“The time to act is now,” said the LA 2020 Commission in its report last year urging big changes for Los Angeles city government. Not so fast, said City Council President Herb Wesson, who created the commission.

Wesson told me Wednesday that he wants the recommendations to go through the council’s labrynthian (my characterization, not his) committee hearing process before big decisions are made. “I have asked the chairs to come up with a timeline to begin the process,” he said when we talked on the phone. “Once it goes through the committee process I will chat with the chairs and what to bring to council and when.”

Wesson created the commission in 2013, telling it to come up with ways to improve Los Angeles’ economy and its slow-moving, financially troubled city government. Attorney Mickey Kantor, a former U.S. commerce secretary and Democratic political power, and Austin Beutner, a top advisor in the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and now publisher of the Los Angeles Times, headed it. Its proposals, while they wouldn’t blow the roof off of city hall, would substantially change how business is done there.

I asked Kantor how he thought things were going. He said he was pleased there was “some movement” on the report. “I only hope that we make progress,” he said tactfully.

Knowing the leisurely manner of city government, I decided to find out what happened to the commission proposals after Kantor and Beutner submitted them to the council. I learned they had been turned over to committees that vote on proposals before the council gets them. I called the councilman who counts most, council president Wesson, who runs everything in the legislative body.

Wesson noted that one of the commission’s recommendations, changing the date of Los Angeles elections, so they will coincide with national and state elections, is on next Tuesday’s ballot. These elections are now in March and April. And he wants to go ahead with recommendations to speed up revisions in community plans and to create a regional body to promote tourism.

But he was in a go- slow mood when I asked him about two of the most important and controversial proposals. One would be to create an Office of Transparency and Accountability. It would analyze the city budget and legislation that would affect jobs and city revenue. Since the city administrative officer, who reports to the mayor, and the legislative analyst, who reports to the council, already do this, they probably hate the idea of giving up power to a new body, as would the mayor and the council. The second would be to set up a Los Angeles Utility Rate Commission, to set water and power rates. Elected officials, who now approve rates, would really hate that.

On the office of transparency, Wesson said, “Is that a good thing to do, is it a duplication of services? Is it going to cost more money? Are you spending money on this and not trimming trees?” Regarding a commission to set utility rates, he said, “I wouldn’t want to say yes or no until this conversation (with committee chairs) takes place. I am not against it, I am not for it but it has to be properly vetted.”

I talked to Councilman Curren Price, whose economic development committee, will study a proposal for economic development zones and Tom LaBonge, head of the committee taking on regional tourism promotion. They said their committees would study the proposals. Paul Krekorian, who heads the budget committee, didn’t call me back but an aide said he’s awaiting a report on the 2020 commission recommendations from city budget officials.

As they say in city hall, not so fast.

I’m a big fan of Jon Regardie, executive editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Downtown News, but I don’t agree with his recent column criticizing former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The perceptive Regardie made some good points. And he gave Villaraigosa and his supporters something to worry about as the ex-mayor decides whether to run for the Senate next year. I’ll get to that, but first Regardie’s analysis of Villaraigosa’s two terms as mayor.

“The fact that some people are seriously discussing a Villaraigosa candidacy is wacky,” Regardie wrote. “It raises the possibility that they suffered an NFL style concussion and developed collective amnesia. I mean, how else to explain the idea that such an underperforming mayor might be a worthy heir to Boxer, one of the most important California politicians of the last 50 years.”

Regardie gives Villaraigosa credit for his greatest achievement as mayor, leading the fight for Measure R, the 2008 ballot proposal that increased the sales tax by a half cent for 30 years and will raise $40 billion for transit projects. He adds that the mayor had a few smaller successes but will be remembered as “kind of a political one-hit wonder” who “should have had a least a half a dozen big wins.”

Actually, that one hit—the transit ballot measure---was a game changing homerun, even more important than the one Dodger Kirk Gibson hit in the 1988 World Series. It resulted in transit lines being started or completed on the Westside, South Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, East L.A. and deep into the San Gabriel Valley. It took a lot of guts for Villaraigosa to raise money for the tax-increase campaign and be its public face as we were entering the Great Recession. That victory was supplemented by Villaraigosa’s deal, laboriously worked out with Boxer, to use the local tax revenues to leverage billions more in federal dollars to finish the lines.

It was also gutty of Villaraigosa to try to improve neglected schools in poor minority areas, an effort mocked by Regardie. Villaraigosa challenged the school district and the teachers union in that fight, following the example of former Mayor Richard Riordan, who also took on the school board and the union. They both understood that the mayor of Los Angeles has a special obligation to speak up for kids and parents in the city.

Villaraigosa will have to deal with some points raised by Regardie. Girl friends and the ex mayor giving the impression of a playboy lifestyle may be the most damaging. I teach a politics class at the Pasadena Senior Center. I asked my students what they didn’t like about Villaraigosa. They didn’t respond to the broad question but when I got specific and mentioned lifestyle and girl friends, they nodded. He’s going to have to convince people that he’s a serious person. But if he can do that and run on his accomplishments, he would be in pretty good shape for a Senate race against fellow Democrat Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris.

The walk through downtown Los Angeles from 7th Street Metro Center to the Wells Fargo Center took longer than necessary.

Leaving my Expo line train, I turned right on Flower Street, heading toward the big Wells Fargo building where I was going to meet my friend Mickey Kantor for lunch at Nick & Stef’s. But sentimentality detoured me across Flower to what used to be known as the ARCO Plaza. Nancy, my wife, was communications director for the ARCO political operation for 18 years. I worked at the Times, owned for most of that time by Times Mirror, and so we often met downtown for dinner or the theater. (Note: Neither of those corporate giants exists today.)

Thinking of old times, I walked around what is now called City National Plaza, figuring it was on the way to Wells Fargo. I had overshot the mark. Then I saw an elevated walkway I was pretty sure would take me to my destination. It led to another walkway with a sign indicating it was the road to Wells Fargo. Actually, it was a road to a wall. I was lost amid the high rises.

These walkways, crossing Flower, Figueroa and other nearby downtown streets are monuments to the paranoid planning that shaped the area from Fifth Street to north of the Music Center.

Through much of the 20th Century it had been Bunker Hill, with streets on steep hills and rundown, seedy Victorian houses. We tore down the Victorians in the mid-20th Century, and all but flattened Bunker Hill for a redevelopment project, channeling many millions of public dollars into the pockets of the developers who built high rises on the newly leveled ground. Reflecting the mind set of the time, the developers figured the high-rise tenants and hotel guests were so afraid of being mugged, they would not venture onto the street. The elevated walkways were designed to take them from place to place safely. What they did was kill off street life and ground level businesses.

In San Francisco, the Victorians on that city’s steep hills survived, as did hotels, stores and classic office buildings. That’s one reason a walk in San Francisco is such fun and a stroll through the remains of Bunker Hill is a barren experience.

After lunch, I found a more direct and pleasant route back to the train station, the 103 steps leading from the former Bunker Hill down to the main library, designed to look like the Spanish steps in Rome. The 1986 library fire spurred the reconstruction of the beautiful library we have today. It also led to the pedestrian-friendly steps, to the grassy park around the library and to the pleasant restaurant nearby. In a bit of sleight-of-hand, redevelopment money had been moved around—this time for a good cause—to join with private donations and rebuild the library. The plan also financed the steps and the Library Tower, now the U.S. Bank Tower. It reflects what the designer of the steps, noted landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, said on their dedication: "Great cities are not made by automobiles, freeways and high rises. Basically, they are made by open spaces and the people who use the open spaces.”

I passed the California Club. It used to be a seat of power, second only to the real seat of power, the Times. The Chandlers, who owned the Times, and the California Club guys—and they were all guys, rich and white—agreed that the Bunker Hill slums had to go, as did the hill itself, to make way for automobiles, freeways and high rises.

A new downtown is replacing their narrow dreams. I thought of them as I settled into a seat on the Expo Line train, one of the transit lines changing Los Angeles.