LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles City Council today will vote on several recommendations that would make significant changes to the way development projects are considered.
The recommendations, which were approved by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, call for developers to be required to select environmental impact report consultants from a pre-approved city list and would require the city to update its 35 community plans every six years.
The changes would be 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.
The recommendations would 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 possible 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.
“Our community plans affect scores of communities, each as distinct and vital as the next, and we must require that these plans are regularly updated to allow stakeholders to weigh in on what they want their communities to look like,” said Huizar on Jan. 31, the day the committee approved the recommendations.
“We need to expedite this process so we can bring accountability and transparency back into our general plan and community plan review processes — the public deserves no less.”
Huizar chairs the Planning and Land Use Management Committee.
Although the actions to be considered by the council today instruct city staff to draft several ordinances, which would then have to be voted on by the full council before becoming law, Huizar’s communications director said today’s vote is the “big vote” as it essentially means the council 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 to do you do it,” said Huizar spokesman Rick Coca.
The recommended actions before the council today would instruct the Department of City Planning 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.
An approval vote today would also instruct the DCP to immediately implement administrative procedures to batch general plan amendments together and to begin working on an ordinance to make general plan amendments batching the law.
An approval vote would also instruct the DCP 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 recently come under scrutiny for granting general plan amendments to some major developers, essentially granting 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 that the area was zoned for.
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 is not before the council today is Measure S’ big idea, which is to halt all general plan amendments for two years or until the city updates its community plans.
Huizar told City News Service on Jan. 31 that he opposes Measure S 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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