CommentsARE YOU GOOD WITH THIS?--A new city Ethics Commission report reveals that developers continue to shell out eye-popping cash for lobbyists to influence L.A. politicians and bureaucrats. In the first quarter of 2017, seven developers landed on the city’s Top 10 list for highest paying clients of lobbyists.
Since 2000, developers and other real estate power players have forked over at least $6.4 million in campaign contributions to L.A. politicians. Developers have also spent millions on lobbyists to woo City Council members and city agencies.
That king-sized cash helps developers gain insider access and win political favors, such as attaining zoning entitlements for luxury-housing mega-projects. With so much developer money in play at City Hall, residents and activists are constantly put at a disadvantage when fighting luxury development that gentrifies neighborhoods, gridlocks streets and ruins neighborhood character.
According to an Ethics Commission report released earlier this month, the seven developers on the Top 10 list are Seaview Investors LLC ($267,337 spent on lobbyists), City Century LLC ($220,000), Lightstone ($185,273), Lowe Enterprises ($150,107), Monteverdi LLC ($119,829), Harridge Development Group ($118,906) and Trammell Crow ($111,264).
Seaview Investors and the other developers spent a whopping total of $1.17 million on politically connected lobbyists in the first quarter of 2017.
The Ethics Commission also reported that lobbying firms such as Urban Solutions, Englander Knabe and Allen and Manatt Phelps and Phillips, among others, raised thousands of dollars in campaign contributions for City Council members Curren Price Jr. (Council District 9), Gil Cedillo (CD 1), Paul Koretz (CD 5), Paul Krekorian (CD 2), Monica Rodriguez (CD 7) and Marqueece Harris-Dawson (CD 8).
Price and Harris-Dawson sit on the powerful Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee, which considers zoning entitlements for luxury mega-projects. If PLUM gives the green light, it’s virtually guaranteed that the City Council and mayor will deliver the final approval.
In recent years, the City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti have engaged in what’s known as “spot zoning,” a troubling practice that’s part of City Hall’s pay-to-play culture.
Spot zoning occurs when LA politicians ignore existing zoning rules that protect neighborhoods from runaway luxury development and its negative impacts on communities, and then deliver entitlements such as a zone or height district change to a developer.
In Koreatown, for example, developer Michael Hakim needed a General Plan amendment and height district change from LA politicians to build a 27-story luxury-housing tower in the middle of a working-class neighborhood that’s not zoned for such a mega-project. Despite community resistance, the City Council and Garcetti gave Hakim the spot-zoning favors.
Koreatown activists have since sued the city of LA over Hakim’s luxury-housing mega-project. Longtime activist and attorney Grace Yoo noted a press conference, “If this project is built, it will have a domino effect on the rest of the area. All of these mom-and-pop apartment buildings will be swept up by developers. The working families living in them will be evicted, and the developers will put up luxury housing.”
To grease the wheels at City Hall, Hakim shelled out $3,900 in campaign contributions and $41,400 in lobbyist fees. Despite what LA politicians say, campaign cash and high-priced lobbyists get results for luxury-housing developers. The rest of us suffer the consequences.
LA residents and community activists, however, have been applying pressure on City Hall politicians to be more transparent in their business, to end spot-zoning and to diminish the influence of developer money through campaign finance reform. You can lend your voice to these causes by sending an email to Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Council President Herb Wesson.
(Patrick Range McDonald is website editor and senior researcher at Coalition to Preserve LA.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw