This past friday evening, Mayoral Candidate Eric Garcetti joined Bill Roschen, President of LA’s Planning Commission, and Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic for the LA Times, in a fast-paced conversation that was full of poetry, philosophy, and campaign promises.

Hawthorne, Roschen, Garcetti. Photo by Stephen Box

When asked what it would take to make CicLAvia a regular event, Garcetti went where no other candidate had gone, he offered a commitment.

“The easiest way to make CicLAvia permanent is to elect me Mayor, ‘cause I’m going to make it permanent,” Garcetti said, “I want to see it regularized, at least once a month. I want to see roving CicLAvias in other parts of the city.”

Garcetti acknowledged that “There’s something happening out there!” and pointed at Silver Lake’s Sunset Triangle Plaza, LA’s first street-to-plaza conversion, as evidence that little projects can have a big impact on a community.

“I want to be the sort of Mayor who is going to partner with communities,” Garcetti explained, “ to find out the individual needs and logic of any neighborhood and to make those dreams possible.”

Garcetti wasn’t shy about embracing the legacy of others. He addressed the need to look at the built environment by looking at the human experience and quoted Dostoevsky, “It’s easy to love humanity, the difficult part is learning to embrace your neighbor.”

When pointing at the need for reform within City Hall, he embraced his inner Dr. Seuss and said “The main mode of politics is to say ‘No, Slow, Make it Low and we have an opportunity to Go!’”

Garcetti pointed to the auto-centric Los Angeles that he experienced while growing up,  one that was based on private spaces, backyards, cars, schools with kids on buses, and a private sector that served the needs of the community.

“It no longer works,” he charges, pointing to his densely populated district with few parks, gang activity, disconnected residents, empty storefronts as the embodiment of this principle. “We’re confronting this failure by emerging from our private space. This a snapshot of what our city will look like.”

Surrounded by architects, planners, and designers, Garcetti rose to the occasion and waxed poetic, recounting his childhood impression of LA’s skyline at night as “a bed of jewels that lays out before us.”

Garcetti introduced his theory of urban acupuncture, explaining that little improvements are catalytic and make the whole neighborhood feel better. “I always start planning with the community,” he explains, “for example in Sunset Junction we addressed homelessness, fixed the fountain, and added bike racks. The idea is to a feeling of limitless space.”

When asked how he overcomes resistance, Garcetti gave a nod to Jackie Goldberg who taught him not to dismiss people’s fears, “You must recognize and feel the fear to move past it.”

Garcetti avoided third rail topics such as the Hollywood Community Plan by reframing the debate and articulating the need to replace a plan from the past with one that accommodates the Hollywood of the future, “one that supports our new bike culture.”

As for the debate over skyscrapers and density, Garcetti countered by pointing at the negative impact of “yardscrapers” and “horizontal density.”

Garcetti is nimble as he gracefully introduces accomplishment after accomplishment from the past decade, yet champions the need for reform within City Hall. He As he looked back at his tour of duty as City Council President, a role he referred to as Group Therapist, it is clear that he intends to include civic therapy in his approach to civic engagement.

From encouraging members of the city family to fail forward to encouraging the public to express their inner fears, Garcetti is full of ideas that are designed to change the way the City of LA gets things done. “The big ideas are small ideas, the big ideas come from experimenting and using the city as a platform.”

Garcetti points to neighborhood after neighborhood as examples of how little ideas had big impacts and resonated as standards that can be implemented citywide.

“In Frogtown, we tore up the street, built a bioswale, rebuilt the street so that it had a water reclamation element with a park at the end, and established LA’s Green Street standard.”

“In Silver Lake, we moved the fence around the Reservoir so that people could enjoy the meadow, now people picnic, children fly kites, and public space brings people together.”

“In Atwater Village, we introduced parking credits so that businesses could share parking facilities, allowing the local economy to prosper by using underutilized space.”

Garcetti addressed the Mayor’s role on the Metro Board by pointing to the four seats that LA controls and addressing the need to build effective relationships and by focusing on the mass transit passenger’s experience, a callback to his human perspective approach to urban planning.

In an evening that was literally a Garcetti monologue with gentle prompts from Roschen and Hawthorne, the conversation was punctuated with murmurs of audience approval at each of the many references to community gardens, walkable streets, pocket parks, wayfinding, river paths, bike racks, and shoutouts to audience members.

Garcetti was challenged on the demise of the CRA, on the abundance of billboards, and on LA’s aged zoning Code, topics that he artfully handled, dispensing with them quickly and shifting the conversation to higher ground.

In a room full of planning and design professionals, Garcetti avoided allowing the conversation to get too technical or political and kept if aspirational and true to his stated conviction that the human perspective was most important.

When asked about the governance of other great cities, he passed on the internal machinations of City Halls and instead pointed to public art, bus rapid transit, bike sharing, festivals, walkable streets, great restaurants and other human scale experiences that transform a city.

Garcetti wrapped the evening with his Measure R promise, to not only pursue America Fast Forward, but to leverage the local return funds so that the City of LA could bond it and use the money now, resulting in 1600 miles of repaved streets.

Lest the discussion of bonds, interest rates, and cost increases harsh the vibe in the room, Garcetti followed up the Measure R nod by positioning “cool” as the element that stirs interest, attracts investment, stimulates growth, and revitalizes communities. “We must use good design to make our neighborhoods great.”

Garcetti is one of twelve declared candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles and the election is approximately a year away.

In 1995, the City of Los Angeles installed some temporary traffic diverters at three intersections along Yucca Street to keep vehicular traffic and discourage other illegal activities that were too common-place such as drug dealing.  They closed the intersections with concrete bollards and later with attachable plastic traffic bollards.  Over the years, the experiment has been a success.  Crime rates on Yucca have dropped off while people-powered transportation has flourished.

View Yucca Street in a larger map

Seventeen years later, Councilmen Eric Garcetti and Tom LaBonge want to finally make the closures permanent while creating a more inviting place for cyclists and pedestrians.  The concrete bollards at the intersections of Yucca and Las Palmas, Cherokee, and Whitley Avenues has degraded creating a community eye sore and the temporary plastic ones are so beat up that in some cases drivers go right over them without even realizing that they are there.

The Councilmen hope that making the closure permanent, and working with the LADOT they can create more attractive and permanent ways to keep car traffic from using Yucca.  When pressed as to why they’re proposing to make the “temporary” closure permanent now, after 17 years of “temporary,” staff pointed to the poor shape of the bollards, a desire to improve the look of the three intersections, and a chance to make sure the intersections and Yucca Street work as a bicycle corridor.

For cyclists, Yucca Street already includes sharrows from Cahuenga Boulevard to Vine Street as part of a north-south bikeway connector. LADOT plans to create an east-west arm of this connector on Yucca Street by extending the Sharrows west to Highland Avenue. Staff for Garcetti believe this will create a comfortable corridor for bicyclists who wish to avoid busy Hollywood Boulevard and Franklin Avenue.

The City Council Transportation Committee will hear this motion as part of the regular meeting on Wednesday.  Streetsblog will follow-up on this story as it moves forward.

Villaraigosa at the L.A. Auto Show in 2010. It's ok, we know you're only smiling because you're daydreaming about the CicLAvia you had ridden in the month before. Photo:Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images North America via zimbio

Picture this.  One day one of the most important political figures in the city stands in front of a major Downtown attraction and announces that train service to this attraction will be increased dramatically in the coming weeks.  The next day, a major political figure, flanked by an up-and-coming political star and the City Council President, stands with the head of the local automotive dealer lobbying group and announces a political proposal to end business taxes for car dealerships.

In most parts of the world, that would be a sign of a hot political campaign with two candidates offering competing visions for a city’s transportation  future.  In Los Angeles, it’s just two days in the life of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  While car dealerships are praising the Mayor’s proposal, supporters of green transportation options are puzzled by today’s announcement.

“This city can’t take too many more of Mayor Villaraigosa’s ‘business friendly’ policies,” writes Alex Thompson, President of Bikeside. “The guy extends Metro hours one minute, and decides he wants more car dealerships the next.”

Earlier today, Villaraigosa, Council President Eric Garcetti and Councilman Mitch Englander stood toe-to-toe with the car dealership lobby and announced a plan to end local business taxes for car dealerships operating in the City of Los Angeles.  The plan makes sense from a short-term economic point of view.  Auto dealers produce substantially more sales tax than business tax. In 2010, auto dealers accounted for only $3.6 million in business tax revenue but $29 million in sales tax revenue.

But the three pols see a potential sales tax boom if they can convince the car dealerships that have fled the city for Glendale, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills to come back.  Since 1986, the City of Los Angeles has lost 95 auto dealers. If those 95 dealers were still operating within the City limits, Los Angeles would have an additional $57 million per year in sales tax revenue.  In addition to the new tax proposal, Villaraigosa also announced that Beverly Hills Porsche is moving from Beverly Hills to Los Angeles.  The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Business Policy helped to persuade Beverly Hills Porsche to come to Los Angeles by pulling department directors together and speeding the permitting process.

“For too long, LA’s business tax has driven auto dealers outside the City limits,” said Villaraigosa.  ”It’s time to reform the way we tax auto dealers so that we can bring more jobs and more sales tax to our City.”

Before Villaraigosa can sign a law exempting new car dealerships, the City Council would first have to sign off on a yet-to-be-drafted ordinance before the Mayor could sign the proposal into law.  Garcetti and Englander will introduce a motion asking city staff to draft such an ordinance at tomorrow morning’s City Council meeting.

Garcetti and President Bill Clinton check out the engine in the trunk of a mostly electric car. Photo:CalCars.org

The public relations blitz to attract new car dealers was timed to come in advance of the LA Auto Show which takes place from Nov. 18-27 in the Convention Center.  Unfortunately for anyone looking to score political points off the exemption, it also comes a week after the Los Angeles Times decimated the Buy Here Pay Here used card industry which preys on poor people desperate for a car by trapping them in a cycle of debt and car dependency.  I’ve asked the Mayor’s office if their proposal would include used car dealerships and Buy Here Pay Here dealerships, but have yet to hear back from them.  An unintended consequence of this proposal could be to bring more of these vampire lenders and car dealers to the city further impoverishing those of lesser means and decimating the tax base of those already underemployed.

If the proposal doesn’t include tax exemptions for used car dealerships, then the Mayor and Council face accusations of providing tax breaks for businesses that only benefit top wage earners and not those selling products to the middle class.  And what about the message this sends the transit dependent who have already seen massive service cuts and fare hikes in recent years?  Subsidies for a Porsche dealership but fare cuts for the transit dependent?  And if will subsidize car dealerships, how about bike shops and footwear companies?

“If I had to speculate, I’d guess the Mayor’s economic development team haven’t talked with his transportation team, so one hand has no idea what the other is up to,” Thompson continues.

For their part, Garcetti and Englander pushed the idea that eliminating the tax on car dealerships is really a first step in eliminating the business tax altogether.

“Having owned a small business in Los Angeles, I know how difficult it is for them to get by,” writes Englander. “Every dollar makes a big difference. Eliminating the gross receipts tax is a crucial incentive that can help bring new businesses to Los Angeles and help existing businesses stay and thrive, create jobs and breathe life into our economy. Eliminating the gross receipts tax for new car dealerships is the perfect first step because they generate so much sales tax revenue and jobs.”

“It’s time to stop surrounding cities from using L.A.’s broken tax system to lure businesses and jobs away from us,”writes Garcetti. “Targeting car dealers is a big first step. But we must eliminate the business tax all together. L.A.’s costly and cumbersome tax scheme is one that taxes businesses even when they lose money. If we’re going to get our economy back on track, it’s simply got to go.”

(Update: We're getting word that these racks have also popped up on Flower Street and Ventura Boulevard.  One person was so excited he wants to know where to send a "thank you" note to LADOT.  If you're the first to send in a picture of meters in an area there's a Streetfilms T-Shirt in it for you.  We'll post a composite series on Friday)

In my first post of 2009, I asked readers what they wanted me to cover and discuss in the new year.  One reader pointed out that with the city's change to meterless parking, a lot of bike parking was removed.  It may have taken half a year, but the LADOT has installed fifty-two of what their calling "meter hitches" on former parking meter polls on Hollywood Boulevard between LaBrea and Vine to create new bike parking. 

These new "hitches" have been used in other cities as they modernize their street parking so cyclists have as many places to park their bikes as before.  LADOT implied at last week's Transportation Committee meeting that hundreds more of these "hitches" are just waiting to be put up.

A statement from Garcetti's office is available after the jump.  If you see more of these racks pop up around the city please, let us know.

COUNCIL PRESIDENT GARCETTI ANNOUNCES NEW BICYCLE PARKING IN HOLLYWOOD

HOLLYWOOD -- In an effort to help Angelenos choose alternative modes of
transportation, Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti today
announced the installation of more than 50 new bicycle racks on
Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea and Vine.  Working with the city’s
Department of Transportation, Garcetti developed a pilot program that
transformed into bicycle racks parking meters made obsolete by the
city’s new Park-and-Pay system.

“This new program will provide more bicycle parking to make it easier
for residents and visitors who want to use bikes to get around the
neighborhood,” said Council President Garcetti.  “We want to make it
as easy and attractive as possible for people to ride a bike rather than
drive a car, especially for short trips.”

To expand bicycle parking capacity, the Los Angeles Department of
Transportation is installing “meter hitches” that convert the poles
of former parking meters into bike racks.  The racks have a central
vertical pole with two half circles extending outward on either side so
that multiple bicycle locks can clasp to the pole. On top of the pole is
a small metal sign of a bicycle, denoting the pole as bicycle parking.
(See attached photo.)  Fifty-two meter hitches were installed last night
as part of the first phase of the program.

"LADOT is encouraging people to stay healthy, and reduce traffic
congestion along with pollution, by taking advantage of the new bicycle
racks in Hollywood. Be sure to ride safely" said Rita L. Robinson, LADOT
General Manager.