Politics’ Role in Planning Is at Heart of Picus Furor : City government: The councilwoman’s controversial deposition sparks scrutiny of the impact of lobbying on urban land-use decisions.

The controversial testimony of Councilwoman Joy Picus in a bitter lawsuit filed against the city by a developer has brought into sharp focus the emerging debate over how significant a role politics ought to play in Los Angeles’ planning process.

Her statements made public last week, and those of other city leaders asked to react to them, indicate that political considerations are often the key to decisions about where and how houses, apartments, offices and commercial centers are built.

But to many urban planning experts and policy-makers, politics unchecked is a bad recipe for balancing the competing interests at the heart of many urban issues.

“I can’t emphasize how strongly I disagree with the notion that it’s what a council member determines is in the interest of her constituency” that is the best idea for the city, said Bill Luddy, president of the Los Angeles Planning Commission. “That provides some truly horrible results.” Luddy’s role is to analyze development proposals and make recommendations to the City Council.

In a lengthy deposition, Picus admitted that she lobbied the Planning Commission to prevent Warner Ridge Associates from building offices in Woodland Hills. Her pitch was unsuccessful with planning commissioners. But later, Picus persuaded the City Council to expedite a law that changed the 21.5-acre property’s zoning to allow only houses to be built.

That maneuver, the developers allege in their $100-million lawsuit, was illegal.

Picus’ statements in the 1,750-page document are controversial because she described in detail how fully she was motivated to take a position that would be popular with her constituents and would help her retain her seat representing the area on the council.

Picus also raised eyebrows by describing the threats she made to Jack Spound, a partner in the project, and the glee with which she sought to embarrass ex-council member Robert Farrell and Mayor Tom Bradley on the issue. Both were opponents of Picus’ stance on Warner Ridge.

As significant a role as the deposition is expected to play in the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in January, it is already being cited as further evidence that Los Angeles needs to rethink its methods of planning its future.

Ideally, said Allan Jacobs, an urban planning professor at UC Berkeley, the political debate over the city’s appearance and organization should occur when general plans and zoning regulations are written.

Once that framework is in place, he said, the resolution of most individual development proposals should be obvious.

“The politics are up front in the setting of the rules of the game for everyone to live within, and that’s perfectly proper,” said Jacobs, former planning director for San Francisco. “That’s setting policy. . . . But once they make it, they ought to not change it every Tuesday and Thursday with each individual case. That’s the antithesis of planning.”

When land-use decisions are based on which special interest screams the loudest or lobbies the hardest, the city’s need to deal with issues such as traffic, the location of jobs and the supply of affordable housing gets lost in the shuffle, several experts said.

And ultimately, it is homeowner groups that are likely to get hurt, Jacobs said. “The history of these things is that the one with the most power wins, and . . . generally speaking, the one with the most power is the one with the most money. . . . That is generally not going to be the neighborhood organizations.” he said.

The power of Los Angeles homeowner groups has increased in recent years, as they have become more sophisticated and aggressive in defending their neighborhoods against the rapid pace of development.

But such groups have been seen as another one of the barriers preventing the city from coping with pressing problems.

A report being developed on the city’s affordable-housing crisis, for example, said that homeowners’ NIMBY, or “not-in-my-back yard,” attitudes had shot down even modest proposals to deal with the issue. The report suggests that neighborhood activists ought to become more involved in the citywide planning process to expose them to concerns that are broader than their own.

In July, in a stern speech to the Planning Department, Bradley said that the city’s anti-growth movement, led by homeowner groups and their allies on the City Council, was beginning to threaten the economic health of the city. He also blamed greedy developers and self-serving politicians for haphazard growth in the city.

The proper role of politics also was a significant element of a management audit issued in August that focused on the Planning Department. A key finding of the much-discussed report, written by Paul Zucker, was that political pressure from the City Council often influences the workload and advice of the supposedly neutral department.

But in an interview this week, Zucker said his observations about the role of political considerations in planning had been misunderstood by critics, who interpreted his findings to mean that politics has no place at all in the planning process.

Zucker said he agrees that elected officials must reach decisions on planning issues based largely on their political instincts. “They have to rise and fall based on how they do that . . . and we certainly were not trying to say that the Planning Department knows better than elected officials,” he said.

But, Zucker said, “if that political perspective becomes so domineering that the Planning Department feels they can no longer give their best professional opinion, then it becomes destructive.”

“If all you have to know to make planning decisions is how to count votes, you don’t need any planners,” he said. “All you need is clerks to count votes.”

In some cities, the role of the planning commission and department is strengthened to provide a counterbalance to the city council. In San Francisco, for instance, many zoning or land-use issues do not even go to the City Council for ratification. Another balancing factor can be a particularly strong planning director who does not bow to political pressure.

Zucker has recommended that Los Angeles select such a person when a new planning director is hired in the next few months.

On Friday, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said he was working on a proposal which would insulate the city’s Planning Commission from political pressure from all sources--including the council.

But William H. Lucy, a University of Virginia urban planning professor who wrote a 1989 book on politics and planning, said such measures are insufficient.

Because Los Angeles’ 15 City Council members are elected by districts and generally have a virtual veto over land-use decisions in their districts, no entity is capable of ensuring that citywide interests are served.

“I don’t think it’s possible to have a rational planning process if the council is all elected from districts, particularly if you have a weak mayor system,” as Los Angeles does, he said.

Even so, Luddy, the Planning Commission president, said the commission usually acts independently, without the lobbying from council members and the mayor that Picus said in her deposition was common.

“She paints a picture that is not accurate in that sense,” he said. “The commission’s actions are not political.

Luddy said, however, that Picus may believe that the commission’s decisions are politically motivated because that is the way she views the planning process.

For her part, Picus has not backed away from views she expressed in her deposition.

“The Zucker report seems to think that planning decisions are handed down on tablets--that God determines that this is a good land use and that planners transmit that information,” Picus said in an interview. “It’s my experience that planning is more complicated than that. I’m elected to represent the people who live in my district, and that’s what I did and that’s what the transcript shows. I believe in the democratic process, and I believe in the people who elected me.”