Another Absurd Act of Blind Faith: 611,000 More Angelenos

Like most Americans, we in Los Angeles want our civic leaders optimistic and imbued with a can-do attitude. The official sanguineness that results is never more evident than when our city fathers and mothers are forced to formally contemplate the future. During those times, their blithe confidence morphs into what only can be called blind faith. A case in point is the City Council’s recent adoption of a long-term strategy to accommodate 611,000 more residents by 2010. This strategy, known as the General Plan Framework, amounts to an act of faith that the city’s infrastructure and services will be able to keep pace with the population increase.

Such an assumption would be a lot easier to swallow if the city had kept abreast of the growth that already has swelled its population to 3.7 million. But it hasn’t. There are not enough classrooms in the city, not enough teachers, not enough cops, not enough public transit, and it seems highly unlikely that even the heart-sickening events of last month are going to discourage immigration, which fuels population growth here.

For five years, a federation of homeowners and environmentalists, skeptics all, has been fighting this official Pollyannaism in court and public hearing rooms. Their opposition has focused most successfully on the GPF’s transportation provisions, which are wormy with internal contradictions.

To oversimplify the kind of excruciating complicatedness only government bureaucracies can devise, the GPF projects a 35% increase in traffic volume and a 50% decrease in average highway speeds. To counteract this, it posits a 20-year, $12-billion campaign of new and improved mass transit and other measures--but casts doubt on whether such a campaign would ever actually be funded.

In a lawsuit, the homeowners and environmentalists jumped all over this contradiction, and a judge gave the city three choices if it wanted to approve the GPF:

1) curtail the development that is envisioned.

2) come up with workable devices to counteract the negative impact of more traffic.

3) adopt a “Statement of Overriding Considerations” that would declare, in essence, that increased traffic misery is acceptable when weighed against the “benefits” of growth. You probably can guess which alternative the city chose: No. 3. In adopting the GPF, the City Council tried to appease opponents by requiring planners to review the traffic situation every six months to see if transportation improvements are keeping pace with development. (I can see it now: What? There’s gridlock on Lincoln Boulevard? Stop construction on Playa Vista immediately!)

The homeowners and environmentalists were not appeased, and they hauled the city into court again in September. Traffic is not the only issue opponents of the GPF are fixating on. Their lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, is also raising the question of whether there will be enough water to bathe all of the bodies and flush all of the toilets in a more populous city. So far, the courts have accepted the GPF contention that there will be sufficient water. In the latest lawsuit, however, Teeter points to contradictory Bureau of Sanitation estimates that current water consumption patterns will result in a shortfall of 134 million gallons a day by 2020.

Demographers project the state’s and region’s future populations to be immense (52 million people in California by 2025). Yet such projections, being abstract, land hollow on the ear. What, concretely, might be required for the city of Los Angeles to absorb another 611,000 people in the next eight years and afford them a decent quality of life? The city of Seattle has a population of 563,374, or 47,626 fewer than what the GPF envisions L.A. growing by. Here is part of what it takes to give the residents of Seattle the quality of life they enjoy:

*1,261 uniformed police officers

*1,111 firefighters

*2,461 teachers

*Facilities for 47,000 public school students

*270,524 dwellings

*2,278 beds for homeless people

*Public school expenditures of $273.9 million a year

*City government expenditures of $2.09 billion a year

*141 million gallons of water a day

City officials here are going to have to come up with something like the above. Unless, of course, their aspirations for an even bigger Los Angeles fall short of what Seattle already has achieved--an unthinkable betrayal of the old can-do spirit. And after they’ve determined how to absorb a Seattle, all they’ll have to do is figure out how to absorb a Covina (population 46,837) in the next eight years too.