Streetsblog Los Angeles

Last night, dozens of Westsiders and union members packed into the Mar Vista Recreation Center to watch the Bill and Tim Show.  Hosted by Councilman Bill Rosendahl, a former talk show host, and featuring special guest AEG CEO Tim Leiweke, the two hammed it up with the help of a team of able sidekicks and more often than not brought applause from the audience as they sold Westsiders on an improved convention center and new football stadium.

A dapper Leiweke holds court last night in Mar Vista.

The headline-grabbing news of the night was Leiweke’s announcement that AEG has reworked their proposed deal to the city to reduce the amount of bonds the sports entertainment giant would purchase from the city.  But the CEO, sans-sports jacket but looking dapper in a suit vest, also outlined a pretty progressive transportation plan, going so far as to beg a questioner who argued that nobody wants to “walk 15 minutes in Downtown Los Angeles” to “Take light rail.  Please.  Take light rail, we all should be doing that more.”  You can read more about AEG’s bonding and fiscal proposals at LA Observed and the Times.  Streetsblog will be looking at parts of the transportation plan after the jump.

In our past coverage, Streetsblog outlined what we believe are four things AEG can do to allay transportation concerns about the stadium right now.  We’ll examine, based on what we know, how AEG is doing in meeting those goals.  Read more…

A station in need of improvement. To see the Sierra Club's ideas on how, click on the image.

If you’re looking for a vision for a sustainable transportation plan for the Downtown Stadium, you shouldn’t look to politicians or even AEG executives.  A group of Sierra Club activists, led by Jerard Wright Angeles Chapter Transportation Committee Co-Chair, have outlined a transportation plan that would fulfill AEG’s claims that Farmers Field will encourage more sustainable transportation options than a rival stadium plan in the suburban City of Industry.

The key to providing real rail transit options is a series of major upgrades to the existing station at Pico and 12th, a rail station that in the Wrights’ words, is a “20 year old station that looks like it’s 50 years old.”  The Sierra Club’s presentation asks for the environmental documents for the stadium to include major upgrades to the Pico Station, bike facilities at the events center and nearby facilities, and streetscape upgrades that actually encourage transportation uses.

“Win or lose this is something AEG needs to do,” Wright said referring to the impacts Staples and L.A. Live are having on the already stressed transit station, “If we’re really serious about making L.A. a transit city, this is one way to do that.”

The first step to creating a great transportation plan for Farmer’s Field is to recognize the importance of the Pico Station.  Currently, the station serves only the Blue Line (and soon the Expo Line) and it’s still overcrowded after Lakers games.  An NFL Stadium can hold nearly four times as many people as Staples Center, so even if the Regional Connector is years away and plans for a Downtown Streetcar are sketchy, the station will need major upgrades just to handle the demand for the Blue Line.  Once the Connector is built, the station will be a hub of activity on game day as fans will be able to access the entire Metro rail system from one stop. Read more…

By this point, its becoming clear that for City Officials, the transportation planning for the AEG stadium is a secondary issue for the politicians who will approve a deal with AEG, possibly within the next 45 days.  While the Council is debating and discussing a lot of complicated issues, it’s taking its eyes off the ball when it comes to transportation planning.

It appears that the people making the decision on the stadium are most interested on the dollars and cents of the deal but that doesn’t mean they can afford to ignore the stadium’s impact on the community that surrounds the stadium site, a community where residents’ incomes are well below the national and city-wide averages.

Over the weekend, Councilman Bill Rosendahl published on Scribd a thirteen page letter from City Staff responding to thirty eight questions he had emailed them at different times.  Of those questions, one was about transportation, and it was about relocating car parking spaces.  Meanwhile, the clock continues to tick-down towards the AEG-created deadline of July 31 for the city and agency to reach an agreement.

One of the reasons the city should be demanding more details about the transportation plan now, before an agreement is reached, instead of during the environmental review process, is that AEG is still planning to push for state legislation that would disallow any lawsuits to be brought against its environmental documents, including a traffic and transportation study.  If the city moves forward with a deal with AEG before details of the transportation plan are known, it could be hard to fix a flawed plan later in the process.

In an editorial calling for a deal to be reached post-haste, the Los Angeles Times notes that AEG claims it could one day host the first Super Bowl where the majority of fans arrive via foot, but those dreams are just that without a plan.  After all, the Stadium will be located near the Staple Center, and while the Stadium will hold many more people than the arena, its worth noting that most attendees to these events get there by car. Read more…

"People don't take mass transit to football games." But mascots? That's a different story.

In the ongoing war between Ed Roski and Majestic Realty versus Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) over whether the National Football League should move a team to the sprawling suburbs of the City of Industry or Downtown Los Angeles a new question has arisen: “will NFL fans ride transit to a football game?”  Blogdowntown quotes a Majestic executive defending and promoting the auto-sprawl bonafides of the City of Industry at a panel discussion last week:

At a Thursday panel organized by the Pat Brown Institute, Majestic’s John Semcken talked about growing up in New York and taking the train to Yankees games. He doesn’t see the same happening for football.

“I think a football stadium is a different animal,” he said. “People don’t take mass transit to football games.”

The location of Majestic’s proposed stadium in the City of Industry is “the single biggest asset in our project,” Semcken said. The site is within a one-hour drive of 15.5 million people in a four-county region.

It’s true that people don’t take mass transit to games that are located in the suburbs, surrounded by gigantic parking lots with limited mass transit options.  But stadiums located near to the urban core of major cities, think Soldier Field in Chicago, have a rich history of multiple transit options and fans riding the rail and buses to the stadium.  Even suburban stadiums are embracing transit as a way to get people to come to their games, something that Majestic Realty surely realizes as they’ve already announced that their planning for increased Metrolink service to a station adjacent to the proposed stadium in Industry.

But there are still some major transportation challenges that need to be addressed for the proposed Farmers Field in the Downtown.  Indeed, a working transportation plan for the stadium could be the biggest challenge facing AEG and will attract the lion’s share of attention during the public process rivaled only by the question of whether or not the stadium is receiving a public subsidy.  The city’s blue ribbon commission, one of at least three government bodies who are reviewing the stadium, is already looking at the issue the wrong way by asking people “what steps can be taken to improve traffic around the LA Live-Staples Center complex.”

If it’s ideas on how to make transportation for the events center and improve public confidence that they’re looking for, Streetsblog has plenty of them.  Our suggestions can be found after the jump.  Leave yours in the comments section. Read more…

Image via Farmer's Field

While the rest of the local media was busy going ga-ga over the press conference announcing that, if constructed, the Downtown NFL Stadium would be named after Farmers Bank, Patrick McGreevey and Jessica Harrison at the Los Angeles Times revealed that the developer’s for the Downtown Stadium are lobbying for the same exemption from state environmental lawsuits that rival developer Ed Roski earned for his proposed Stadium in the City of Industry.

As top executives from Anschutz’s firm roamed the Capitol to lobby for their project this week and a who’s who of power brokers in sports, business, labor and politics announced their backing for it in Los Angeles, dozens of activist groups were mobilizing against the billionaire builder, pressing legislators not to exempt AEG from provisions of the state’s environmental quality act.

In 2009, billionaire developer Ed Roski convinced the legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger to exempt their stadium plan from any legal challenge even as the neighboring City of Walnut tried to use a lawsuit to force a more complete traffic study for his stadium.  Roski turned to the legislature and Governor who changed the law, just for Roski, so that his project’s environmental documents could not be challenged in court. Read more…

AEG says they're drawing inspiration from the Dallas Cowboys new stadium. Apparently that inspiration doesn't include a giant parking lot.

The Sporting News provides one of the first real looks at what plans entertainment giant AEG has planned for their proposed NFL Football Stadium that would be located in Downtown Los Angeles.  There’s some good news for those concerned that the new Stadium would be accompanied with a gigantic sea of parking, as most NFL Stadiums do.  According to the Sporting News:

Candidate Weiss and his union supporters last March. Photo: Jack Weiss/Flickr

Former City Councilman Jack Weiss has not been what one would call progressive on most transportation issues.  While he backed the Mayor on transit issues, he also was his largest backer for the massively unpopular Pico-Olympic Plan which would have sped up rush hour automobile traffic at the expense of parking for businesses, bicycle and pedestrian traffic.  Weiss sounded a progressive tone on his candidate's survey for Streetsblog, but also backed an LADOT plan to remove traffic calming in Holmby-Westwood.

None of this history explains his bizarre editorial in today's Jewish Journal where Weiss makes the case that Los Angeles desperately needs an National Football League team because of the city's lack of public spaces.

Instead, I want to discuss the more subtle, community-building impact of a stadium and a team. I didn’t understand this issue in 2002, but I know more now about the city than I did then.

Los Angeles is an anomaly. We may have beaches and mountains, but we have very little in the way of shared civic space. The “Civic Center” itself is a fib of a name. We lack grand walking avenues, a true central park and pedestrian plazas. We drive from home to work on elevated freeways, park underground and then drive home again, rarely interacting with one another in the way common daily in New York, Chicago, Washington or San Francisco.

When we feel a need for communal spaces, we turn to developed space, not public space. The Grove, Century City, L.A. Live, Universal CityWalk and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade are popular precisely because city planners permitted the city to grow wide and not deep. They fill a gap that our city’s infrastructure cannot — pedestrian-friendly space for thousands of people at a time...

...And that’s what intrigues me from an urban policy standpoint about an NFL stadium — it addresses what Bret Easton Ellis’ narrator was talking about in “Less Than Zero” when he said, “People are afraid to merge in Los Angeles.” It fills the void in Paul Haggis’ opening lines from “Crash” — “It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Read more...

Governor Schwarzenegger is ready for some football and sweetheart deals for billionaires.

Last weekend, in the wake of Governor Schwarzenegger’s signing of a law exempting the largest development project in Southern California since the L.A. Colliseum, the drumbeat began for more exemptions for projects that are going to be a lot less destructive to the environment.  The OC Register opines in a Saturday editorial:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week may have cemented his eventual
legacy as the man who brought professional football back to Los
Angeles. But a better characterization might be that he gave one
business a pass on having to follow laws that he otherwise vigorously
supports, and, depending on how the process unfolds, that he put
taxpayers in harm’s way…

…Gov. Schwarzenegger made the case for one business that we’ve been
making for all businesses – that environmental mandates have grown so
severe they unfairly restrict business growth and add significantly to
cost. If it works for Mr. Roski, why not for Mr. or Ms. Every
Entrepreneur?

As a supporter of strong environmental reviews, I can’t help but agree with their central point.  If you’re going to exempt a mega-project such as the stadium, enforcing the law on smaller developments seems unfair.  Strike another victory for our Environmental Governor!

The editorial goes on to mention that the claimed economic benefits of sports stadiums rarely meet the boasts of officials before the stadium is built.   However, as a supporter of gutting environmental regulations, the paper doesn’t mention that the only people that officially reviewed the environmental documents for the project were the City Council representing eight hundred people in the City of Industry.  They also didn’t mention that Industry’s Mayor and other elected leaders are going to reap a windfall in contracts when the stadium is completed.