The recent resignation of Gail Goldberg, the City’s Planning Director, is a great loss for Los Angeles. I hope the Mayor and his new team appreciates what she has accomplished and recognizes the transformation she has set in motion for city planning in Los Angeles. As we look toward the selection of the next Director, we need to assure that neighborhood council and civic leaders across the city are actively involved in the selection process to help insure the continuation of what Ms. Goldberg has started.

From the beginning, Ms Goldberg came out to neighborhoods throughout the city and engaged the residents. She listened and conveyed a sense of respect for the differences and an optimism that a high level of professionalism could help forge consensus, even in controversial land use discussions.

I had an opportunity to work closely with Ms. Goldberg’s team as Chair of PlanCheckNC, a grass-roots alliance to promote local stakeholder participation in planning issues. Recognizing the role neighborhood councils as part of the city structure, she took the lead in creating a successful “Planning Department Pilot Program” with neighborhood councils citywide. This program has provided greater transparency and opened new channels of communication on neighborhood concerns by providing a liaison with the Planning Department, giving neighborhood councils early access to all project entitlement applications and helping to train neighborhood council leaders on land-use planning.

I saw first-hand the progress she made in transforming a highly political and unpredictable land use and development environment into a more participatory process, with real planning for communities that both residents and developers can count on. She is a leader whose professionalism, intelligence, and willingness to embrace change in order to accomplish clearly articulated goals set the right direction for city planning in Los Angeles.

And she is delivering–there are now four communities with new draft plans that will be brought to the City Planning Commission later this year. She has insisted upon creating “real” plans — plans that are comprehensive and detailed, that include all of the zoning and other measures that implement those plans so they won’t just sit on a shelf, but provide a consistent guide for implementing the vision of the community. And that, for the first time, identify the infrastructure needs of each community. Continuing this work must be a priority for our city to develop confidently forward into the future.

At the same time, she began an ambitious and far-reaching reorganization of the entire department in order to better serve communities, better handle development project applications, and more effectively deploy the severely reduced staff. Some observers have called the reorganization “a game changer,” and it is. Entitlement projects will be handled by a single staff member from beginning to end. And all case processing will no longer take place in functional “silos,” but, instead, in geographic divisions in order to allow staff members to develop closer relationships with the communities they serve.

I personally participated in a unique and unprecedented outreach effort by the Planning Department which speaks volumes about the direction the department has been taking under Ms Goldberg’s leadership. The Planning Department sought a grant to take 17 South LA residents to Portland, Oregon to see first-hand what good Transit Oriented Development can be, as our community grapples with potential development proposals around the new Exposition line stations. We all learned a great deal and what we experienced opened our eyes to what is possible in South LA. This was meaningful outreach by a department that clearly values it.

Beyond even her specific accomplishments, Ms. Goldberg has made real strides in changing the often-poisonous and politicized culture of planning in Los Angeles. She insisted that Planning Department staff recommendations and decisions be guided by sound professional planning principles, not by political whims or bullying. As the Director, Ms. Goldberg sometimes disagreed with elected officials, with developers, and with neighborhood representatives, but she always did so with the utmost respect and her disagreements were based on planning principles, not personalities or politics.

In all of these ways, the Department of City Planning has changed quite meaningfully over the past four years. What will her resignation bode for the future of planning in our city, and the Planning Department? Will Mayor Villaraigosa choose to build upon this recent progress, or do the hints in press accounts about frustration in the development community mean that he will select a new director who focuses on speedy case processing, to the exclusion of policy planning and real community engagement?

Until the answers to these questions become clearer, neighborhood and civic leaders need to be especially vigilant in the coming weeks, and loudly reassert the value of “doing real planning” with transparency and an open door.

Maggi Fajnor, Chair
PlanCheckNC