Caught in a Blueprint for Bureaucracy at Building and Safety

Curtis the homeless veteran divides his workday fairly equally among the buildings at the Government Center in Van Nuys--with the exception of the Department of Building and Safety, which he shuns as the palace of bad vibes.

Folks coming out of that place just don’t seem to be in a particularly generous mood, Curtis observes. Most of them are too stony-faced and grim to part with spare change.

Curtis, a gray-bearded panhandler with a bedroll of faded blue that matches his eyes, knows nothing of Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan to slash red tape in the city’s notoriously bureaucratic building-permit process. But if that plan would put visitors to the Building and Safety office in a more relaxed, more charitable frame of mind, he’s all for it.

On a recent day, most of the weary-eyed, briefcase-toting builders and would-be builders at the office were for it as well.

Of course, most of them didn’t know anything about the mayor’s 66-point plan, either. They had spent the previous five hours in line, not keeping up with the news. But after waiting day after day, receiving two or three contradictory answers to a single question, they agreed they were ready for anything--anything but this.

Some offered a simple, one-point plan.

“Common sense,” said Martin, the 74-year-old co-owner of an Orange County sign company. “They just don’t use it sometimes.”

Nestled between the public library and the Criminal Courts Building, bathed in fluorescent light and suffering from its own ailments--sagging, rain-soaked ceilings, cracked paint--the Building and Safety office is a gathering place of the reluctant, confronting the obdurate, plodding through the endless.

Those who know, those who’ve been here before, come prepared.

Take the contents of Martin’s briefcase, which exemplify the permit seeker’s survival needs: rulers, compasses, protractors, architectural drawings, notarized copies of official-looking papers, a crossword puzzle and a can of flat, warm Coke.

It is now after 2 p.m. and Martin has been here, off and on, since 7:30 a.m. “I once read 351 pages in a book” while waiting, he says. “The book was called ‘In the Interest of Justice.’ ”

Martin is seeking approval to replace the sign at a Ventura Boulevard shop he represents. As he tells it, his day has gone something like this:

The first employee he spoke with said he needed photographs and dimensions of not only the sign to be replaced, but all the signs on all the stores in the mini-mall where the business is located. So Martin dragged out a tape-measure and camera and spent the next two hours measuring and photographing. When he returned, the first employee was at lunch.

“So, I went to this young man,” Martin says, pointing at a bespectacled clerk. “And he said, ‘You didn’t have to do all that.’ ”

Well, OK. On to one of the local planning offices for a required stamp of approval. Stamp price: $356. But all the employees were out, he said, so Martin was left to wait an hour and a half before getting his stamp.

Then he returned here, put his name on the waiting list, and is now . . . waiting.

According to the study that spurred the mayor to action, it can take Los Angeles residents 22 times as long as residents of nearby cities to get a building permit. The authors of the study, a private group called Progress L.A., suggested 83 measures to streamline the system.

Reform would be fine with builder Paul Nagel, who just wants to replace aluminum-framed windows with wood-framed ones for a family whose home was battered by the Northridge earthquake.

“I’m having a bad day,” Nagel said with a wan smile as he passed the four-hour mark. “They’re out to get me.

“I’ll give it till 3,” he said, massaging his temples. “Well, maybe 3:30.”

Nagel and Martin and others understand the need for complex regulations, to an extent. You can’t have people running around throwing up makeshift shacks with no oversight, they say--especially in the most famous earthquake city in the world.

Assistant Office Manager Robert Bassman sits in his quiet office. He is beyond the hubbub, but this is where complaints come, and he’s heard plenty.

“I don’t think we get enough credit in the wake of the Northridge quake,” the soft-spoken Bassman says. “Fifty people died--and that’s a tragedy--but it’s also not bad for a 6.7. Look at Kobe, Japan.”

Back out front, few customers disagree with his defense. After all, more than 5,000 died when the earth shook in Kobe. And, as did the permit seekers polled for the Progress L.A. study, they say the employees and inspectors are knowledgeable, helpful and downright friendly. Martin, in fact, holds out his arms in a gesture of welcoming an old friend when a face he knows calls his name.

“Sue,” he said. “Suuuuue.”

The problem is not the people or the politicians or even the individual rules, they say. It’s the “system.”

By 3:30, Nagel is done. He hurries out the door, passing Curtis, the panhandler.

Curtis--who says he spent a year in Vietnam as “Patton’s radio operator,” although Gen. George Patton died 20 years before the Vietnam War got going--takes a long, contented drag on a bummed cigarette and listens to rock ‘n’ roll on his headset.

He has scored a couple of half-eaten sandwiches from the trash cans, but that’s about it. Soon, however, he’ll head over to the county library, where the most generous people can be found. He can study existentialism most of the rest of the day and still round up a pocketful of change.

And although he never sets foot in the Building and Safety office, he figures it can’t be that depressing. You want depressing? he said. Try Sartre or Nietzsche.