LOS ANGELES — Two months after crews began prying up the cracked terrazzo of the Walk of Fame, a council committee spent an hour on Tuesday trying to pin down the two numbers the public keeps asking about: how much the repaving will cost, and when it will end.
The answers came back confident on the first count and hedged on the second. A public works manager told the committee the project remained within its approved budget and had finished its opening block roughly on the timeline set in the spring. Pressed on the completion date, he repeated the phrase officials have used since the ribbon-cutting — that the corridor should be done “within the year, absent surprises.”
It was the surprises the committee wanted to talk about.
“Every block of that sidewalk sits on a hundred years of pipes and patches nobody has a clean map of,” said Councilmember Alicia Rendón, who requested the review. “I don’t want to read about a burst main in October and learn the schedule never had room for it. Tell me where the slack is.”
The manager acknowledged that crews had already lost several days on the first block to a water line that appeared on no current drawing, and that the department had built some contingency into the schedule but not an unlimited amount. If the underground turned out to be worse than expected across the corridor, he conceded, the finish date would move.
Committee members pushed on a second concern that merchants have raised repeatedly: the fencing. Several asked whether the closures could be shortened, staged overnight, or timed to spare storefronts during the busiest tourist weeks. The manager said the terrazzo simply needs time to cure, and that crews could not safely compress the work without risking the panels they had just poured, but agreed to look at whether signage and open-business notices could be improved along the fenced blocks.
No money was appropriated and no vote was taken; the session was informational, the kind of hearing that produces a directive rather than a decision. Rendón asked the department to return with a block-by-block schedule, a running tally of costs against budget, and a plain-language notice program for affected businesses.
A representative of a Boulevard merchants’ group, given two minutes at the microphone, told the committee that shopkeepers were not opposed to the work and never had been. What they wanted, she said, was a date they could plan around and a phone number that answered when a fence went up in front of a door.
“Tell us it’ll be November and it’s November, and you’ll hear no complaints from my members,” she said. “Tell us ‘within the year’ one more time and you’ll hear plenty.”
The committee thanked her, set the follow-up for the fall, and moved to the next item on a long agenda.