Mayor Karen Bass’ office announced a sidewalk press conference on the 800 block of 20th Street in San Pedro on Dec. 4 with less than 24-hour notice. Amazingly enough most of the entire LA press corps was there along with a platoon of public worksmen in yellow vests and hardhats along with a bunch of other city employees not in uniform. The point of this publicity event was to dig up, repair a broken sidewalk and trim a single tree to show the mayor’s commitment to making LA a “world-class city.”
This reporter had the obligation to point out to her that the historic part of San Pedro had some of the oldest infrastructure in the entire city ― much of it dating back 120 years. Clearly, I said, it deserves some prioritization in the thousands of miles of cracked sidewalks and curbs in the City of LA.
Tim McOsker, councilman for CD15, was at hand too, to add his support and to get credit for the $28 million in the budget for sidewalk repairs, which it must be noted is separate from the $1.4 billion legal settlement in 2015 following a 2011 class action lawsuit lodged by disability advocates. Curiously there once again were only two reporters out of the entire LA press corp that actually asked any pertinent questions.
That case came from a class-action lawsuit filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which alleged the city did not maintain its sidewalks “in a condition that is usable by class members who rely on wheelchairs, scooters, and other assistive devices to get around.” And for that matter by almost anybody else who walks their dog or pushes a stroller.
McOsker has come up with some novel ways to use the Clean LA Jobs program to get some sidewalk work done rapidly, but clearly, it’s not enough and taking 30 years to finish the repairs won’t make LA ready for the 2028 Olympics but it’s a start. The mayor still wants every Angeleno to use 311 to report sidewalks, potholes and other municipal repairs. Yet there seem to be a few problems with the 311 APP, that the new deputy mayor of infrastructure Randall Winston promises to fix with new software.
Winston, like a lot of the other city appointees, is a young, good-looking professional type who is full of optimism and yet is only now becoming aware that LA’s real problem isn’t just the size of the city, but the complexity of coordinating multiple departments with layering jurisdictions. For instance, the LA Dept. of Water and Power, comes out and trims the street trees that interfere with their power lines, oftentimes giving the trees some bizarre haircuts, but doesn’t trim branches overhanging residential streets because that’s another city department’s responsibility. City workers only do what they’re told, and that’s part of the problem. There’s no cross-communication between departments and not much collaboration. So much for calling it “the city family” unless it’s a dysfunctional one.
The other problem the mayor addressed is that the city is chronically understaffed by some 5,000 to 7,500 employees and that the civil service system itself is to blame for not being able to hire people fast enough to fill those positions. It’s the kind of problem where you have to fix one problem before you can fix all of the others. In the meantime, you must use what you’ve got to do what needs doing.
I shared with the mayor one of the solutions Mayor Jimmy Hahn used when confronting the very same issue 20 years ago. He held a small town hall kind of meeting with all the department heads for city services in each district, he made them listen to all the complaints and made them take notes. Then he brought them all back on a monthly basis to sort out who was doing what and what progress had been made. That lasted for his one term as mayor and was then promptly forgotten, but it seemed to work. There’s probably a lot more that could be done for less money if the city family just cooperated rather than being separated by boundaries, but hey, most families have their problems.
At this moment, Mayor Bass just like the mother of the family pleading like Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?” That’s a great idea but it only happens when Mama takes the reins with some executive orders, like with the homeless crisis or the fire under the Santa Monica freeway. In those moments, it was suddenly all hands on deck.
The city would find it much less expensive to avoid the millions in civil litigation by being more proactive in its approach to sidewalk repairs and other things by making the city employees themselves responsible for reporting neighborhood conditions, such as potholes, sidewalks, cracked telephone poles and what have you. They might try empowering workers to make more decisions in the field and stop waiting for orders from the top down. Sure, the citizens have some responsibility in this, but it’s kind of like policing ― in which the “man with a gun” call takes priority over the loud party at midnight that turns into a drunken fistfight with broken beer bottles on the street.
In the end, it’s reassuring that Mayor Bass wants to address infrastructure issues but again the biggest challenge is to get her family to communicate and cooperate. It’s something that’s universally been a major impediment to the human condition. Fights over territory between people have been the cause of both wars and petty jealousies since the beginning of time– and we think humans have evolved.