Speeding Toward Gridlock

Despite their vows as born-again environmentalists, Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles City Council just can’t resist huge construction projects.

The last big one was Porter Ranch, where 10-story office buildings, a shopping center, a hotel and 3,395 dwellings will be built in the Santa Susana foothills in the far northern San Fernando Valley.

Now, City Council committees have approved a project that will really have commuters fuming--Metropolis. While this Metropolis isn’t as big as the place where Superman hangs his cape, it will be substantial, with three 30-story office buildings, a shopping mall and a hotel to be built over a 12-year period at 9th Street and the Harbor Freeway in the heart of downtown L.A.

Since Metropolis will add about 3,000 vehicles to the freeways and city streets during morning and afternoon rush hours, I imagine you want to know why the project is speeding through City Hall.

About three years ago, two developers, Jim Miller and Ron Lushing, proposed what became known as Metropolis. They were later joined in the deal by two big European firms, one Swiss and the other based in Luxembourg. The developers made the proposal to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, a powerful body with planning power over the vast downtown redevelopment area.

Lushing is a Bradley political associate. I met him when he was fund-raising chairman for the mayor’s 1986 gubernatorial campaign. A quiet man who liked to stay in the background, he accompanied the mayor on campaign trips.

The lobbyist and chief publicist for the project is another staunch Bradley-ite, Fran Savitch, an influential former Bradley aide and his one-time liaison with the CRA.

Bob Tague, the CRA’s director of special operations, said the political connections didn’t give Metropolis a break. Maybe not, but Lushing and Savitch certainly knew their way around City Hall.

They knew enough to understand that the Bradley Administration needed this project. Expansion of the city convention center, close to the Metropolis site, has been hit by cost overruns and the city needs more money to complete the job.

Lushing, who later dropped out of the Metropolis project, agreed to pay $34 million to the city for development rights entitling him to put up the high rises. Of this, $17 million will go to convention center construction. Much of the rest will be used for a city low-cost housing program, park space and child care facilities. And, the developers agreed to include a hotel in Metropolis, something that fits right into the city’s plans for attracting convention-goers.

As you can see, this is strictly a business deal between the city and the developers, a way of bailing out the convention center.

Nobody seemed to worry about traffic except for Bob Rogers, a Planning Department official who is one of the few members of the bureaucracy with the guts to publicly express his doubts about the effect of downtown development. Rogers has been saying for months that the huge number of high-rise projects proposed for downtown will eventually choke the Harbor, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Golden State and Pasadena freeways.

Rogers’ report on Metropolis said that 100,000 vehicles pour into the downtown freeway loop in the late afternoon rush hour. This is just 5,000 under the loop’s capacity. Metropolis and the 46 other downtown buildings on the drawing boards will add a total of about 30,000 vehicles to the loop. That’s 25,000 over capacity--certain gridlock.

Rogers had a solution for the traffic problem. Make Metropolis and all other new downtown developers pay to prevent gridlock.

Force them to pay millions of dollars in fees to help finance projects that will prevent the threatened downtown freeway loop gridlock--the Metro Rail subway, new surface rail lines, street widenings and new roads.

That’s not a revolutionary idea. The city Department of Transportation favors it. Developers in other parts of the city pay such fees. Only the politically influential downtown developers have been able to wiggle out of these payments.

That will be the big issue when Metropolis comes up for a council vote later this month. Council committees have recommended a mild version of the fees for Metropolis, but not the full, bitter dose for all of downtown proposed by Rogers and the Department of Transportation. Considering the enthusiasm shown by Bradley and council members for downtown development and other big projects, I don’t know whether they’re up to the job.

And, unfortunately, Bob Rogers isn’t Superman. We may be stuck with all this traffic.