Urban Growth Battle Embroils Major Project

A proposed 45-story hotel-office complex on the north side of Pershing Square downtown is the latest focal point of a struggle over urban growth that is becoming the dominant political issue in Los Angeles.

The principal figures in the imbroglio are Dan Garcia, president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, who believes that city planners ought to have a larger role in shaping new building downtown, and James M. Wood, chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency. Wood argues that the city’s success, so far, in revitalizing the downtown area is due in large part to the ability of his agency to operate independently from bureaucratic meddling.

Both sides are looking for support from Mayor Tom Bradley and City Council President Pat Russell at a time when political sensitivities to growth issues are at a new high, and several council members, including Russell, are at work on legislation that would give voice to citizen concerns over commercial development. Those concerns were demonstrated last month on Election Day by the voters’ overwhelming passage of Proposition U, which sharply curtailed the size of new commercial buildings near residential neighborhoods.

The dispute over Pershing Square Centre grew out of a lawsuit filed against the CRA by the Los Angeles Conservancy, challenging the CRA’s power to grant the developer of the 700,000-square-foot hotel-office complex the right to double the size of what is normally permitted in that part of town.

In approving the Pershing Square deal, the CRA had not acted differently than it had in other deals it made in the process of stimulating $5 billion in new downtown investment during the last 10 years. As a result, the suit came as a jolt to redevelopment agency officials.

Moreover, in efforts to save historic buildings, CRA officials said, they thought that they had a good working relationship with the Los Angeles Conservancy, the 2,600-member group formed to protect historic buildings that is suing them.

Yet, the lawsuit reflected a growing feeling among city planners and preservationists that the CRA, in its haste to rebuild the inner city, has not paid enough attention to matters of design and density that affect the quality of life downtown.

After a year of legal maneuvering and intervention by city planning officials, attempts to settle the lawsuit appear to have moved beyond the issue of how large Pershing Square Centre should be--it probably will not be scaled down--to the larger question of how such grandiose development will be regulated in the future.

If the Pershing Square Centre dispute sets a precedent, it will have less to do with prohibiting the construction of mammoth buildings than with requiring developers to conform to stricter design standards and to help pay for a wide range of public benefits, from historical preservation to day-care centers.

On one level, the current controversy is a contest of wills between Wood and Garcia, both of whom have ties to the mayor. Wood, who makes his living as a labor union official, favors cowboy boots and gung-ho, build-or-bust rhetoric and is in the process of purging the CRA staff of people who do not share his pro-development zeal. Garcia, a lawyer, is regarded as a moderate on growth issues who is working to aggrandize his own power in the face of challenges from both the neighborhood slow-growth movement and downtown development interests.

The two men recently displayed their attitudes on development at a conference discussing the future of the central business district.

Wood invited developers who are facing neighborhood resistance in other parts of the city to bring their projects downtown.

“To those folks who don’t want Westwood developed, no problem. To those in Century City who don’t want any more growth, no problem. . . . We’ll do business with anyone,” Wood said, adding: “You can expect a very aggressive CRA and one I don’t think we have to apologize for.”

A few minutes later, Garcia warned that if builders in the downtown area are not willing to accept more planning, they will face the same kind of political opposition that mobilized behind Proposition U in areas such as Westwood and Century City.

There was a time, before the lawsuit was filed, when the city Planning Department and the redevelopment agency were working toward an accord that would have given planners a greater role in determining the size and shape of new construction. In the spirit of that period, the CRA sought and, ironically, received the Planning Commission’s approval of the Pershing Square Centre project.

Subsequently, city planners were widely criticized for blessing the project. The suit was filed by the conservancy against the CRA and, during the past year, the city Planning Department reconsidered the project and came up with a new approach.

Now, to put an end to litigation that could delay construction of Pershing Square Centre indefinitely, the CRA may have to accept a series of conditions, put forth by the conservancy and the Planning Department, that would alter its agreement with the developer of Pershing Square Centre and set a precedent for future negotiations with other downtown builders.

As part of the original deal allowing the developer to exceed the legal building size limit, the CRA required an $11.2-million contribution to a fund for acquiring city park land.

In general, the conservancy and its allies in planning are contesting the right of the CRA to decide unilaterally the quid pro quo for developers who want to exceed legal building limitations. If building rights are going to be exchanged for public benefits, it is argued, the deal ought to be worked out by the Planning Commission.

“The commission is in a better position to balance public and private interests than is the CRA, whose mission in life is to expedite private building,” said a spokesman for the plaintiff’s side in the lawsuit.

The Planning Commission, which is scheduled to take up the matter today, has not indicated what benefits its members think the Pershing Square Centre developer ought to pay for. But the Planning Department has produced a 50-page report calling for a variety of benefits, including funds for day-care facilities and to make alcohol and drug abuse counseling available to employees of the building, that would add several million dollars to the developer’s costs.

In addition, the conservancy wants the CRA to devote more of its own resources to historical preservation and is asking that a citizens’ design review panel be established to help decide what new buildings will look like downtown.

Wood said that the CRA will not bow to all of the demands and insists that the agency will not do anything that requires violating its original agreement with the Pershing Square Centre developer, Houk Development Co., the same agreement, he maintained, that the Planning Commission signed off on last year.

Garcia said that he does not think that either the conservancy or the Planning Commission will be inflexible and suggests that the requests for day care and counseling funds may be dropped.

But he pointed out that the settlement of a prior lawsuit, brought against the city by a federation of home owners’ groups two years ago, mandated a new, more aggressive role for the Planning Commission in downtown redevelopment. And he said that the resolution of the conservancy’s suit against the CRA must be true to that mandate.