"knows the value of…good box office issues." Like his predecessor, Edmund D. Edelman, Yaroslavsky vacated his seat early, after his successful election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In a 1994 story marking his first day as a supervisor, the Los Angeles Times noted that "Yaroslavsky was more often than not a dominant player in virtually every municipal initiative of note since he joined the City Council in 1975." Positions Land use and the environment Soon after his election, Yaroslavsky began confronting development and traffic issues across his Westside district, which included such communities as Bel Air, Westwood, Fairfax and Pico-Robertson. Among other things, he successfully obtained ordinances that reduced neighborhood building heights and imposed severe restrictions on hillside development. Yaroslavsky also led an effort to substantially limit the scale of development in Century City, once envisioned by developers as a "mini Manhattan." Yaroslavsky was credited with orchestrating the negotiations concerning the use, for the first time, of potential traffic congestion measurements to help determine the scope of a project. In 1984, Yaroslavsky suffered a stinging setback when the Los Angeles City Council voted 8–7 to reject his proposed moratorium on high-rises along Wilshire Boulevard, a proposal that had turned the heavily-traveled thoroughfare into a "political battleground." Yaroslavsky said the defeat—which he blamed on council colleagues who reneged on promises to vote for the measure—left him angry and committed to taking his "slow-growth" message to voters. In 1986, Yaroslavsky and Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude authored a ballot initiative, Proposition U, that the Los Angeles Times called "the largest one-shot effort to limit development in the city's history." The measure proposed to cut in half the size of new buildings allowed on more than 70% of the city's commercial and industrial property. Critics, including labor and business leaders, predicted that Prop. U would discourage investment in L.A. and reduce jobs, particularly in economically-depressed minority neighborhoods. But the measure passed by a margin of more than 2-to-1 and was hailed by supporters as representing the "dawn of a new era" in managing Los Angeles' growth. The following year, Yaroslavsky and Braude teamed up again, this time to gather signatures for a ballot initiative that would block Occidental Petroleum Corp.'s decades-long effort to drill for oil in the Pacific Palisades along the city's shoreline. The controversial Proposition O would ban future drilling 1,000 yards inland of the mean high