CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : This Contraption Just Won’t Do : The region’s Balkanized government and politics ensure that the appetites of the local parts make mincemeat of the whole.

Warnings of impending thrombosis are increasing in our body politic. Public confusion about the proper fate of our police chief seems unrelated to the alarming audit that found our planning department doing very little city planning, but both signal that the civic health of Los Angeles is under attack. In the first instance, our politicians seemed confused and unable to manage a powerful bureaucrat insulated by the civil service system. In the second, we find an entire agency of government powerless to fulfill its primary mission. What kind of political contraption have we built, so unsuitable to the challenges we face as a community, that our police power is untouchable while our power to plan does not exist?

Unfortunately, we are getting what we want instead of what we deserve. As an expression of political will, structure is policy. Southern California has always preferred the appetite of the parts to the integrity of the whole. Opportunity (and opportunism) has flourished in this environment, with impressive but by now increasingly mixed results.

For some time, it seemed good government to separate public administration from public politics. But this attachment to the principle of insularity encouraged the proliferation of political jurisdictions and administrative bureaucracies, until we now have the most complex, costly, overlapping, redundant, fragmented, Balkanized, ineffective crazy-quilt of governance and politics of any region in the nation.

Politically, this system is most responsive to local interests and least responsive to issues that transcend political jurisdictions: the environment, transportation, economic development, affordable housing, water--the very stuff of planning.

Administratively, our single-purpose imperial bureaucracies promote the interest of their insulated missions at the expense of their impact on the missions of other agencies. Transportation promotes movement at the expense of land use. Air quality promotes purity at the expense of economic development. Redevelopment promotes commerce at the expense of housing and planning. And planning does nothing at all.

For much of the history of this young region, it seemed that little could limit our growth and the opportunities associated with growing. Now we face changed circumstances in which constraints are feeding back into the system. These constraints, arising from population growth and change, are the sort that threaten community well-being and discourage the exercise of private initiative; they are beyond the grasp of our political system; they require integrated planning.

The insularity that once contributed to our pride of opportunity and self-determination has left us helpless before the changes that threaten the continuity of those values. And our fears increase when public servants cannot be held accountable in a system so complex that there is no place for the buck to stop.

The natural consequence of fear is a conservative politics that resists all change, even those healthy adjustments of the system that are required if the whole body is to survive. When a council member threatens to cut the planning budget as punishment for a proposal that may benefit the city at the expense of an anxious local constituency, the agency has little incentive to plan.

The present system was designed to make elected officials especially sensitive to local issues, and that is what it does. Planning is perceived as a threat to local interests, and that is why the council undercuts, perhaps is even compelled to undercut, the planning function. That is why we get what we want as a city, instead of what we as a city deserve.

But planning, while it affects local interests, is especially about those related issues of transportation, the environment, economic development and housing that transcend the local. The complex behavior of these larger constraints have immediate community impacts that can be mitigated only when the larger system is understood and managed. At the same time, the enrichment of the public realm cannot be accomplished without the same larger vision. Example: The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission will soon be coordinating close to $4 billion a year of spending on transit improvements, driven largely by congestion management criteria rather than by consideration of the land-use issues that have an impact on every aspect of our lives and are absolutely fundamental to the future well-being of the whole region. If uninformed by a holistic vision, these expenditures will constitute a planning failure of colossal magnitude.

Alternatively, the proper expenditure of those funds can have a beneficial influence on the environment, recreation space, greater access to cultural facilities, economic development and affordable housing.

This is what city planning ought to be about. But it is a mission that requires continuous interaction with the community, a politically volatile process that makes elected officials extremely nervous; hence the council’s covert pressure on the planning department to stick to expediting permits--which is what the audit shows it mostly does.

We cannot plan unless the public is enlightened, through thoughtful analysis by the media and the advocacy of determined civic organizations such as the 2000 Partnership (formerly L.A. 2000). Our goal must be to free council members from constituents’ pressure to keep everything out of their back yards.

Under these circumstances, planning programs, to survive, must be linked to an accountable political agenda. The mayor should have the power to appoint and remove the director of planning and be held accountable for the performance of the department and the quality of vision in its proposals. The mayor’s power to implement the planners’ proposals must be enhanced if issues of accountability are to be fairly judged. This means strengthening the mayor’s hand in budget negotiations and elsewhere.

Advocates for the whole--members elected citywide--must be added to the council so that the balance of power is shifted in favor of the mayor and an invigorated planning staff. These new members would facilitate new coalitions on matters of citywide concern and weaken the current council’s hold over the planning department.

The experiment of Southern California has resulted in prospects and problems whose built-in potential for conflict is now dangerously evident. Yet we are still blessed with the capacity to innovate and succeed as a region. Though our problems arise from the insularity we have desired, created and structured into our politics, our prospects will improve if we should decide to address the constraints on our future through political reform that is inseparably linked to planning.

If we have so far gotten what we want, isn’t it now time for us to get what we deserve?