Promising Future- TPR Exit Interview With Councilwoman Miscikowski

Cindy, given your three decades in city government, from your time as a member of Marvin Braude's staff through your two terms as a councilmember, please share with our readers an experienced perspective on the challenges that the city of L.A. faces?

The city's ongoing challenges were enumerated over and over again by all of the candidates running for mayor recently. Clearly, more than ever now, and almost constantly over the last decade, transportation issues have constituted part of the public debate. Much of what we are suffering from and dealing with today was predicted years ago. If we had done better in coordinating our general planning and transportation planning strategies, we might not be facing some of the issues we face today. For instance, in the 1970s, plans for some future freeways were eliminated for some obviously good and sound environmental reasons. The thinking was that we should not encourage sprawl. We eliminated the transportation system but let the sprawl continue, and today we are suffering the consequences.

There are a lot of great new ideas and strategies on the city agenda to address housing and mobility. A number of these focus on transportation corridor development, which will spur further transit development in those corridors. You can call it infill, mixed-use or adaptive-reuse. All of them are talking about the same thing, which is to take our existing one- and two-story commercial strips, which are everywhere in the city, and make them more viable. These strips are near our major and secondary highways and near our bus systems, and in some cases near where we should have our future transit systems.

You know as well as anyone how difficult it has been to coordinate transportation, housing and infrastructure planning with general planning. With a new administration taking office July 1, is there the potential of linking the city's planning department with transportation policy?

Absolutely, and it couldn't be better than to have a mandate for a new energetic leader, a mayor that says he is going to head MTA, a mayor who says he is revisiting the issue of who should be planning director for the city. There isn't a more perfect time to pull it all together. The City Council and the mayor have already allocated money in the budget for more community planners.

This really is a day to rethink our community plans, to rethink our general plans and to do things differently than we have in the past. This is a time to break through the barriers and create a new paradigm for what planning is. As part of that, there should be a top deputy position in the mayor's office that could pull together a general manager's meeting, not every month or every quarter, but almost every week. The heads of the Planning Department, Transportation Department, Community Redevelopment Agency, and the Housing Department should meet every week to figure out how to break through the barriers to understanding and coordinating the priorities that we-the city, the council, and the Mayor-will set in response to the demands that we heard from our constituents across the city in this last election.

The Planning Report, and its sister publication, The Metro Investment Report, have featured a series of articles recently on what Chicago's Mayor Daley and his school superintendent are doing to build and use schools as anchors for their city's neighborhoods. With mayoral control of Los Angeles schools an issue in the last election, do you believe it is possible for LAUSD to collaborate with the the city and non-profits in Los Angeles and match Chicago's success?

Absolutely. There is no reason why a school district representative could not be a member of the group that I just suggested should meet weekly to coordinate the city's planning issues. We have talked about this kind of integration before. We have taken some baby steps in this direction, but never really managed to integrate or coordinate our processes. The idea is fairly straightforward: as we are building up the city, as we are providing transit throughout the city, as we are looking at growth in the city, the school district is doing the same for its student population, and the processes should inform one another.

Beyond that, in terms of taking the next step, in terms of the city's governance structure being more involved in the education governance structure, I believe we are awaiting the newly formed commission to determine when and how this could happen.

You made reference to the fact that Mayor-elect Villaraigosa is revisiting the search for a new planning director. What characteristics/talents should the City's new planning director have?

The characteristics are pretty straightforward. I remember, when Cal Hamilton became planning director in the late 1960s. He really did come in emboldened with an idea of what the city ought to be, and he created the community plan and the general plan structure that had not been updated for forty years at that point. Los Angeles was clearly a different city in the 1960s, than it had been from the 1920s through the 1950s.

We do not necessarily need to reinvent ourselves today, but we really need new tools. The planning approach that we have had, whereby we craft a general plan and then a community plan and then a specific plan, and then realized that none of the codes match, just creates a tangle. You need someone to bust through all that-in part by bringing all the general managers together-and create a new paradigm for getting things done.

The planning in the city has not been bad; it's the implementation of the planning that has not been good. There are things that were ordained in the 1970s, in the era of Cal Hamilton, as to what our community planning should be, what our policies should be, and where our growth should be. It was a great plan, but we did nothing to implement it, other than roll back our zoning. And a zoning roll back did not lead us to build the city the way we needed to build the city. So, we need a much faster turnaround on developing a plan, and immediate implementation of the plan, as opposed to getting around to the a zoning amendment or a code change eight years later.

In the early 1980s, there was a blue ribbon task force chaired by Dan Garcia, which included design professionals like Brenda Levin, that set out a coherent agenda for city planning. Is it time to undertake a similar civic effort?

There is a collection of blue ribbon committee reports on development reform in the City of Los Angeles that dates back to the 1970s, through the Bradley era in the 1980s and 1990s, and including Riordan's development reform committee in the mid 1990s. They are wonderful. But all these committees said pretty much the same thing, and we never did much to implement their findings. Again, we took some baby steps, but not much more.

I don't think we need to spend a lot of time to develop a report that says the same thing that reports said five or ten years ago and every five-year iteration before that. We really need someone who can evaluate the findings and says here's the way to go.

Political effort is needed in terms of someone who is out in the communities articulating the issues and carrying the communities along. Neighborhood councils obviously can't be forgotten, and are an integral part of this, but they must be integrated into the process along with everyone. We can't develop a plan and then send it to the neighborhood councils to be studied for two years. The time is now.

We have talked again and again and again about communities that need to take their fair share of housing. There is no reason that a look at where housing needs to be can't be underway right now as part of a dynamic, quick, down and dirty process, rather than a blue ribbon study. We know there are communities that need growth. Let's go ahead and look at Western, Wilshire, Ventura or Roscoe. Let's look at those boulevards and corridors on which we want things to happen and not affect the single-family homes, because that is what people get upset about. We are not talking about the single-family homes. We are talking about real integration of housing, transportation, schools and commercial activity.

You were the political architect of the now approved consensus LAX Master plan. With a new administration taking office and your exit from the council, will this plan be implemented?

I honestly believe that the blueprint of the Master Plan, as adopted and as approved by the FAA, gives us not only our starting point, but identifies things that we need to measure along the way. The blueprint identifies the green light projects that, by consensus, have been approved. We should get those underway immediately, if the incoming administration wants to look at other options as we are building those green light projects. That can happen. If there are better alternatives than some of the yellow light projects, vet them, discuss them, study the environmental impacts, and ensure that air quality and transit mitigations are in place.

I think the new administration will have a regional perspective that necessarily includes the airport. This is very important to the region and Los Angeles. If we can't come together and move and improve things at LAX, as at least initiated by this plan, Los Angeles will be literally flown over by the major carriers coming from the Far East to land at airports in regions that are building the transit system to accommodate the air traffic.

In closing, please share with our readers what your post City Council plans are?

I really have no plans at the moment. I made the decision a while ago to concentrate on finishing my term as a councilmember, before determining what the next chapter in my life would be. I do know that it will be in Los Angeles. I know that it will involve working with the city in some way. I have spent the last thirty years believing in, loving and working for the city. I am not going to change that course, but what exactly I will be doing, I don't know. I will take a little time out and hopefully come back and be in the position to network with all of your readers and other colleagues to do something that will be good for Los Angeles.