Looking Ahead : Citizens Panel Starts Debate on City’s Growth

In Sylmar, where corrals and condominiums compete for land in the shadow of Angeles National Forest, Los Angeles city officials have embarked on a long-awaited and much debated exercise in democracy.

The city this week convened the first of 35 neighborhood planning committees. They are citizens groups charged with drawing up a citywide blueprint for growth, showing where new jobs and homes should be created, how new buildings should look and pointing out where historic structures, natural beauty or simple back-yard tranquility ought to be left undisturbed.

Citywide Concerns

With the formation of the boards, local residents are officially thrust into the citywide struggle against air pollution and traffic congestion. That struggle is almost certain to require sacrifices.

The new committees will have to deal with the argument, rapidly gaining favor among the region’s officials, that to reduce dependency on cars, the city will have to build homes and offices closer together, even if it means greater density and more low-income housing and commercial development near middle-class neighborhoods.

The neighborhood committees will bring their concerns about safety, privacy, aesthetics and the preservation of open space to the debate. At the same time, they will be asked to balance their home-grown concerns against the needs of a city that by 1991 must come up with a traffic reduction plan or have one dictated to it.

Officially applauded, the formation of the committees is regarded with a degree of skepticism behind the scenes. Many neighborhood activists see the committees as a case of too little too late, while some regional planners say there is a danger that the committees will sacrifice citywide goals on the altar of neighborhood protectionism.

“There is the potential for parochialism. It can be avoided only if they (the committees) recognize the collective impact that their decisions have on the whole region,” said Mark Pisano, director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Easy Answers Unlikely

Sylmar, where the first planning committee was organized, is not likely to offer any easy answers. Once prized for its horse trails and open country, it has become the fastest-growing community in the city. Townhouses sprout on old ranches and an industrial park may be built on an abandoned golf course.

Change has sparked debate: Should minimum lot sizes be dropped from five acres to one-fourth of an acre? Should chain-link fences be banned from new developments? Should street signs be mounted on poles or stone “monuments”?

While many residents worry that they are being swallowed up by urban sprawl, Sylmar continues to be a candidate for more development. With about 50,000 people scattered over 12 square miles, it is one of the least dense communities in the city. Moreover, with 75% of its work force commuting elsewhere every day, a strong argument can be made for creating new jobs.

City planning officials anticipate that the new neighborhood committees can expect to feel pressure to accommodate more development than they may want.

“They (the committees) will be under a lot of pressure, especially in suburban areas like Sylmar where there is land available and where the opportunities for creating new employment seem more plentiful,” said Los Angeles Planning Director Kenneth Topping.

The committees, serving areas of the city with populations up to 200,000, grew out of a campaign promise made two years ago by Mayor Tom Bradley, when the city’s slow-growth movement represented a strong threat to Bradley’s 1989 reelection.

To hear city officials talk about them, the 35 committees--with 15 to 21 members apiece--will function like New England town meetings, offering an official forum to local residents in a city often accused of letting politicians and real estate barons monopolize land planning.

However, in the form they were approved by the mayor and the City Council, the committees lack the independence, the resources and the authority that neighborhood activists have been pushing for.

Not Elected to Job

There will be no elections to the committees. Instead, members will serve at the pleasure of the council members who appoint them. The committees will not have money of their own, and the community plans they produce can be set aside by city officials without a vote.

Neighborhood activists like Laura Lake of Westwood, one of the first people to call for the creation of neighborhood planning committees, are disappointed but not surprised by what the mayor and the City Council have set up.

“Land use is the basis of power in this town, and no one who has that power, including the mayor and the City Council, wants to give it away,” said Lake, who is on the faculty of the UCLA School of Health and who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council earlier this year.

Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson put it a different way when asked why he did not favor giving the committees the power to make binding land use decisions.

“That’s what you have a City Council for,” he said. “That’s what you have a city Planning Commission for. To make those kinds of decisions.”

Although they are responsible for planning much larger areas of the city, the planning committees follow in the tradition of neighborhood advisory groups, made up of residents, land owners and businessmen, set up by council members to monitor new construction projects in their neighborhoods.

These groups can be surprisingly influential.

The persistence of one such group in West Los Angeles has led to substantial modifications of a 6-million-square-foot development of homes and offices, virtually a new town, in Playa del Rey. At stake was the future of one of the largest undeveloped pieces of oceanfront property within a major U.S. city.

A committee representing several nearby neighborhoods has helped persuade the developer, MacGuire Thomas Partners, to cut back by at least 1 million square feet and to move the development away from the environmentally sensitive Ballona Wetlands.

In the northern San Fernando Valley, where another mini-city is proposed for Porter Ranch near Chatsworth, a citizens’ committee chose to exercise its influence in a different way. Despite local polls that indicated strong opposition to the 6-million-square-foot development, the committee has voted overwhelmingly in favor of it.

The action of the committee, which was appointed by Councilman Bernson, who also supports the projects, has reinforced the concerns of neighborhood activists who argue that neighborhood committees must be independent from the City Council.

On the other hand, the intransigence of an ad hoc group opposed to the Porter Ranch project has some people wondering if independent neighborhood groups can be more trouble than they are worth.

Questions Ridiculed

Last spring, members of the opposition group, called PRIDE, submitted a list of questions they said should be answered before the project is approved. Some of the questions: “What will the rate of incest be in the completed development? . . . What will the number of assault weapons be? . . . What will be the incidence of obesity? . . . What is the plague risk because of the rat population? . . . How will the cat population adversely impact the wild bird population?”

Paul Chipello, who heads PRIDE, said the questions were meant to be taken seriously, although he said they did not represent the sentiments of all group members.

“The questions are meant to make people think about the global impacts of local projects. Unfortunately, they (the questions) have become a subject of ridicule.”