Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Wednesday the city has started taking real steps to prepare for the next big temblor, with the City Council set to consider a law next month that would require Los Angeles property owners to strengthen their buildings against earthquakes.
“I think this last year, here in the city of Los Angeles, we finally took our head out of the sand,” he said during an emergency preparedness summit in Elysian Park.
Garcetti released a plan in December — called “Resilience by Design” – – that sets forth recommendations for reducing casualties and protecting the city’s water supplies, communications infrastructure and buildings.
The mayor announced today the council next month is expected to take up one of his recommendations: requiring property owners to make seismic retrofits on pre-1980 buildings.
Under Garcetti’s plan, owners of wood-framed, “soft-story” buildings with weak first floors — commonly apartment units built over garages — would have up to six years to make the upgrades, while owners of concrete “non- ductile” buildings would have up to 30 years.
“We have, moving toward council for votes next month, the work that we will do on the retrofits of soft-story buildings in the city — the mandatory retrofits that we are hoping to go forward with,” Garcetti said. “And similarly, soon thereafter, mandatory retrofits for our concrete non-ductile buildings.”
“That work is critical,” along with other steps the city is taking to bolster the city’s water distribution and communications infrastructures, he said.
The City Council last week instructed the City Attorney’s Office to prepare city laws based on Garcetti’s seismic retrofitting proposals.
Separate ordinances will be drawn up for soft-story and concrete buildings, according to Building and Safety Department spokesman David Lara.
The council’s Housing Committee is also expected to discuss in the next month how property owners and tenants would share retrofitting expenses.
Councilman Gil Cedillo, chairman of the Housing Committee, said while the panel hopes to move forward with the ordinance to mandate retrofits, it will continue to discuss options for funding the retrofitting projects.
“We want to create a menu of economic resources for landlords and building owners so that they can choose what works best for them,” he said during the Sept. 16 committee meeting.
Garcetti said today local governments and the state are developing financing options, grants and incentives for property owners, “so bottom line, you have no excuse” to not make retrofits to buildings.
“And if you’re a building owner — what’s worse? Losing your building altogether or paying some money up front to retrofit it to ensure it survives in a quake, to ensure lives are not lost and to ensure the building is not destroyed?” Garcetti said.
Garcetti noted that state lawmakers recently approved a bill, authored by Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, D-Sherman Oaks, that would offer tax incentives for property owners who need to make seismic retrofits. The bill is awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.
Garcetti told City News Service he supports passing some but not all of the retrofitting costs onto tenants.
“I think through the discussions that happened over the process of a year, it was clear that landlords probably couldn’t shoulder it all themselves and it would be unfair to ask for it to be a 100 percent pass through,” he said.
He said he is “flexible” on the cost-sharing ratio, but said he thinks “50/50 is fair,” adding that he hopes there will be tax credits or other programs to prevent any costs from being passed to tenants.
Garcetti noted the summit that the city this year adopted building codes that will protect cell towers and is working with regional water agencies on ways to strengthen water pipes.
The City Council recently approved stronger building standards for making new, freestanding cell towers more stable, though city officials said at the time the new codes would not apply to the majority of the city’s existing towers, which sit atop buildings.
Garcetti’s updates on his nine-month-old earthquake plan were delivered at the PrepareAthon summit held this morning at the Los Angeles Fire Department’s training facility in Elysian Park. The event came two weeks before the Great ShakeOut, an annual earthquake simulation drill put on by public safety and emergency preparedness agencies around the state on Oct. 15.
Garcetti said the next big earthquake is inevitable and urged the public to prepare.
“This is not a matter of if — this is a matter of when,” he said. “Talk to your family, get an analog plan in a digital era … even though we’re strengthening your devices.”
Los Angeles Fire Department officials today also urged the public to remember to create evacuation plans and kits not just for human members of a household, but also for their pets and livestock, such as horses, in the event of a wildfire, earthquake or other major emergency.
