By HOWARD FINE
Staff Reporter
Ruth Galanter
Title: Councilwoman, 6th District, City of Los Angeles
Born: New York, 1941
Education: B.A., English literature, University of Michigan; Master’s in urban planning from Yale University.
Most Admired Person: Eleanor Roosevelt
Career Turning Point: At Yale, halfway through a degree program, switching focus from planning to citizen activism
Hobbies: Writing satirical poetry and reading mystery novels
Personal: Single, no children
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter is back in the spotlight, with two of the region’s largest and most controversial projects, Playa Vista and the LAX expansion, in her district.
True to her track record, Galanter has been doggedly determined both in her support of Playa Vista and in her opposition to the LAX expansion. The odds are long for Galanter and other airport-expansion opponents who are taking on the city’s business community, the airlines, and most of the political establishment including Mayor Richard Riordan.
On Playa Vista, the proposed home of Dreamworks SKG, she has dealt with years of wrangling among the developers, financiers, environmentalists, the courts and area homeowners.
It was the issue of saving the Ballona Wetlands adjacent to the Playa Vista project site that propelled Galanter to the City Council 11 years ago, following a dramatic campaign during which she was attacked and seriously injured by a robber in her home. The attack left Galanter hospitalized with damage to her vocal cords. For the next couple of years, she could not speak much above a whisper.
Galanter first made a mark as a slow-growth advocate in her native New York during the 1960s. She brought her activism with her when she came to Los Angeles in 1970, following the breakup of her marriage. As an environmental consultant, she led the first successful appeal of a project to the California Coastal Commission.
Question: Why are you opposed to the Los Angeles International Airport master plan expansion?
Answer: I think your question is a bit misleading. I am not opposed to any expansion of Los Angeles International Airport. Of course there will have to be some expansion, just to handle the amount of passengers and cargo that go through there today.
I do think, though, that LAX should not bear all the additional air traffic burden for the entire Southern California region. That should be spread among other airports in the region. Even if you expand LAX to 98 million passengers a year, that still won’t meet the needs of the entire region. You need a regional approach.
Many of the obvious candidates for expansion, like Burbank and El Toro, are beyond our control.
However, there are four airports that are under the control of the city: LAX, Ontario, Van Nuys and Palmdale. At Ontario we are moving ahead with expansion, but there are physical limitations on how much more you can expand that airport. Van Nuys is a general aviation airport and, given its space limitations, is not a serious candidate for commercial travel. That leaves Palmdale. We’ve got 18,000 acres at Palmdale LAX is only 3,500 acres and the residents around the site want to see an airport there. When you have the space and local support, that deserves serious attention.
Q: Why can’t you seem to get solid support from the rest of the City Council for your airport stance?
A: It’s way too early in the process to expect council members to be versed in the airport issues. We don’t even have an airport plan that’s on the table yet. At the earliest, the council might vote on a plan late next year, but it most likely will be longer than that. If it is not in their district, most council members don’t pay close attention until it gets closer to the time.
Q: On the airport expansion, don’t you have a sense that you are tilting at windmills?
A: A lot of people tell me that I’m tilting at windmills. But my whole career has been tilting at windmills successfully, I might add.
For example, 25 years ago, when I was an environmental consultant, I made the first appeal of a California Coastal Commission decision it was on the Colony Project in Santa Monica. People at the time told me I would never win, that nobody had ever challenged the commission before. But we won on the strength of our arguments.
When I ran for office back in 1987, I was taking on an 18-year incumbent. Everyone wrote me off, except for a handful of loyal supporters. They all said I was tilting at windmills. They still said I was tilting at windmills when I came in second in the primary. But I won.
Q: Have you accomplished the goals you originally set out with?
A: Ironically, while I have accomplished a lot in my years in office, the one thing I campaigned on restoration of the Ballona Wetlands has still not happened.
Q: That’s adjacent to the Playa Vista project. You now support the project. But wasn’t there another setback on that project this past weekend with a judge’s ruling that the Environmental Impact Report was inadequate?
A: Right. But I’m not willing to say that there has been a setback on the project yet. I have not seen the entire 53-page ruling. The plaintiffs in that ruling only faxed out the last page. If it was such a favorable ruling for them, why didn’t they fax out the whole thing? I suspect there’s a much more mixed message in the ruling, but I won’t know until I see it.
Q: But what if the ruling actually bears out what is said in its last page?
A: Well, then I would say that for these “environmentalists” to seek a halt to this project is not very environmental. What they are doing is halting the wetlands restoration. There are plants out there that are ready to go into the ground to help turn that ecosystem around. Now nothing can be done there during this delay and the wetlands will continue to degrade.
Q: You have been involved in urban planning issues for over 30 years. What prompted you to become so involved in such issues?
A: Well, I must admit, that was not what I thought I’d be doing when I was growing up. I first wanted to be an artist. But my mother quickly explained to me about the reality that artists faced of trying to make a living. When I was in high school, I looked seriously at journalism. But my first assignment as a reporter for the school newspaper was on new furniture at the art department. What a comedown.
What ultimately led me to choose urban planning was that I was always interested in cities and how things work. I still have some of that fascination today. It’s often hard for me to walk down a city street without thinking about the sewage system.
Q: But you are not a city planner and never really have been. Instead, before being elected to the City Council, you made your living opposing many of the plans drawn up by planners. What happened to change your mind?
A: I figured out halfway through planning school that planners didn’t control the process, people and politics do. I realized that it was the people who voted who made a difference. It was a real revelation that people like me could actually make a difference.
Q: But now, aren’t you part of the very establishment you so frequently opposed in your earlier career?
A: Well, I think one of your earlier questions on the airport indicates that I am not really part of the establishment, much of which wants to plow ahead on the LAX expansion without stopping to look at the regional approach.
Having said that, now that I am on the council, it has given me the ability to solve things I could never have done from the outside. For example, I played the role of a Henry Kissinger on the Mono Lake settlement reached in 1994 between the DWP and the activists who wanted to save Mono Lake. That was because of my unique ties to both camps.
Q: During your first campaign for office, you were assaulted and hospitalized with serious injuries. How did that experience change your outlook?
A: I learned that I was much tougher than I had given myself credit for. I was nearly killed that night, but I was determined to see the campaign through. However, it also confirmed for me how nice it is to have people take care of you when you really need it. If you remember, I could hardly speak for a long time after the attack, and that’s something that you can ill afford in this line of work. But everyone pitched in and was there for me when I needed them.
Q: Besides the airport expansion and Playa Vista, is there anything else that you would like to accomplish before leaving office?
A: Yes. But it’s a huge area and I’m still searching for a way to tackle it. I’m talking about introducing more sustainable development in the city. Right now, for example, we let storm water drain off of properties and parking lots in this city. That water goes right to the ocean and is useless for us; it also exacerbates flooding. In the city of Davis, they have an innovative program to keep storm water on properties and use that fresh water to grow grapes. And there are some experimental driveways now that use cinder blocks that allow water to percolate through to the soil. Just think of all the runoff that would be put to good use. And there are other things: How about changing the building code to require light-colored roofs so that sunlight is reflected off them and summer energy bills reduced? Or using recycled building materials in our building projects? There’s so much more we could do here.
Q: You can run for one more term next year before you are termed out. What do you plan to do then?
A: I only take these things one step at a time. My next step is getting re-elected in April 1999. After that next term, I really will have to see what the world is like. Most of my career choices have been made by looking at opportunities and seizing the best one at the time.
