No Happy Medians in Sight

I was told a long time ago that I . . . well, that I can’t have medians of my own.

And I’d always wanted a little median. They’re so little, so helpless, and what with them being right out there in the middle of the street, you have to keep an eye on them constantly, take care of them, make sure they stay clean and healthy.

People told me I should adopt a median instead. I could love it and care for it and watch it flourish. And the folks down at the city said they’d be delighted to help me.

But oh boy. They say you can’t fight City Hall. What they don’t say is that it’s even worse when City Hall is fighting on your side.

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Public service is performed in degrees of difficulty. The least demanding asks only that you kindly remember not to toss lighted cigarette butts into dry brush along the roadside. The sternest could subpoena your reading matter and DNA-test your bedsheets.

Surely that wasn’t the degree of public service the City of Los Angeles had in mind in 1989 when it undertook its Adopt-A-Median program. Its underlying message was this:

“Look, people, we don’t have money for the basics, let alone fripperies. Heck, by the time we can get around to trimming the trees on your street, they could be classified as old-growth forests. So if any of you wants to put in some time and money to spruce up those dreary little traffic islands on your street, we’d be happy to help.”

“Help” is a process of permits, forms, specifications, limitations, agreements and releases, reviews and approvals from four separate departments. From inside the bureaucratic belly, it must seem streamlined to light-speed. From outside, it makes Fredonia look like a model of Marxist efficiency--and I don’t mean Karl, I mean Groucho.

Specified, over many pages, are such particulars as the dimensions of contour mounds, the kind of tree ties, six (6) inches of topsoil containing so much agricultural gypsum, so much redwood mulch, so much Nitrohumus.

Unspoken in all those pages of forms is our secular religion, the Great God Equity, but it hovers there unspoken. In California, property values are family values. Like smudged eyeglasses or chipped paint, a desolate, graffitied street divider is a small nuisance inviting larger neglect.

Adopting a median made all the difference on the stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys that Flip Smith and his business peers undertook. What had been a de facto dump for dirty diapers, sprung sofas and burger boxes is now “like the reverse of the broken window syndrome,” says Smith. “Once you do it, you see other places cleaning up their act too.” Yet had they known at the start how they would find themselves challenged over the weight of PVC pipe and charged $1,300 for a water meter, they might not have undertaken it at all.

On the traffic islands of Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Mt. Olympus, neighbors labored to put in plants and irrigation systems. Yet when they were done, the city, which had pledged to water their handiwork, didn’t. It took three letters from Councilman John Ferraro to divine why: “Each time the city negotiates a new contract with a company to do landscaping maintenance, there is a lag period of several months when no maintenance is done.” By the time the contractor got around to it, the plants were dead.

Now Councilman Joel Wachs wants to streamline an adoption process that currently invites civic activism the way the 1040 form invites tax compliance. Maybe he can keep the city from its own evident mission to prove that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Since 1989, only 15 city medians have been adopted. The city wants the process to be “simple enough to allow committed groups to succeed . . . but sufficiently difficult to weed out those groups that may not have a strong commitment.”

How strong? Read Attachments I and II, the deal-killer that Wachs’ re-engineering ought to un-deal if any of the rest of it is to work: They state, in sum, that because the city is so gracious as to permit you to do its work in adopting this median, the city is hereby off the legal hook, and you are hereby on it.

Is someone planting medians with punji sticks and land mines? Who wants to risk getting sued because some idiot says your oleanders distracted him from seeing that turn signal and that’s why he crashed? What’s next, voters being sued for electing an idiot to public office? Adopt-a-Median: a worthy community project you can have fun doing with the neighbors--if your neighbors happen to number among them a site engineer, a horticulturist, a hydraulic expert and a personal injury lawyer.