For the first time in decades, the City of Los Angeles has a real opportunity to structurally reform how it invests billions of dollars every year into the city’s sidewalks, streets, parks, and public space. In October 2024, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass opened the door to real systems change in the way LA manages its infrastructure by issuing Executive Directive #9: Streamlining Capital Project Delivery and Equitably Investing in the Public Right-of-Way (ED #9)—which sets the foundation for LA’s first-ever comprehensive Capital Infrastructure Plan (CIP). But without strong external leadership and strategic expertise to support the city’s effort, ED #9 risks remaining a vision at best—or worse, a status-quo solution shaped by the same systems that led to the current challenges.
ED #9 prioritizes outcomes of equity and transparency. Key commitments include, but are not limited to:
- Disability community engagement in planning and maintaining public spaces;
- Equitable investment by directing resources to underserved communities;
- Workforce development by supporting local hire initiatives and small businesses.
This will culminate in a 5-Year CIP (a first for LA, which currently plans one year at a time). A CIP would address decades of underinvestment and focus on long-term, equitable improvements. And for it to succeed, the development of the CIP requires community involvement and external accountability.
Mayor Bass has offered an opportunity with ED #9 to transform Los Angeles’s systems for managing public spaces by prioritizing people’s real, everyday needs.
These critical systems are about people. With half of the city’s sidewalks broken and 200,000 tree wells empty, millions of people face unsafe and unwelcoming streets. And it gets worse: poorly designed and unmaintained roadways, limited public restrooms (only 14 in the public right-of-way!), broken streetlights, inaccessible sidewalks, a lack of bus shelters, and far too little access to parks and green spaces—all of these and more are the result of one siloed project at a time decided in a politically informed, piecemeal, private process. Angelenos are literally left out in the dark.
This is an opportunity to change the system, as opposed to the current position many find themselves in: fighting for change, project by project in a city of 200+ neighborhoods. This is a chance to change how projects, priorities, and needs are understood and, most important, how they are budgeted and “put on the list” for funding.
The time is now to remake the City of Los Angeles into a City that provides basic city services and access for all neighborhoods and people. We’re talking about an actual funded and working streetlight program or a plan to accelerate the efforts to ensure we have access ramps installed on our sidewalks. Ultimately, we’re improving the quality and longevity of life for Angelenos by cooling neighborhoods with shaded areas, ensuring full access for people with disabilities, preventing deadly vehicle collisions, and creating welcoming public spaces. This approach is better than the City’s current strategy: paying more in lawsuits for injuries caused by dangerous conditions in our streets and sidewalks than the City invests in fixing the sidewalks.
We can create transparency and shared power. With ED #9 fully implemented and developed with broad expertise from inside and outside the City, Los Angeles will have a comprehensive CIP for the first time in the 21st Century. Giving City staff a multiyear work plan that coordinates across departments and is born from consensus-based priorities abandons the current, flawed system where infrastructure planning is reactionary, often driven by 15 Council members with different priorities, one motion at a time. With successful implementation, ED #9 will create a new system to decide which projects get funding, jettisoning the current process that forces staff to fight with each other for the limited resources that aren’t already politically allocated.
We need to move fast. LA is in the global spotlight as host of the 2026 World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl, and 2028 Paralympics and Olympics, giving us a rare opportunity to build a long-term, coordinated approach to public space investment far beyond these events. The window is open for about 12-24 months before the City and its leaders move their focus to other pressing issues.
Systems change is hard. There’s a reason previous administrations haven’t tackled this—it’s hard. This will not happen without building the power and community needed to support the Mayor and City Council in dismantling this complex and self-serving system.
Together, we will make the Mayor’s bold statements an operational reality. The language of ED #9 reflects the language of our work over the past ten years, which is an obvious call to continue this work to continue to bring people together to seize this opportunity to finally create the systems change Angelenos deserve. Every time you see a broken sidewalk, burnt-out street light, or neglected public space – remember it’s the system that is broken – and as a collective voice, we have the power to fix it.
This is no longer a conversation about transportation, open space, or street maintenance; it is about the City stewarding resources, serving the people, being transparent, and redefining how the city fundamentally operates regarding basic city services. The time is now to fix the entire broken system instead of taking a piecemeal approach to fixing one broken sidewalk at a time.
