The chaos at the Department of Water and Power is bleeding the town dry with rates going to soar like never before and far too much of the money going into the bank accounts of its workers and union treasury of controlled by IBEW union boss Brian D’Arcy, the official City Hall blackmailer.
The scandal at the Community Redevelopment Agency is enriching wealthy developers and various other special interests without any meaningful public debate or significant public benefits.
Bad as those two agencies are, nothing they do impacts the quality of life so dramatically and negatively as what is going on in the Planning Department under the leadership of wannabe mayor Austin Beutner and his squire Planning Director Michael LoGrande.
They talk the language of smart growth — walkability, community enhancement, public benefits. But he has started to push through the Council without anyone standing up for the public a series of radical changes that separately and collectively make zoning laws meaningless, negate the need for environmental impact studies and all but eliminate even the pretense of public input.
The result will be allow the Planning Department — gutted of its most experienced, talented and knowledgeable planners — to green light developments of any size in any part of the city no matter how much damage they do to the quality of life of residents or harm they do to local businesses.
The goal is simple: Densify, densify, densify. The justification is simple: Jobs, jobs, jobs.
By short-circuiting the planning process — instead of simplifying and clarifying it as this mayor promised to do but failed to achieve — and by using public money from the DWP and CRA to subsidize new projects, they are intending to cause irreparable harm to the city.
Already, LA’s long record of ignoring good planning policies has led to traffic congestion, shortages of water and clean power, deterioration of neighborhoods and decaying infrastructure of pipes, power lines, roads and sidewalks.
What they are doing is the coup de grace to a city that has lost much of its middle class and become increasingly like the dying Rust Belt cities of Detroit and Cleveland than the paradise for the common man and woman it once was.
Fortunately, LA Neighbors United founded by Cary Brazeman is fighting back on behalf of all us.
On Thursday, the group’s attorney Douglas Carsten, a planning expert, filed a lawsuit (planning-lawsuit.pdf) on behalf of the public to block implementation of the recently-approved Community Plan Implementation Overlay District Ordinance (CPIO), calliing it a “Trojan Horse” that will “mark
the beginning of the end of real community planning in Los Angeles.”
“The City maintains that the ordinance is
necessary to effect street-level planning, but the tools already exist to do
that,” Brazeman wrote in announcing the suit..
“The real reason for these districts is to create a mechanism to effectively
rezone or upzone areas without the benefit of a holistic Community Plan update,
which includes a high level of public participation and environmental review.”
Brazeman, who has extensive experience in real estate and bought full-page ads in local newspapers that successfully slowed down approval of another new radical change in planning policy, offered alternative strategies and posed a number of questions in his statement.
“How is the community going to be able to evaluate multiple districts that might
be created in a general area, and weigh in on their potential impacts,
including relative to each other? They wont be able to.
“What will be the collective impact on our City of these districts that allow
development that is 20% or more intense and dense across the board? We dont
know.”
He points out a number of seriious problems with the CPIO: Allowing dense development with less parking and less open space
everywhere in the city: giving the Zoning Administrator power to approve, without public hearings, development bonuses of up to 20
percent for every project, even spot zoning single parcels.
“To those
who think we citizens are cynical for not trusting the Mayor and his appointees
to do the right thing by this far-reaching ordinance, I say simply this: The
Mayor has given us good reason to be cynical. Theres no better evidence than
the Citys density-bonus ordinance, which makes no effort (zippo) to target
density based on infrastructure including transportation … no effort (zippo) to
ensure project designs are compatible with neighboring properties … and no
penalties (zippo) to ensure the community benefit (the affordable housing) is
actually delivered.
“It is a one-size-fits-all development incentive from a Mayor who had a chance
to implement real inclusionary housing in his first term, but reneged on his
campaign promise.
“Odds are this ordinance will be used exactly the same way: As a
one-size-fits-all development incentive to create high-density, low-parking,
reduced open-space districts with little or no community benefit for the people
of Los Angeles.”
City Hall cannot be trusted with this kind of unlimited power after its years of failure that have led to soaring poverty, unemployment disparities between rich and poor that pose long-term threats to the social fabric.
If you want join the fight against what they are doing in bringing the DWP, CRA and Planning Department into a single weapon of destruction, you will suffer the consequences of your passivity without pity.
City Hall cannot be trusted. For too long power has been held by the few and has failed in its duty to the many.
old school politicking, that’s right Herb Wesson talks about the old timers all the time – the only man allow to fire up and blow smoke
Doesn’t sound like they are going to blow Herb out the door that easy. That may be a waste of time and money.
Sounds like RonKayeLA just called Brian D’Arcy the offical blamailer. I witness that meeting at City Hall, ZD got stuck outside cause he was late for the meeting. He said, oh then tell Mr. D’Arcy to get ZD’s limo ready for production.
Ron, identified the CRA in previous activities the famous Hollywood Vine. And indeed, by way of measurment to public benefit; Logically, in fairness to the public, folks on the ground living with no results the public is frustrated withthe CRA and Mayor of LA, especially.
So aside from the frustration, then you need to raise a better argument. You need to have an idea, a plan to deal with the wise guys over at LADWP. If not, same ol’ same ol. Thats why they fire up joints, and checking out the ho’s its only Christmas but by spring after the Snow melts; let the show begin.
Here is an excerpt from an article on “Curbed LA” about our Planning Director whose top priority is the AEG stadium, which has never been discussed with the community.
“Los Angeles planning director Michael LoGrande has been on the job now for about three months, so what’s he been up to? Last night, LoGrande and LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne got together for a chat at Occidental, sponsored by the LAT and the college’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute. LoGrande was pretty candid–he compared taking over at planning to being 16 and getting a sweet car, then slowly realizing it’s got a broken transmission and pricey insurance. And he had a lot to say about a downtown NFL stadium–he said he supports a stadium there over one in Industry.
Tackled last night: designing rail stations, revitalizing the river, pre-gaming.>>>
On the Downtown NFL stadium: LoGrande has been meeting with stakeholders in the AEG stadium/convention center mashup plan. Hawthorne was concerned a huge stadium downtown might be overwhelming or albatrossy like LA Live, and LoGrande pointed to new urban design guidelines for downtown. “We’re a lot better prepared than we were when LA Live came through.” He also said he wants to keep the stadium architects (no, we still don’t know who that is) heavily-involved and “empowered,” and threw out the possibility of having a design committee for the project.
Overall, LoGrande said the idea of the stadium is to “have it improve downtown.”
He said that everyone agrees it’ll be important to improve Blue Line access to the project (currently, the street/track configuration makes crossing Flower complicated), and to otherwise make sure the stadium is well-connected, both to the surrounding streets and via transit and cars. He also pointed out one challenge of an urban stadium: no tailgating. What’s the planning approach to pre-gaming?”
As for his comment about the sweet car with a broken transmission, he should resign and let a more experienced driver fix the car.
Very briefly, that meeting at Occidental College with the city’s new planning director, Michael LoGrande is reported on 12-2-10 on the college’s website at http://www.oxy.edu/x10790.xml
The meeting was on December 1st with L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne doing the interview before an audience.
While the city is cutting out provisions for parking slowly but surely in many of its plans, it is working on change in parking ordinances so a resident park and block his or her own driveway and not get a ticket. The area is Rosendahl’s district where parking can be scarce.
While at the same time, to use a Tony Cardenas favorite-phrase, the city continues to create a condition of diminishing parking as it approves building projects with variances, especially if near a so-called “transit corridor”, i.e., bus or light rail route, as if the need for automobiles is reduced.
You have a city that has a mission to make city automobile unfriendly, trying to force use of public transportation by making parking less available and less affordable, helped by newer meters and higher rates. It’s a sort of “aversion” therapy that just make people frustrated and causes changes in shopping habits that, of course, the city council puts low on the priorities rankings. This happens to be another aspect of L.A. city government being “business unfriendly”, addressing in band-aid fashion the results of it’s “planning” or should I say, “social engineering” efforts.
The item on the Oxy website mentions the Eagle Rock locale in which Oxy sits, considering how streets are to be treated. Without any parking structures like Old Town Pasadena has, this areas businesses will continue to see parking in short supply, but the city looks to be moving to pack in more people than to preserve a lower congestion condition, so we should be alert to what the council, the mayor and their operatives ave in store for us, regardless of whether they appear to be bearing “gifts”, i.e. “jobs”, something that usually gets Ed Reyes’ enthusiasm to perk up, regardless of the quality or temporal nature of the jobs.
CRA is another tool of these political trades men and women, especially where “blight” can be established to allow them to enable the “densification” to proceed.
All this is more reason to move to re-electing no one for city council and begin work on behalf of the people who live and work here.
Interesting timing…LA Neighbors files its lawsuit and the Planning Department sends out a “fact sheet” purported to dispel the myths about the latest “planning initiatives.”
I read this well-worded b.s. and found myself thinking “What’s wrong with what we have?” “Don’t current planning, zoning, municipal codes do the same things?”
Silly me. I must have lost my mind for a minute.
I read that Planning Myths and Facts document. Pure hogwash.
When I read the Planning Myths and Facts document, I had an immediate sense of outrage in being manipulated and misled. We have been told over and over again that the core finding only seeks to streamline the planning code and eliminate redundancies.
Let us be very clear what we are really talking about: As Mr. LoGrande says in his letter of December 7, 2010, the Core finding ordinance seeks to consolidate and standardize many required findings for discretionary approvals. And, why are these approvals called discretionary? Because they seek to DEVIATE from the planning code. And what will those deviations look like? Taller, fatter, denser buildings with less setbacks and less parking.
This standardization seeks to eliminate written findings, so no one can be held accountable. If it isn’t necessary to document the finding for allowing a bigger, taller, fatter building, how can anyone follow the path that allows the building to be built not in conformity with the underlying code? And who makes that decision of those findings? Certainly, not the community nor even the Council Member whose district is affected.
It is no myth to say that this ordinance will give the Planning Department free rein and will short cut the public process. It is no myth to say that this will make it easier for the planning department to approve larger building. Mr. LoGrande claims that these new ordinances cannot be used to approve larger, taller buildings. That is technically true as it doesn’t change the code to permit by right larger taller buildings. BUT, it is the discretionary approvals with no oversight and no public input that will allow larger, taller buildings to be built that are not in conformity with the planning code. Again, Mr. LoGrande is technically correct that the planning code will remain in place. It’s just that it will be rendered meaningless.
And what does a neighborhood do when the 20 story building shows up on Culver Blvd when the community plan calls for only 4 stories? They don’t know that it is being built because they are not notified; they don’t know who approved it or what the rationale was. And, who will be there to stop it? No one. And, finally, when the neighbors say that it is out of character with the neighborhood, the rationale of being for the good for the “region” or city will be trotted out.
I predict that if this core finding revision (not simplification) is adopted, huge out of scale projects will be approved all over the Westside and the Valley under the rationale of providing jobs.
It isn’t auto repair shops and check cashing stores that threatens to disrupt quality of life for residents. If there was a general discussion of what city of LA should look like and the citizenry had an opportunity to weigh in a la Proposition U, I would not have this sense of outrage. But that is not what is happening here. City Planning is pursuing a course that will drastically change the character of the city while maintaining the fiction that there is no significant change being proposed.
What really chaps my a– is that this misdirection is being done because people like the mayor and Ed Reyes know better than the rest of us what the city should look like. This is planning theology–dense is right and the rest of us are just plain wrong.
Who says attorneys are all bad?
The long arm of the law is the only thing that will get the attention of the mayor and council members. They’ve proven time and again that won’t listen to us, the people who pay their salaries.
Maybe a law suit will get the attention of the media, too, or do we have to be another Bell before they get in on the act of really covering City Hall?