This is an email to let you know that the Baseline Hillside Ordinance (CPC-2010-581-CA; Council File No. 10-1001) will go before the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee on Tuesday, July 20, 2010. The meeting starts at 2:30 p.m. and will be located in:

Board of Public Works Edward R. Roybal Hearing Room
200 N. Spring St., Room 350
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(Google Maps)

The agenda was released today (we are item 4) and can be downloaded at the following link: http://ens.lacity.org/clk/committeeagend/clkcommitteeagend2667399_07202010.pdf The first 3 items are expected to be relatively quick, so please take this into consideration when determining what your arrival time.

You can track the progress of ANY case before the City Council and download available public documents at the City Clerk Office – LACityClerk Connect website (http://cityclerk.lacity.org/lacityclerkconnect/index.cfm). The Council File Number for the Baseline Hillside Ordinance is 10-1001. You can view the online electronic case file for this project by going to the following link: http://cityclerk.lacity.org/lacityclerkconnect/index.cfm?fa=ccfi.viewrecord&cfnumber=10-1001 You can also subscribe to receive direct email from the City Clerk whenever the “file” is updated (look for the envelope at the top of the webpage).

You can download the Planning Department documents listed below by following the links:
April 22, 2010 City Planning Commission Staff Report: http://planning.lacity.org/StaffRpt/InitialRpts/CPC-2010-581.pdf
May 27, 2010 City Planning Commission Staff Report: http://planning.lacity.org/Code_Studies/BaselineHillsideOrd/CPC-2010-581-CA052710SRpt.pdf
City Planning Commission Determination Letter: http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2010/10-1001_rpt_plan_6-8-10.pdf

Feel free to forward this information to anyone you feel might be interested.

If you received this email via forwarded message from someone other than myself, and you want to obtain updates directly from the Department, please email erick.lopez@lacity.org and ask to be added to the interest list. Please type “Add Me To Hillside Notification List” in the subject line and provide your group/organization/company affiliations and contact information (please include at least your ZIP Code).

Facebook™ Users: Look for the Baseline Hillside Ordinance page; add the page and receive updates in your news feed. You can also view our events calendar and participate in discussion boards.

As always, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact myself or Jennifer Driver at jennifer.driver@lacity.org or at (818) 374-5034.

Thank you for your time and attention.

__________________________________________
Erick Lopez
City Planner
Department of City Planning
Community Planning Bureau – West Coastal Division
200 N. Spring St., Room 621
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 978-1243
(213) 978-1226 – fax
erick.lopez@lacity.org

Here’s the link and also copied below.

http://www.planningreport.com/tpr/

Gail Goldberg Retires: TPR Reader Quotes—Whither Planning in the City of L.A.?
TPR readers – select developers, planners, architects, community leaders and elected officials – respond to the question: Whither Planning in the City of L.A. after Gail Goldberg’s retirement?

In response to the retirement this summer of Gail Goldberg, following a tenure of more than four years as the director of planning for the city of Los Angeles, The Planning Report surveyed a distinguished group of its readers: developers, planners, architects, advocates, and policy-makers on whither planning in the city of Los Angeles. The question asked, and their thoughtful responses, follow. Because of a dearth of local news coverage in Los Angeles, copies of forthcoming issues of The Planning Report will include even more insider viewpoints on this and like issues; the August Issue of TPR will be available in print and online next week!

TPR Survery Question: In choosing a new City Planning Director, should Mayor Villaraigosa select a candidate who will continue Gail Goldberg’s game changing, reform of city planning processes* or someone who will roll back her reforms to better staff and expedite individual development projects…“the way it always was in L.A.?”

*See The Planning Report, June Issue: “L.A. City Planning Reorganization Is ‘Game Changing’” http://www.planningreport.com/tpr/

TPR Reader Responses:

Wayne Ratkovich, President / CEO, THE RATKOVICH COMPANY

Gail Goldberg was a gift to the City of Los Angeles, deserving of enormous gratitude. The best way for the city to express that gratitude is to ensure that her policies and practices will continue.

Mark Winogrond, FAICP, Planmark Associates

In Los Angeles, there is only one team dedicated to a better physical future: City Planning. To say that a better future can (or should) be “expedited” is a foolish and dangerous idea. The Mayor selected his first Director of Planning wisely; he will hopefully apply that same wisdom to this selection. The quality of a city is decided by the courage of its leaders, not be the speed of its approval stamps.

John Greenwood, Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council

Gail Goldberg believed in the integrity of the zoning process and opposed speculative zone changes. She was a breath of fresh air to Neighborhood Councils concerned about projects that increase traffic in already congested neighborhoods. L. A. needs to continue her thoughtful initiatives.

L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky

The next Planning Director should have a broad vision for how to manage the City’s inevitable growth, without destroying the unique characteristics that make many of our communities livable. “One size fits all” planning is tempting in a city the size of Los Angeles, but it tends to produce lowest common denominator results. Los Angeles and its neighborhoods deserve better.

Renata Simril, Vice President, Forest City

It would be advisable that the next Planning Director continue the reforms instituted by Gail Goldberg. Gail’s focus on neighborhood planning – detailed, robust and seeking to provide more certainty and balance is the right direction for the Planning Department to be going. It is better for developers and better for residents. New Community Plans and the reorganization of the Planning Department to a geographically based structure are the 2 most essential foundations for assuring positive change in the planning and development process in LA.

James Rojas, Urban Planner, Artist, Co-Chair Latino Urban Forum

The new city planning director should have a background in a field other than planning. The profession has become very inward-turning, with the same cast of characters having the same conversations. The new director needs to attract new participants to the conversation, and to tap into the creative thinking of every Angeleno to solve our city’s problems.

Len Hill, Partner – Linear City Development LLC

Much of the challenge that any new Planning Director will confront is political. How can you motivate an understaffed department? How do you deal with administrators who have virtual tenure? How do you make coherent planning decisions in an environment that has given City Council Members exaggerated authority over the planning process? How do you contend with the outsized role that developers play in financing local political campaigns? We need to spur smart development and to do that we need to candidly confront some real political obstacles.

Dan Rosenfeld, Chief of Staff, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas

All of the important selection criteria for this position – planning vision, community sensitivity, integrity and courage – suggest that the City should rehire Gail.

Joseph T. Edmiston, FAICP, Hon. ASLA, Executive Director, State of California—Natural Resources Agency, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy

Gail went the right direction, but not far enough or fast enough. There are enough expeditors/lobbyists in the private sector; public planners shouldn’t be the expeditor’s handmaidens.

Gary Toebben, President and CEO, L.A. Chamber of Commerce

We need a planning director who will create new efficiencies in the planning process and continue efforts to develop neighborhood plans to outline entitlements in advance.

Michael Woo, L.A. City Planning Commissioner

The next Planning Director should continue Gail Goldberg’s reforms—and pick up the pace and expand the scope of the reforms. The Mayor and the City Council should give the next Planning Director what Gail Goldberg didn’t have: the staffing, the budget, and most important, the political support not only to speed up the permit process for individual projects but also to make individual projects “better”. Better fitting the scale of their block and their neighborhood, better architecture, better pedestrian orientation, better availability of housing closer to jobs, better compatibility with new rail and bus transit service, better sustainability, better vision.

Andy Lipkis, President, TreePeople

Keep up the momentum–hire a well qualified senior staffer. L.A. has invested years (and millions) in bringing the Commission and senior staff into a transparent culture committed to sustainability and historic community integrity. Why return to the all too recent days of Wild West deal making over our future?

Kathi Littmann, VP School Operations, Knowledge Corporation Distance Learning

The proposed city planning structure is an important foundational framework for accountability, transparency, quality community service, and much needed streamlined processes; it also has all the makings of a bureaucratic boondoggle as the agency attempts to develop new processes, procedures and behaviors while continuing to deliver projects already in the pipeline. The new City Planning Director will need to provide proven experience, politically savvy leadership and a sustained and clear focus on cultural change both within the agency and within community expectations to take advantage of this opportunity. Let\’s hope Mayor Villaraigosa both continues and supports Goldberg’s initiatives.

Bill Witte, Related Companies

The new Director can’t just be a “placeholder”. But this shouldn\’t be just about one person: the Department has lost a lot of its senior leadership and is understaffed. The Mayor’s Office is rightly focused on job creation, but a lot of community interests are more than ever resistant to growth. Whoever is named, reconciling those two agendas will be a huge challenge.

John Kaliski , Principal at Urban Studio-LA

Former President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

As a global city, no planning will not establish the environmental amenities and atmospheres Los Angeles needs to compete economically, culturally, and socially. Los Angeles absolutely needs to hire a real planner with real vision to lead a division of planning and urban design. However, let the planning director dedicate themselves to this singular activity. Find a second individual capable of leading entitlement efforts. To leverage resources for the new planning director, consolidate the City’s multi-agency planning functions into one division and let them do their thing (with democratic oversight of course)!

Julie Gertler , Chief Executive Officer, Consensus Inc.

Change the game! The old compartmentalized process has created the “blind man and the elephant” syndrome. Each planner in each specialized unit sees a project only through his/her narrow lens, leading to different and often conflicting requirements. Give one person the responsibility and accountability for seeing a project through its lifecycle. Reduce tunnel vision and encourage holistic thinking.

Jay Stark, JH Stark Companies

It is not as much a question of who, but why? Given the city’s structural deficits, lack of resources for real planning and continued layoffs, how do you convince a nationally recognized candidate to take LA\’s top planning job? It will have to be one heck of a PR job to attract the candidate that LA deserves.

Daniel A. Mazmanian, Professor & Bedrosian Chair in Governance Director, The Judith and John Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise

The choice can’t be framed as between thinking big and boldly or returning to considering each development proposal incrementally, since the real challenge is finding a way to do both. City leaders must be both extremely sensitive to the changing effects of climate that are bearing down on us, and equally so in designing the physical infrastructure and business policies of the city to attract global commerce and finance. While our geographic location gives us enormous advantages in goods movement and quality of life, there is far more to being an internationally attractive and model green city.

Will Wright, Director, Government & Public Affairs for AIA|LA.

Why not both? Mayor Villaraigosa should empower the next Planning Director to provide expedient project development services. Additionally, this candidate must continue Goldberg’s excellent reform initiatives and place a strong emphasis on updating the community plans, which will enable more certainty and deliver maximum economic and environmental value to our City as a whole.

Robert Scott , Director, Mullholland Institute, the Valley Economic Alliance & Former Chair of the L.A. City Planning Commission

The City of Los Angeles is a city of cities, with 15 major political districts and dozens of unique communities. A strong planning philosophy is important for a planning director, but it is even more important that they understand the political terrain. No single person runs this city, and “one size” does not “fit all”.

Copyright © 2006 The Planning Report
David Abel, Publisher, ABL, Inc.

By Dick Platkin*

City employees and members of the public who follow city planning issues in Los Angeles rapidly traded emails in response to the June 30 announcement by the Director of Planning, Gail Goldberg, that her last day of work would be July 16, 2010. 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 through late August. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

Those who think that Gail Goldberg’s departure will usher in new planning policies or practices, such as the enforcement of conditions and codes, 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 planning policies, but only over the speed at which discretionary actions, such as zone variances and zone changes, can be processed so over-sized real estate projects can more quickly receive building permits.

Nevertheless, Los Angeles is in desperate need of serious city planning and code enforcement. After all, its General Plan Framework was adopted in 1995 and is based on antique 1990 census data. It has not been monitored in over a decade, should have already been replaced, and is generating law suits against the city. Similarly, most of the other General Plan elements are out-of-date, such as several infrastructure elements. They were adopted in the 1960s, years before many current Los Angeles city planners took their first breath. Even the city’s 35 community plans, several of which are now being updated, are on a slow track. Based on current schedules, it will take over a decade to revise these aging community plans, at which time the fresh 2020 census data will quickly render them obsolete.

This failure of the city’s elected officials to properly plan Los Angeles is unfortunate for many reasons.

First, Los Angeles is legally required by California State law, as well as its own Charter, to have an accurate and timely General Plan. When it fails to comply with these laws, it not only sets a dismal example for its own residents, but also leaves itself wide-open for law suits. Second, without accurate and current plans, City Hall muddles through its frequent budgeting crises with short-sighted political haggling, rather than turning to carefully developed planning policies based on rigorous data analysis, community participation, and a long-term policies.

But, despite these compelling reasons why Los Angeles’s official city plans should be updated and implemented, there are even more pressing reasons for the city to follow it own laws and policies. It is L.A.’s miserable day-to-day realities: its declining quality of life. After all, we have this country’s worst traffic congestion, worst street conditions, and worst air quality. Furthermore, Los Angeles has experienced two highly destructive civil disturbances, Watts in 1965 and the aftermath of the Rodney King trial in 1994. Finally, L.A. is sitting on dangerous earthquake faults and could, at any moment, face the famous “Big One,” an enormous earthquake larger than the 1994 Northridge earthquake. These are all reasons to kick start city planning.

But, these reasons fall of deaf ears at City Hall, where the long-range planning Los Angeles urgently needs rests on the shoulders of two remaining staffers. In reality, only one planning principle now prevails: the primacy of turbulent market conditions. This approach, camouflaged by the benign maxim of making the city business friendly, is antithetical to planning. In planning practice “business friendly” means ignoring or misrepresenting legally adopted plans, while using the business models of flippers and speculators as the criteria for dishing out land use entitlements. If this year’s real estate fashion is condos, then that is what gets approved. If next year’s trend is shopping centers, then the rules and procedures will bend that way.

Of course, a compliant local government which gives a green light to every developer’s request cannot be planned. This is why the city’s plans are disregarded, why adopted plans become outmoded shelf documents, and why nearly every discretionary action is granted. It also explains why a change in the Planning Department’s management will not translate into a change of planning policies or practices.

It is hard to imagine how this situation can continue for much longer. Will the city become so unlivable that only the very rich and very poor remain, divided by an ever larger LAPD? Or will a combination of law suits and enormous public pressure finally force the city’s planning process to be revived and implemented?

Meanwhile the clock is ticking.

* Dick Platkin is a planning consultant who formerly worked for the LA City Planning Department. He welcomes comments on this article at rhplatkin@yahoo.com .