L.A. Planning Director Quits Amid Criticism

City Planning Director Kenneth C. Topping announced his resignation Tuesday after a behind-the-scenes effort by critics to remove him from the powerful post.

Mayor Tom Bradley praised Topping’s performance over the last four years and said he may remain with the city as a consultant in earthquake safety planning.

The resignation was announced late Tuesday after rumors about Topping’s departure had circulated widely around City Hall. Bradley said a national search would begin immediately for Topping’s successor.

Dissatisfaction with Topping, a former San Bernardino County deputy administrator for development and planning, has emerged recently from disparate quarters, including real estate developers, slow-growth advocates and City Council members.

Topping said Tuesday that Bradley did not ask him to resign, nor did he feel pressured by critics. The mayor has given full support throughout his tenure, Topping said.

“Complaints about things taking too long are chronic with this department,” Topping said. “There’s always room for improvement. It’s a resource problem.”

Topping said he decided to leave because he was “fatigued” by the heavy workload of the department. “I reached for the impossible and I achieved a lot of things that were possible.”

Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani said Tuesday that criticisms from developers and council members played no role in Topping’s departure.

City planning, Fabiani said, will remain focused on encouraging builders and community groups “to work together so that developments are environmentally sensitive and can exist harmoniously with the surrounding neighborhoods.”

The Planning Department, with an annual budget of about $17 million and 359 employees, has authority over nearly all new development and plays a key role in shaping the growth of the city. Its staff processes environmental impact reports on major projects and requests for zoning changes.

A department report earlier this year showed there was a backlog of 94 unprocessed environmental impact reports and said that the department’s environmental unit was relying on a set of guidelines that hadn’t been updated since 1975. As a result, the Planning Commission ordered changes that were intended to streamline the process for environmental reports.

“Developers complain that the Planning Department takes too long to approve EIRs and community groups complain that it takes too long to get plans approved,” one council member said Tuesday.

“Probably the loudest complaints were from developers,” acknowledged William Luddy, president of the Planning Commission, the five-member citizen’s panel that oversees the department. “Ken was at the sharp end of the stick when the city was going through a metamorphosis in its thinking about planning.”

Topping, 55, was appointed in June, 1986, and was unanimously confirmed by the City Council. He succeeded Calvin Hamilton, who had been the city’s top planning official for two decades.

Topping said at the time that he viewed Los Angeles as a “world city that is moving forward at a great pace, perhaps for some more rapidly than they would like. But it is destined, I believe, to become the premier city of the Pacific Rim.”

Topping found himself in the middle of a volatile debate sparked by homeowner groups and council members leading the city into a “slow-growth” movement. In rapid succession, he was faced with homeowner lawsuits and ballot measures through which citizens tried to gain greater control over the city’s planning priorities.

“I think the city has turned a big corner in the last several years and there’s a big interest in planning now,” Topping said Tuesday.

In recent weeks, officials said, developers asserted that the Planning Department obstructs and sometimes kills projects with its inaction. Some developers took their complaints to the mayor’s office.

“I and others have communicated our concerns directly to the mayor,” said Dan Garcia, the influential former Planning Commission president and close Bradley ally.

Garcia, who on Monday was appointed to the city Police Commission, has represented some of the city’s largest developers, including the builders of the vast Porter Ranch project in the San Fernando Valley and New York real estate magnate Donald Trump, who wants to build a skyscraper on the site of the Ambassador Hotel.

“There are serious concerns about the performance of the department from a lot of different sources,” Garcia said. “Not all of this is directed at Topping, but he is the director.”

City Council members privately described Topping as indecisive. Some, such as Councilwoman Gloria Molina, said the Planning Department functions poorly and often does not provide the information and expertise requested by council offices.

“I can’t get anything done in there,” Molina said. “We often need expertise and technical assistance and they aren’t producing the work product.”

A slow-growth advocate influential in planning matters said Tuesday that the department has been extremely slow to revise the city’s community plans, the long-range documents that set guidelines for neighborhood development.

Councilman Michael Woo, one of the three lawmakers who sit on the council’s Planning Committee, said that Topping was put in a “trap” by elected officials who made great demands on him without providing his department with the required resources.

“When there’s a crime wave, you see council members calling for more officers to be hired, but when there’s a development wave or a traffic gridlock wave, you don’t find them jumping in front of each other to hire additional planning staff,” Woo said.

Topping praised those who worked for him and said Tuesday they are forced to work under “difficult conditions” in cramped quarters. One problem, he said, is that the department’s computer system is “in the Dark Ages.”

He denied being indecisive. “That’s in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “My style is deliberative. . . . I’m certainly not afraid to make tough decisions and I’ve made plenty of them.”

Topping said he plans to take some time to consider his next career move.