“Connectivity”–What Does it Really Mean?

The San Pedro Harbor community is about to learn a new word: connectivity.  When you get down to it, it’s the same issue that has been argued and discussed for more than three decades – how to reconnect the town of San Pedro to its own waterfront without Harbor Boulevard acting as some kind of impenetrable barrier? Community activist Noel Park coined the term “seamless interface” to describe the goal of connecting town and port. Many others were in the community discussion for years.

It was sculptor John Lilly who came up with the brilliant idea, that if you can’t bring the town closer to the water then bring the water closer to the town. And thus, the downtown water cut was born as was the first leg of the waterfront promenade. Mayor Jim Hahn’s administration built the first 1.25 miles of the promenade and it took two decades to bring it down to the old Ports O’ Call site where West Harbor, that innocuously named development, is now under construction. There’s supposed to be a “community update” on this project in the near future. Let’s see how much has changed from the original version.

The word, “Connectivity,” sounds like some kind of advanced urban planning exercise, but the process seems so much like the ones before that leaves most of the old guard of San Pedro less than impressed. It indeed is just a new name wrapping up many old ideas and polishing it up to appear as new, and the lack of public scrutiny makes me wonder whether this is an exercise in “manufactured consent.” Who is making the KoolAid?

The Port of LA sent out the following statement to the neighborhood councils, but was not sent directly to this media outlet: 

After extensive community and local stakeholder input, the Port of Los Angeles has released a draft Waterfront Connectivity Plan for San Pedro, a long-term planning and visioning document outlining strategies to better link Downtown San Pedro, surrounding neighborhoods, and the larger region to the LA Waterfront and its many attractions.

I question the accuracy of their words, “After extensive community and local stakeholder input,” as there have been but a handful of public meetings.  The few that I attended had maybe 40 people in attendance, which was promoted exclusively on social media. When I asked the leader of SWA Group touted as the leading landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm, he indicated that the Port didn’t want to advertise in our media, which I took as being a form of biased contracting, a practice I attribute to the fact that RLNews has been the only publication that has offered any kind of criticism of the port and its multiple policy failures. And as Harbor Commissioner Diane Middleton said at a recent commission meeting, Random Lengths is the only publication that doesn’t just transcribe press releases but actually interviews people!

Those words seemed to have been lost on the ears of upper management at POLA as there seems to be some kind of continuing grudge going on between the Port’s PR department and something we’ve written or that I’ve said at a neighborhood council meeting.

The next “public input meeting” is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 28 to provide a more detailed presentation of plan elements and to obtain additional comments and public feedback. This is not a town hall meeting, and there probably won’t be much live public comment. But it will probably follow their format of being a presentation without vibrant public discourse. It is a sad statement on the state of affairs at the port that true public engagement is only tolerated in the allotted three minutes (enshrined by the Ralph M. Brown Act) during the LA Harbor Commission ―  a time that is most inconvenient for the general public, the working class, or union workers to attend and pay attention to what is the largest government agency in our region and impacting so many people.

What is not in the Connectivity plan is as important as what they are considering. The Red Car reactivation is not even in the “scope of work” nor is it connected to Banning’s Landing (that will have its own community update on Sept. 27)  nor is there anything like a footbridge going from the residential areas between 7th street and 14th  streets down to the waterfront over Harbor Boulevard. However, in almost every map showing the connections there seems to be the assumption that the Pacific battleship USS Iowa has been approved to be moved to the SP Fisherman’s slip near the LA Maritime Institute as opposed to putting it next to the SS Lane Victory out near Kaiser Point. 

Clearly, much of the real deal-making on the chessboard of the waterfront game, between the West Harbor developers and the port’s real estate development team, is being done behind closed doors and not in the public purview, out of fear of what the community might actually want. The September 28 meeting is the time for every community activist and every community organization to show up and to give voice to the concerns of the community and not what the port seems to think is beneficial.

If the waterfront developments are going to attract millions of visitors every year, one might consider having a connection to the rest of LA via light rail directly to the cruise terminal, building remote parking either in downtown San Pedro or close by and to consider the cumulative effects of all the projects now slated for development on the San Pedro waterfront. This is a once-in-a-century opportunity to get this right, and I fear that the port’s lack of vision will linger on for the next 100 years.