The Master Planners : For Mark and Jane Pisano, There’s No Time Like the Future

MOST SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA commuters, safe in a parking lot with fenders intact, can escape into a shop or office and forget frantic highway scenes for the rest of the day. But for Mark and Jane Pisano, who car-pool in the family Corvette from Los Feliz to downtown Los Angeles, there is no escape. They spend their workdays trying to develop strategies for keeping traffic jams from getting worse--traffic jams and schools, smog, the purity of water and everything else that is important to the quality of life in Southern California. For the Pisanos, every workday means more searching for ways that business, government and voters can keep the grimmest forecasts from coming true.

Mark Pisano, 46, is executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a regional planning agency supported by six county and 170 city governments, with headquarters in the Barker Brothers building at 7th and Flower streets. Jane Pisano, 45, whose office is just up Flower on the 47th floor of the Bank of America building, is president of Project Los Angeles 2000. She is in the second phase of a research-and-action effort involving dozens of executives, politicians, academicians, planners and others who were appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to tell him what needs to be done to produce a less chaotic future for the city.

The Pisanos’ work goes far deeper than quick-fix ventures, even though they can think of a number of relatively easy ways to help solve some problems. Jane, for example, invokes the 1984 Olympic legacy that banished traffic jams during the Games by banning truck deliveries before 6 a.m., encouraging car pools and giving commuters better traffic information faster--all elements of Bradley’s newest transportation master plan.

But the Pisanos hunt bigger game, on a scale perhaps best described by environmentalist Barry Commoner’s admonition that “everything is connected to everything else.” In his agency’s most recent venture, Mark helped draft land-use and transportation guidelines to accompany a long-range clean-air plan developed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. It is not perfect, he says, and it troubles him that Americans, after more than two decades of trying, are still not very good at integrating plans to improve air quality and water quality with plans for managing transportation and waste disposal and locating housing and jobs in ways that reduce erosion of the environment.

One common question about Southern California’s future is whether there will be enough jobs to go around. “I won’t say we’ll have more jobs than we need, but we’ll have the jobs,” Mark says. His more basic concern is whether everyone who lives in the Southern California of the next century will be welcomed into “the economic system, the social system and then, most important, the political system. Our long-term stability depends on our dealing with those issues, and we’ve just scratched the surface. We’re just not doing that.”

The future could go either way. Los Angeles could one day be the peaceful and productive crossroads of a global melting pot, capital of the Pacific Rim. Or it could be a nightmare, a brutish re-creation of the movie “Blade Runner,” where the handful of rich live lavishly far above the trash piles of poor on the streets below. Mark was among the first moviegoers to foresee that possibility, but the future he sees is far less bleak. Still there are no guarantees. As Jane’s report put it: “Clearly, potential is not the same as destiny.”

Jane ranks one factor above housing, transportation, parks and other essentials of a decent urban life. “Without question, education is No.1 on my mind,” she says, and it cannot be improved with classroom reforms alone. “When you talk about education, you are not just talking about classrooms; you also are talking about human services, about health care, about prenatal care, about nutrition, and on and on.”

That analysis emerged in the first report of Jane’s committee, presented to the mayor late last year. Now, she says, “it is going to get messier. Now we ask what can be done, and after three months in the second phase we still have some people saying reform will work and others saying we have to shut down the schools and start over. What we are doing is assessing what children will need to know to get by in the next century. Lastly, we’ll ask how a school system must be structured to teach what they need to know.”

The LA 2000 report said that the city’s economy was the “healthiest and wealthiest” in California and is, in fact, regarded by some as “the most positive economic force in the nation.” But a recent analysis by a team of students at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning concluded that “inequality and poverty are greater than two decades ago.” The relatively rich who are getting richer are mostly Anglos, and the relatively poor are mostly blacks and Latinos. The major causes of inequity, the analysis concluded, are education and environment.

Can analysis and proposals for tinkering with the future help change that situation? “The honest answer is that I’m not sure,” Jane says. “I think it can be done, but I don’t underestimate the challenge.”

“Are people in the future going to have three squares a day, an education, a job, an opportunity to enjoy life?” Mark asks. “Those are questions we haven’t yet sorted out.”

Mark, a native of Santa Clara, graduated from Georgetown University, concentrating on philosophy, political science and economics. He earned a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Santa Clara and returned to Georgetown for a doctorate in economics. Even though “quantitative econometrics” earned him his first planning job in 1970 with the then-new federal Environmental Protection Agency, his base in philosophy has been more helpful during his 13 years at his current agency, he says, because it taught him to ask the basic questions, including: “How are we going to do this?”

Jane’s path to regional planning was more roundabout. She was raised in Bethesda, Md., and is a graduate of Stanford and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She taught at Georgetown and, when they agreed that Mark should take the planning job in Los Angeles, was on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House.

“In that field, and especially living in Washington,” she says, “the focus is not on American cities. So when we decided to put down roots in Los Angeles, I decided to change the focus.” The change began with work on the city’s bicentennial and evolved to the bigger picture of LA 2000.

The Pisanos, their daughters Lea, 19, and Marianna, 15, and their son Chris, 17, live in a Spanish-style house in Los Feliz on the fringe of Griffith Park.

“Mark and I talk shop now and then,” Jane says, “but I like to keep the time at home clear for walking and shopping in the neighborhood. This is sort of overwhelming stuff, you know.” Marianna and Chris are both tournament-level tennis players, so the Pisanos spend many weekends with them on the circuit.

Mark and Jane view most aspects of the future in the same way. Both believe that government cannot plan for change unless business is a committed partner. From the 1920s through the 1960s, civic leadership came easily to businessmen, who found it natural to help build cities around their own enterprises. After World War II, those leaders took their interests to the state level, pushing Sacramento to build the university system, freeways, the water project. In the 1960s and 1970s, with those projects in motion, the leaders’ center of political gravity moved to Washington.

“Now, we’re coming full circle,” Mark says. “The power to get things done is moving back to where it began, but to regions, not to cities or to Sacramento. And the day of the oligarchy as a mechanism for getting things done is over. California is too diverse, and it’s changing too fast. And what goes on in economic regions, not just here but all over the country, is going to be the basis for how we grow and accumulate wealth and increase the size of the pie,” he says.

“The businessman is going to see that if he wants to participate in the global market--and that’s his market from now on--he must put together a labor force, create housing for his workers, press for roads to move his products. When he realizes that his wealth-creating capacity is related to the public policies of the region, you can bet he’s going to get involved. Problem is, the regional structure of governance is not yet quite fully defined. It will take time for the businessman to learn where to go for help, but it will happen.”

Mark acknowledges with a quick smile that he may be talking about power coming full circle because his job makes him want to believe it. And it may be that he focuses on that analysis because all of the other possible futures are too ominous to dwell on. Whatever the explanation, it is comforting that the Pisanos can walk away from their kind of work with a sense that the future might just turn out all right.