Part IV: Mayor Disaster

We’ve still got three years with LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. And like a bad movie, the plot of this thriller is headed straight off the rails.

At home in Getty House near Hancock Park.

“What I see,” said Chapman University lecturer in urban politics Joel Kotkin, “is that we have a mediocre government, with mediocre leaders surrounded by mediocrity.” Kotkin outlines the pathetically low standards and failures of execution that have plagued the Villaraigosa reign.

Too little vision, too little oversight, and too little leadership. The record is not pretty for Mayor Villaraigosa. But it’s even worse for the students, commuters, and out-of-work neighbors who have found absolutely no help from the man in charge at City Hall. Just take the now-unfolding disaster at the city’s Planning Department.

Part IV of An Ongoing Series

Three and a half years ago, the Mayor put a street-wise, social justice-talking former stay-at-home mom in control of the LA Planning Department. When Gail Goldberg took over, her mission was to execute the Mayor’s vision: “rebuild some of the city’s old neighborhoods and make them taller, denser and linked to mass transit.”

And here we are, three and a half years later. Villaraigosa and Goldberg’s original goal, to update the city’s “community plans,” was the first step toward smart long-term planning. It is long since dead. Planning Department employees have been shed, either volunteering to take early retirement parachutes or merely succumbing to the budget mess and taking furloughs.

Now, Goldberg’s gone. And the Chief Zoning Administrator, Michael LoGrande, has been promoted up to Planning Director. LoGrande is a thirteen-year veteran of City Hall: a number that should give us pause, since even elected Councilmembers must decompose within twelve years. LoGrande is a friend of developers — precisely why First Deputy Mayor and Interim Director of the DWP (seriously, both) Austin Beutner pushed to get him the job.

“Part of the reason for a change in leadership is to make sure we drive all aspects of planning — including community plans — further, faster and more aggressively than have been done,” says Beutner.

“I look at Michael as someone who gets things done. That doesn’t mean that he’s going to roll over for developers. It just means Michael will get to a yes or a no, and I think that’s a good thing.”

But getting to “yes or no” only works for citizens when there’s a structure for what we want in our city. Is it more strip malls, more condos, and more cheap architecture? Finding a beautiful neighborhood or historic building in LA is to be treasured. More importantly, it’s rarely a result of unreformed 1950s-era community plans. Instead, the Planning Department has been bereft of a true mission, and lacks the tools to turn hopeful rhetoric into reality (Mr. Mayor, your pattern is showing). And into the void have entered developers with dollar signs in their eyes, looking for their next rubber-stamp of approval.

That time has got to stop. But Michael LoGrande continues the willful disregard of citizens and fundamental failure to work that has become Mayor Villaraigosa’s true legacy.

Ron Kaye hits LoGrande’s “willingness to side with developers, inexperience and lack of being accredited by the American Institute of Certified Planners, a prerequisite throughout the region for anyone to run even a small planning department.” LoGrande had allegedly been frozen out of working with Goldberg months ago, she “disappointed in his inability to reduce the continuing (and unprecedented) mash up in the Office of Zoning Administration.”

Attention now turns to the City Council, who must vote to confirm any general manager selected by the mayor. Already, Councilmember Tom LaBonge (CD-4) has applauded LoGrande, pleased that the mayor “is shifting focus toward the effort to expedite the process of approving planning applications.”

Councilmember LaBonge, planning is about more than reducing bureaucratic paperwork for developers. We deserve a smart, credentialed, action-oriented director with the streets of our neighborhoods foremost in his or her mind. It is a shame that the Mayor’s good plan — to build a strong Planning Department with an honest-to-gosh mission for making our city a better place — has been traded in for fast deals with slick billionaires. It is a shame that the Mayor’s good plan to streamline 12 stages in the permit process has suffered a similar end. It would have been a boon for business and worker alike — allowing some positive local growth at a time of national economic recession.

Here’s a picture of LoGrande getting a signature from a real estate agent. LA Curbed reports: “Rumor is that LoGrande mistook [real estate agent Chad] Rogers for one of the Jonas brothers and was getting the autograph for one of his kids.”