Something Is Wrong With This Picture : Proposed Fox expansion gets ambushed at almost every turn by red tape and chaos

As the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles has a huge vested interest in the movie and television business. But the city’s inability to settle a long-running dispute over plans to expand Fox Studios points to the absence of a cohesive strategy to foster wealth-producing industries--such as entertainment--that are vital to the long-term economic health of Los Angeles.

For more than three years, Fox has struggled to gain approval from the city to construct new administrative office space and to renovate old studios at its 53-acre motion picture and television production facility in Century City.

The cost of delay is significant not only to Fox but to Los Angeles, which must wait for 1,600 new jobs and forgo millions of dollars in potential city revenue as deficits grow ever larger.

The lengthy holdups in the project speak as much to the Byzantine nature of the regulatory process as to the disorganized nature of urban planning in Los Angeles.

By all appearances Fox has reasonably addressed most of the objections to the project. The studio has made commitments to designate the site for “studio use only,” meaning that the studio could not change the use of the property without city approval; to spend more than $5 million to mitigate traffic; to limit the height of new structures to seven stories, and to preserve historic buildings and sound stages. Fox is also negotiating to scale back the amount of new office space and complete construction in several phases.

Yet these assurances have not satisfied the often highly vocal opponents of the project. The opposition has used city and state regulations--including requirements for separate licenses or permits involving development, zoning, environmental impact, air quality, traffic mitigation, density and seismic safety--against Fox to further delay an already lengthy approval process.

This obstructionist ploy is all too easy in a city that has trouble in just identifying valuable projects, much less in hastening their approval.

It is obvious that the city must do a better job of targeting and retaining those industries that are crucial to its economic well-being. It would help if city and state leaders found a way to consolidate and streamline all the regulatory functions. A worthy project simply should not be required to comply with more than 700 separate conditions. It’s not reasonable. It’s all too clear that something is very wrong with this picture.