ALPERN AT LARGE-Increasingly, the job of duly elected neighborhood councils and neighborhood/homeowner associations is to protect itself from a City Council and Planning Politburo that is all-too-willing to break the laws of the City of Los Angeles and ruin the lives, economy and environment of its residents.
After enduring a miserable experience fighting the Casden developers, we now have JMB Realty and its paid-for backers willing to crush the Westside. For those upset with the Koch Brothers and the Citizens United verdict from the Supreme Court, they need not worry about some inaccessible out-of-state powerbrokers crushing those Angelenos pleading for the City of Los Angeles to abide by its laws.
JMB Realty and its political backers are right here at home, and whether they are from City Planning or the City Council, they are more than happy to step on us to help a few special interests.
Key Point #1: JMB and their paid backers should "Stop Tripping" us all over misleading arguments! It's easy to get past the clouds of brimstone and logic-twisting smoke thrown by JMB Realty to defend its proposed Century City Center tower, a 37-story tower that is three times the size legally-allowed as per an established legal covenant. Just realize that the whole "calculated trips" argument is based on legally-unsupportable half-truths.
The whole "trips" thing should be ignored...period. The whole "trips" thing is irrelevant...period.
The number of trips allotted to the commercial portion of the Century City Specific Plan in 1981 was designed by a formula that tied a specific number of trips to a specific amount of commercial/office square footage, in that there would be a ceiling of 2.5 million square feet of commercial/office square footage to protect the visual, traffic and environmental impacts of Century City on adjacent single-family neighborhoods.
The willingness of JMB Realty to point out traffic trips based on this formula, or that formula, or whatever formula, has therefore no relevance whatsoever--the office building to be built and owned by JMB Realty is assigned a specific number of trips, and we can call them widgets, or hockey pucks, or credits, or anything else...but the claims that their gigantic office building won't hurt traffic are for this reason alone completely without legal merit.
Key Point #2: Size Matters, and the proposed JMB Realty tower is almost thrice as large as is legally allowed! If JMB Realty and the City of Los Angeles want to triple the size of Century City, there are legal ways to break the covenant that was part of the aforementioned 1981 agreement.
Tripling the size of this commercial development is probably not something that Paul Koretz and City Planning want to run by the public in a legally viable process, so this whole obfuscation with trip numbers and payouts appears to be all that JMB can do. In other words, if you don't like the Century City North Plan and the 1981 commercial square footage ceiling and associated covenant, then amend the Plan...but if you don't want to follow the law, expect political and legal blowback by those who (gasp!) expect all parties, even wealthy ones, to adhere to the legal process.
We just saw LA County Superior Court Judge Allan Goodman throw out the Hollywood Community Plan as "fatally flawed" because it failed to comply with the state's environmental laws, and it would be nice to not have our new Mayor (who previously represented Hollywood) embroiled in a new legal controversy that wasn't even of his making.
Key Point #3: Business districts are great, but they have to be located where they are environmentally legal! My most recent CityWatch article supported the LAX Connect Plan (a westward swerve of the north-south Metro Crenshaw/LAX Light Rail Line, connecting to a strategically-located Intermodal Transportation Center and an east-west Automated People Mover) not only as a method of connecting MetroRail to LAX but as part of a vehicle to create a gigantic and profitable (AND LEGAL!!!) business district for the City of Los Angeles.
In other words, business and commercial districts are GREAT--we need them for jobs, and we need them for our economy. But there are many reasons why business districts have to be capped in size when surrounded by residential districts, particularly when the entire Westside would be hurt from an inappropriately-oversized Century City THAT would result from an approval of THE currently-planned JMB Realty's Century City Center.
To the point: if JMB Realty is allowed to build a commercial tower three times the legal size allowed, expect a flood of other Century City and Los Angeles developers to do the same.
Key Point #4: JMB Realty already CAN build its tower, but it has to do so legally! Again, the covenant that demanded a ceiling of 2.5 million square feet for commercial square footage should be referenced. It's the law, and if JMB Realty wants to purchase trips from other real estate owners to keep this ceiling intact, then it should do so immediately and end all legal arguments to its project.
Note to JMB Realty: just buy the trips, and this whole hassle ends for all of us. Please? Pretty please? Following the law isn't too much to ask, is it? If the Century City Center will be a boon for business, for unions, for construction guilds and for the rest of us, then the process of building this tower legally is one which it always had, and always will have, before it to ensure its smooth approval and legal defense in the years to come. Being pro-law-abiding is not mutually exclusive from being pro-business or pro-development...is it?
Key Point #5: Paul Koretz, Don't Supersize Century City!
Councilmember Koretz, you were elected as someone who would be different from, and better than, the former CD5 Councilmember Jack Weiss who completely prostituted himself to developers to suffering of his constituents. In the same vein, the former troika of Antonio Villaraigosa and Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss were thrown out of Los Angeles' political future because of their unholy ties to citizen-crushing special interests.
The Mar Vista Community Council, the Westside Village Homeowners Association, and the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee (which includes many CD5 residents and representatives of CD5 neighborhood councils and neighborhood associations) voted overwhelmingly and emphatically to oppose the Century City Center currently proposed by JMB Realty.
It's not just a few local NIMBY's, and it's not just a few Luddites, who oppose the project. CD5 and CD11 overwhelmingly oppose the project as is because it'll affect the entire Westside, from La Cienega to the ocean, in the same manner that past and presently-proposed and oversized CD11 and Santa Monica projects will threaten the eastern half of the Westside.
We're not anti-business, we're just pro-legal process. And we did NOT and do NOT want any money from JMB Realty (PLEASE ignore those few groups that got hush money from JMB...PLEASE!).
We just want a right-sized Century City Center tower based on the assigned trips that will prevent the tripling of and "super-sizing" of Century City.
Do it right, do it legal, and do it with the understanding that the citizens of L.A.--who are being asked to tax themselves even more for road repairs that should have already been paid for by our past taxes--demand nothing less than a representative government that adheres by its laws and respects the rights of their constituents to a good economy, a clean environment, and a first-rate quality of life.
(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Boardmember of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected] This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us . The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 101
Pub: Dec 17, 2013