Lance the Contract Negotiator

For the past twenty years the City of Los Angeles has had a contract for Street Furniture — name for Bus Shelters, physical stuff you could put next to a Bus Shelter, and in the case of this particular contract, fourteen Automated Public Toilets. Five of the fourteen are in Skid Row.

That twenty year contract was set to end on December 31st and on December 16th City Hall officially extended it through 2022.

Starting in November 2020, Streets LA was given the charge by City Council to create a new program with the existing Street Furniture program set to expire December 2021 and for this new program (contract) to bring in more revenue to the City. The name Streets LA, the City Department overseeing all of this, came up with for this new program is STAP (Street Transit Amenities Program).

There is a huge problem with City Council framing this need to create a new program and contract to replace the existing twenty year old one as an opportunity to generate more revenue and it touches on a huge criticism of the twenty year contract: Equity.

Money generated through the twenty year Street Furniture program/contract was exclusively through ad revenue. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, find a Bus Shelter on a street corner with a Bus Stop and look at it). Because advertisers obviously prefer their ads in neighborhoods with disposable income (money), that means lots of Bus Shelters in neighborhoods with money and very few Bus Shelters in neighborhoods without money.

And so if a City Council goal is to generate more revenue for the City, you find ways to do so like increasing taxes or give advertisers more bang for their Bus Shelter buck or maybe both. For the year 2021, the City chose the way of looking to increase ad revenue. Where that takes you is into all the cool things that now exist high tech-wise that didn’t exist twenty years ago when the existing contract was signed. And there are lots of new cool things that provide real assistance to folks at your local Bus Shelter.

One of the new cool things is LED (light emitting diode) lighting. LED offers all kinds of creative eye-catching possibilities namely for increased ad revenue. The massive problem, as other cities have found, is that light emitting diodes can distract drivers and a distracted driver can easily run into something.

As Streets LA spent eight months from the end of 2020 to the summer of 2021 putting together STAP as a program that can create a new contract, I went to a product demonstration in July outside of City Hall set up to get public input into the two Transit Amenity models created by two different companies, finalists as in the Miss America Pageant version of urban transportation amenity companies. This demonstration took place in several different part of Los Angeles during July. I was really impressed by all the new possibilities offered the Bus Shelter experience due to advances in high-tech technology.

And now I’ll go back to sentence number one: “For the past twenty years the City of Los Angeles has had a contract for Street Furniture, a name for Bus Shelters, physical stuff you could put next to a Bus Shelter, and in the case of this particular contract, fourteen Automated Public Toilets.”

Five of those Automated Public Toilets are in Skid Row, known for having far less access to Public Hygiene than the minimum standard for a United Nations Refugee Camp.

Martin Schlageter, Public Engagement Director of Streets LA, reached out to me and other Skid Row folks the first part of this year to make sure Skid Row was tracking with STAP development because he knew the unique needs of Skid Row. Martin used to be the Policy Director for Jose Huizar, former City Council representative for Skid Row.

In August of this year, I went to the monthly meeting of the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition and suggested we invite Martin to give an official presentation of STAP in light of the existing twenty year contract getting ready to end. Folks said sure.

Martin came to our September meeting and brought with him Lance the Contract Negotiator and Audrey the Engineer. During the presentation and follow up Q and A, Lance said Streets LA will get into heavy contract negotiations the second half of September and so if we get him Skid Row input by September 15 he will include that in the negotiations. We immediately created a working group to accomplish that goal, later called the Transit Justice Working Group.

Doing lots of wide open transparent Coalition work over the next couple of weeks resulted in detailed input/recommendations that got to Lance on September 14 as well as submitted as written public comment to a meeting of the Public Works Committee.

And so, with these huge City Council contradictory STAP dynamics at play around ad revenue/monies, and the very real possibility of a lawsuit filed against the City by the advocacy group Los Angelenos Against Distracted Drivers (LAADD-say lad but take more time-I made this group up), a new finalized contract was not accomplished this year and all this now extends through 2022 simply by making the existing twenty year contract into a twenty one year contract.