Exit Interview With Departing L.A. City Atty. Cecilia Estolano

Cecilia, when TPR first interviewed you more than three years ago, you were filled with enthusiasm about heading a new "Super Division" in the L.A. City Attorney's Office focused on real estate and economic development. As you prepare to leave the City Attorney's office, address what you have accomplished and what remains for your successor.

Well, it has been an incredibly productive three years for this administration. First of all, we did form the Super Division – the Real Estate and Economic Development Practice Group – which now includes about 60 attorneys. Actually, our attorneys do land use, real estate, environment, public finance, housing, and economic development, also including the lawyers who advise the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Housing Authority. Just forming that organization and making sure the attorneys in those divisions talk to each other has fundamentally changed the way the City Attorney's Office does business. We now have people working collaboratively on every big deal that comes through. Things don't get lost in the shuffle anymore or fall through the cracks.

Division managers and line attorneys are thinking about how their work in their specific fields affects the larger outcome for the city. So, a real estate attorney may think, "Oh, there's economic development money in this project, maybe I ought to consult with somebody in the Economic Development Division to find out if there are any special rules or regulations." That sounds so simple, but it really has changed the way we do business. People are taking accountability for entire deals, rather than just staying in their silo mentality. I think that change in attitude and perspective has been a tremendous accomplishment.

In that earlier TPR interview, you spoke at length about the culture you wanted to create within the City Attorney's office – a public law firm that represents city departments and agencies like the CRA with developers in the private sector. Elaborate on the culture that's evolved during your tenure.

It is a collaborative culture. It is a culture that says, "What is the client trying to accomplish here, and how do we solve that problem?" rather than, "How do I answer the precise question that was asked of me?" I think that has been a culture shift. Now we have people thinking about problem-solving from a larger perspective.

A good example is the Santee Court project. This is 500 units of adaptive-reuse housing that really is a catalytic development down in the Fashion District. We have attorneys from three different divisions working on that project and trying to creatively come up with solutions to some very complex issues. How do we help a very positive development get built in the city on short order? I don't know that in the past there would have been that same kind of troubleshooting across divisions. But that's the kind of culture I set out to create or to encourage, and I think it now exists in this practice group.

Your super-division has 60 lawyers within a 400-lawyer City Attorney's Office. How much of the culture and productivity that you have been able to create in your divisin has permeated the entire office?

This is not really about me; this is about an ethic that Rocky Delgadillo has brought to the office. From what I can tell, at least among the civil side with whom I mostly work, these collaborative efforts are going on. I think it is starting to permeate the rest of the office. The entire Neighborhood Prosecutor Program was set up to problem-solve regardless of the specific authority of the individual prosecutor, and I think that has been a success. I think a lot of people have viewed that as one of Rocky's signature programs. Neighborhoods and people in the community don't really want to have an org chart of the City Attorney's Office. All they want is to know that their problem is being solved. And I think we have started to take on that ethic across the office.

Cecilia, given that in the past three years there have been so many leadership changes in the Los Angeles city departments and agencies that you serve as legal counsel, please address the role of the public lawyer regarding the giving of advice.

I think that's a great question. Three of our big clients have had major leadership changes: Bud Ovrum came in to head the CRA, Cliff Graves took over the Community Development Department, and Mercedes Márquez took over the Housing Department. Now a fourth, Rudy Monteil has been hired at the Housing Authority. These are four powerhouse agencies for the city, and each of those departments has had changes at the top. In each case, our attorneys played important roles in continuity and in helping these executives find the problems and solutions in their organizations.

I think at HACLA, we are going to see something similar to what happened with CRA, but maybe even more intensive. While the board of HACLA was searching for a new executive director, our attorneys were on site working with the interim directors, helping them deal with the takeover effort by the federal government, helping them with a number of audits and a number of substantial pieces of litigation, and really helping to keep ship steady until the new captain got on board.

I think we have managed to turn around the perception of at least this practice group in the eyes of our major clients, so that they see us as partners. Con Howe is a long-standing general manager of the Planning Department, and he has been working very closely with our top land-use attorneys. In most of these departments, the top attorneys meet with the directors on a monthly basis, sitting down and mapping out priorities, hot spots, and the long-term projects that need some assistance. That is something that I don't believe happened before this administration took office, and I'm very proud of how our managing assistants – the heads of these four divisions that I supervise – have stepped up and have forged these very close relationships with the top managers of their departments.

Pushing back a bit, how capable have your city clients been at working collaboratively with other city agencies & departments across bureacratic silos?

I believe that, with new general managers in place, you are seeing that happen. I want to applaud the folks that I've mentioned: Bud Ovrum, Con Howe, Cliff Graves, and Mercedes Márquez. They have wanted to embrace that approach. And so, yes, our clients are very capable of it, and they are trying to break through their own silos. They understand that the city, the CRA, and the Housing Authority have limited resources, and that in order to leverage those resources we really do need to work across boundaries.

Let me give you an example: the "superstore" ordinance that was passed by the City Council. Con Howe, Cliff Graves, and Bud Ovrum were sitting in a room, mapping out a strategy that would accomplish the City Council's goal in a way that would be defensible legally and administratively efficient. That was an amazing thing to watch, these three brains sitting in a room with their lawyers working out a plan. So, when we're faced with the challenge to do it, our clients and our department have stepped up to solve problems.

Obviously, each of your clients has responsibilities that intersect with the school district, the MTA, and other regional agencies that serve Los Angeles. How has your Super Division increased the capacity of city departments to successfully engage in collaborative joint-use projects with non-city agencies?

That has been disappointing. We have certainly increased our capacity to work collaboratively, but that doesn't mean that the other sides have increased their capacity as well. Candidly, it has been somewhat frustrating to work with the school district on a variety of initiatives. We're making progress with them, but it's not easy. We've worked with them the best that we can. I can think of a couple of examples, specifically in developments with the CRA, where we have had a lot of success working with them. They are a very professional, focused organization, and we have been able to sit in a room and get to the right result with them.

But it remains a challenge. As difficult as it is to get the city's departments to talk to each other, it is an order of magnitude more difficult to work with another government agency. In some respects, it is more difficult to work with another government agency than it is to negotiate a settlement with a long-time private-sector adversary. I had hoped it would be easier to collaborate across jurisdictional lines, and I think it will have to get easier if we are going to solve Southern California's problems. But we are not there yet.

Given your three-plus years of experience in the City Attn's Office, what has to be done to move forward on land-use collaboration in a built-out city like Los Angeles? What price do we pay if public agencies in the region do not collaborate?

I think we have worked very hard to try to put our heads in the mindset of the school district. We understand the challenges they face in having to build dozens and dozens of schools, in a very short timeframe, in a built-out city where there just isn't a lot of land. We understand their pressures. But I think to make a collaborative effort work, they need to understand our perspective. We need to see that they really are trying to understand where the City of Los Angeles is coming from. We also need land. We have fire stations, animal shelters, new roads, and widened roads to build. We also have to deal with our own land-use requirements. We need them to also try to understand the pressures we are under. I think then we can work collaboratively. Right now they have a very different mission and they are extremely focused; I understand that. I think we are trying to make a concerted effort to accommodate their mission as part of our mission. I'm not sure that it is happening the other way around.

If we don't fix it, we will have government agencies competing with each other for scarce land, suing each other over scarce land, and creating gridlock when it comes to solving some basic quality of life issues. One issue that is very close to my heart is how we deal with the poverty of parkland in this city. We will really have to work with the school district to solve the problem, and we have tried. Maybe we could have been more flexible. It is utterly important to government to ask: Who will take the indemnification risk? Who is going to pay for the cost if folks trip and fall in a park? Those are the sorts of questions that cause joint-use efforts to stop. We need to have both entities share the pain and share the risk. If we don't do that, then we are going to have government entities spending a lot of money trying to achieve different goals, but we won't serve the taxpayer well, we won't improve our quality of life, and we won't have well-planned communities.