HOLLYWOOD — The bus bench blocking the Boulevard’s last newsstand can be moved in time after all. The city has known this since Wednesday, when the street-furniture company’s written reply reached the transportation department, and the news has been traveling through City Hall ever since, slowed somewhat by the number attached to it: $4,850.
The reply, described to this newspaper by a transportation department official, comes in two parts. In the ordinary course of the citywide street-furniture contract, the company’s crews reach this part of Hollywood in late October — comfortably inside the 90 days the contract allows for a relocation request, which the department logged on August 5, and comfortably outside September 30, the date by which Marisol Quintero’s newsstand near Hollywood and Cherokee must pass its access inspection. The bench, installed in 2011, leaves 44 inches of clear sidewalk where the federal standard requires 48. The stand, bolted to its corner since 1981, has the vending ordinance’s legacy clause on its side and four inches against it.
The second part is the interesting one. The contract, it turns out, contains an expedited-service clause: for a fee of $4,850, the company will relocate a piece of its furniture within three weeks of payment. Three weeks from a prompt payment is mid-September. Paid soon, the clause dissolves the whole problem — bench gone, sidewalk clear, inspection passable, and no need to test the inspecting office’s patience with the question, still officially open, of whether Ms. Quintero’s inspection could simply be scheduled for after the bench departs. That office has still not said no. It has still not said yes.
What the clause cannot dissolve is the question of whose $4,850 it is. The ordinary per-move fee is a budgeted item; the expedited fee is not, and as of Thursday no office in the city had agreed to recognize it as its own. The transportation department’s position is that it filed the relocation request on the city’s behalf, not its own, and that its street-furniture account contains a line for standard moves and no line marked “faster.” The vending program’s position is that its budget is funded by vendors’ permit fees and audited against them, and that spending vendors’ money to relocate a bench the vendors did not install is precisely the kind of expenditure audits exist to find. Councilmember Alicia Rendón’s office can reach the sum through council discretionary funds — but that route runs through a transfer authorization that ordinarily takes weeks to process, unless the council votes to waive the wait.
Ms. Rendón intends to ask it to. “Find the money, pay the fee, and argue about the account in October,” she said Thursday. “I am not going to watch a forty-five-year-old business fail an inspection over four inches while three departments hold a seminar on whose column the check comes from.” Her office confirmed the waiver will go to the council’s committee when it returns in the last week of August — a fourth item for a session already carrying the vending enforcement question, the held-over Vine Street bike lane study and the Walk of Fame accounting motion. The committee’s agenda, like the sidewalk, is running short of clearance.
Councilmember Whit Bogardus, the committee’s resident skeptic of found money, said he will vote for the waiver. He did not say it warmly. “I’ll vote yes, this once, and I want the minutes to reflect what we are doing,” he said. “The city is paying a premium to its own contractor to undo an obstruction the city’s own contract installed. We wrote the clause, we signed the clause, and now we are buying our way past it at retail.” He said he will move to have the expedited-service terms reopened when the street-furniture contract next comes up for renewal.
Whether the fee is actually paid — and from where — now waits on the committee, which is to say, on the arithmetic of a crowded afternoon in late August.
Ms. Quintero heard the figure on Thursday, between customers, and did not reach for the tape measure she takes to the gap most weeks. This time the measurement had already been done for her, so she did the other kind.
“Four thousand eight hundred fifty dollars for four inches,” she said. “That is one thousand two hundred twelve dollars and fifty cents an inch. On this boulevard, that may be a fair price for sidewalk. I wouldn’t know. I got mine in 1981.”