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PLANNING WATCH - The City of LA finally has a Climate Action Plan. It has been prepared by the Mayor’s Office, but it is not part of LA’s legally required General Plan. It was not prepared by the Department of City Planning and then subjected to public hearings prior to the Los Angeles City Council adopting it. This is a slow, cumbersome process which would eventually result in a new, required environmental element added to the City’s mandatory General Plan.
Instead the Mayor’s Office prepared its Climate Action Plan in isolation, without any public hearings or a City Council adoption vote. While Mayor Bass’s document is useful, it will be short-lived, without any implementation budget or enforcement authority.
The General Plan’s existing documents (i.e., Elements) nevertheless address some climate issues in Los Angeles, although not as comprehensively as the Mayor’s new Climate Action Plan. For example, the City’s General Plan contains a Health Element with a chapter (pages 165 to 174) entitled . . . Environmental Justice Requirements and the Existing City of Los Angeles Plan. This section outlines the contents of an expanded Health Element, but there is no budget allocation for this. To date there is only a 43 page Preliminary Draft Environmental document. Prepared in 2025 and entitled Health and Environment Justice Element, funds were withheld to proceed to the City Council adoption process. This means the City of Los Angeles only has fragmented policies scattered throughout the 12 separate City Council-adopted documents in LA’s General Plan. These include 35 separate Community Plans that together form LA’s Land Use Element.
Furthermore, the planning Elements that together form LA’s General Plan are, for the most part, old. They should be updated to address Los Angeles in the uncertain years ahead.
· Framework Element, adopted in1995 and re-adopted in 2001.
· Safety Element*, adopted in 1996.
· Mobility Plan 2035 Element*, adopted in 2015.
· Conservation Element*, adopted in 2001.
· Air Quality Element*, adopted in 1992.
· Noise Element*, adopted in 1999.
· Infrastructure Systems Element, adopted in 1971.
· Public Facilities Element, adopted 1969.
· Open Space Element*, adopted in 1973
· Land Use Element*, adopted as 35 Community Plans and Two District Plans
*Mandatory General Plan Element. While The State of California also requires counties and cities to adopt an Environmental Justice Element, LA has no known work schedule to do this.
Clearly, most of the City of LA’s General Plan Elements are old. They should be updated to remain relevant. After all, Los Angeles has gone through tremendous changes in recent decades – such as the decline of the downtown -- and the City’s official General Plan elements should be address today’s Los Angeles, not a city that existed decades ago, when most General Plan Elements were prepared and adopted.
While it might be useful to have the Mayor’s Office prepare a Climate Action Plan for Los Angeles, her office should take a long-term perspective, so the new mayoral Plan can be adopted as a General Plan Element. This would allow the Mayor’s Climate Action Plan to become part of the City’s permanent General Plan, not a document quickly filed away in dusty archives when Mayor Bass leaves office. If this happens, environmental planning for LA will be further sidelined, to allow expensive apartments to be added to the City’s and County’s inventory of housing that most local residents cannot afford.
(Dick Platkin ([email protected]) is a retired LA city planner. He reports on local planning issues and is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles. Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
