Bradley Urges L.A. to Lead Anti-Smog Fight With Parking Fees, Car-Pooling

Facing federal pressure to cut air pollution, Mayor Tom Bradley on Wednesday said that Los Angeles should lead the fight against smog in Southern California and proposed, among other steps, a mandatory parking fee at shopping malls and more freeway car-pool lanes through the city.

The federal pressure on Los Angeles has come from regional officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, who have complained that Los Angeles has allowed excessive growth in recent years.

In unveiling a list of 63 possible steps to clean up the air, Bradley embraced the idea that Los Angeles officials should manipulate future growth to reduce the potential for new air pollution.

The mayor was not talking about less growth, Bradley aides stressed, but about focusing construction in dense corridors along the Metro Rail subway and busy bus lines, and requiring that developers who erect new office buildings also provide residences nearby. Both ideas would reduce air pollution by curtailing the need for commuters to drive long distances, Bradley aides said.

In effect, Bradley endorsed a concept gaining momentum in City Hall to consider the impact of new development on air pollution. The mayor’s list of suggestions also includes prohibiting most free parking in the city except for residents in their own neighborhoods, and for car-pools and other forms of mass transit.

Although many of the steps should be taken unilaterally by Los Angeles, Bradley said, the move to require that shoppers pay for the privilege of parking at malls should only be made if nearby cities do the same.

The list of ideas, released at a City Hall press conference, also included the establishment of a city air quality office to advocate the changes proposed by Bradley. The mayor said 20% of air pollution emissions could be reduced in the next decade if his proposals are adopted by the City Council.

“It’s a blueprint for action in the future,” said Bradley, whose ideas were praised at the press conference by Norton Younglove, chairman of the South Coast Air Quality Management District Board of Directors.

EPA officials had threatened to hold up a $25-million grant for work at a Van Nuys sewage treatment facility until Los Angeles proves that the new air pollution caused by the excessive growth has somehow been relieved.

While negotiations ensued between the government and the city, the deadline for the $25-million grant passed and the immediate conflict became moot. However, Bradley aides said Wednesday that the EPA still wants evidence that Los Angeles is mitigating the air pollution contributed by development.

The clean-air steps introduced Wednesday began as an effort to compile a master list of anti-pollution measures that could be undertaken by the city to satisfy the EPA. In fact, city department heads tabulated for the mayor 165 steps taken since 1981 to reduce air pollution, ranging from buying more fuel-efficient city cars to the voters’ passage of Proposition U, which reduced the density of some developments.

Bradley and aides said the list of 63 tactics offered Wednesday were recommended by an air quality task force that the mayor formed last year. Many are ideas already proposed by Bradley, such as expanding the use of computerized traffic signals, towing away illegally parked cars and using more traffic officers at intersections in an effort to speed up traffic and reduce the emission of automobile exhaust.