Resembling undertakers more than anything else, the development team that thought up the hotly disputed Entrada Office Tower building at the southern edge of Culver City, dramatically filed into Council Chambers — as a body, so to speak — Wednesday evening.
Was it a psychological game intended to intimidate?
There were about 15 of them.
They looked uncommonly imposing, especially because the room was empty.
After all, it still was half an hour before a momentous meeting of the Planning Commission that would nearly fill Chambers with dozens of angry residents who have spent months conducting impressive research into arcane corners of the project.
Mostly tall, mostly slender, mostly under 50, and almost uniformly attired in dark suits, the smartly striding team of almost- morticians had come to bury the considerable residential opposition to their project.
Methodology
Whether through cerebral persuasion or for other reasons, the builders scored a brilliant triumph, sailing right down the dais with only a scant blip of objection.
It can be debated whether finesse or their raw and awesome power won the day.
This carefully plotted victory will advance the builders’ enormously ambitious scheme to the City Council for final approval later this spring.
The heavily protested Environmental Impact Report was unanimously approved.
But the vote on other accoutrements, notably the request to grant a sizable — some say tricky — exception to Culver City’s 56-foot height limit, encountered a snag.
Did They Worry?
In the main, as a double-barreled architectural and commercial strategy, Centinela Development Partners muscled through Council Chambers without producing even a miniature bead of perspiration.
A lone voice on the Planning Commission was raised against them, by Andy Weissman, a candidate for the City Council in the April 8 election.
On the grounds that the proposed Entrada Office Tower, 6161 Centinela, is both too tall and too bulky, Mr. Weissman rejected the builders’ contention that the Tower would be comparable to nearby buildings.
“The magnitude of the building struck me,” he said.
“It almost was not the height so much as it was the mass of the building. It is very tall and it is very wide. After all, it is 340,000 square feet.
“To me, it seemed very intrusive.”
Mr. Weissman’s recommendation that the developers compromise with a mid-rise office building in the range of 110 feet, about 11 stories, never left the ground.
To a casual listener at the Planning Commission, it may have seemed the opposing parties were talking about different projects.
In testimony before the Commission, the tightly scripted builders kept referring to the 13-story Entrada Office Tower a modest structure a little over 100 feet.
Stubbornly, the mostly Westchester residents insisted on referring to the Entrada as pointing 220 feet into the air.
Despite the drastic disparity in their measurements, both sides were technically correct.
The Office Tower is a little over 100 feet all right. But the full project measures 220 feet since the 13-story office building is to be perched atop a 6- or 7-story parking structure.
The 220-foot distance would make the total project roughly twice as tall as any nearby building.
A Time for Yawning
The tediously long evening — the rhetoric-heavy 7-hour session did not end until 1 this morning —marked the intersection of a political oddity for Culver City.
Nearly all of the thundering opposition to the hulk of a project came, oddly but logically, from Los Angeles — mainly persons who live just over the city line, in the Westchester Bluffs area.
Sightlines Obscured
Vociferous as they were, the residents probably are not going to win any oratorical contests. But for sheer comprehensive and compelling research data, they shook the walls with the soundness of their reasoning.
They mounted a half-dozen lines of resistance, but their most passionate arguments seemed reserved for aesthetics — how their once unadulterated views of the city will be obstructed, “ruined,” they said, by the Entrada Tower as if it were a splotchy ink blot in the middle of their personal screens.
With the help of CDs, Bluffs residents graphically, and emphatically, made their points.
The Planning Commissioners were listening, intently, but they decided the financial and aesthetic benefits to Culver City were far greater.
