Dear Friends and Members of Santa Monica Mid City Neighbors,

• Comment Deadline Today – Recirculated EIR Village Trailer Park D.A. Project. Email Jing Yeo, Special Projects Manager, before 5:30 p.m. – jing.yeo@smgov.net [See analysis of problems below.]

• Squirm Night – We have withdrawn our sponsorship! Santa Monica Daily Press has set new rules for their event, which has excluded certain candidates. Tonight, many plan to picket the event. Those who attend have been asked to show their support for excluded candidates by wearing green.

Understanding the problems inherent with development not properly regulated is key to understanding how local politics relates to national politics. Betting on wealthy developers to invest their money responsibly to increase our quality of life rather than maximize their profits may be betting on the wrong horse. Most often, one person’s profit is another person’s loss. Only when all people are taken into account can we be sure that all people will benefit. Please make certain that you are taken into account by emailing your comments on the proposal for Village Trailer Park and by following our local race as well as our national race to determine in what direction we will go in the years to come.

Gregg Heacock
President of Santa Monica Mid City Neighbors

P.S. Check out our website–http://www.midcityneighbors.org/–for information on candidates and links to their websites. The one website not listed yet is Bob Seldon’s–http://www.seldonforcouncil.com/Home.html–which I include here so that you might see it along with the others. Below you will find more information on the Village Trailer Park D.A. Project:

Look up Planning Department comments on Village Trailer Park Development Agreement Project: http://www01.smgov.net/planning/planningcomm/environmentalreports.html

Zina Josephs has contributed the following analysis as a resource for people writing comments to the City before today’s 5:30 Deadline:

1) Cumulative Impacts – The Village Trailer Park project should not be studied or considered in isolation from both the nearby projects: the Colorado Creative Studios project has been sent back for re-design by the Architectural Review Board, and the Roberts Center has just completed its DEIR comment period.

None of these three projects should be considered in isolation from one another because:

a) The City of Santa Monica applied for and was awarded a $652,500 grant from HUD and DOT to develop a Master Plan for 140 acres of industrial land, including Bergamot Station, Bergamot Transit Village, and the Mixed-Use Creative District. This area includes parcels between Cloverfield and Centinela, and between Colorado and Exposition Blvd.

To put 140 acres in perspective, it would be roughly equivalent to the downtown area from Ocean Avenue to Lincoln, and from Wilshire to Pico. The streets and intersections in this Master Plan zone are already clogged with traffic at many hours of the day.

b) CEQA prohibits piecemeal environmental review of projects. All of the developments in the 140-acre Master Plan area will have a cumulative impact that won’t be apparent if each individual project does a separate EIR in isolation from the whole.

2) On page 2-1 of the Recirculated DEIR, the proposed Village Trailer Park project now consists of 343,970 sq ft, with 377 residential units (161 apartments and 216 condos), 25,940 sq ft of neighborhood-serving retail, with a maximum height of 57 feet, 10 mobile home space, and 799 parking spaces.

It states that 99 of the apartments would be “subject to rent control,” but what would the rent on those units start at?

3) On page 2-25, the revised Village Trailer Park project will generate 2,138 daily car trips.

How does this meet the LUCE goal of “No new net trips”?

4) On page 2-3, “Increased traffic volumes would result in significant and unavoidable impacts at 11 intersections:

• 20th and Olympic

• Yale and Broadway

• Stewart and Colorado

• Stanford and Colorado

• Centinela and Broadway

• Centinela and Colorado

• Centinela and Olympic

• Centinela and the I-10 westbound ramp

• Bundy and Olympic

• Bundy and Pico

• Bundy and the I-10 eastbound ramp

In other words, every major north-south and east-west street in the area would be affected.

And on page 2-4, it describes increased traffic levels along neighborhood streets, including Yale, Stanford, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska.

Why is that acceptable? And why should a project with this tremendous increase in density be allowed to go forward when it results in these negative impacts?

5) I would like to see a Draft EIR for the alternative project that AIA architect Ron Goldman proposed to the Planning Commission and the City Council:

• one that would maintain half of the current mobile home spaces on the property, not just 10;
• one that would preserve half of the beautiful mature trees on the property;
• one that would not overwhelm the residential neighborhood across Colorado Avenue; and
• one that would not generate 2,138 daily car trips.
=