Gifts That Plug Into City Hall

There are 200 planners in the Los Angeles Planning Department, but the city supplies them only nine computers.

Ten more are on order but haven’t arrived, said Planning Director Melanie Fallon. So desperate is the need for computers to process information that some of the planners bring in their own PCs.

Even so, it takes months to process the many reports and permits needed for the big office buildings going up around town. After waiting a year for approval of an environmental impact report for an office building complex at the San Fernando Valley’s Warner Center, the JMB/Urban Development Co. asked how to speed up the process.

Give us more computers, planning officials replied. JMB, which also owns much of Century City and is planning another high-rise there, donated four personal computers, along with two laser printers, two modems and software. The planning director accepted. A City Council committee agreed and the full council is expected to approve the gift soon.

Anti-development homeowner groups think the gift has the smell of a City Hall fix. “It’s intended to speed up the process and ingratiate them (JMB),” said Laura Lake, a Westside slow-growth leader. She’s complained to the city Ethics Commission.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be quite so quick to call in the ethics cops. In a City Hall where political life is supported by hundreds of thousands of developer campaign contributions, honorariums, free meals and gifts to elected officials, donating four PCs and accessories to the city planning office ranks low on my crookedness scale.

Rather than being a case of the fix, the gift illustrates the relationship between developers and the planners, analysts and others who do the basic, boring, unpublicized but extremely important detail work of planning, or attempting to plan, a city.

You need that relationship to build a skyscraper. Even with a building that everyone likes, there are literally boxes of plans and reports that must be approved by several levels of the Planning Department before the project moves on to the Planning Commission, the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley.

The process is so complicated, and expensive, that--long before the JMB computer gift--developers have been paying for planning work in the department.

But that pragmatic working relationship is now bumping up against the no-growth, slow-growth movement. What seems like an honest partnership to the engineers and planners looks like collusion to slow-growth advocates.

They view developer-bureaucrat friendship as one that can become too cozy.

I got a taste last year of just how cozy things can become. Someone far down the City Hall chain of command showed me a city report on a proposed downtown building. As I read the document, the official told me that the developer’s lobbyist had personally made several changes in the wording--editing which enhanced the project’s chances.

Such incidents persuade homeowner groups that there is a game to be played among planners, and so they have developed some tricks of their own to counteract what they see as undue developer influence.

They are experts at digging out information to help their causes. They can afford legal advice. They have the leisure for City Hall battles. And they know how to get their stories in the press. With their well-kept phone books, these activists can reach reporters on the planning beat any time--at home or at work.

But the gift-giving phenomenon suggested by the new developer-bought computers may change the game, forcing the homeowners to bring presents of their own as they vie for attention in a city where ostentatious gift-giving is an art.

For one thing, everyone at City Hall seems to expect that the Planning Department will be receiving more gifts like the JMB computers.

“I don’t see any reason not to unless we give them favors,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the City Council’s Planning Committee. “And they’re not going to get any special consideration.”

What sort of gifts should a no-growth advocate give a city planner?

Well, they might begin with computer games. That would distract the planners working on their new JMB computers. An espresso machine or a microwave would keep them from their desks altogether.

There are many other possibilities, too many in this rich town. And if, like wedding guests, the no-growthers don’t know what to give, no doubt the Planning Department will soon be listed in the gift registry at Robinson’s, the Broadway and several other stores.