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L.A. City Council planning committee to review recirculated
EIR for the Village at Playa Vista
One of the most anticipated environmental analyses in recent
years will soon be heard by a Los Angeles City Council committee that will help
decide whether the second stage of a Westside development will gain steam or
lose traction.
The recirculated environmental impact report for the
Village, Playa Vista’s commercial component of its planned community structure,
will come before the city’s Land Use and Planning Committee Tuesday, March
9th.
Playa Capital, the developers of the Village and Phase I, the
residential component of the affluent bedroom community, are confident that
their document has covered all the necessary bases, and hailed the support of
the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.
“There is tremendous
support citywide for the passage of the Village,” said Steven Sugerman, a Playa
Vista spokesman. “The big boost of support, especially from an organization like
the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is indicative of the support for job
creation and economic development.”
Sugerman said the project would create approximately 7,000 new
jobs and “hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and property tax revenues
over the years.”
The Village, which will feature 2,600 residential units,
175,000 square feet of office space, and 150,000 square feet of retail space,
was approved by the City Council in 2005. But local environmental groups quickly
filed legal action against the EIR and an appellate court sided with the
plaintiffs, striking down an earlier lower court ruling upholding the
environmental analysis.
The court found that the analysis was deficient
in three areas: land use impacts, mitigation of impacts on historical
archaeological resources and wastewater impacts.
The recirculated EIR was
made public in September, four years after the appellate court stripped the
project of its approvals.
María Elena Durazo, executive
secretary-treasurer of the labor federation, has indicated that her union will
lobby for the committee to approve the EIR, which will then move to the City
Council.
“We request that the City Council and the Department of City
Planning move quickly to revise the three sections of the EIR as required by the
court to bring the matter to the City Council for approval,” Durazo wrote in a
letter last month to City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who represents Playa Vista.
“Playa Vista represents great public policy and is an important center for
quality union jobs and union investment.”
The Neighborhood Council of
Westchester-Playa has overwhelmingly given its support to the Village, voting
18-2 last year in favor of the project.
“The Village will have a positive
effect on property values, and the impact of well-paying jobs coming to the area
cannot be understated,” said David Voss, a member of the council’s land use and
planning committee. “Attracting these well-paying jobs is also very good for the
local economy.”
Opponents of the project are still hoping that city
planners will listen to their objections to the Village.
“I don’t think
(the committee) should approve the EIR until Phase I is complete and fully
occupied,” said Marcia Hanscom, co-director of the Ballona Institute, a Playa
del Rey-based organization that works to preserve the Ballona Wetlands. “(Playa
Vista) says that they will have open space, but if it’s not contiguous, it
doesn’t help the wildlife (in Phase II).”
Sabrina Venskus, the attorney
who won the 2007 appeal, says the council should wait until after the budget
hearings have subsided before they consider re-examining the EIR.
“I have
a hard time understanding how the council can focus on one of the most important
land use issues of our times in the middle of a budget crisis,” Venskus said. “I
cannot fathom why they’re trying to address this important project
now.”
Venskus, who lives in Venice, said the approach that the City
Council has taken regarding many pending projects is to table them, and the
reason given is that it is working on arguably its most pressing matter —
reducing its $212 million budget deficit.
“Every time we try to bring
other projects before the council, we’re told that there’s no time to hear them
until after the budget (has been adopted),” she said.
Durazo also touched
on the economic impact that the second stage of the project would
bring.
“The Village phase alone represents more than $2 million of direct
investments in Los Angeles and is expected to create more than 5,000 union
construction jobs and hundreds of apprenticeships,” she said.
Hanscom
feels that there are questions surrounding Native American remains in Phase II
that she says have not been fully addressed.
“That’s a very big problem,”
Hanscom said. “In my view, they should be reburied in Phase II, where they were
discovered.”
Playa Vista agreed in 2008 to inter thousands of Native
American ancestral remains after a protracted standoff with the
Gabrieleno/Tongva tribe, which once inhabited the region below the bluffs of
Loyola Marymount University and as far west as the Ballona Wetlands in what is
now Playa del Rey.
The tribe’s most likely descendant Robert Dorame and
Playa Vista reached an accord brokered by Rosendahl to rebury the remains below
LMU during a ceremony attended by hundreds of tribal members, environmentalists
and city and state officials.
H.L. Boihem, who moved to Playa Vista in
2006, thinks the time has come to build the second stage of the planned
community.
“There’s been so many challenges to the Village,” Boihem said.
“There comes a time when you have to stop the divergence and start the
convergence.”
Voss agrees.
“There are those who wish that
everything would stay underdeveloped, but that’s not very realistic,” he said.
“I respect (Playa Vista’s opponents’) fervent desire to do whatever they can to
stop this exemplary project, but I think at this point they’re grasping at
straws.”
Venskus reiterated her desire to see the city postpone the
review of Phase II.
“This is the largest privately owned undeveloped
parcel in the city,” she noted. “There’s too much going on with the budget for
the council to focus on this important issue.”
But residents like Boihem
have encouraged Rosendahl to support the mixed-use project.
“My
expectation is given the circumstances that we are in today, I would like to
have him help us get what we want,” said the Playa Vista resident.
The
City Council is slated to review the EIR for the Village later this month.
Director James Cameron's science-fiction blockbuster has already redefined the art of special effects on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, raking in more than two billion dollars worldwide since its release.
James Cameron had to wait more than a decade for technology to catch up with his imagination, but when it did the results were spectacular, a visually stunning masterpiece which has been nominated for nine Academy Awards.
The American Film Institute has lauded "Avatar" as a "pioneering effort to unleash the human imagination... a film that has firmly established itself as a landmark in the way stories are told."
Set in the year 2154, "Avatar" tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic former Marine who is sent to live among the Na'vi, a humanoid race of blue aliens living on the exotic Earth-like moon, Pandora.
When Sully falls in love with a Na'vi native he rebels against his human controllers, leading them in a rebellion to save their way of life.
The film's pro-environment, anti-imperialist storyline has attracted criticism from conservatives but Cameron remains unapologetic.
"It's not an Oliver Stone-style bludgeon-you-over-the-head political film but it does have a political subtext," said Cameron, who is nominated for best director 12 years after he won the award for "Titanic."
Cameron was able to bring the world of Pandora and the Na'vi to life courtesy of experimental, state-of-the-art, "performance capture" cameras which the film-maker had helped to invent.
Working under blanket secrecy out of a giant converted warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Playa Vista, the cast of "Avatar" were rigged in bodysuits covered with small sensors, allowing 140 cameras to capture every movement.
Additionally, a tiny camera fixed to each actor's head allowed Cameron to record every muscle movement or expression in their faces. That information was then passed to animators who helped transform actors into Na'vi.
After this painstaking process was complete, animators then examined video of the actors in each scene to ensure that their Na'vi doubles accurately reflected every nuance of their performance.
Cameron barely took a day off for five years after production on his masterpiece got underway.
"It turned out to be more labor-intensive than expected," Cameron has said. "I took a day off about once every seven weeks, when I started slurring my words. I got the swine flu -- I took half day off for that."
Cameron's reputation for attention to detail is reflected in the research which went into creating the world of Pandora and the Na'vi.
University of Southern California linguistics expert Paul Frommer was hired to invent an entire language, a process which took months just to settle on rules for a basic grammatical structure.
"He didn't just tell me to build a language from scratch. He actually wanted to discuss points of grammar," said Frommer, who drafted an instruction manual -- "Speak Na'vi" -- used to teach actors.
Meanwhile every animal on Pandora were given Na'vi, Latin and common names, while an expert in botany from the University of California was hired to provide detailed scientific descriptions of plants created in the film.
Other experts hired for the film included an astrophysicist, a music professor, and an archaeologist.
Finally a team of writers and editors helped distill all this information -- most of which is never mentioned in the film -- into a 350-page manual dubbed the Pandorapedia, explaining the culture and science of the planet.