Glendale’s Out to Find a Vision for Year 2020 : Planning: Mayor’s committee will look to the 21st Century instead of trying to solve current city problems.

On the very night he was sworn in as mayor of Glendale in April, Jerold Milner announced the formation of a task force to study Glendale’s future to the year 2020. What Milner didn’t see was the much more immediate future.

After six months of thinking over the idea and evaluating a list of nominations provided to him by his City Council colleagues, Milner appointed 11 members last month to his 2020 Task Force.

Every one of the appointees was Anglo. Every one was male.

The mayor defended his selections, arguing that the group was to study technological matters and not gender- or race-related issues.

But not everyone was happy. One group in particular, the American Assn. of University Women--whose members include several scholars versed in science and technology--became especially upset with the mayor’s response. On Nov. 11, they voted to protest the group’s composition through a letter campaign and presentations at City Council meetings.

Two days later, Milner added two women and a black man to the group, and the “task force,” at the mayor’s request, was renamed and downgraded to “study group.”

In explaining the function of this group--something even its members admittedly know little about--Milner said Monday in an interview that it will be charged with the limited and somewhat esoteric role of identifying world mega-trends and how they will affect Glendale.

“For example,” he said, “what may be the practical result of China taking over Hong Kong? Will a number of Hong Kong businessmen move to Southern California? If so, how will it affect Glendale?”

Or “will the automobile industry continue building cars the same size? What will be the consequences to our city of the current trend toward global warming?”

These are the types of questions that Milner wants his study group to address. To this end, he expects to spend about $5,000 in city money to bring in futurists and a wide array of guest speakers to lecture the group. The study group will hold its first official meeting Dec. 6.

As for mapping out Glendale’s future, Milner said, city planners, staff members and hired consultants will continue to carry most of the load. In fact, Milner believes that most of the necessary planning has already been completed. By the year 2020, he envisions Glendale functioning as a well-greased machine--efficient, quiet, uncluttered--with little need for government intervention and few internal conflicts, ethnic, gender-related or otherwise.

In Milner’s mind, Glendale will retain not only about the same ethnic mix, but also the same number of people, cars and open spaces as it has today.

The influx of immigrants now flooding the city, he said, will slow down to a trickle once a tough package of growth-control ordinances he is spearheading begins to kick in over the next couple of years.

City government, which is passing more ordinances than ever before to keep the city from growing out of control, will have returned to its traditional hands-off approach. It will mostly limit itself to enforcing laws, providing services, arbitrating local disputes and fighting regional agencies to retain home rule, Milner said.

“In the old culture of Glendale,” Milner said, “the basic political conservative philosophy was to leave as many decisions as possible to the individuals. These days, people are asking government to protect their quality of life, so we have to intervene. But in the next 20 or 30 years, the local government will become less and less involved again.”

With Big Government gone, the city budget--which went up a record 11% last year to accommodate the needs of a fast-growing population--will cease to grow beyond cost-of-living increases, Milner predicted.

The redevelopment agency will have completed its work and no longer exist. There will be four or five new buildings downtown, but no more than that, he said. Traffic will be kept manageable through van-pooling and more public transit.

“If we are successful,” he said, “the city will not look a whole lot different than it does now.”

The 2020 group, said Milner, “is not planning Glendale’s future. They will be trying to guess what outside influences may have an impact on the city. They will have a totally unfocused and non-directive approach. If they become too narrowly focused, I will ask them to broaden their perspective.”

This mandate should come as something of a surprise to the volunteers who make up the group. Some have expressed desires to address issues that are closer to home than Hong Kong or the ozone layer.

John Hilts, for example, wants to look at how to bridge the gap between north and south Glendale. A 2020 member and the president of an umbrella organization of homeowners associations throughout the city, Hilts would like to devise a program to bring together the city’s south side--inhabited by mostly low- to moderate-income, ethnically diverse apartment dwellers--and the more affluent, mostly white homeowners north of the Ventura Freeway.

“The situation that separates the north from the south is not good for the city,” Hilts said.

Developer Donald Platz, another committee member, wants to look at the possibility of expanding the city’s freeway access ramps. He would like to know what will happen once condominiums replace the last remaining old houses in south Glendale’s apartment zones, and begin to make their way into north Glendale’s residential neighborhoods.

Committee member Charles Veden, an insurance executive, understands his role as one of “looking to improve Glendale’s quality of life in transportation, waste management and population density.”

And Moses Wilson, a traffic management executive and the lone minority in the group, said he plans to make contributions that go beyond his professional expertise.

“I plan to represent the minorities’ point of view on a global basis,” he said. “Just because of my position, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a voice or I don’t have an opinion” on how Glendale should prepare to deal with minorities in the future.

Other study group members agreed with Wilson that ethnic integration should be part of the agenda.

As far as the women members are concerned, it was not immediately clear whether they planned to bring up women’s issues during study group meetings. Lorina McWilliams, a bank executive and 2020 member, was out of town on vacation and could not be reached.

The other woman, insurance executive Virginia Killian, declined to comment. And Lois Frederick, president of the local chapter of AAUW, which had fought so hard to get women in the study group, said she had talked to neither Killian nor McWilliams, had no intention of doing so and was perfectly satisfied with their appointments.

Milner said he doesn’t believe that these topics belong in the 2020 agenda. The city, Milner said, has other groups working to solve these problems. For example, as a result of a court order in a racial discrimination suit involving its police force, the city hired attorney Herman Sillas as a consultant on minority issues. Sillas and the city’s affirmative action coordinator have put together several workshops and programs, some of which the mayor has taken part in, to help the city come to terms with its racial problems and prevent sexism in the workplace.

As for the controversy ignited by his appointments, Milner acknowledges that he made a mistake in not naming minorities to the task force--not because the group needed a minority point of view, but because Glendale has yet to overcome its sensitivity toward ethnic issues.

“Someday,” he said, “we will get to the point where we can hire, select and appoint people whose background, expertise and capacity help achieve our goals disregarding gender, culture and race.

“But for now, with the scrutiny city government is under, you have to consider gender and ethnicity in putting together a group. It’s called affirmative action.”