Phil’s new red ride

Angelenos complain about traffic like urbanites back east complain about the weather. But with apologies to Mark Twain, we’ve found at least one Los Angeles resident with a novel way to actually do something about it.

Phil Hess is a New York transplant who’s lived and worked in L.A. for nearly two decades. For years, the Hancock Park lawyer navigated the city streets as conventionally as the rest of us – comfortably gliding around town encased in his Lexus, but increasingly sweating traffic that seemed to grow exponentially worse by the day.

Today, however, Hess has largely ditched the cushy sedan for a flashier ride: a “Ferrari red” Vespa GTS-250 250-cc motor scooter. And the way he tells it, it was practically love at first sight.

A former planning deputy for retired County Supervisor Ed Edelman, Hess has since built up a thriving private practice as a land-use attorney with cases ranging from Thousand Oaks to the South Bay. “My two most common meetings are meetings with clients or court dates, and the Vespa is essential to be able to do either of those.”

What finally gave him the idea to jump out of the car and onto the scooter?

“I didn’t ditch the car completely,” he admits. “I don’t take the scooter in the rain, and I use the car when I absolutely have to – when I have too much to carry, for example.” But Hess admits that his compulsive New Yorker’s nature can’t abide waiting in traffic – “there, at least it moves; here, it seems to just stop” – and he found LA’s increasingly round-the-clock traffic jams more and more difficult to tolerate.

“What finally snapped my patience,” he says, “was when I had a client in Pacific Palisades with a very complicated land-use issue. There came a time when he couldn’t meet with me until 3 p.m. That evening, I had tickets to a classical concert downtown, and though I left the client at 5:00 p.m., I didn’t get home [to Hancock Park] until 8:15p.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests he’s not alone; Philharmonic officials have long fretted about falling concert attendance among Westsiders due in part to increasingly unmanageable cross-town traffic.

Hess is clearly infatuated with his two-wheel paramour, and eager to show her off.

“The old Vespas were built cheaply and tended to fall apart. They had little two-cycle engines, where you had to mix the gas and oil, and they required a great deal of personal attention to keep running.” As a kid, Hess had plenty of experience with a two-cycle Lambretta, Vespa’s primary competitor. “And if you didn’t get the mix right, ensuring that the engine got enough lubrication, you’d be riding along and the engine would basically seize up into a solid block of metal.”

Subsequent technical advances have largely eliminated that hair-raising possibility while increasing the scooter’s power. What’s more, operating costs are very low. Hess says that, after his roughly $7,000 initial investment, “in three years, I’ve only spent about $300 and tripled my fuel economy.”

So how does a white-collar professional manage to dress for the road and for the board room?

“When I have to meet someone, I get dressed up in layers—I wear well-protective motorcycle boots and stash my dress shoes under the saddle. On a hot day, I’ll put my suit jacket under the saddle and wear a leather jacket. I tried leather chaps once, but they were too uncomfortable.”

Hess concedes that earning a motorcycle license may not be for everyone, with the DMV requiring rigorous testing and training. Then comes the actual practice drills on busy metropolitan streets. Hess shudders at the memory. “You go through six months of absolute terror – Long Beach, Norwalk, Downey, Thousand Oaks. Lomita, Lennox, Hawthorne.” Today, he rides strictly on surface streets: “Although the Vespa technically is freeway legal, it’s totally crazy. I did it once for about 100 yards and got off.”

Cycling safety calls for constant vigilance. “Any kind of spill can be extremely painful,” Hess notes. “The first time I went down, I ripped my suit, and had bruises that took about a month to heal.”

Still, the upsides are considerable, including being able to score great parking spots. “The funny thing is in Italy, where they’re made, nobody rides them anymore – they’re too expensive.”

7 things you should know about the Westside Subway

With the Metro board’s recent approval of long range transportation projects for the region, the Westside Subway extension is embarking on an important new stage in its journey. With Santa Monica envisioned as the line’s ultimate destination, there is currently $4.1 billion in local funding, mostly from Measure R, to get it as far as Westwood. Federal dollars will be essential to finish the job.

Some critics of the proposed line argue that it will take too long to build, divert resources from other parts of the region and tunnel through some geological challenges. But proponents, including Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, say the subway’s projected ridership success makes it the best bet for getting federal dollars, particularly since Measure R already is funding projects such as Expo Phase II, the Gold Line/Foothill extension and the Crenshaw Transit Corridor.

Key decisions are still to come on design and technical matters; community meetings are taking place to help determine the placement of stations, and there’s a new video to promote the project (thanks to Steve Hymon for flagging this at Metro’s new blog, The Source.)

So even though the first phase of the project—to Fairfax–won’t be completed until 2019, it’s not too early to know what’s driving the train.

It will go where jobs are.

The Westside has hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively concentrated area—currently 429,000 of them, according to the latest mid-year forecast by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.– and commuters who live in outlying areas where housing is more affordable will be able to take advantage of them. That will be a boon to area business owners who’ve long complained about difficulties in hiring and retaining workers frustrated with time-consuming commutes, says Jack Kyser of the Kyser Center for Economic Research, one of the forecast’s authors. A bonus: those jobs are the highest-paying in the county—averaging $66,497 a year. The area also is home to UCLA, the 7th largest employer in the region, with more than 28,000 faculty and staff members.

It will create jobs.

Thousands of jobs will be created. As a rule of thumb, the building trades industry estimates 6,000 construction- and construction-related jobs per $1 billion invested in a project. The exact number of jobs in the long run, however, is hard to predict because those initially hired could stay with the project for multiple years, thus driving down the overall job count.

It will benefit commuters throughout the county.

Metro estimates that 64% of the line’s benefits—a federal formula measuring ridership and time saved–would go to those outside the Westside, with the greatest benefit (22 percent) accruing to the San Gabriel Valley. Metro research shows that more than 310,000 people travel into the Westside from across the region each morning, while 137,000 others leave it and 88,000 travel within it. Meanwhile, UCLA, California’s largest university, is a major area-wide draw with nearly 38,000 students, and the subway extension also has the potential of boosting cross-town access to a variety of major cultural venues, from Disney Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Royce Hall.

It will save thousands of hours in commuting time.

A hypothetical twice-a-day commuter from Koreatown to Westwood would get back the equivalent of eight days in saved commuting time each year by using the subway, according to Metro estimates. Someone commuting from Pasadena would save even more time–12 days a year. To put it another way, that Pasadena commuter currently spending 82 minutes to get from Pasadena to Westwood on public transportation would be able to make the one-way trip in just 50 minutes. “It actually shrinks the city, in a sense,” says David Karwaski, planning and policy manager in UCLA’s Transportation Services Department.

It will help LA to get a greater share of federal transit dollars.

Putting this project in the pipeline sets the stage for Los Angeles to get an allotment that’s more like the New York/New Jersey behemoth, shown in this Metro graphic representing 2010 federal funding for new transit starts. A far more robust showing is possible in the future now that the board has adopted its long range projects priority list. Move over, New York and Salt Lake City. Hello, Los Angeles.

It will help relieve overcrowding on the region’s busiest bus corridor, Wilshire Boulevard.

The Wilshire corridor is the most heavily used bus corridor in the County of Los Angeles, with some 70,000 boardings every weekday from downtown to Santa Monica. With tens of thousands of office workers pouring into the area each day, and bumper-to-bumper traffic at peak hours not only on Wilshire but on the Santa Monica Freeway, the project provides a new option for bus riders while also easing the overall traffic crunch.

It beats taking the 10.

Need we say more?

Check out this Metro-produced video on the Westside Subway

A creek runs through it

Bringing a creek back to life isn’t a job – it’s a commitment for all seasons.

And for the biologists, environmentalists and volunteers who’ve made it their mission to restore Topanga Creek, removing 26,000 tons of concrete and debris last year was just the beginning.

This fall, they’ve moved into planting mode, laying the groundwork—literally—for a rebirth of not just a creek but of an entire ecosystem.

The oaks, sycamores, cottonwoods and other California native plants are still going into the ground, but Rosi Dagit, the driving force behind the project, has seen enough to declare the process a success.

“Beyond our wildest dreams, it worked,” says Dagit, senior conservation biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. Dagit has spearheaded the creek restoration effort with a huge and varied array of supporting players that includes the Mountains Restoration Trust, the Temescal Canyon Association, TreePeople, the California Conservation Corps and a Sierra Club trail crew.

“It’s huge,” says Jo Kitz, co-executive director of the nonprofit Mountains Restoration Trust, praising Dagit’s tenacity. “I don’t know how many agencies she had to go through to get where we’ve gotten. Once it’s done, it’s just going be one of the brightest spots in the mountains.”

Although the project has been years in the making, progress has been dramatic lately. The first big test of the restoration effort came last winter, with the downpours of December.

Would Topanga Creek return to its natural flow, now that a 1,000-foot-long mound of debris had been leveled? Would the creek once again become a birth canal of sorts for endangered steelhead trout that once flourished in its waters?

Dagit and her team crossed their fingers, jumped in their cars and headed to the creek to see whether their carefully crafted plans would unfold in the natural world as they’d envisioned. They were awestruck.

“It was the coolest thing ever,” says Dagit. “We couldn’t cross the creek because the water level was so high. I was a little weepy.”

The massive project had, in fact, worked to send water racing again through a stretch of the creek that had been rendered largely dry by the concrete berm, originally built four decades ago to protect homes from canyon flood waters. Over the years, residents just kept piling it higher and higher. Tons of backed-up sediments from the berm had literally driven the stream underground. Over the course of the next few years, winter rains will continue the clean-up process, washing sediment out to the shore, Dagit says.

And the steelhead trout, which live in both fresh and salt water, will have a straight shot from creek to ocean—and a swimming chance to repopulate in far greater numbers. What’s more, new habitat has been created for other at-risk creatures, including pond turtles, two types of garter snakes, the California newt and an assortment of frogs.

In all, during three months last fall, 26,000 tons of dirt and debris were hauled away—all of it recycled except for 94 truckloads of hazardous soil. Native plants and trees were protected, and native lupines were planted. The total cost was about $3 million in government grants, including $450,000 from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s Third District funds.

Over the past year, monthly workdays have drawn volunteers to plant, water and weed. The Conservation Corps recently swooped in to pick up 30 tons of left-behind concrete and 10 tons of asphalt. A Sierra Club trail crew has chopped away invasive non-native plants like arundo.

“It’s an extremely big deal,” Ron Webster, leader of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains trail crew, says of the project. “The creek is an incredibly important resource. It’s so rare to have a year-round creek running through the mountains and to the ocean.”

With the creek finally reconnected, the biologists are turning their attention not only to planting but to the progress of the steelhead trout.

Late last year, Dagit and her colleagues tagged 75 to 100 of the endangered fish to track their movements. An antennae was placed in the stream to register each time one of the tagged steelhead passed by on its way to or from Santa Monica Bay. (A warning to would-be poachers: there’s a $25,000 fine for removing steelhead from the creek.) This November, Dagit and her 10-person team are going to hand-capture fish and compare scale samples with those taken last year — an unprecedented way to document the age and growth rate of steelhead in this location.

Eventually, the heavy work of planting will be completed and the focus will shift to another huge undertaking: the clean-up of Topanga Lagoon. But there are moments, as the seasons march by, when Dagit can’t resist stopping to savor the satisfaction of all that’s already been accomplished.

“I actually can’t believe we really did this,” she says. “I’m still pinching myself.”

Stepping up oversight for troubled children

In the wake of several high-profile deaths, the Board of Supervisors has taken steps to improve investigations and accountability at the Department of Children and Family Services and other agencies that intersect the lives of vulnerable youngsters. Two of those measures are focused on technology as a way to strengthen management oversight and improve communication among county agencies. A third aims to improve the diagnostic and forensic examinations of children allegedly abused or neglected.

Improved Communication: The supervisors, led by Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael D. Antonovich, directed county agencies to immediately start feeding information into and using a computer database created years ago to help social workers with child abuse and neglect investigations. A number of county agencies have not been participating in the system, called the Family and Children’s Index (FCI), as they’d previously agreed to do. Although in place for more than a decade, FCI has been “woefully underutilized,” says Yaroslavsky. But now the agencies have signed memos of understanding, and this month (November), all seven agencies directed to use FCI will ramp up toward full employment of the information-sharing system.

Enhanced Accountability: A new, automated alert system called SafeMeasures will allow DCFS to keep its supervisors better informed of—and more accountable for—cases in which the department has received multiple abuse allegations against a single family. E-mails will be sent to higher ups in the Emergency Response chain of command, for instance, when three or more referrals come in about the same family or when two are received in the same year. Similarly, when social workers determine that a preliminary investigation does not warrant opening a full-blown case, two layers of Emergency Response supervisors will be required to sign off. In addition, supervisors must be notified if social workers have not started an investigation within 15 days after DCFS receives an abuse or neglect allegation.

Broadened Medical Exams: To ensure thorough medical and psychological evaluations of potential victims of child abuse or neglect, the supervisors voted unanimously to look into expanding the categories of children who can be examined by the county’s own medical and psychological experts through the County’s Medical Hub system. Currently, these expert medical and mental health exams are available at the Hubs only after county officials have opened a dependency court case for a child based on suspected abuse or neglect. The new proposal would expand the rules to allow the Hub-based experts to examine children at the earliest stages of an investigation, giving social workers key information to help determine whether to file a case. At present, parents often pick local doctors to examine their children who may not have training in recognizing child abuse or neglect. The change might add another 23,000 exams at the Hubs, more than doubling the current 17,000 according to DCFS. Separately, the board wants to expand the county’s ability to perform forensic psychological and medical examinations of children for use in court cases. The plan would station forensic experts throughout all seven Hubs in the county, shortening travel times for traumatized children.

A new roof for homeless kids and their parents

A rundown budget motel in Culver City is being transformed into an oasis for homeless families, a place where they can find emergency housing and comprehensive services designed to stabilize and restore their lives. Set to open in late January, 2010, the Family Shelter, operated by the Santa Monica-based Upward Bound House, will become the first emergency family shelter on the Westside in at least a decade.

“We are filling a real need,” says Upward Bound House Executive Director David Snow.

The $4 million transformation of the former Sunbay Motel on Washington Boulevard will allow it to house as many as 72 homeless adults and kids – an estimated 210 children and their parents each year. Families may come from anywhere in Los Angeles County and remain for up to three months, until they’ve secured permanent housing or moved into a transitional apartment while awaiting a permanent residence.

Keeping families together during the 90-day transition is the shelter’s goal. “Our entire model is keeping families intact, so each family will have its own unit” housing up to four people, Snow says. He anticipates that most clients will be single-parent families with one, two or three children. The new facility also will feature an on-site playground and a computer lab for kids.

Beyond safe living spaces, the Upward Bound House Family Shelter will provide comprehensive homeless services, including what Snow calls “wraparound case management” intended to teach adult skills, such as household budgeting, that will help residents succeed on their own.

Families will get two daily meals in a new multi-purpose room, thanks to pledged donations of leftover food from Second Helpings and Google. Youngsters will be enrolled in Culver City or LAUSD schools to ensure continuity.

The Sunbay cost $3 million to acquire, with another $1 million for renovations that will give the facility a contemporary, energy-efficient look, says Jay Vanos, principal at Jay Vanos Architects, which designed the new facility. Vanos’s team is using sustainable materials, is saving cooling costs by blocking excessive sunlight with “eyebrows” over windows and is replacing the old pink and white color scheme with “a warm grey to maintain a quiet low profile” in the neighborhood.

Funding flowed from a variety of sources, a reflection that several cities will benefit from the new facility. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky provided $750,000 in Third District funds as seed money. That amount was matched by then-Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke of the Second District, which includes Culver City. The cities of Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills also made contributions.

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