City Committees Postpone Measure HLA Implementation Ordinance Vote

This morning’s joint meeting of the L.A. City Council Transportation and Public Works Committees voted to continue (to postpone) their vote on the two Measure HLA items on their agenda.

If you’re unfamiliar with Measure HLA and the city’s response, maybe start with last week’s meeting preview post.

There was a tiny bit of news out of this morning’s meeting as Transportation Committee Chair Heather Hutt introduced a series of proposed amendments [see full city mark-up] to the City Attorney’s draft Measure HLA implementation ordinance. The amendments, if approved, would be a few modest steps toward multimodal transportation.

Among Councilmember Hutt’s proposed amendments:

• Hutt proposed that the city’s HLA appeal process would be optional. The City Attorney had proposed that before anyone could file an HLA lawsuit against the city, they would first have to file a mandatory appeal to the city itself, and wait until the city ruled on that appeal. A mandatory city-level appeal would be contrary to the legal process approved in HLA, and city-level appeals would likely result in significant delays in the city install HLA-required bus/walk/bike facilities.
• Hutt’s amendments also quantify city appeal timeframes, replacing noncommittal City Attorney language (for example, the city could delay appeals “a reasonable period of time” would instead be limited to “15 calendar days”).
• Another modification would mandate including multimodal information on the Mobility Plan 2035 dashboard, which is required by Measure HLA to be in place by April (one year after HLA took effect). Earlier city council directions focused on requiring that the dashboard include car-centric impacts, including anticipated loss of car parking spaces and car travel lanes. The proposal today directs the dashboard to also include information on traffic violence (deaths, injuries), accessibility, transit service, active transportation, and more.

Pressed for time after consideration of a Councilmember Traci Park motion against the Venice Dell affordable housing project (the motion was approved in a split committee vote, the project appears to be in legal limbo), the committees postponed the votes on the two HLA items, which are now scheduled for February 26.

This morning’s meeting was only the first of two L.A. City Measure HLA meetings this week. Tomorrow night at 6 p.m. the Department of City Planning will host a virtual information session on its proposed Standard Elements Table that clarifies what minimum bus/walk/bike features are mandatory for various networks approved in the city’s Mobility Plan, and are now triggered by Measure HLA.

The post has been corrected to include the correct date for tomorrow’s meeting