[img]1862|left|John Walsh||no_popup[/img]A judge has dealt a major blow to the Los Angeles real estate Mafia's efforts to cravenly spur huge commercial development in many parts of Historic Hollywood. He called a new zoning plan for the area “fatally flawed,” and said the document should be repealed.
Hurray.
In a tentative 41-page ruling issued on Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Allan J. Goodman said the city's self-important, so-called leaders failed miserably to comply with the state's environmental law when they unanimously approved an update to the Hollywood Community Plan, which mapped out absurdly lax limits for high-rise crazy development projects in this scrappy neighborhood of ours.
The misbegotten plan sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to allow practically unlimited construction of much, much bigger buildings in most parts of Hollywood, particularly around underground transit stops and directly on top of an active earthquake fault.
Three brave civic groups were thought (at the time) by the MSM to have absolutely no chance whatsoever of judicial success sued the city last summer over the just-now-bankrupted-by-court-decision dingbat plan. They said, rightly, that the L.A. City Council and their city planner-toadies purposely had relied on wholly inaccurate data and had failed to properly consider serious alternatives to this straight-to-hell community development plan the court has just now ruled was illegally foisted on us.
“A clear-cut victory for all three plaintiffs and the community,” said Frank Angel, one of the attorneys for www.Save Hollywood.org, one of the three groups.
Mr. Rob Wilcox, spokesman for City Atty. Mike Feuer, once again on the sad end of the judicial stick, whimpered to the press that the City Attorney's office staff had not been notified of any tentative ruling on the Hollywood Plan. That's called playing dumb, a ploy the office’s shysters are great at.
A deflated spokesman for Mayor Eric Garcetti, who championed and shepherded this blown-away, deformed community plan while a Hollywood Councilman before ascending on a silver cloud to the exalted office of L.A. (Big Deal) Mayor, utterly failed to save face. He shrugged off the whole sick mess with a statement that the Mayor's staff was looking into the matter.
Robert Silverstein, who represents the La Mirada Avenue Neighborhood Assn. of Hollywood, described the tentative ruling as a “significant setback” for Mr. Garcetti, who represented portions of Hollywood for what his constituents felt were 12 painfully long years.
“His 'vision' includes height- and density-busting projects that push out longtime stakeholders, harm neighborhoods, overtax our infrastructure, and overburden our already gridlocked streets and freeways,” Mr. Silverstein said in an email. “And he intended to emulate this plan citywide.”
In his tentative ruling, Judge Goodman said the city's plan, and its accompanying Environmental Impact Report, contain “errors of fact and of law.”
The decision, Mr. Angel said, means the city will need to start all over again from scratch with its now thoroughly discredited approval process (which will take years to come). This time they will need to provide much more accurate( non-rigged) population data and to improve the analysis of alternatives.
This serves as an immense embarrassment for Mayor Garcetti and all 15 of his City Council members! Read this and weep, gentlemen and only one lady.
In addition, it will prevent the city from relying on the bogus zoning changes dictated to worthless local politicians by the mega-developers that have functioned as an oh-so-essential part of the plan's birth that has been aborted, including provisions that allowed for even greater nasty density on certain major Tinseltown streets. (Beverly Palmer is an attorney for the group Fix the City.)
The hapless City Council members voted unanimously, as usual, to update the doomed Hollywood Community Plan in June. At that time, bought-off, phony, fervent supporters described it as a visionary document, roughly equivalent to the Holy Bible with blueprints,that would magically allow Hollywood to complete a 20-year transformation from a hotspot of violent criminal activity into a a hotspot of non-violent civil criminal activity. It falsely promised a vibrant center of (menial) jobs, (ugly) residential towers and (lightly-used) subway transportation… all the while studiously ignoring the desperate plight of larger and larger numbers of displaced Hollywood homeowners, evicted-for-demolition Hollywood apartment dwellers and smugly-purged Hollywood owners of precious small businesses.
Civil prophets accurately warned that this new metastasizing future growth would hopelessly super-snarl already notoriously bad traffic and destroy views for those who live in Hollywood's hillsides.
These prescient critics also said that our city did not have the proper infrastructure to support the vast increase in population that was plan-envisioned by the city's elected rapacious pols who (not coincidentally) unashamedly pocketed huge amounts of election campaign contributions over and over again from these same callous multi-millionaire developers who thought they were going to get mega-rich quick by the politically-correct gang-raping of historic Hollywood.
But we won.
Mr. Walsh may be contacted at WWW.HOLLYWOODHIGHLANDS.ORG and JWALSHCONFIDENTIAL.WORDPRESS.COM
