Valleywide : Panel to Hear Plan for New Bus Benches

A city panel today will consider a proposed city contract with a company that wants to replace more than 6,000 worn-out bus benches citywide.

To execute the proposed contract, the city would have to rewrite the specific plans for 15 Los Angeles communities, including the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan. Those documents, which are master plans that regulate local development, forbid new benches that carry advertising.

The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee will consider the proposal at its 1 p.m. meeting today in the council chambers at City Hall, 200 N. Spring St.

The proposal was referred to the committee by the City Council’s Public Works Committee, which held a public hearing on the issue Aug. 16. The issue has pitted community leaders from the specific-plan areas, who say the proposed benches are ugly, against local activists from areas without specific plans who say the new benches are preferable to the old ones, some of which they say are unsafe.

Residents of the specific-plan areas have asked that their communities be exempted from the contract, but officials from Norman Bench Advertising, which would get the contract, said excluding those communities would make the contract economically unfeasible for their company.