General Plan in Need of Swift Revision, Commission Is Told : Development: Officials are receptive to a call by a management audit for wholesale reforms, including less influence by politicians.

Los Angeles should swiftly update its master development plan to restore order and remove excessive politicking from the planning process, city planning commissioners were told Friday.

Some planning documents are decades out of date, commissioners were told, and planning decisions in some parts of Los Angeles are governed by dozens of separate building moratoriums, a sign that the city lacks a unified vision for development.

The Planning Department also needs an independent-minded director to ensure a more professional approach to planning, said Paul Zucker, author of a management audit critical of the department charged with maintaining the city’s quality of life.

The audit’s call for wholesale changes found a receptive audience during a four-hour commission hearing Friday. Planning Commission President Bill Luddy said implementing the Zucker report is “one of the most important pieces of business” to come before the department “in a long time.”

The commission did not vote on Zucker’s recommendations, but its five members indicated support for the reforms. Some of the proposals may be implemented by the commission and department, but others would require the approval of the City Council and mayor.

Acting Planning Director Melanie Fallon called the audit “helpful and healthy” and rarely disputed the recommendations reviewed in detail Friday. In fact, only three dozen of the audit’s 267 recommendations need more study, Fallon said.

Zucker’s audit contended that the department strayed from professionalism and too frequently allowed its workload and advice to be shaped by elected officials, who are often driven by pressures from rambunctious homeowners or well-heeled developers.

Zucker said the department “cannot survive the Los Angeles City Council” unless it is guided by an up-to-date General Plan, relevant community plans and a strong work schedule less prone to manipulation by elected officials.

Such plans and procedures would act as “major bulwarks” against political influence by providing staff members with a commonly accepted “constitution for planning” on which to rest their decisions, Zucker said in an interview.

“The General Plan is supposed to be our magnetic north, our Ten Commandments--it should remind us of our ultimate direction,” Luddy said. The city’s General Plan is a series of documents that outline broad planning objectives and is supposed to guide all planning efforts.

On average, the city’s General Plan documents are 16 years old and its 35 community plans are 13 years old, the Zucker audit found. “Your General Plan is in very, very bad shape. That’s our No. 1 finding,” the consultant told the commission.

The plan should be updated by 1993, an effort that would cost $9.2 million, Zucker estimated.

Zucker said the General Plan’s irrelevance is evident in that there are dozens of building moratoriums--known as ICO’s for interim control ordinances--in effect in the city. “If the General Plan were a good policy document, you wouldn’t need them. What an ICO does is say that the current planning policies--as embodied in the General Plan--don’t reflect what’s wanted, so we have to put in interim measures to prevent those policies from being implemented.”

Commissioner Fernando Torres-Gil said the city’s General Plan, for example, contains no “fair share” provision that calls for spreading low-income housing projects throughout the city. As a result, council members have trouble resisting homeowner groups that oppose low-income housing projects, because the city lacks a blueprint mandating such efforts.

Councilman Joel Wachs on Friday introduced a motion urging the council’s Planning and Land-Use Management Committee to hold public hearings throughout Los Angeles to allow homeowner associations to comment on the reforms. The chairman of that committee, Councilman Hal Bernson, has already created a task force to review the Zucker audit.