Valleywide : Exemptions Urged on Bus-Bench Contract

Activists from across the city implored a Los Angeles City Council committee this week to exempt their neighborhoods from a proposed bus-bench contract that they say would erase years of efforts to beautify their communities.

In order to carry out the proposed contract, which would replace more than 6,000 worn-out benches citywide, the city would have to rewrite the specific plans for 15 Los Angeles communities--including the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan. That’s because the contract calls for the replacement of benches that carry advertising with new ones, which are prohibited or restricted under many specific plans, or master plans that regulate local development.

The Public Works Committee--in this case, Councilman Richard Alarcon, the only member who attended the meeting--decided Wednesday that it did not want to make such a drastic recommendation to the full council.

Alarcon, who chairs the committee, instead sent the proposal to the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee with a request that it make a recommendation to the Public Works Committee within 60 days. The councilman also directed the Department of Public Works to come up with an alternative interim proposal that would allow some old benches to be replaced in non-controversial areas.

The issue was a sticky one for the committee because it pitted the desires of some community activists to have attractive benches in line with their painstakingly crafted specific plans against the wishes of other community leaders who see the dilapidated existing benches as ugly and unsafe.

Arlan Renfro, representing Norman Bench Advertising, which would get the contract, said exempting the specific plan areas and those covered by the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative urban improvement project, which pose similar problems, would make the contract economically unfeasible for his company.

But Joel Silverman, chairman of a residents committee overseeing the Westwood Specific Plan, said, “I don’t believe the economic viability of a contract supersedes 10 years work of the community.”

Alarcon said he took the unusual step of holding the council committee meeting not at City Hall, but at a community location--the Van Nuys Women’s Club--to make city government more accessible to residents.