LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles City Council voted today to move forward with several recommendations that would result in significant changes to the way development projects are considered.
The city staff recommendations, which were first vetted by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, include requiring developers to select environmental impact report consultants from a pre-approved city list and directing that the city’s 35 community plans be updated every six years.
The changes are prominent departures from how the city currently handles development projects; developers can pick their own EIR consultants, and some community plans — which provide guidelines for what can and cannot be built in a neighborhood — have not been updated in 15 years or more.
“This is not just a good thing to do, it is an essential thing to do,” Councilman Mike Bonin told the council before the 12-0 vote.
The recommendations also clump all general plan amendment requests by developers in a neighborhood to be considered together on a semi-annual basis so officials can consider multiple development projects at once and their potential impacts more comprehensively.
The changes stem from a motion, introduced last April by Councilman Jose Huizar and six other council members, that also received support from Mayor Eric Garcetti.
“We have expedited this because we know how important this is for us to ensure that we continue to provide neighborhoods with a sense of rules that we all know exist and we can all abide by and continue to control the growth that is happening in our neighborhoods,” Huizar said.
The next step is for city staff to formally draft several ordinances, which must be voted on by the full council before becoming law. But Huizar’s communications director, Rick Coca, characterized the council’s action as the “big vote” as it essentially means the panel approves of the ideas.
“It’s not just a vote on, ‘Hey, we’d like to look at doing this.’ We are asking the council to support an ordinance. The rest is just logistics of how do you do it,” Coca said.
The Department of City Planning was directed to report on the necessary resources and funding it would need to implement six-year updates for community plans, and to report with a draft ordinance to codify that requirement.
The vote also instructs the DCP to immediately implement administrative procedures to batch general plan amendments together and to begin working on a related ordinance making it the law in the city.
The DCP was also directed to immediately begin processing a requirement that all future EIRs associated with development be batched together and issue a request for qualifications to establish a pre-qualified list of environmental consultants.
The recommendations come as the influence of deep-pocketed developers in getting their projects approved by the city has received increased focus and sparked a number of moves by the council toward more transparency.
The council has come under scrutiny for granting general plan amendments to some major developers, essentially giving special permission to build a structure taller or larger or with different parking requirements that zoning in the area allows.
One recent example involves a high-rise by developer Rich Caruso near the Beverly Center. The council last month granted a number of general plan amendments — also called “spot zoning” — and approved the project even though it was 185 feet high and far above the 45 feet for which the area was zoned.
Opponents of the project pointed to a Los Angeles Times investigation that found Caruso and his affiliates have donated a total of $476,000 to all but one of the city’s 17 elected officials and their initiatives over the past five years.
What was not before the council today was the big idea behind Measure S, which is to halt all general plan amendments for two years or until the city updates its community plans.
Huizar told City News Service late last month that he opposes Measure S – – which is on the March 7 election ballot — because it would hurt the economy and prevent the city from building housing for the homeless. But Huizar credited the group with bringing some of the issues before the council today into the public debate.
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