LOS ANGELES — The committee came back from its five-week recess Tuesday to the most crowded afternoon it has scheduled in years, and by 6:40 p.m. the arithmetic that built the agenda had done what arithmetic does. Four Hollywood items went in. Three came out.
The bench went first, and fastest. The $4,850 expedited-relocation fee — the price of moving the 2011 bus bench that leaves Marisol Quintero’s newsstand four inches short of its federal clearance — was approved 4 to 0, funded from council discretionary money, with the transfer wait waived. Councilmember Whit Bogardus, who had promised to vote yes without warmth, kept both halves of the promise and read a statement for the minutes: that the city was paying a premium to its own contractor to remove an obstruction its own contract installed, and that he will move to reopen the expedited-service terms at the contract’s renewal. The street-furniture company was notified Wednesday morning; its crew is scheduled for the week of September 8. The inspecting office, which had spent a month saying neither yes nor no to scheduling Ms. Quintero’s inspection after the bench’s departure, said yes on Wednesday afternoon: September 24, six days inside her deadline.
The vending gap took longer and produced the afternoon’s only split. The committee adopted Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s proposal that a pending county health application count as compliance when enforcement resumes October 1 — meaning a vendor with a city permit and a complete application in the county’s queue cannot be cited while the county works through it. Mr. Bogardus supplied the two conditions that got it through: a hard end date of December 31, and a monthly public report of the county’s queue length, “so that in November we are reading numbers instead of adjectives.” It passed 3 to 1, the dissenting colleague objecting that the city was certifying compliance with a process it does not run. The county, for its part, told the committee its two additional inspectors were approved in the fall budget and start in October.
Efraín Cordero, city permit number 9, whose own county inspection is Thursday, watched the vote from the second row and pronounced the law “three-thirds finished, if Thursday goes right.”
Then came Vine Street, and the file boxes. The transportation department delivered its long-awaited “additional analysis” of the bike-lane plan’s parking impacts: nine pages, the substance of which — as Ms. Rendón observed on the record, having predicted it in July — is the department’s 2023 occupancy count “in a different font,” supplemented by a week of new curb-turnover sampling. Nadia Constantino’s merchants filed their sign-in sheets and hand-counted turnover logs into the record; Tobias Ferrand’s volunteers filed their map of 34 injury collisions since 2015, printed large, as promised. The committee did not vote on the lanes. It voted, unanimously, on the thing everyone could finally agree on: a special session on September 16 with an up-or-down vote, ahead of the paving window that closes the first week of October and would otherwise add roughly $400,000 to the project’s cost. “No study, no hold, no different font,” Ms. Rendón said. “Yes or no, while striping is cheap.”
Which left the Walk of Fame accounting motion — the question of whether the repaving contract contains a liquidated-damages clause anyone can locate — holding its file when the afternoon ran out. It was continued, without discussion, to September 16, where it will share the room with the bike lanes. Dora Feldman, the merchant who has attended every hearing of the repaving era, collected her bag in the hallway with the composure of long practice.
“I have been continued before,” she said. “At least this year they looked embarrassed. You learn to bank that.”
Ms. Quintero was told Wednesday that the bench that has boxed in her stand since 2011 now has a moving date. She has measured the gap most weeks all summer; she said she would not be measuring this week.
“The tape and I are done. It is the truck’s turn,” she said. “I will believe the bench when I see the bench go.”