Hi:

This is to all of you Santa Monicans in the press who have published stories on our Park’s proposed development. I have just become aware of a story that requires reporting work, so I want to let you know about it.

The proposed developer Luzzatto turned in a request for continuance of the hearing by the City Council scheduled for 8/28 on the alleged ground that he was redrawing plans to keep some trailers at the current site along with his new development. At the time, we could tell by reading the story that it was nonsense, since he was really planning to leave about 10 trailers here, not a significant number when we started with 109 rent-controlled spaces.

What we have heard since then is the real reason he did this is the City has decided he needs to pay for some $4 M switch. At first the rumor was it was on Pennsylvania Ave. Then we heard it was below the Roberts building next door to us. If any of you wants to follow up on the story, I will tell you the name of the resident who knows from hearing it from someone official, not rumor.

We have been saying in our comments about what should be covered in the EIR about the proposed development here (in June 2010), in our comments about what was discussed in the Draft EIR (in January 2012), and then again preparing our list of what was still illegal in the Final EIR (in July 2012), that nothing of the infrastructure to support the enormous proposed development exists here. There is not even any drainage in the street past 26th Street! The City never tested the soil, even lied about having done so in the FEIR, after we repeatedly pointed out there were raw human sewage spills every month or so here before we filed the Failure to Maintain lawsuit in the late 90s, the repairs and payment of settlement damages for which led the owner to sell part interest in the Park to Luzzatto in 2006. And they never tested whatever the switch is about, either, along with 10 or 12 other necessary categories of environmental impacts.

The bigger story about this is why it is just bad planning and impossibly irresponsible official supervision by the Council to do developments by development agreement, the way they are doing them now and have been since apparently 2010. That’s when the two elements of a General Plan called LUCE (Land Use and Circulation Elements) were passed in July. It’s now two years later, and other than a beginning on the Bergamot Transit Center Area Plan, there has been no work on getting any standards in place for development. The City likes keeping the public in the dark about what is going to be approved and why. Then they and their developer crony contributors can just carve up the City whatever way they want to.

My husband Peter Naughton is a land use planner with 31 years’ experience in Europe and the US. He has a masters degree in land use planning from Cambridge in England. His first job as a planner was in Dublin for the company that is now after many mergers named Atkins, the company that did the EIR for the Hines project at the Papermate factory site, the 13th largest planning company in the world. He says the engineers then all said, in those days before EIRs, “It’s all about the pipes.” By that they meant not just pipes literally, but drainage, water supply, air quality effects, noise, traffic, pollution, and yes, pipes such as sewer pipes. “It’s all about the pipes” means in shorthand, developments can be done only in the proper environments with the proper infrastructure. Looking at a picture in what is euphemistically called a “float-up” and deciding based on the developer’s presentation to go ahead with a development agreement is pure insanity, to say nothing of illegal under CEQA.

Please follow up on this story. We will help you any way we can, to get out the word that all members of the current Council except McKeown are totally bought-and-paid-for by developers. Worse, all of them are incompetent and care nothing for the effects of their incompetence. It’s all about money and their future political careers to them. Moreover, even new people like Shari Davis who take money from Larmore and co., attorneys for developers, will be the same.

brenda barnes