An Eyesore That Won’t Go Away : It shouldn’t take months to get rid of a Civic Center disgrace

The homeless encampment across from City Hall was dismantled following reports that the nearly two dozen men living there were selling and using drugs in the heart of the Civic Center. The weeds that helped camouflage their lean-tos are mowed, the concrete building foundation broken up, the fence reinforced and the rat-infested underground garage is being sealed.

Progress? Hardly.

Unless county and state officials wake up, nothing more is likely to change for a long while, once the county’s search-and-destroy mission at the site is completed. Not that the county, which oversees the site along First Street between Broadway and Spring streets, or the state, which owns title to the land, were comfortable with the use of the property as a shooting gallery and outdoor latrine. Local officials were clearly angered and embarrassed by reports of these activities on the site of a former state office building. But neither do these officials appear willing to move along the process of permanently improving the site at faster than the usual glacial bureaucratic pace. The story of why this prime real estate parcel is so neglected and could remain so for many more months is sadly emblematic of the gridlock that plagues local government in Los Angeles on a broad range of issues.

Since the state building was razed in the mid-1970s, the county has hoped for a major commercial development on the site that would generate tax revenue. A succession of ambitious plans have been drawn but the lack of construction financing and the rising downtown office vacancy rate killed each project.

Meanwhile, the lot has stood vacant, generating escalating public health and safety problems rather than tax revenue. The owner of Five Star Parking, which operates a parking lot along the northern boundary of the property, offered last year to spend a considerable amount of his own money to take down the fences around the site and landscape it so that the public could use the space as a park, at least until the downtown real estate market revives enough to make commercial development profitable. Joe Lumer figures this is a good investment; the homeless people on the lot and the associated drug trafficking can sometimes constitute a problem for his parking lot business. In return for his expense in improving the vacant land, Lumer wants the county to extend the parking lot lease he holds with the county for five more years.

To us, Lumer’s proposal sounds generous, indeed civic-minded. Certainly, no one else lined up to spend his own money to improve this sorry piece of public space. Lumer has already commissioned preliminary landscaping plans and presented them to county officials. But the Board of Supervisors only saw in Lumer’s proposal a sweetheart deal and the potential for corruption. All projects must be competitively bid, the county insists.

Those rules exist for good reasons. But a public bidding process as currently defined means the county must issue a formal Request for Proposal (RFP). Before it does so, however, the county plans to send out letters to local landscape architects and planners soliciting ideas and specifications to be included in the RFP. That letter is now being drafted.

All told, the process of drafting the RFP, allowing prospective bidders time to respond, evaluating their proposals and negotiating with the winning bidder should take us into November. And all this to landscape a vacant lot.

County officials promise to “expedite” the process this time, but we have to wonder why they can’t do better than that. Surely Supervisor Gloria Molina, in whose district this land resides, can do better. This is the very sort of offer that screams for a common-sense approach. Somebody wants to spend his own money to help clean up a blighted downtown lot. Let’s make it easy for him to do so.