This is what bicycle advocacy looks like at 4:28 a.m. on a Thursday night.

The Los Angeles County Deparment of Public Health recently setup a grant program to award money to entities in Los Angeles County that can increase levels of physical activity among residents in their daily lives. The grant will pay out over $300,000 during a 3 year and five month period to awardees.

The deadline to submit a Letter of Intent to the county was Friday, October 5, 2007 at 9 a.m.

I had an idea that interested some of the members of the LACBC board of directors, so they decided to work on getting that idea submitted as a proposal to the county.

After a lot of intense phone calling and emailing, Jennifer Klausner, executive director of the LACBC, and Alex Kenefick, an LACBC board member, and Helen Campbell, a planning deputy with Councilman Ed Reyes’ office, lined up an agreement with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. If my idea was selected to get this grant money, the Planning Department and the LACBC were going to work together to see that the idea would get implemented into a Community Plan and a set of low-cost physical improvements in an area of a Community Plan.

I doubt the old Planning Deparment would have cared much about this whole thing - but under new department head Gail Goldberg, things in Planning are really changing. Her department was able to respond to this idea rapidly and effectively (a sentence I never thought I’d utter about a city department in my whole life). A nudge from our local Councilman’s Office couldn’t have hurt our chances either.

So, with an agreement to implement my idea secured on the Wednesday before the deadline, Alex Kenefick went into over drive. He showed up at the Bike Oven’s doors on Thursday night, midnight bag of tacos in hand, and blazed through the details of the Bike Oven’s idea - putting together a pretty decent Letter of Intent.

Hopefully, if the county likes my idea, the LACBC will get a large chunk of money to implement it (working with the Planning Department, of course). If things work out, the Bike Oven might be able to obtain some of this funding through the LACBC. We might earn money for the Oven by implementing pro-bicycle policies! We’ll see how this all works out in a few weeks, but I am hopeful we’ll make it to the next round in the process.

Bike Oven’s 2007 PLACE Grant Letter of Intent [bikeoven.com]

Policies for Livable, Active, Communities and Environments Grant RFI [lapublichealth.org]

Los Angeles County Bicycle Coaltion Homepage [labike.org]

Councilman Ed Reyes’ Homepage [lacity.org]