I feel the need to respond to two recent articles in thefrontpageonline.com.
In an article of May 21 (“Doesn’t Anybody Know When to Leave the Stage, Gracefully?”), Mr. Noonan implies that people don’t seem to know when a decision is lost.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is the only one who doesn’t know her run for the Presidency is over.
But the fight about the Entrada Office Tower project is not over.
The Entrada fight is not like a sorority house pillow fight.
There, when the housemother (the City Council) says to stop, everyone goes back to what they were doing before the fight started.
It is more similar to a WWF caged death match. It will go on until only one is left standing. To put it simply, the fat lady ain’t sung yet.
According to the article, “Two properly empowered bodies at City Hall, following all legal procedures, have approved the Entrada building plans next to the Radisson Hotel.”
A Couple Examples
If this is true, and all legal procedures have been followed, the Carlyle Group should have no worry about the lawsuit. It couldn’t be true, as the lawsuit claims, that the two properly empowered bodies approved a flawed environmental impact report.
I mean, when was the last time Culver City experienced problems with CEQA compliance lawsuit.
1993? 1987?
Or was it in April of this year when a Superior Court judge ruled that the Culver City had violated the state law when it sold a developer a public parking lot in the Hayden Tract.
And this lawsuit is not about methane, as the one article implies. It is about the deficiencies in the EIR.
About Those Impacts
Even the EIR acknowledges that constructing the project will have certain significant and unavoidable impacts on the immediate and surrounding areas in air quality, cultural resources, noise and traffic.
Also, in addition to an inadequate analysis and unsupported conclusions of the EIR, the city’s failure to consider any feasible project alternatives is a problem.
The deficiencies include the interruption of views. Former Councilman Alan Corlin stated in a May 20 article about the lawsuit (“Entrada Flares Again: Westchester Residents Bring Suit Over Their View”), “I know of no one who has a ‘right’ to a view.”
If this is correct, why did the producers of the EIR spend a significant portion of their presentation on describing what the eye sees?
Neutral Party Needed
We read in the news about cases where people are forced to remove trees and building plans are not approved because of the blockage of views. The problem is that the criteria for determining the blockage of views are very subjective.
The Carlyle Group says the blockage isn’t significant. The Westchester Bluff residents say it is significant. An unbiased arbiter is needed.
The suit also devotes space to the city’s building height limit of 56 feet. This is in an ordinance enacted in 1990. It expressed the will of the people to limit building heights.
Culver City officials have argued that the project site is in a designated redevelopment area, which allows a developer the option to request a height variance. And while ignoring the 56-foot limit may not be a CEQA violation, it does show how the City Council ignores the will of the people.
What About Tenants?
The developer’s representatives have focused on the economic incentives that they claim Culver City and its immediate neighbors will see from the project over the next several years. The company anticipates that the project could generate in excess of $1 million annually for the city.
But there are no tenants lined up to lease the office space. So we may not achieve that revenue.
We don’t know what the demand for office space will be when the building is complete. And we have no experience dealing with a building of this height. So we have no idea what the expenses may be.
What if there is a fire on the top floor. Can our current firefighting equipment handle it? This million dollars a year in revenue is still very questionable.
Lastly, in a May 20 article, a City Hall cynic is quoted as saying, “I can’t believe anybody would spend big money on this lawsuit.”
I find that interesting.
When talking with Culver City residents about the project, most people I talked to said, “I can’t believe that the city would approve this project.”
I guess it depends on who you talk to as to what people can’t believe.
Tom Supple may be contacted at
tomjsup@ca.rr.com
