Some might wonder why anyone would want the job of planning director in Los Angeles, what with the city’s sprawl, myriad and divergent community interests, dire housing shortage, meager resources and staffing woes. Gail Goldberg, who will take the reins of the agency at the end of February, sees it in a somewhat different way. “It feels like there are so many things to do that we have to have some successes,” she said simply. It’s an attitude that won for Goldberg, who fills a vacancy created when Con Howe retired from the job last year, a string of admirers in San Diego, where she spent a nearly 20-year career in city planning, the last five as the city’s planning director. Described as a “straight shooter,” “organized,” “professional” and “visionary” by those who worked with her in San Diego, she appears custom-ordered for the job of planning director in Los Angeles, with its multi-tiered and far-flung bureaucracy, and where business and community groups alike have criticized the current agency for its failure to bring a cohesive vision to the job of managing the city’s growth. In San Diego, she was responsible for 44 different planning areas across a sprawling city, each with its own neighborhood constituencies and needs. She rebuilt the planning department after the unit had been virtually eliminated for years, oversaw the projects that came before the city and developed a so-called “city of villages” plan based on smart growth principles. “She’s very organized and a good manager,” said Larry Clemens, president of Lennar Urban Division, which developed the massive Ballpark Village in downtown San Diego. “You know the old saying, ‘how do you eat an elephant? Bite by bite. That’s Gail’s approach. She does enough nibbling that she has solved it. Even though it’s Los Angeles, Gail will tackle it but in a very organized fashion.” Although smaller, San Diego is facing many of the same problems that exist in L.A. Its growth far outpaced the city’s general plan, projects were approved or denied without much regard for how they fit into the whole city, and Goldberg’s job was to develop a plan to accommodate that growth and get the city to buy into it. “She was a great leader in that way, and that’s why I think it was a loss (for San Diego),” said Peter Hall, former president of the Centre City Development Corp., which was responsible for revitalizing downtown San Diego. “Every community has a community planning group who were everything from NIMBYs to the environmental activists and political wannabes. She had to be able to speak at every community in an appropriate, sensitive, politically smart and professionally responsible way and she brought that whole plan forward.” She took planners out to community meetings, making herself visible in the neighborhoods. She won the respect of developers, and she was considered particularly adept at bringing diverse groups together to gain consensus. “She can be in adversarial positions with somebody and absolutely turn lemons into lemonade,” said Lynne Heidel, a land use attorney with Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP in San Diego. “She will face right up to somebody who is a political adversary and somehow they will both come out laughing.” But for the most part, Goldberg’s efforts did not come to fruition, the result of the city’s inability and unwillingness to commit the kinds of infrastructure resources required. Only time will tell whether she will win that support in Los Angeles, but those in San Diego all agree that, despite the focus paid to who is running the planning department, the success of any program is dependent not on the head planner but on the heads of the city. “I sat on the mayor’s smart growth planning committee only to find out that city was not in a position to commit to the increased needs for parks, libraries and other quality of life components that would support higher density in each of the neighborhoods where we would truly become a city of many villages,” said Hall. “You hire Gail to give them the answers, but you elect the mayor and the councilmembers to have the chutzpah to stand up and do what’s right. She can help them see the answers, but she cannot independently implement it.” Ask Goldberg whether she thinks she will find greater support in her new post and she will candidly tell you that she hopes to, but she makes no promises. Instead, she will tell you that her biggest disappointment in San Diego was the city’s inability to find revenue sources for the city of villages. She will tell you that any plan must make sense for developers and for the community. And she will tell you that she is optimistic that she can develop a plan that does just that. She will also tell you what she was told while she interviewed for the job. “What I heard in the interview process was an interest in refocusing the department on long range planning and re-engineering the staff that’s there,” Goldberg said. “I also heard a real interest in trying to do more community outreach and connecting planners more with the communities so we could listen better and understand the needs. And when we establish those relationships we have a better chance of educating those communities about how is L.A. going to grow, and how can we do it in a way that makes Los Angeles a better place.” Arbors Sold The Sares Regis Group has acquired The Arbors, an office complex in Thousand Oaks, for $34 million. The property includes two existing office buildings totaling 128,464 square feet and an 8-acre parcel entitled for an additional 136,832 square feet. The buyers plan to break ground in the next 90 days and construct two additional buildings by year end. The property, a site formerly owned and occupied by Teledyne, was acquired by Hileman Co. several years back. Hileman tore down all but one of the existing buildings, leased it and constructed one additional building. Those properties are currently leased to Aetna, Progressive Insurance and Skyworks, a Massachusetts-based semiconductor company. With the shortage of available properties in the Conejo Valley and elsewhere, brokers said they received a great deal of interest on the Arbors from a range of prospects users, retail developers and other developers. It took only about 30 days to market the property before an agreement was reached, said Michael Slater, a broker with CB Richard Ellis who marketed the parcel along with CB’s Mark Perry, Tom Dwyer, Ken Ashen, Nick Gregg and Carlene O’Neil. Slater, Dwyer and Ashen will also handle the leasing. Final Flip The last portion of the Washington Mutual headquarters campus is on the block, just a year after IDS Real Estate Group acquired the property. IDS, through Tom Bohlinger at CB Richard Ellis and Jim Lindvall at Grubb & Ellis, is marketing a 231,000-square-foot building occupied by Washington Mutual at 9200 Oakdale Ave. in Chatsworth. It is one of three properties IDS acquired totaling about 800,000 square feet. An additional land parcel was sold earlier as were the other two buildings. “We love everything about it,” said David Mgrublian, CEO and managing director of IDS. “But on a certain level, if you have a fully leased asset, to be a good fiduciary you need to put things on the market.” Conejo Sale A 27-acre parcel of land in Westlake Village sold to a development group for $27 million. The buyers, Steadfast Business Properties and Amstar Group intend to develop the parcel, located between Village Glen and Lakeview Canyon Road, as an office complex. The group is planning a 482,000-square-foot campus consisting of eight buildings. Doug Humphrey, a broker with Lee & Associates, represented the buyers. Mike Foxworthy of GVA Daum represented the seller, Canyon Mesa Inc. Office Sale Rancho Plaza, a 24,795-square-foot office building in Thousand Oaks, was sold for $5.35 million. The property, at 60-100 Rancho Road, was 95 percent occupied at the time of the sale to Ventura Oaks Capital LLC. The seller was Rancho Conejo Partners LLC, a company of Santa Monica-based investment group Metro Properties. Kevin Shannon and Tom Festa, both with Grubb & Ellis, represented the buyer and seller. Senior reporter Shelly Garcia can be reached at (818) 316-3123 or by e-mail at [email protected].