City Planning warns cuts would stall community plans, environmental justice work and implementation of housing rezoning

City Planning officials told the Budget and Finance Committee on May 2 that proposed deletions of 35 positions and a 25% reduction in filled staff would sharply curtail long-range planning, community-plan updates and technical work that the department said it has spent years and public money to complete.

Why this matters: Planning enacts and updates the General Plan, prepares community plans and zoning, and handles environmental review. Several major projects and plans on the departments workplan are midstream and the department warned that pausing them now would both waste prior investments and risk statutory noncompliance that could cause legal or financial liabilities.

What Planning reported: Director Vince Bertone and staff described work delivering the Housing Element rezoning program (CHIP), the recently adopted Downtown Community Plan and several community-plan updates and specific-plan amendments in the Harbor, Southwest and other areas. Bertone said roughly 74% of the department's direct costs are special-funded, but many special funds subsidize public processes (for hearings, appeals and plan work) that are not full cost recovery. He said the department faces a proposed elimination of filled positions that would amount to about a one-in-four staffing loss and that many long-range planning efforts would have to pause.

Plans at risk: The department said the cuts would slow or stop community plans in central Los Angeles, Harbor-area work, the Cornfield/Arroyo Seco plan, some transit-neighborhood plans and the Venice Local Coastal Program (LCP), which had multi-year technical work and grant funding. Bertone warned that technical studies become out of date if a plan is paused and that redoing them years later would be more expensive.

State timelines and legal exposure: Planning staff noted state law and permit-streamlining timelines; council members pressed whether delays could expose the city to automatic approvals or fines under state housing and permit-streamlining legislation. Bertone said failures to meet statutory timelines can result in penalties and de facto approvals in some cases and stressed that capacity is required to avoid such outcomes.

Revenue, fees and expedited processing: The department flagged the need to update fees and said its last major fee update was years ago; it also noted vacant and unfilled budgeted positions in expedited-processing units that could be filled if hiring restrictions were lifted because those positions are full cost recovery. Councilmembers asked the department to report on options for using existing enterprise or special funds to staff development-services counters and expedite project reviews.

Committee requests: Members requested multiple memos and studies including: a) a budget memo on restoring the filled revenue-generating positions, long-range planning staff and technical units needed to advance development; b) a report on impacts of cuts to San Fernando Valley planning work and the Venice Local Coastal Plan; c) a memo on continuing community-plan projects that are already at critical stages; and d) a study on using expedited-processing and DBS enterprise funds to move pre-entitlement zoning-review work into Planning.

Next steps: Planning will provide detailed memos on project status, which community plans are at critical implementation stages and what staff would be required to complete them. Committee members emphasized the high cost of pausing mid-stream plans and asked for prioritized lists of plans and staff needs.