Author: Editor

MMRA Opposes Subway Work Hours Exemptions

~ Editor

Miracle Mile Residential Association Opposes Work Hours Exemptions For Purple Line Subway Extension

Los Angeles, July 23, 2012 – The Miracle Mile Residential Association [MMRA] announced today that it opposes exemptions from work hours ordinances sought by METRO for the construction of the Purple Line subway extension. The Miracle Mile is the future location of two subway portals along Wilshire Boulevard: at La Brea Avenue and at Orange Grove Avenue (across from LACMA).

METRO is seeking exemptions from ordinances prohibiting construction activity at night, during rush hour traffic periods, and the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season. In a letter to METRO released today the MMRA stated: “The construction staging sites for the La Brea and Orange Grove subway portals will extend well into residential areas and the disturbance and disruption to our community will be substantial even if normal working hour restrictions are strictly observed.”

METRO maintains that such exemptions will shortened the construction schedule, but the MMRA countered that they are “familiar with the challenges of construction in a methane hazard zone replete with rich deposits of important fossils. Construction delays and complications are very common in the Miracle Mile. We anticipate that the construction of the Fairfax portal will be fraught with difficulty and that its completion will be over-schedule with or without work hours exemptions. Such exemptions will offer small advantage to METRO and create a very large and ongoing disturbance to the residents of the Miracle Mile.”

METRO has encountered similar resistance to work hours exemptions from downtown residents and businesses surrounding the construction of the Regional Connector Transit Corridor.

MMRA Letter to METRO:

July 22, 2013

Ms. Jody Litvak

Director, Community Relations

Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority [METRO]

One Gateway Plaza

Los Angeles, CA 90012

litvakj@metro.net

[Via email w/ hard copy to follow.]

Dear Ms. Litvak,

At the July 11, 2013 meeting of the Board of Directors of the Miracle Mile Residential Association [MMRA], a motion was made and approved by the board instructing me to write this letter – with copies to the Los Angeles Police Commission and Councilmember Tom LaBonge – conveying our opposition to any and all work hours exemptions that METRO may seek in connection to subway construction in our community.

At  METRO’s  June 5, 2013 Purple Line Extension community meeting it was announced that Metro would be seeking the following work hour exemptions for subway construction in the Miracle Mile (between La Brea and Fairfax Avenues):

  • Peak Hours exemption to allow construction to continue work in the public right of way during rush hours.
  • Extended Work Hours exemption to allow overnight work within specific noise limits.
  • Holiday Moratorium exemption to allow construction to continue between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

Although the subway extension is the largest construction project to ever come to the Miracle Mile, it is by no means the only construction project we are confronting: the Museum Square office building project on Curson and the re-adaptation of the former May Company for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures at Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard are entering the EIR stage; plans are underway to subdivide the Shalhevet property (boarded by Fairfax Avenue, San Vicente Boulevard, and Orange Grove Boulevard) and construct a new private high school on the northern section of the parcel and a mixed-use 145 unit apartment building on the south; a 175-unit building has begun construction behind the Wilshire-Tower (“Desmond’s”) building on Wilshire Boulevard; not to mention that the Petersen Automotive Museum is preparing to announce plans for a major renovation of their facility and that Los Angeles County Museum of Art is actively raising funds to do a major overhaul of their campus in the next three-to-five years that would require extensive demolition and construction.

The Miracle Mile is the location of two subway portals – the impact of subway construction threatens to overwhelm our residents and businesses for nearly a decade of construction.

Given the extraordinary number of major construction projects in the pipeline, that Metro would seek such a work hours exemption has caused much alarm in our community. The Miracle Mile is a unique area in that our residences, particularly multi-unit buildings, directly abut the office and commercial buildings lining Wilshire Boulevard. The construction staging sites for the La Brea and Orange Grove subway portals will extend well into residential areas and the disturbance and disruption to our community will be substantial even if normal working hour restrictions are strictly observed.

The Miracle Mile is celebrated as Museum Row, it is a source of pride to our community. Work hours exemptions allowing nighttime and holiday season work would exacerbate what will already be a significant impediment to museum visitors. Attendance at our museums increases during they holiday season.

A holiday season work exemption would also deprive our residents of the enjoyment of the very holidays that the ordinance was created to protect.

Nighttime work is a particularly sensitive issue for us as noise travels further in cooler night air and is magnified by the reduction of ambient noise from daytime levels. There is no effective way to mitigate noise at night. Allowing any sort of construction activity would mean many sleepless nights for hundreds of residents.

In regards to traffic and congestion in our area, rush hour work exemptions will only make what promises to a be a miserable situation completely intolerable. The advent of BRT lanes on Wilshire Boulevard will divert a projected 20-to-30 percent of rush hour traffic onto 3rd, 6th and 8th Streets, as well as Olympic Boulevard. Subway construction during rush hour periods would turn these key east/west routes into parking lots

METRO maintains that such work hour exemptions would speed the completion of the project, but we believe that this is overly optimistic. We are intimately familiar with the challenges of construction in a methane hazard zone replete with rich deposits of important fossils. Construction delays and complications are very common in the Miracle Mile. We anticipate that the construction of the Fairfax portal will be fraught with difficulty and that its completion will be over-schedule with or without work hours exemptions. Such exemptions will offer small advantage to METRO and create a very large and ongoing disturbance to the residents of the Miracle Mile.

We acknowledge the truth of the axiom that METRO’s representatives constantly tout: “That you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” We realize that our community will be inconvenienced and disrupted by the construction of the subway – in the “frying pan,” so to speak. We are committed to do our best and work with METRO to manage the impacts on our community – but the MMRA strenuously opposes these work hours exemptions.

The MMRA has never endorsed such work hour exemptions for any construction project. Work hour ordinances exist for the greater benefit of community; they protect residents from undue and constant disturbances that would intrude on their basic right to enjoy the peace and quiet of their own homes.

We chose to make our objections to these work hours exemptions known now, prior to METRO’s formal application to the Los Angeles Police Commission, because we wish to establish a forthright and strong working relationship with METRO – to which end, we saw no benefit to either party in waiting to make our position known on this matter. We also wanted our objections to go “on the record” with both the Los Angeles Police Commission and our Councilmember.

We are hopeful that METRO will not wish to antagonize our community by pursuing this matter further.

Sincerely yours,

(Signature)

James O’Sullivan, President

Miracle Mile Residential Association

P.O. Box 361295

Los Angeles, CA 90036-9495

CC:

Los Angeles Police Department

Board of Police Commissioners

100 W. First Street Suite 134

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Councilmember Tom LaBonge, 4th District

Los Angeles City Hall

200 N. Spring Street

Room 480

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Councilmember Paul Koretz, 5th District

Los Angeles City Hall

200 N. Spring Street

Room 440

Los Angeles, CA 90012

A Perfect Storm

~ Editor

A Message from Jim O’Sullivan, President of the MMRA

The Miracle Mile Residential Association is beginning to analyze a number of upcoming development projects and some basic questions are already being asked. They deal with mobility and the perennial issue of traffic. While the Miracle Mile isn’t alone in traffic concerns, we certainly have far fewer options than many other areas to get in and out of our neighborhood.

A comment at one of the mayoral debates caught my attention – it was said that what Los Angeles needed was a tunnel under the Sepulveda Pass to connect the Westside to the Valley. My immediate thought was that the Miracle Mile needs a tunnel under Park La Brea, because it sits like a large man-made mountain just to our north, which effectively gives us only four north-south routes into and out of the Miracle Mile. Fairfax, Hauser, Curson and La Brea are the only streets that can get us to 3rd Street or Beverly Boulevard – where many of us go to purchase a number of items we need to live our lives.

Frankly, if we had more retail services in the Miracle Mile this would not be as big a problem as it is. Wilshire Boulevard is designated by the City as a “Regional Center” – which means it serves as a focal point of regional commerce, identity, and activity for a population of 250,000 to 500,000 persons. In the Miracle Mile we have the corporate and professional offices, the restaurants, and the entertainment and cultural facilities that regional centers are supposed to have, but we are severely lacking in retail stores – which is one of the main reasons why so many of us are in our cars trying to get in and out of the neighborhood. The so-called “mixed-use” projects recently constructed aren’t particularly “mixed” – they have provided hundreds of new apartments and a dozen-or-so new restaurants but that’s pretty much it. We did get a cash-for-gold outfit and a bank branch, but no clothing, furniture, or other retail stores. If you need a pair of jeans or a coffee table you’re not going to find it on the Miracle Mile.

Once upon a time we had the May Company at the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire where I could get most everything I now have to travel to the Grove or the Beverly Center to get. (The May Company tearoom also had great Cobb salads, which I still miss.) In its place we will get the Academy Museum that I’m sure will be incredible – but it will add an extra 800,000 visitors a year to the 1.2 million visitors that LACMA already attracts. On the drawing board at Wilshire and Curson is a quarter of a million square feet of office space with 300-plus residential units to be added to the 1,200-plus units already built in the Miracle Mile in the last eight years.

The City of Los Angeles is about to undertake an Environmental Impact Report for the Mobility Element Update of the General Plan. It’s the old Circulation Element, which deals with everything that moves. Part of that update requires the City to comply with the state mandated “Complete Streets Act” which will fundamentally change how we use our streets. We have to make them accessible and safe for pedestrians, bicycles, autos and the movement of goods. Given that LA is once again the number one most congested city in the United State that will be a real challenge because some of the plans call for removing traffic lanes from service to facilitate certain mobility goals (i.e., bike lanes). Meanwhile, Metro will start construction of the Bus Rapid Transit project along Wilshire this summer which will divert as much as 30% of rush hour traffic onto 6th and 8th streets and the L.A. Department of Transportation and other forces seem eager to snatch traffic lanes from 6th Street for bike lanes.

It is a perfect storm: unchecked development and utopian transportation schemes colliding into each other and rendering our community paralyzed. Advocates and planners tout high density and bike lanes as the one-size-fits-all solution for all that ails Los Angeles. But the residents of the Miracle Mile want specific solutions to their specific problems. We don’t oppose innovation or change, but there are practical things that were working for us – like the DASH bus system that has seen its budget and service slashed. And if the City wants to talk about mobility, how about they fix the sidewalks first? Why isn’t repaving Wilshire or La Brea a priority to all these whiz-kid urban planners?

The Miracle Mile Residential Association is prepared to participate in any and all efforts to keep our streets and sidewalks usable, livable and safe. But we will not surrender our common sense to achieve these goals. We will ask hard questions and demand answers that our grounded in reality. Pie in the sky isn’t on our menu.

[from the May 2013 edition of the Miracle Mile Residential Association Newsletter]

OPINION: A Different Kind of Exit Poll

~ Editor

by Jim O’Sullivan, President of the MMRA

The March mayoral primary is behind us having only motivated 21% of registered voters to cast a ballot for Mayor. That means over 1.4 million registered voters didn’t vote. That’s a staggering number of people that refused to participate in our most fundamental right: to choose those who will represent us. It begs the question, what’s going on?

Political pundits have offered all sorts reasons for the “no-shows” at the polls, from voter burnout after the presidential elections to candidates too boring to generate interest or negative campaigns that turned voters off. Maybe that figures into it a bit, but does it explain why 79% of the registered voters in Los Angeles didn’t vote? I don’t think so.

I’ve always voted, no matter what. I’ve voted for Democrats, Independents, Republicans and probably a few Libertarians. In Los Angeles I have rarely been excited about the candidate I end up voting for, but that has never bothered me because I always subscribed to the “lesser of two evils” theory. I could always find something in one of the candidates that sufficiently elevated them above the other enough to allow me to cast my vote. Now that the primary is over I’m looking at the two candidates left standing and a terrible thought has crept into my thinking: what if in the City of Angels there is no lesser evil?

A good argument can be made that the two mayoral candidates left standing are equally complicit in driving the City to the edge of bankruptcy, so is there any difference between them? Actually, I think there could be – but the real question should be: do either one of them have the guts, ability and independence to turn this mess around? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

At a recent political roast Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa teased the two remaining candidates, Wendy Gruel and Eric Garcetti, about the I.B.E.W. (the union representing the Department of Water and Power workers). The I.B.E.W. spent millions on Greuel’s behalf. Garcetti’s campaign has complained that Greuel would not be independent from I.B.E.W. boss Brian D’Arcy.

At the roast the Mayor quipped about Gruel that: “She’d fit perfectly in Brian D’Arcy’s pocket, right where Eric wants to be.”

Unfortunately, for many of us who closely follow the goings on at City Hall, Mayor Villaraigosa hit the nail squarely on the head.

Candidates know that unions can deliver thousands of volunteers to get out the vote. Politicians prefer to win elections – and, understandably, they are predisposed to favor those who help them get elected. As a result the needs of the residents and neighborhoods end up getting the short end of the stick. Simply put, politicians don’t worry about the voters who don’t show up at the polls.

The MMRA does worry about it. We are a non-partisan organization. Our purpose is to be “a squeaky wheel” and fight for the services and policies that preserve the quality of life for the residents of the Miracle Mile. We’ll work with anyone, regardless of their political affiliation, to achieve the best interests of our community. But I can’t help but think that the reason our residents are so civically engaged has to do with scale. We have a keen sense of place. Our strong connection to our community motivates us to take the trouble and the time to participate. And perhaps the overwhelming scale of a city as large as Los Angeles is so huge and complex and frustrating – the special interests and bureaucracy so deeply entrenched – that the vast majority of the voters just can’t find a personal connection to an entity that is too big to be managed, let alone changed.

Maybe the way to make voters more responsible is to give them a city that is more responsive to their needs – a bunch of new cities, that is. Smaller cities, cities that better serve their communities. Cities like Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills – properly scaled cities that enable a sense of place and foster connection.

Sadly, Los Angeles is a collapsing star and our best (and only) hope is that a new galaxy of cities can be created from its implosion. Perhaps the 79% percent of registered voters who didn’t vote were actually voting for something after all.

[The opinions expressed above are solely the author’s and do not reflect the official positions of the MMRA.]


Gone Hollywood; How the Hollywood Plan Threatens the Miracle Mile

~ Editor

A Message from Jim O’Sullivan, President of the MMRA:

Like many of you, we lost power at my house during the two wind events last week. I say “wind event” rather than wind storm because occasional wind gusts do not equate to a full-fledged storm. I have no idea what exactly caused these particular power outages ­– but I’m sure it has something to do with our aging and neglected infrastructure in Los Angeles. Our sidewalks are being buckled by untrimmed trees, our streets are an obstacle course of potholes, our aging water mains have become time bombs, hit and run accidents go uninvestigated for lack of properly trained traffic investigators, and budget cuts have slowed the response times of paramedics – the critical systems that support the quality of our lives are in a free fall.

Why would those of us who don’t live in Hollywood get involved in criticizing and/or opposing the recent update of the Hollywood Community Plan? The answer is: infrastructure. Because what happens in Hollywood doesn’t stay in Hollywood. Mayor Villaraigosa calls the super-sized developments recently proposed for Hollywood “elegant density,” but the residents call the plan the “Mahattanization” of Hollywood and find very little elegance in a plan that calls for adding an additional 50,000 residents without addressing the strain it will impose on the already collapsing infrastructure.

The new Hollywood Community Plan does not allocate funds to pay for fire and police services, water main and sewer maintenance, street and sidewalk repair, tree trimming, and the like. The City will have to borrow from Peter to maintain Paul, so to speak. In lieu of sensible long-term budgeting and planning the City will continue to deal with our infrastructure needs on a crisis basis: deferring routine maintenance and repairs in the Miracle Mile and every other community in Los Angeles to deal with the problems of the hour.

High-density-mixed-use-development-along-mass-transit-corridors is the new mantra of city planners and private developers. Build it big, the bigger the better; don’t sweat the details, it will work out somehow. The residents in the Miracle Mile are all for development, more jobs, reduced carbon footprints, subway extensions, and bike lanes, too – but we also like good old fashioned infrastructure. Infrastructure is the foundation of our city and it is folly to renovate, remodel, or expand a structure with a sinking foundation.

Like Hollywood Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard is a mass transit corridor. In the years to come, the Miracle Mile will have two subway stations and the city planners and private developers already have visions of yet another Manhattan dancing in their eyes. They will want to do to the Miracle Mile what they are doing to Hollywood and, once again, they don’t seem inclined to let the lack of funding for proper infrastructure impede their goals.

Many of us love the real Manhattan (I do), but the real thing has a public transit system that actually takes you where you want to go and its famous density is a result of being an island. Manhattan is also a very expensive city with an ever-shrinking middle class being squeezed out by the high cost of living. Development and gentrification in Hollywood has already driven away thousands of working class Latino families. (LA Weekly; Hollywood’s Urban Cleansing.)

All this brings me back to the so-called “wind events” which seem to constantly knock out our power in the Miracle Mile. Councilman LaBonge has told me he will find out what happened and I know he will, but that won’t solve a basic question I have, which is: Where does all the money go?

Los Angeles has a $7 billion budget (which doesn’t include the Department of Water and Power, LAX, or the Port of L.A.), so what are they spending that $7 billion on and why do they keep wanting to increase our fees and taxes? Something very wrong is going on here and before the City turns Los Angeles into Manhattan they need to explain how they are going to fix our infrastructure – or, in other words, how they will keep the lights on at my house.

 – from the March 2013 edition of the Miracle Mile Residential Association Newsletter

MMRA Position on Bike Lanes on 6th Street:

~ Editor

Save Our Parking!

Preferential Parking District 78
Threatened with Elimination of 6th Street Parking

In July 2012 a tragic accident occurred at the intersection of 6th Street and Hauser Boulevard. A vehicle traveling westbound on 6th Street collided with a eastbound vehicle attempting to make a left-hand turn onto Hauser. The collision forced the westbound vehicle off the road and into a pedestrian, a 74-year-old-woman, who died as a result of her injuries. The intersection of 6th and Hauser has a long history of being one of the most dangerous in our neighborhood. We commend Council Member LaBonge’s quick action in introducing a motion calling for the Department of Transportation to make recommendations for implementing traffic calming measures at 6th and Hauser in order to address safety issues. The motion was referred to the council’s transportation committee which passed the resolution and the city council followed suit on August 15th, 2012.

The MMRA fully supports traffic calming measures, but in the same motion Council Member LaBonge also requested that the Department of Transportation consider adding dedicated bike lanes on 6th Street that would cause the loss of a traffic lane in each direction as well as the elimination of preferential parking spaces. Preferential Parking District 78, like most of the Miracle Mile, includes many older apartment buildings with scarce or no off-street parking. Eliminating permitted parking on 6th Street will make an already bad parking situation much worse. It will force residents to seek parking spots on adjacent blocks creating a domino effect that would adversely impact on-street parking throughout the Miracle Mile.

Installing bike lanes on such a heavily trafficked street defies common sense. There are other less congested streets in the Miracle Mile that are better suited for bike lanes – streets that would be far safer for cyclists. Losing two traffic lanes on 6th will doubly impact the Miracle Mile when the Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] rush hour–bus only curb lane restrictions go into effect. The city estimates that BRT will divert 30% of Wilshire Boulevard traffic onto 3rd, 6th and 8th streets. Removing two lanes from 6th will clog our neighborhood with commuters searching for alternate routes.

The Miracle Mile Residential Association opposes bike lanes on 6th Street. We believe there are practical solutions to calm traffic on 6th Street that will preserve valuable on-street parking.

– from the February 2013 edition of the Miracle Mile Residential Association Newsletter