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LA WATCHING - Facing massive budget issues and an edgy populace, Mayor Karen Bass and City Council propose to raise waste collection fees, massive layoffs and postponement of maintenance and repairs of the crumbling city infrastructure, instead of reconfiguring the city`s departments to cut costs, and redefine the duties carelessly assigned to them.
But that is not how it works. Whenever there is a fork in the road, the easiest path is the one of choice for today’s elected officials. It is easier to saddle homeowners with 54 percent increase in trash collection fee to address the $1 Billion budget deficit rather than oppose the special interests that finance their campaigns and provide hidden perks.
It's a fancy as old as the hills: the public be damned!
Restructure the Department of Public Works—a wasteful anachronism outmoded by time.
Initially, it appeared as a reasonable concept, one entity that would house all city physical infrastructure projects with multiple obligations. But with age and time, it became a colossal body that futilely oversaw tasks ranging from construction of bridges to wastewater treatment plants, from graffiti removal to trash collection and streetlight maintenance.
The federal government realized the need for such a transformation and decided early to depend on multiple, discrete departments specializing in transportation, general services, and other public infrastructure tasks. Likewise, California followed suit and turned to smaller, specialized groups.
Since 1949, the city has commissioned at least six in-depth reports from staff, outside consultants and citizen commissions, all recommending reorganizing and restructuring the Department of Public Works.
Merging the Bureau of Street Services (BSS) with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (DOT) would also lead to efficient operations and savings.
According to a Chief Legislative Analyst report, “DOT since its establishment in 1979, never implemented the second step of its mission of bringing planning and policy, design, construction, and maintenance responsibilities into a single department, leaving the city with a fractured system.” The report continues, “This fractured system is a structural barrier that has impeded the implementation of every major transportation plan or policy adopted by the City Council, from the Bicycle Plan to the Safe Routes to School Strategic Plan to the Mobility Plan to the Green New Deal.”
Mayoral initiatives like Great Streets and Vision Zero have also struggled to advance beyond temporary pilots and spot improvements, falling short of the systems change they were intended to catalyze.
Sidewalks and crosswalks are part of the path of travel for people, but they are presently excluded from transportation and mobility planning, which comes under the DOT purview. Departments routinely work at cross purposes, with one agency widening streets to outdated standards while others seek grant funds to narrow them back for safety and livability. While different agencies manage the space inside the curb and outside of it, no one is responsible for making sure the curb in in the right place, it was stated in the CLA report.
Los Angeles Daily News reported that, according to an audit, the City of Los Angeles failed to meet its goal of eliminating traffic fatalities by 2025, in part due to a lack of support from political leaders and poor coordination between departments. Nearly half of the 56 “actions and strategies” outlined in the Vision Zero Action Plan were not accomplished as of 2023, as per an audit from KMPG, which was released on April 11. Initially, each of the goals had target dates in 2017 and 2020.
The city council recognized in 2018 that many operational inefficiencies existed, with the most disruptive being the division of responsibilities between DOT and BSS. No other major city conducts key planning, operational and maintenance functions among several departments like Los Angeles. For example, DOT is responsible for traffic signals, street signs, and lane striping, but BSS is responsible for street resurfacing, sweeping, and issuing special permits that require use and closure of our city’s streets.
And a motion introduced in council three years later repeated that under the city’s current organizational structure, one department is responsible for paving streets, and another is responsible for striping that pavement; one department is responsible for placement of bus stops, and another is responsible for bus shelters. One department oversees the operation of personal mobility devices on our streets and another regulates parking devices on sidewalks.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to take-over the Bureau of Street Lighting (BSL).
Street lighting is a foremost sore point with residents who see darkness as reasons for denigrating neighborhoods and spreading crime. Yet, ten percent of the 233,000 lights do not work, and the streetlight bureau does not have the money for the job, although property owners have been paying $44 million per year for this purpose.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power also performs streetlight work, with the city Street Lighting Bureau owing LADWP over $78 million dating back to 2016. In 1998, Mayor Richard Riordan recommended that LADWP should take over streetlighting work. However, the Bureau of Street Lighting with its lobbying and backdoor political maneuvering kept things as they were.
Regardless of the wealth of calls for changes, and numerous parallel reports and studies, today’s city leaders have failed to quash the squandering of tax dollars.
A recent headline in a major newspaper referring to Los Angeles read: Wealthy West Coast city in danger of becoming the ‘next Detroit’.
Fiscal dilemmas lead to city crises and the loss of growth and jobs. While the wildfires supplied a major setback, the ineffective leadership and aimless direction by city leaders are intimating an ominous future.
(NICK PATSAOURAS is a civic leader, who has overseen as a volunteer a number of infrastructure projects for LA County Supervisors and Mayors.)
