Key city planner quits

One of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s most outspoken appointees resigned Thursday from her position as president of the powerful citywide Planning Commission.

Attorney Jane Ellison Usher led the volunteer commission as it took stands that irritated some of the city’s elected officials, opposing a plan for new digital billboards along the 10 Freeway and rejecting a planned 242-room hotel in Koreatown. Both votes were reversed by the City Council.

Usher also wrote an infamous e-mail to neighborhood leaders providing a legal strategy for challenging the City Council’s newly passed “density bonus” law, which allows developers to construct buildings that are taller and more dense than the zoning normally allows. Lawsuits were filed weeks later.

“She was someone who seemed to have an understanding that development was getting a little out of control,” said Mike Eveloff, president of the Tract 7260 Homeowners Assn.

Usher said she felt no pressure to leave, saying she had been seeking to step down for six months, in part because she is looking for a job. On Monday, she sent Villaraigosa a four-page resignation letter outlining the planning department’s unfinished business.

Usher said the department should make the city more pedestrian-friendly by rejecting development projects that look like “automobile parking entrances . . . with a structure appended to them.” Yet she also warned that the department should be careful when attempting to carry out the mayor’s vision of “elegant density.”

“Please reject any [proposal] that relies on the careless, sprawl-inducing approach of adding density at every rapid bus stop,” she wrote.

Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo said the mayor does not yet have a replacement for Usher.

Usher’s outspokenness made her something of a hero to some neighborhood leaders, who recognized that city commissioners risk being removed when they voice opinions that differ from the mayor’s.

With Usher at the helm, the commission took one of its more controversial actions last month, voting to seek a temporary ban on new billboards and supergraphics. That effort quickly stalled in the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which argued that new billboard regulations could be adopted without a short-term moratorium.

Dennis Hathaway, spokesman for the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, called Usher’s departure another piece of bad news.

“On our issues at least, she definitely showed leadership,” he said.

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david.zahniser@latimes.com

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.