Content area
Full text
Bill Luddy earns $100 or less a week. He has no personal staff, no phone and little recognition.
But as president of the Los Angeles Planning Commission he has considerable influence over land use in the city's 469 square miles, more than any other civilian.
The panel of five residents-none can he elected officials or civil servants-fashions all major zoning and planning proposals before they go to the L.A. City Council for a final vote. They are the common man's voice at City Hall.
With all its clout, however, the commission is hardly celebrated as an L.A. power broker.
"I'm not sure that people know what-is fully at stake here," Luddy told the Business Journal in a recent interview. "You're designing the future of the city-what direction it's going to take."
Yet the panel rarely pops up in newspaper headlines or in cocktail party conversation. Once in a while, several hundred people crowd into commission meetings, held at either the public Works boardroom at City Hall or the Van Nuys Women's Club. They did so this month for a hearing on permitting about 1,300 acres of hilly land at Porter Ranch to be developed for up to 8.5 million square feet of office buildings and 3,000 homes.
But day in and day out, the five are only closely followed by a coterie of residents and business interests that are directly affected by land-use issues, admits Luddy. He guffaws at the suggestion that his name would ever become a household word. "No way, not if I do the job right." He will remain a low-profile official as long as he keeps from "lurching along from crisis to crisis," he says.
William G. Luddy learned about politics and its pitfalls long ago. The New York native, an English major who never earned a bachelor's degree, "got very involved with the New Left in college, the politics of the 60s. But there was a lot of disillusionment and the politics were a little screwy. The organizing was just around spot issues," he says.
Alter moving to Los Angeles in 1976, Luddy got work writing a newsletter for the local carpenter's union and has been affiliated with unions and the building industry ever since.
Now as the second-most...