POLITICS LA-When Mayor Eric Garcetti's recent nomination of a real estate company executive to the West LA Area Planning Commission was greeted with outrage by community leaders, it was quickly withdrawn.
But while those activists may rightly take credit for blocking a nominee with terrible credentials, the kerfuffle raises serious questions about how positions are filled on the City's many public boards and commissions.
As reported in CityWatch last month, and subsequently by the LA Times, that nominee, Jaime Lee, was CEO of a large commercial real estate company that had allowed illegal supergraphic signs on its buildings during the past decade. The company, Jamison Realty, had also joined a rogue sign company named SkyTag and a number of other property owners in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the city's ban on new billboards and supergraphic signs.
That legal assault was abandoned after an appeals court upheld the city's ban. The City then sued SkyTag, Jamison and ten other property owners who had allowed the multi-story vinyl and fabric advertisements on their buildings. Last year that lawsuit was dismissed after SkyTag agreed to a $1.2 million fine and the property owners accepted an injunction against putting up any of those lucrative signs in the future.
Although Lee's nomination crashed and burned, many were left to wonder how a Mayor with a reputation for having a sensitive political antenna would put forward such a nominee in the first place. Surely he knew that the City's Westside had been ground zero in the illegal signage and digital billboard wars. He couldn't help but know that Mike Bonin and Paul Koretz, the two city councilmembers who represent most of the commission's area, were highly sensitive to their constituents’’ feelings on the subject.
A recent investigative piece by David Zahniser in the LA Times revealed the extent to which Garcetti has appointed campaign supporters and contributors to boards and commissions.
Consistent with a view of the new mayor operating a kind of spoils system is the fact that Lee, along with members of her family and company employees, contributed more than $16,000 to Garcetti's 2013 campaign.
So what did Garcetti perceive as Lee's singular qualifications to sit on one of the busiest of the city's seven area planning commissions, which make decisions on everything from backyard fences to major commercial projects? Other than those aforementioned campaign contributions and the fact that she works in the real estate industry, that is.
The mayor's letter of nomination sent to the City Council contains no clue. It states, in its entirety, “I certify that in my opinion Ms. Lee is qualified for the work that will devolve upon her, and that I make the appointment solely in the interest of the City.” That's it. No public announcement or other introduction, just that letter filed with the City Clerk's office on Nov. 25, two days before the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Lee's nomination appeared on the council's Planning Committee agenda three weeks later, again without any public notice other than being posted in City Hall and on the city's website. A community member saw it there two days before the Planning Committee meeting and alerted others who had reason to be appalled by the prospect of a person with Lee's history sitting on the five-member commission. Emails started flowing to the offices of Garcetti, Bonin, Koretz, and the members of the Planning Committee, the item was dropped from the committee agenda, and the nomination was quietly withdrawn.
In one sense, this narrative shows that the democratic system worked the way it should. Community sentiment was strongly expressed, and the powers-to-be responded. But in a larger sense, everything about the affair illustrated something amiss with the system. In fact, if not for much happenstance this nomination could now be through the approval process and Ms. Lee could be ready to take her commission seat and cast a vote on a major project.
Why weren't community organizations such as neighborhood councils formally notified of the nomination with ample time to weigh in? Why didn't the mayor provide more than that single, boilerplate sentence in his letter to the City Council?
The short answer is that those things aren't required. That's also a statement of the problem. Nominees to commissions of vital importance to local communities can be seated without members of those communities knowing much of anything about them. They can vote yea or nay without having undergone any public scrutiny, other than answering the softball questions typically lobbed by city council committee members.
A staple of city election campaigns is candidates promising to listen more closely to residents, to empower local communities to help city government be more responsive and effective. Garcetti was no exception, and he has sounded this theme since taking office last July.
Is this just empty rhetoric, or does he truly mean what he says? Communities would be justified in demanding an answer to that question, along with some proposal to reform the nomination system to give community members more notice, more background information on the nominees, and more opportunity for formal input.
And if Garcetti is unwilling to do any of this, community members should insist that their City Council representatives take up the cause, and try to institute some fundamental repair of this broken process.
(Dennis Hathaway is a journalist, a contributor to CityWatch and the president of the Ban Billboard Blight Coalition. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 2
Pub: Jan 7, 2014
