When I wrote last week about one of my favorite mountains – the streets of LA – I immediately started asking questions.
People wanted to know about the scoring system that gave just 15 points, out of 45, to John Coanda and his wife, Barbara, who uses a wheelchair due to ALS. A Mar Vista couple had applied to the city’s Safe Sidewalks program to repair a broken sidewalk in front of their home.
With several road accidents on both sides of their block, Barbara can’t make it on her road. So how is it possible that under LA’s “Sidewalk Repair Program and Scoring System”, their minimum score of 15 means they can wait “over 10 years” for help?
I have the answers.
The Coandas received 15 points for being in the accommodation. But they did not meet the requirements for two additional 15-point awards. They do not live within 500 meters of a bus or transport stop. And they were out of line to repair the sidewalk for over 120 days.
However, it’s not clear that going to 30 points will take out city workers in less than 10 years. Knowing what I know, I wouldn’t bet on it.
The scoring system exists because in a settlement 10 years ago, the city agreed to spend $1.4 billion over 30 years to fix damaged roads and other infrastructure failures that impede mobility for people with disabilities.
But there is a backlog. A huge backlog, in the thousands. At my request, the city disclosed on Friday that it is accepting twice as many disability rehabilitation applications per year as it says it is. Additionally, the backlog of disability access and resident applications for the road repair rescue program is nearly 30,000, and approximately 600 are repaired each year.
As I mentioned in a previous column, LA may be completely covered by the ’28 Olympics, but that will be 3028, not 2028.
Cracked sidewalks, to be clear, are just a symptom of the deep, decades-long decay of City Hall. Basic services have given up on workers’ compensation and pension costs the city can’t afford, as homeless services add to the budget crisis.
By the way, I heard from one reader in response to my suggestion last week that if you can’t wait 10 years or more for the city to fix a broken road, you can apply for a rebate program, which will cover part of the repairs. Don’t bother, said Lori Lerner Gray, a Silver Lake homeowner who applied two years ago, but eventually gave up.
“There’s a huge waiting list and it’s a very difficult process to try to get on, let alone talk to anyone to help,” Gray said. “Once you’re in the process, you can’t proceed because of permits, engineering reports and ultimately you’re required to bring the entire facility into ADA compliance at your own expense.”
He said he was told he would have to pay to move the aid pole.
And sidewalks aren’t the only infrastructure problem, as some readers have noted. The city is far behind in filling potholes, repairing roads, installing curbs, improving parks and replacing broken streetlights. I recently wrote about all the bad things surrounding City Hall, including the monument with graffiti and the fountain that hasn’t been working for the past 60 years.
Oren Hadar, a Mid-City resident who writes about housing and transportation on his blog The future is LA website, reported last year in a Times op-ed that the city’s roads were crumbling because the city had changed from repairing all the roads to doing what it called “paving the big asphalt.”
With the change, the city avoided federal requirements to upgrade sidewalks to paved streets, Hadar said. He told me that when he goes to other cities near or far, “I’m always envious of everything. The sidewalks are in better shape or there are better bike lanes. … You can even go to Santa Monica or Culver City. You don’t have to go far to see better infrastructure.”
Other major cities have had formal infrastructure plans for years, while LA has been lost and gone. Finally, earlier this month, Mayor Karen Bass launched the plan The city’s long-awaited CIP (infrastructure infrastructure plan), and provide a brutal examination of what went wrong.
“For too long,” he said in an executive summary, “information has been spread across departments, buried in long reports and budgets, and difficult to fully understand. These challenges have had real consequences, contributing to decades of underinvestment in the environment we are built on.”
This summary is like an indictment of City Hall leadership and how public spaces have been damaged. As Bass runs for re-election, voters must decide whether his role in that failure is grounds for ouster, or whether his early campaign season should help him win a second term.
The report, with support from City Council members, cited “disparate systems and databases,” “no shared vision across city departments,” “increasing maintenance backlogs,” “slow, inefficient budgeting,” no “standards for project adoption,” “very fragmented and uncoordinated grants,” “poor resource planning and staffing,” and “mysterious staffing.”
Sure, team.
You can take many of those same criticisms and apply them to the indirect way city and county leaders have dealt with homelessness.
However, the city’s infrastructure plan provides a framework for assessing damage and prioritizing projects, as well as using constitutional reform to create a public works director position with greater authority. None of this is going to happen anytime soon, and when you look at the budget, you may wonder how any of this is going to be paid for.
Proposals in the report include bonds, a parcel tax, grants, ticket fees for concerts and sporting events, taxi fares and rideshare fares, and more. None of this will be popular, especially if the public isn’t sure that city leaders can be trusted with more money.
City planner Deborah Murphy, chair of the city’s pedestrian committee, noted that LA has received grants or government funding in the past for certain projects, but due to staff shortages or other obstacles, failed to secure the deal.
“It hurts our reputation for future funding,” Murphy said.
Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place and who has been advocating for the infrastructure plan for a long time, is happy that the city has finally taken this step.
“But the important question is: who is really in charge of making it happen?” he asked.
It’s important, Meaney suggested, that city leaders push for changes to laws that place infrastructure authority under the newly empowered public works director. He said that if the city gets this right, the implementation of the infrastructure plan “may show Angelenos the true scale of deferred maintenance, make trade visible, and create a road map of roads, streets, parks, and better accessibility.”
If the current separate mandate remains in place, Meaney said, the topic will be:
“No one owns your street and City Hall is determined to keep it that way.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
