Need Seen for Bold Leader to Head City’s Planning : Government: Search narrows to 6 candidates. Politics and entrenched problems make the job a daunting one.

A yearlong search for a director of planning--one of the most prestigious and daunting jobs in Los Angeles city government--has narrowed to six candidates, including two nationally recognized advocates of inner-city neighborhoods, an urban design expert and two local planning executives.

As the closely watched search nears an end, sentiment is strong among city officials and homeowner groups for Mayor Tom Bradley to name a bold, charismatic planning chief--departing from a practice of appointing bureaucratic loyalists to top jobs. Bradley is expected to make the appointment by the end of the year and submit his choice to the City Council for confirmation.

Traditionally associated with zoning and land-use regulations, the position of planning director is now considered critical to solving many of the city’s most entrenched problems--housing affordability, job and middle-class flight, traffic congestion and neighborhood tensions.

To succeed, the next director must reform a department that a recent city audit described as demoralized by political interference and unable to rise above parochial concerns that have made citywide planning impossible.

“The city needs someone who will capture the public’s imagination. It needs a gutter fighter who the politicians will be a little bit afraid of,” said Richard Weinstein, dean of the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Affairs.

Observers as diverse as Councilman Michael Woo from the melting pot of Hollywood and Councilman Hal Bernson from the suburban San Fernando Valley agree that the right planning director can be a powerful engine for rescuing the city.

“This city is becoming unlivable,” Woo warned. The next planning director must articulate and implement growth plans that will restore the “Los Angeles dream of mobility, affordable housing and a decent environment,” he said. “The planning director needs to lead the fight on these issues.”

One major task will be to improve a regulatory climate that has contributed to businesses steadily leaving Los Angeles for more hospitable places. To do that, said Bernson, who chairs the council’s Planning Committee, the new planning chief must cut the red tape that inflates the cost of building homes and doing business in the city.

But some City Hall observers wonder if Bradley can be expected to pick a planning director forceful enough to succeed.

Too often, his critics say, the mayor has chosen trusted lieutenants or diffident outsiders lacking fortitude and vision to head city departments.

Of the city’s 32 department heads, only a handful have come from outside its immediate bureaucratic family or from beyond Southern California. Among the top six contenders are two City Hall insiders--the acting director of the Planning Department, Melanie Fallon, and her top aide, Frank Eberhard.

Woo said he would not bet against a familiar face getting Bradley’s support. The mayor “is not a man who’s full of surprises,” Woo said.

But there are indications things may change.

Last summer, the mayor publicly chided the Planning Department for letting politicians dictate policy. Lately, his aides insist, Bradley has been looking for an inspirational planning director.

“Charisma is a big part of the job,” said Jane Blumenfeld, Bradley’s deputy for planning. “The mayor genuinely wants a strong, independent person with a holistic view of the city--its economy and ecology, its design and the importance of its various communities.”

The selection process was set in motion last fall by the resignation under pressure of then-Planning Director Kenneth Topping.

The finalists were chosen from 39 candidates, who were rated by two panels of academicians, neighborhood activists and city officials. The panels were selected by the city’s personnel department.

In order of their ranking, the six finalists are:

- Con Howe, 42, who served as executive director of the New York City Planning Commission from 1987 to 1991. Howe won acclaim for the design standards he set for the redevelopment of Times Square and the city’s theater district.

Although he did not hold the city’s top planning post--that of planning commissioner--Howe became known as an artful mediator between intense political pressures for commercial development and the desires of neighborhood groups to preserve housing and social services.

Howe is the director of the Lower Manhattan Project, a public-private partnership formed to address economic stagnation at the southern tip of Manhattan.

* Bruce McClendon, 45, who since 1985 has been planning director of Ft. Worth, where he sharpened his national reputation as a strong advocate of efforts to make the planning process more understandable and accessible.

* Norman Krumholz, 64, a professor of urban affairs at Cleveland State University who served as Cleveland’s planning director from 1969 to 1979.

An advocate of inner-city interests, Krumholz fought and won a number of political battles to block the construction of a freeway through a poor neighborhood, to improve mass transit for working-class residents and to curb discriminatory lending practices by banks in low-income neighborhoods.

* Fallon, 41, named acting director by Bradley 11 months ago, has developed a reputation for getting along well with the opposing interests that come before the Planning Department.

She has coordinated the department’s planning for Warner Center in the San Fernando Valley and Central City West, two of the largest commercial developments outside downtown.

* Ronald Short, 52, who headed the Phoenix Planning Department for more than four years and before that directed planning for Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes the city of Tampa.

In Phoenix, where there is strong pressure to let market forces rather than government regulation govern development, Short is credited with building a citywide consensus for long-range planning. Short’s efforts have strengthened the role of neighborhoods in planning decisions and channeled commercial development into a series of “urban villages” where jobs are concentrated close to people’s homes.

* Eberhard, 51, has been deputy director of the Los Angeles Planning Department since October, 1990, and a staff member for 24 years. He has shepherded many of the city’s biggest and most controversial real estate projects through the planning process.

Fallon and Eberhard have presided over the department during a period marked by internal disarray, plummeting morale and sharp criticism of the department’s inability to regulate development in a consistent and timely manner.

This criticism intensified last summer with the release of the city audit that said the department had compromised its professional integrity by allowing itself to become a captive of parochial politics. Matters came to a boil in August when the department’s seesawing assessment of the city’s supply of residential land undermined the mayor’s efforts to launch an aggressive campaign to build more affordable housing.

Bradley had blamed an apparent scarcity of land on opposition to apartment development from powerful homeowner groups. But the mayor’s housing strategy was discredited when the Planning Department unexpectedly announced that buildable land was far more plentiful than it had first claimed.

As a result, some observers have wondered if it is possible to attract a top-notch planning director. “Because of the politics of the thing, the job is known around the country as quite an impossible one,” said UCLA’s Weinstein.

Others are heartened by the credentials of several of the finalists. Cindy Miscikowski, a council aide who specializes in planning issues, said “there was a sigh of relief when we saw all the credible candidates.”