Criticism of Planners by Mayor Gets Poor Reviews : Development: Bradley complains in a speech that policies favor slow-growth advocates. But some residents and city officials find the comments disturbing.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s complaint in a speech Thursday that the city’s Planning Department and processes favor slow-growth advocates and their policies brought disagreement, dismay and concern from homeowner representatives and Los Angeles City Council members who represent the San Fernando Valley.

“Most of the homeowners I know feel powerless and that the planning process is biased toward the developer,” said Councilman Michael Woo, who represents Studio City and parts of Sherman Oaks.

Richard Close, an attorney and homeowner association president, said the tenor of the mayor’s remarks was especially disturbing because Bradley will play a key role in selecting the next person to fill the vacant post of city planning director.

If the mayor’s speech reflects his criteria for picking a planning chief, “it definitely worries me,” said Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “The mayor may be gone in two years, but the planning director can be here for 20 years. If we get the wrong person, that’s scary.”

In his remarks Thursday to Planning Department staff and to the five-member Planning Commission,Bradley called both no-growth and unlimited growth concepts “bankrupt ideas” and urged “balanced growth.”

But the thrust of the remainder of his remarks were unmistakably critical of a city planning system that he sees as largely stacked to stymie development.

“If you think a no-growth policy will stop” the stream of international migration to Los Angeles, Bradley warned the planners, “you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Stop responding to the loudest voices,” Bradley said at another juncture in his speech. The view that “I’m here now, but I don’t want any change, not in my back yard” is “small thinking,” the mayor said.

“Let’s see that residential properties are protected,” Bradley added. “But let us not listen to those who can mount a campaign, come in with their placards and shout as loud as possible to you and say ‘We don’t want it. Take it some place else.’ ”

Continuing, the mayor said: “It’s time for homeowner groups to say what they want, not what they’re against. . . . Any city that doesn’t grow will stagnate and die. That, my friends, is not going to be the fate of Los Angeles.”

Gordon Murley, president of an umbrella organization of homeowner groups, the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., said he was horrified by the mayor’s remarks.

“His head is stuck down the hole of non-reality,” Murley of Woodland Hills said. He called the speech proof that the “mayor has gotten down and licked the boots of developers. . . . All he understands is big developers giving campaign contributions.”

Even Councilman Hal Bernson, often viewed as pro-development largely because of his support of the huge Porter Ranch project, viewed the mayor’s remarks as harsh.

“The mayor obviously thinks the Planning Department and the council are paying too much attention to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) elements,” Bernson said. “There is some validity to that . . . . But I think we have to listen to the homeowners, the nay-sayers, and we need to evaluate the impact of projects on their community and weigh that against other considerations.”

Councilman Joel Wachs, another Valley lawmaker, said he “would not be pleased with a message from the mayor” that discourages or belittles public participation in the city’s planning processes. In fact, the opposite message should be sent, Wachs said.

Particularly bothersome, Wachs said, was the mayor’s insinuation that the Planning Department intentionally drags its feet in its state law-required review of the environmental impacts of major projects. Bradley pointedly warned the city planners that he would not tolerate their delaying environmental impact reviews in order to kill or stop projects.

“If you can’t move with us, we’ll go around you,” the mayor said. “If you can’t do that job of conscientiously reacting and taking appropriate steps on EIRs, then we don’t need you. It’s just that simple.”

But neither Wachs, Bernson nor Woo said they had any sense that the Planning Department’s environmental review unit has been captured by slow-growth advocates.

“Speeding something up can be an excuse for ignoring the requirements for doing an adequate assessment,” Wachs said. “I’ve never seen the department intentionally slow things down.”

Still, several council members acknowledged that the city’s planning process is notoriously slow, and to this extent agreed with the mayor’s call for streamlining. But the difference was in their assessment of how to correct the problem.

A lack of adequate personnel and funding, not bias, was cited as the culprit by Wachs and Woo, who called for a solution of charging the developers higher fees for processing their applications.

Looking into the future, Woo also claimed to see as much likelihood that the city could fail because of too much growth rather than, as the mayor feared, too little.

“We could grow so much that we die,” Woo said. “L.A. is in danger of losing all the qualities that made it great. People came here because of the low density, the easy flow of traffic, the air. If we lose sight of these environmental qualities, we lose sight of what L.A. is all about.”

BACKGROUND

Mayor Tom Bradley’s comments on planning were made against a backdrop of growing sensitivity to land-use. An August, 1990, Times poll found that more than 40% of Valley residents favored slowing or stopping commercial or residential construction. Many of those polled also blamed their elected officials for the excessive growth they saw as eroding the Valley’s traditional suburban lifestyle. Their anger was manifested during last spring’s Los Angeles City Council race for a seat in the northwest Valley held by incumbent Hal Bernson. Bernson won reelection by only 861 votes after he was battered by foes of the Porter Ranch development project, one of the largest in city history.