, unplanned, unmonitored city, where felons-in-waiting and slippery bamboozlers make key decisions, in synch with the real estate speculators who are their key donors and beneficiaries. $100 bills dished out to the Chair of the LA City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee. Nevertheless, LA’s officials have access to three powerful tools that could still salvage the city: General Plans, monitoring, and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). If implemented, they could produce the sound public policies that Robert Reich prematurely attributes to his fellow Democrats. With one Republican and 18 Democrats holding elected office at LA’s deep blue City Hall, they could methodically transform a rapidly failing city into a well-governed one. General Plan. California state law and the LA City's Charter require the city to prepare and adopt a General Plan. It must have seven mandatory elements (e.g. Housing), but can also include optional elements, such as Air Quality (1991), Climate Change, and Economic Development. By law, General Plans must be internally consistent, timely, and implemented through ordinances and budgets. But as I have reported in previous Planning Watch columns, LA’s General Plan is out-of-date. Only a few mandatory elements are current, and other crucial elements are either ancient: Open Space (1973), Safety (1996), and Public Services and Infrastructure (1969), or simply missing (Urban Forest, Climate Change, Economic Development). The all-important Land Use element consists of LA’s 35 Community Plans and two District Plans. According to the Los Angeles City Council, they should be updated every six years, but over 15 years of starts and stops, only a handful of Community Plans have been updated. While many Updates are underway, they have become a prop for up-zoning real estate schemes. When the City Council adopts them, real estate developers can then garner windfall profits by flipping properties -- unless the Superior Court again rescinds plans and up-zoning ordinances because they are based on spurious data. Monitoring. All California General Law cities must annually monitor their General Plans to determine if their demographic assumptions are correct, if the plan’s goals are being met, and if the implementation programs are working. In the case of Charter Cities, such as Los Angeles, monitoring is optional. But Los Angeles legally committed itself to annual monitoring reports. While the Planning Department prepared several partial monitoring reports in the late 1990s, the monitoring unit still does not exist. As a result, the City of Los Angeles is deliberately flying blind by refusing to monitor its plans. Current General Plan elements and monitoring reports should be applied to the City’s operating and capital budgets. In fact, LA’s City Planning Commission is charged with reviewing the Capital Improvement Program for consistency with the General Plan. But this never happens. The General Plan’s policies and programs are totally disconnected from the City’s operating and capital budgets. These parallel lines never meet in the Mayor’s offices or the City Council’s chambers. California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). California has provided local municipalities a powerful tool, CEQA, to identify the environmental impacts, including climate change, for all public and private projects. Whether a project requires a smaller Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) or a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR), decision makers are furnished irreplaceable information to approve, reject, or redesign a project to reduce its environmental impacts. LA’s decision makers never take advantage of this good governance tool. Instead, they always certify the most environmentally damaging project alternative through a Statement of Overriding Considerations. These are unverified claims that a project will generate so many jobs or transit trips that the City Council can overlook a project’s adverse environmental impacts. Unfortunately, City Hall’s actual record flies in the face of Professor Reich’s claims that Democrats govern through thoroughly vetted public policies. Of course, Los Angeles, like Sacramento and the Federal government, could carefully review public policy options instead of surrendering to lobbyists and campaign donors. But for this to happen, we need to tell the apologists and the elected officials to stop gaslighting (deceiving) the public. Officials from both parties have become adept at lofty rhetoric, while in private or the small print turn government into an ATM for real estate developers, ig pharma, fossil fuel companies, health insurance corporations, military and police contractors, and Wall Street in your backyard. (Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He serves on the board of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA) and is co-chair of the new Greater Fairfax Residents Association. Previous Planning Watch columns available at the CityWatch archives. Please send comments and corrections to rhplatkin@gmail.com or via Twitter to @DickPlatkin.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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  LA’s City Hall Could Write the Book on Inept Governance Dick Platkin 01 October 2020 Previous Article The Art of the Spiel (A Review) Next Article Presidential Pity and Pathos Tools  Print  Email Facebook Twitter Share PLANNING WATCH -Robert Reich is a distinguished UC Berkeley professor of public policy, a former Secretary of Labor, and a frequent ed-op writer. I often admire his articles, but his recent essay , “The Real Difference Between Democrats and Republicans,” was only half-right.  “The Democratic Party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and impleme...
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The California Cargo Cult Shilling for Real Estate Speculators

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The California Cargo Cult Shilling for Real Estate Speculators Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA , September 24, 2020 PLANNING WATCH -The South Pacific cargo cults are gone, but we have plenty of modern cults, and the one I regularly encounter is the Supply-and-Demand cult. Like the Cargo Cult, (photo above: Mock Cargo Cult P-52 airplane built on Melanesian Island) which built mock airplanes to lure back the riches left by Japanese and Allied flyers during WWII, our modern cultists imagine that zone changes are the market magic the will create real estate fortunes. It will not only make investors and their champions rich, but also solve the worsening housing crisis and turn car habituated Angelenos into regular bus and subway riders.  We can dismiss the Cargo Cults as an imaginative effort by Neolithic communitie...
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Climate Change Denial Runs Deep at LA's City Hall

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Climate Change Denial Runs Deep at LA’s City Hall By Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA, September 17, 2020 PLANNING WATCH - Sly climate change deniers have learned how to appear more “woke” than Donald Trump and his anti-science supporters .   These dapper deniers don’t call climate change a Chinese conspiracy, propose raking leaves in forests, or claim public policy should ignore climate science.  Instead, at LA’s deep blue City Hall climate analysis, change mitigation, adaptation, and monitoring is not just on the back burner; it is falling off the stove. In fact, no climate change initiatives are underway despite last week’s record heat wave, LA worst air since 1993, and uncontrolled wildfires on the entire West Coast.  In City Hall’s insulated world, climate disruption happens elsewhere, e...
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