Getting Beyond Nowhere

0

If you were asked to write an essay about the challenges that Los Angeles faces and you had to propose solutions what would you write?


The UCLA Anderson Forecast asked local leaders to go through that very exercise, and it got back 37 essays that were surprising for their range. Many see challenges in traffic, others in education. Some see hurdles in sustainable construction, others in affordable housing. No matter the topic, virtually every essay was thoughtful, insightful and sincere.


But for me, one stood out. It was by Anthony Buzzelli of Deloitte & Touche. He wrote that the many boards and councils, along with various other efforts to improve the community, are not aligned or coordinated, “resulting in inefficiency and too many ‘one off’ attempts to tackle problems.” He proposed creating what he called the L.A. Coalition to align those various efforts. (His essay and another appear on page 11.)


Buzzelli’s essay is inspired because it goes beyond individual problems and gets to the way we deal with problems in general. There is no L.A. Coalition to decide how to solve problems or who should solve problems. There is no coalition to rank the biggest problems.


Oh sure, there are city councils and chambers of commerce and all manner of civic groups and such, each of which has its way of identifying and dealing with problems.


But a metro-wide commission above them could debate the big issues facing the city and rank them by priority. It would be clarifying for the entire community if the commission were able to say that, for example, education and traffic are our No. 1 and No. 2 priorities, and the ones we’re going to work on first. Affordable housing is No. 3, and we’ll get to that in three years.


If the commission took the next step and carved up the problems into tasks that would be assigned, suddenly solutions would seem in reach.


I’m convinced that real progress is accomplished when you concentrate the brawn of the business community, the power of governments, the money of foundations and the energy of the civic community. The secret is to get them to work together on one commission.


The membership of such a commission should not be revival of the old secretive and clubby groups of power elites, such as L.A.’s Committee of 25, but should be made up of big hitters from local governments, big businesses, foundations, universities, civic groups and such.


The real beauty of such a commission is that it allows a city not just to react to problems in front of it, but to take the next step and be proactive, to set a course for the future. Buzzelli mentioned a couple cities that did this. Another one, Indianapolis, pulled together local governments, foundations and other groups a couple decades ago and they decided to remake the town into an amateur sports capital, which they did.


Los Angeles seems like the kid who doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. The city reacts to problems as they come up but has no real sense of direction. There’s no over-arching commission whose eyes are fixed on the North Star.


As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll surely get there.



Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at

[email protected]

.

No posts to display