Council, planning and power in Los Angeles.
The special session did what it promised: a yes or a no. Harlan Beaufort was the yes, on the condition that the merchants' parking count be run for real. And the city attorney found the liquidated-damages clause — $1,200 a day — along with three change orders that moved the date it counts from.
Twenty-two minutes, three men and a truck ended fifteen years of a bus bench boxing in Marisol Quintero's newsstand. Her tape says forty-one inches. The inspector comes September 24. Cornell Biggs has a new seat, fourteen feet east.
Back from recess, the council committee spent three hours on four items and finished three: $4,850 for the bench move, 'pending counts as compliance' through December 31, and an up-or-down bike-lane vote set for September 16. The Walk of Fame motion ran out of afternoon — again.
About 120 people came to the reading room Saturday. The volunteers kept the one rule — promise the building, never the hours — and the campaign left with a new commitment it did not plan to make: asking the system to publish how the 34 branches were chosen.
The street-furniture company's written answer reached the city Wednesday: ordinary service gets to Hollywood in late October, past the newsstand's deadline — unless someone invokes the contract's expedited clause and pays the fee. Everyone at City Hall wants the money found. Nobody wants it found in their budget.
Hollywood's permit counter is running ahead of projections; the county health queue behind it is not, and the difference lands on September 30. Meanwhile, the bus bench blocking the Boulevard's last newsstand turns out to have a clock of its own.
A motion filed Thursday demands a public accounting of the terrazzo restoration's third delay. Its authors say they have found no liquidated-damages provision in the contract — and the city cannot yet tell them whether one exists.
The measure heading to voters will fund construction and seismic work at 34 branches, Hollywood's among them. A clause promising to protect operating hours did not survive the drafting.
A proposal to require shade at transit stops and along new commercial frontage has been drafted twice and passed never. This week's heat put it back on an agenda, and produced a number nobody disputes: 61 percent.
Hollywood is the test case for the city's rewritten sidewalk vending system. The first fortnight has produced fewer permits than expected, for a reason nobody wrote into the ordinance.
