NEWS ANALYSIS : Mayor’s Field of Dreams for City Slow to Bloom

Calling Los Angeles “America’s most fertile field of dreams,” Mayor Tom Bradley launched his unprecedented fifth term in June, 1989, by pledging an ambitious series of housing, transportation and environmental programs.

One year later, most of the mayor’s reforms have yet to blossom.

For example, Bradley’s proposal to cut rush-hour truck traffic on city streets by 70% won initial City Council approval last November, but now is stalled. Mayoral staffers are trying to work out unresolved questions, such as ways to enforce the proposed truck ban.

Bradley’s initiative to target more than $100-million a year in downtown redevelopment funds for affordable housing and after-school education is at an impasse. No visible progress has been made in what the mayor hailed as “the largest municipal housing and homeless plan in American history,” and thousands of homeless people continue to sleep in cardboard “condos” and rescue missions within blocks of City Hall.

Other sweeping proposals--such as turning the Los Angeles River into a verdant recreation area or maximizing city airport revenues by possible sale or long-term lease of Los Angeles International Airport to a private utility--also have not moved beyond the talking stage.

In a series of interviews in late June, Bradley and his top aides contended that substantial progress has been made during the last year on many of the more complicated and innovative proposals.

But when the city’s unwieldy bureaucracy and budgetary constraints are factored into the equation, they said, significant changes will take additional time and patience.

“It doesn’t discourage me or deter me just because a program may take many months longer than someone perceives that it should take,” said Bradley, who has three more years to make good on his 1989 campaign promises. “I had an excellent year.”

Bradley and his staffers cited several significant accomplishments in the last year:

* A five-year moratorium on the demolition of single-room occupancy hotels on Skid Row.

* Creation of a division of storm drains to help protect Santa Monica Bay from pollution.

* Establishment of a public hot line for information on buses, vans and rider sharing to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution.

In addition, Administration officials said that the mayor took a leadership role in getting the city to ban the sale of ammunition for one week before New Year’s Eve and Independence Day. Bradley also proposed mandatory 10% cuts in water usage to ease the city’s water shortage.

Council members generally agree that Bradley, in seeking to move beyond the scandals that plagued his Administration for more than a year, has raised his visibility on major issues.

“One year he ran for reelection and bragged about the fact that he did things quietly,” said council President John Ferraro. “Now he’s talking about everything that’s coming down the pike.”

But Ferraro and several council members say it remains unclear whether the 72-year-old mayor has the ability and inclination to accomplish his goals.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said he is encouraged that Bradley has hired several energetic aides, such as Chief of Staff Mark Fabiani and housing coordinator Michael Bodaken. However, he added, “It’s too early to know how much of (the Bradley agenda) is going to come to fruition. I hope the staff that he has brought aboard is a precursor to things that will happen rather than . . . to create the appearance of change.”

Independent Council

Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores said the mayor has a more difficult time getting his proposals through the council. “I don’t think it’s as easy as it has been in past years for the mayor to make eight phone calls and get eight aye votes because I think we’re looking at the issues on an individual basis,” she said.

Council supporters of Bradley counter that slow progress is the nature of big government and that rosy predictions are sometimes necessary to achieve long-term reforms.

A case in point, said Councilman Marvin Braude, is the truck reduction proposal, which Bradley aides had predicted would be in place last fall. The measure aims to bar 70% of large trucks from city streets during rush hour.

“That means regulating the whole of Southern California’s trucking industry,” Braude said. “It’s a major step and to expect that can happen in six months is unrealistic.

“If you want to do something new,” the councilman added, “you can’t admit that it’s going to take a long time when you start. Otherwise, you’re giving up before you begin.”

City traffic planners are conducting a noise study to assess the impact of late-night truck deliveries. The city also has asked the South Coast Air Quality Management District to assist in setting up enforcement procedures and fee structures for the ban, which the Bradley Administration believes should be used as a model for the entire Los Angeles Basin.

Reforms ‘Dormant’

“It would have been easy to throw something in place that wasn’t well thought out and that didn’t have the cooperation of key sectors of the Southern California economy,” said Fabiani, who was promoted from the mayor’s legal adviser to chief of staff last November. “The mayor chose to go around, meet with every affected party, try to bring them into the process. If that means a few extra months, in the end it is really going to be worth it.”

Fabiani said the mayor’s 1988 proposal for massive affordable housing construction is equally complicated, since the funding scheme relies on county and school district approval to raise a court-imposed ceiling on Community Redevelopment Agency spending from $750 million to $5 billion.

Critics have termed Bradley’s initiative, which he unveiled in January, 1988, a thinly veiled attempt to free enormous sums of money for further redevelopment. They note that there is little incentive for schools and the county to surrender property tax revenues to the city.

County budget officer Jerry Roos said last week that “progress has been slow,” but that the county is open to further negotiations with the city.

Bradley refused to discuss specifics of the impasse, saying only that “we haven’t given up, we’re going to go at it again.”

The mayor and his aides cite other progress on the affordable housing front in addition to the downtown demolition moratorium. In late June, the mayor established a new Affordable Housing Commission and a Housing Preservation and Production Department.

Nonetheless, the city’s housing crunch continues, according to city housing coordinator Bodaken, a former Legal Aid Foundation attorney who was appointed six months ago.

Bodaken said that the city had all but ignored the housing issue until a 1988 city committee called for the annual production of 10,000 new housing units.

And most reforms proposed by the committee “lay dormant” last year due to a nine-month vacancy in the housing coordinator’s post, he said.

Now, Bodaken said, a top priority of the mayor’s office is establishment of a fee system under which commercial developers would be required to pay per-square-foot assessments for construction of affordable housing. The council recently approved an ordinance placing developers on notice that the fee is being formulated. An extensive study is under way to help determine the fee levels.

Recycling Scaled Down

In keeping with a campaign promise, Bradley signed a law last January that eventually will require all households to recycle garbage.

But the program has fallen behind schedule because of delays in the purchase of garbage trucks and in locating purchasers for the recycled plastics, glass and paper.

Recycling was to begin in September in 150,000 households from Koreatown to Eagle Rock, but now is scheduled to start this fall in 24,000 homes in those areas. In other parts of the city, the starting date will be delayed until 1992.

Bradley wanted to establish an air quality management office staffed by four employees. But the City Council last year created a much larger Department of Environmental Affairs over the objection of the mayor. Since then, the mayor appointed a general manager, Lillian Kawasaki, to head the environmental affairs department, and 11 of the 20 authorized staff members have been hired. Kawasaki said her staff has begun coordinating the city’s air pollution reduction efforts and is preparing a plan for dealing with coastline oil spills.

Bradley has hired a city AIDS coordinator and a director to oversee efforts to expand the use of reclaimed water in public parks.

The mayor, who had promised to expand the police force, won council approval for 500 new police officers last year. But his plan to hire another 400 police this year was rejected by the council on the recommendation of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who said that he would rather spend limited resources on more pressing needs.

Bradley’s proposal to “green” the Los Angeles River has stirred words and action far beyond the river’s banks. In Washington, a House committee has recommended a $700,000 study and in Sacramento, legislation is pending on an alternate plan to turn the concrete flood-control channel back into a natural waterway.

Perhaps the most controversy has been whipped up by another proposal. Later this summer, a $100,000 county transportation commission study is due on Assemblyman Richard Katz’s (D-Sylmar) plan to turn the riverbed into an expressway.