Los Angeles is the city of dreams, but it’s not living up to its potential. We are hosting the Olympics in 2028, and we are anything but ready. Trash continues to pile up on our freeways, alleys, and public spaces. Many streets and sidewalks are in disrepair; neighborhoods lack shade trees. Only 1/3 of City streets have regular street cleaning, which has recently been reduced to biweekly sweeping due to staffing reductions. Worse yet, there is no equitable distribution of the effort to improve our quality of life. Depending on where you live in LA, one area may be better off than another.
The beautification of Los Angeles must be a top priority for our city leaders. Time to clean up our act. Here’s how:
- Update and utilize technology to manage our assets more effectively and equitably (streets, sidewalks, trees, trash cans, bus shelters, etc.). We need to reimagine how we handle trash management and our assets in this city.
- Develop a sidewalk inventory to identify the most egregious locations and ensure resources are allocated to fix them or develop gig-economy like contracts to contract out the work more quickly
- Advocate for a new customer-centric new 311 Platform
- Ensure that we spend resources equitably addressing the most egregious problems with data-driven decisions instead of focusing on neighborhoods with the most political connections or constituents who might complain the loudest
- Work with the Mayor and Council to put more pressure on CALTRANS to clean our trash-filled freeways. Keep CALTRANS accountable for their inactions.
Our current City Controller has recently prepared many substantive audits on the deficiencies with our 311-service request system, tree care, broken sidewalks, and deficient street sweeping, but these audit recommendations often sit on the shelves collecting dust and are ignored by our Politicians.
