HOLLYWOOD — The city has scheduled a ribbon-cutting for May 13 to mark the completed repaving of the Walk of Fame. We would like nothing more than to attend it, and we will believe it when the scissors close. The neighborhood has spent too many years watching this city announce dates it does not keep to take another one on faith.
Consider the recent record. The library reading room closed in December 2024 for a seismic retrofit that was to be a matter of months and has instead run more than a year, over budget, with a reopening still described only as “sometime this year.” The skate park under the 101 has been “close” for three council budgets running, its opening always one more agency sign-off away. The Walk of Fame repaving itself slipped through delay after delay before landing on a May date that, we are asked to believe, is finally firm.
We do not raise these to pile on the public workers who actually do the jobs. Retrofits uncover surprises. Freeway underpasses are genuinely hard to build on. Costs rise. The complaint is not that projects run into trouble; every project does. The complaint is that the city insists on announcing a finish line before it has any business doing so, and then treats the missed date as though no one had been counting on it.
Someone always is counting on it. A parent tells a twelve-year-old the skate park opens this year because the city said so, and then has to explain, again, why it didn’t. A student plans a semester of studying around a library that stays dark. A merchant on the Boulevard schedules around a repaving that keeps not finishing. Each broken date spends a little of the trust that makes people believe the next announcement, until they stop believing any of them — which is roughly where this neighborhood now sits.
The fix is not complicated, though it requires a discipline City Hall has not shown. Announce dates you can defend. Build the surprises into the estimate, because there are always surprises. When a date slips, say so plainly and early, with a reason and a new date, rather than letting the old one quietly expire and hoping no one kept the flyer. A city that under-promised and delivered would be a pleasant novelty. A city that simply stopped promising what it cannot deliver would be enough.
So we will hope the May 13 ceremony happens on May 13, that the stars are laid and the barricades gone and the councilmember hands out the usual remarks about pride and renewal. If it does, we will say so, and mean it. And if it slips to June, we will note that too, and add it to a list that has grown long enough that the neighborhood no longer needs us to keep it. People here have learned to read the city’s calendar the way they read a weather forecast: useful, well-intentioned, and no reason to cancel your own plans.