LA has a plan

What if I gave you nearly one billion dollars every year to improve Los Angeles's public spaces? There's only one catch: you can't plan how to spend it more than one year in advance. Unbelievably, this is how LA currently manages its public infrastructure budget. In fact, we are the only major U.S. city that does it like this. And if you're someone who relies on LA's public infrastructure, you know that what we're doing now is definitely not working. Suddenly it makes sense why we might have, say, 50,000 backlogged sidewalk repair requests.

A highly anticipated executive order from Mayor Karen Bass that's been in the works for at least a year intends to completely overhaul this process, dramatically changing how LA funds, improves, and maintains its streets, sidewalks, and city-managed public spaces like parks. Executive Directive 9, which was signed today by Bass, would create what's called a capital infrastructure plan for the city, forcing LA's infrastructure spending to align with a set of citywide priorities around climate, safety, and accessibility — ostensibly before we welcome millions more visitors to the city in the upcoming years.

Honestly, I could not have described the problem that we're facing as a city better than the language of the executive directive itself:

The City of Los Angeles currently lacks a comprehensive, multi-year plan for maintaining and developing infrastructure in the public right-of-way. Angelenos do not have a clear understanding of what can realistically be funded and when, nor what the City’s long-term priorities are beyond those of a given year. Additionally, fragmented governance over what gets built on and below our streets means that projects requiring strong collaboration between City departments experience last-minute changes, creating cost overruns that contribute to a growing total cost of capital projects. Furthermore, the City is financing many of these projects in a year-over-year approach, often meaning that without dedicated and predictable sources of capital, project work stops and starts and takes much longer to complete, costing us more. As a result, many communities suffer from deferred maintenance that degrade our streets, sidewalks, parks and aging facilities, and delay improvements that prevent injury and save lives.

That last part is perhaps most critical for a city teetering into a financial crisis, partially due to paying out an excessive number of liability lawsuits — which is why City Controller Kenneth Mejia has been urging the city to create such a plan since he came into office.

"Currently, there’s no real budget for capital — just a wishlist of mostly underfunded projects, which isn’t nearly enough," he says. "The City funds infrastructure projects one by one, without any big picture strategy. As a result, we’re overwhelmed by faulty infrastructure, causing harm to the public and costing the City enormous amounts of money in liability claims. Planning ahead for infrastructure needs would save the City a lot of money — we would see fewer liability claims and emergency repairs." Mejia sees a capital infrastructure plan as a major step forward: "putting people first when it comes to the public realm and safety."

Practically, ED 9 creates a new capital planning steering committee made up of representatives from a long list of city agencies and departments. That committee would work together to compile proposed projects citywide, create shared metrics for success, and publish a long-range capital infrastructure plan — a public list with clear costs and estimated deadlines for those projects. There's also a nifty section in there about similarly coordinating and streamlining how the city maintains existing capital projects. The mayor's office provided a list of the types of improvements that might be prioritized by ED 9: "roadway improvements to reduce traffic collisions and fatalities; parks, green space, and recreation and senior center upgrades; bridges, stormwater and sewer upgrades, and LA River related projects; better street maintenance for trees, parkways, medians, street furniture, and lighting."

But I'd argue that an effective capital infrastructure plan will also make our streets, sidewalks, and parks much nicer places to be, simply by aligning the existing goals across various departments — which are generally pretty good — with the many existing city and county plans that currently attempt to improve our public spaces.

For example, LA has two 2015 strategies on the books to make streets safer and more multimodal: Vision Zero — the goal to eliminate traffic deaths by next year, which is certainly not happening — and the Mobility Plan, a proposed network of bus and bike lanes, among other infrastructural improvements. A decade later, the funding for these plans has never been prioritized citywide, so LA has made very little physical progress — so much so that a ballot measure requiring the city to implement its Mobility Plan, Measure HLA, was passed in March by two-thirds of voters. With a capital infrastructure plan in place, the city can present a unified vision for which streets should be first in line for comprehensive fixes instead of councilmembers battling for piecemeal changes in each district. And, as part of that interdepartmental collaboration, other elements which should be integrated into making a street safer and more multimodal, like the city's sidewalk repair program, could be addressed at the same time roadway fixes are made — along with other extremely necessary improvements like stormwater gardens, shade trees, bus shelters, and street lighting. In a best-case scenario, what ED 9 will do is allow our infrastructure to actually reflect our values as a city.

I really cannot underline what a huge deal this could be for LA — and how long a coalition has fought for these very changes. For the past seven years, the nonprofit Investing in Place has been advocating for a better plan for LA's public right-of-way. Last year, Investing in Place delivered a community pledge to Bass's office endorsed by local groups working in the right-of-way (including me!) that included nine key principles for an effective capital infrastructure plan. And as you can see when you read through ED 9, the nine key principles proposed by Investing in Place are well-represented in the mayor's order.

"I think a lot will depend on the leadership of the mayor, city councilmembers, and executive teams of the bureaus and departments — as well as civic leaders. But this gets the process off the starting blocks," says Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place. But perhaps even more importantly, she tells me, is the way that ED 9 will give the general public an unprecedented level of infrastructural transparency: "Communities can know what is being planned."

For my infrastructure wonks out there, Meaney also sent along a list of how ED 9 has the potential to really change how LA works in very systemic ways:

1. For the first time, Los Angeles is engaging the disability community as a key partner in planning and maintaining the public right-of-way.

2. Maintenance and asset management will be prioritized, with transparent cost allocations for these efforts.

3. Project list development will move from the "black box" to a process that includes community engagement as a component.

4. The Directive eliminates bureaucratic silos by consolidating multiple existing workgroups, creating a unified, shared vision.

5. The Directive emphasizes equitable investment in the public right-of-way, ensuring historically underserved and low-income communities receive the attention and resources needed to address long-standing infrastructure disparities.

6. The Directive commits to economic and workforce development, prioritizing procurement and career path opportunities for Angelenos and small businesses, thereby supporting local hire initiatives and fostering community growth.

The timing of ED 9's announcement seems intended to create a "we are ready" atmosphere for a delegation of Paris officials who are at City Hall today for a post-games debriefing. But one major challenge confronting this new steering committee will be balancing any improvements being proposed "for the games" versus the improvements that are urgently needed for Angelenos trying to navigate our deadly streets, dangerous sidewalks, and inaccessible parks every single day. As I've written before, other LA County cities are way ahead of us on this; Long Beach has a five-year plan already in progress, Elevate '28, intended to deliver legacy improvements by 2028. If it takes us 10 years to fix a sidewalk now, how do we both change that process and deploy major infrastructural changes in less than four years?

But what we will have in place for certain by 2028, and hopefully long before, is an agreed-upon vision for how we want LA's streets, sidewalks, medians, parkways, tree wells, gutters, curbs, intersections, plazas, and parks to look and function. We will have a set of common infrastructural goals. Whether or not the city is able to implement those goals is a whole other conversation. For now, it's just a plan. But now, finally, LA has a plan. 🔥