Michael K. Woo

Michael Woo was the first trained urban planner and the first Asian American elected to the Los Angeles City Council. For eight years, he represented a highly diverse district of 235,000 residents centered in Hollywood and extending from Studio City and Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake and Echo Park. In response to a conflict of interest scandal in City Hall, Woo led the effort in the City Council to enact a comprehensive ethics and campaign finance reform measure in 1990. A subsequent citywide ballot measure created the L.A. City Ethics Commission and produced the most far-reaching municipal ethics law in the country at the time.

 

Since leaving elective office, Woo has served in several leadership roles in the public and nonprofit sectors. He is advisory board chair of Zócalo Public Square, vice-chair-designate of Parks California, and Dean Emeritus of Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design, having overseen the university's programs in architecture, art and graphic design, landscape architecture, and urban planning for 10 years. He was a Los Angeles City Planning Commissioner for 6 years. He currently teaches undergraduate and master's-level courses in urban planning at USC. To raise awareness of the largely-unknown massacre of 18 Chinese at the hands of a racist mob in 1871 Los Angeles, Woo is president of the 1871 Memorial Project, aiming to complete a permanent physical memorial to the massacre in time for the 2028 Olympics.