‘89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : A Mega-Manager

Activist Felicia Marcus has put her environmental law degree to work full-time. “I’ve gone into mega-management,” she announced from the City Hall office she occupies as one of Los Angeles’ five commissioners of public works. They oversee a five-bureau, 5,000-employee department that is responsible for the city’s sewers, waste treatment facilities, garbage, street maintenance and other housekeeping activities.

“Our work ranges from the nitty-gritty to the sublime,” said Marcus, who was profiled in View June 16, just before she was named to the post by Mayor Tom Bradley. Before then, Marcus, 33, was director of litigation for Public Counsel (a public-interest law firm) and spent her free time as a volunteer activist on behalf of environmental reform. As a founder of Heal the Bay, she led a successful movement to stop the city of Los Angeles from dumping sewage sludge into the ocean. Now she has an inside seat, and the luxury of focusing all her energies on environmental issues. “I can be a lot more effective here than being on the outside part-time,” she says of her $65,000-a-year job. “People are incredibly supportive of the things I suggest.”

With Los Angeles at a “major crossroads” in terms of environmental issues, Marcus thinks that decisions being made today are pivotal.

“We need to look at Los Angeles as a whole,” she said. For example, “it strikes me as incredibly odd that we have this huge problem with water supply and we have a huge problem with solid waste disposal. About a third of the solid waste disposal is yard clippings, and that doesn’t make sense, because that’s all stuff that has to be watered.

“That’s one of the results of not having long-range planning.”