|
 |
|
|
Community Fights Last Phase of Playa Vista
by Dennis Romero From L.A. City Beat, Thursday September 30, 2004 www.lacitybeat.com Native Americans and environmentalists vow to fight second phase of contentious Playa Vista project If, 200 years from now, your remains were moved to make way for high-end apartments and condos, you'd at least hope your surviving relatives would be bummed. And so it is for some Native Americans, who fear that a more than 200-year-old Gabrielino-Tongva burial site just east of the Ballona Wetlands will soon be paved over with 2+2s and modern living, now that the Los Angeles City Council has given its approval to Phase 2 of the controversial Playa Vista development south of Marina del Rey. Can you say Poltergeist? It's bad enough for Native Americans that their land was taken and their people were nearly killed off centuries ago. Now government is saying that one's sacred legacy is subject to the whim and fashion of the power elite of any given era. Who knows? Maybe someday in the distant future, Cyber-Gabrielinos will arrive and build monuments to their contemporary presence on the site of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels or the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. As it is, the burial site at Phase 2, which contained the remains of at least 160 and as many as 391 Native Americans near the Westchester bluffs, has already been excavated, the bones put in onsite storage. Native American activists want the artifacts returned to where they were found and the area to be preserved, but this would require the developer to reroute a manmade waterway that's part of the Phase 2 site plan. "It's the largest burial ground of its kind in modern L.A. history," says Rob Wood of the California Native American Heritage Commission. "We're arguing they need to put it back. They need to move their ditch and preserve the site." In a 10-1 vote last week, the City Council glossed over burial grounds, traffic concerns, and environmentalists' fist-shaking (tree-huggers want the area to be redeveloped as wetlands to filter the area's filthy water runoff). So the next move for defenders of the burial site and for the environmentalists is going to court. Activists foresee at least two likely lawsuits stemming from the development of Phase 2. One will probably come from Native Americans who believe that the developer's 10-year agreement on artifacts, signed in 2001 with members of Gabrielino-Tongva, is invalid (finding an entire, seemingly intact cemetery was not part of the deal, they say). Another will likely come from environmentalists who argue that Phase 2 would violate the California Environmental Quality Act and federal clean water standards that prohibit pollution of nearby wetlands and the Pacific, more than a mile west. "The developers made promises 10 years ago concerning protecting the Ballona Wetlands and they've now reneged on those promises," argues Rex Frankel, president of the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project. "Federal law prohibits putting polluted water into federally declared wetlands [which lie to the west]. If you pave over an area, you have to clean up your runoff, and you're not allowed to put any pollution into any federally protected wetlands." The developer, Playa Capital, says see you in court. After all, numerous lawsuits since the early '90s have been technically unsuccessful. In 2001, the developer did make a deal to sell 192 acres to the state and donated another 291 acres to allow California to preserve the area along Ballona Creek, west of Lincoln Boulevard, as wetlands. A bit of a victory, perhaps, given that environmentalists had argued Playa Vista was paving over one of the last, great natural wetlands remaining along the California Coast - home to the California least tern, the California red-legged frog, and the Riverside fairy shrimp, among other endangered species. The property to be preserved amounts to 70 percent of the land Playa Capital originally intended to develop. "These same people have one goal, and that's to stop the project," says Playa Vista spokesman Steve Sugarman. "They have sued the project 19 times and they have lost every time." Sugerman notes that the litigious factions could contradict each other. Some Native Americans want the project's federally mandated creek channel, dug adjacent to the planned structures, moved to preserve burial grounds. But pressure from environmentalists concerned about the natural flow of creeks in the area, he says, helped push the channel to its present location. "There's nothing to tell us we wouldn't find remains somewhere else if we move the corridor," Sugarman says, noting that the area is rich with artifacts. Playa Vista and others spin the development, to include 2,600 housing units - apartments, condos and homes - and long-promised retail space of 150,000 square feet, as "smart growth." The region is expected to grow by 6 million people in 2025, and the present-day housing market is already crammed with prospective buyers and renters who are squeezed by high prices and rents. Nearly 15 percent of the dwellings in Phase 1 and 2 are designated as affordable, with rents starting at $600 a month, and many will be set aside for public workers such as police officers and firefighters, Sugarman says. "This is a model for how to deal with growth," he says. Many area residents - 1,200 of whom packed a meeting about the project at Venice High School last week - are concerned mainly about the traffic generated by the additional housing. Although Playa Vista was first pitched as a self-contained urban center where residents could live, eat, shop, and work, so far Phase 1 has been mostly a bedroom community. Neighbors fume daily over the gridlock that happens along Lincoln Boulevard, from Los Angeles International Airport to Santa Monica. The developer has promised to "mitigate" the traffic by helping to widen Lincoln, adding a connector road to Sepulveda Boulevard and purchasing five buses for nearby Santa Monica and Culver City municipal lines. But some residents are wary. They say Playa Vista hasn't presented them with a study on what impacts Phase 1 has had on area traffic so far, and so they don't want to add to the traffic nightmare. Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who's running for mayor, agrees, and his was the only council ! vote against Phase 2. "I had made a promise to people here on the Westside that I would hold off on supporting Playa Vista Phase 2 until such time as Playa Vista Phase 1 was completed and we had the full impact reports on traffic and the environment," Villaraigosa says. "And I am concerned about the Native American burial site." Playa Vista says it has been careful with the remains, consulting with Native American and archeological experts, and will rebury them at an appropriate site nearby. "There are hundreds of pages of documents governing how to handle these remains according to federal and state laws," says Playa Vista's Sugerman. "We have people working on their hands and knees daily," he says. "The remains will be reburied at the site. We're awaiting instructions from most likely descendents." And while Playa Vista states that its Native American consultants are okay with the reburial, Anthony Morales, tribal chairman and chief of the Gabrielino/Tongva of San Gabriel band of Mission Indians, says there's widespread support in the local Native American community to keep the remains where they were found. "Everyone's in agreement to save that cemetery," he says. Adds Wood of the California Native American Heritage Commission, "There was a Native American village in that area. What we've been saying all along is that we don't want to stop this project, but we want to preserve the burial ground." Perhaps ironically, Phase 2 will be called "The Village."
BY HELGA CARR The Argonaut, September 30, 2004 More than 1,200 residents attended a town hall meeting opposing Playa Vista Phase II, co-sponsored by Neighborhood Councils, groups and environmentalists at Venice High School Auditorium on Monday, September 20th. The goal of the meeting was to marshal opposition to approval of the Playa Vista Phase II project by the Los Angeles City Council Wednesday, September 22nd. Despite the large turnout for the meeting at Venice High School, the Mar Vista Community Council chair Tom Ponton presented 5,000 signed petitions - more than 2,000 from Mar Vista residents - opposing Los Angeles City Council approval of the project, to local Los Angeles Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who was invited to attend and address the audience. Sponsors of the Monday, September 20th meeting included Mar Vista Community Council -the city-certified Mar Vista Neighborhood Council - Grass Roots Venice Neighborhood Council, Westchester Neighborhood Council, the Ballona Ecosystem Project, the Surfrider Foundation, the Ballona Wetlands Trust, and members of the Gabrielino/Tongva Indian Tribal Council. Sponsors of the town hall asked Miscikowski if she would meet with them Tuesday, September 21st - the day before the City Council hearing on Playa Vista - to discuss traffic mitigation and other issues. Miscikowski told them they could come to her office at 9 a.m. Tom Francis of Ballona Land Trust said if the City of Los Angeles approved Phase II, "we might have to litigate." Rex Frankel of Ballona Ecosystem Education Project asked the city to "look at the big picture," saying that the entire Los Angeles basin had been underwater in the past and was a flood plain, and should be treated as one. "Should you be mad about this stupid development?" Frankel asked the audience, who cheered and applauded, shouting "yes." Frankel said since the City of Los Angeles is under federal orders with the Clean Water Act to clean up the Santa Monica Bay, preserving the Ballona Wetlands to allow it to remain a watershed and cleaning the bay was more cost-effective than developing the project. "The taxpayers paid $225 million to Playa Vista for the parcels to be preserved, Playa Vista didn't give that to the taxpayers," said Frankel. Francis told the audience to stand up if they opposed the Playa Vista project and nearly all of the 1,200 attendees stood up, applauding and cheering. Francis said a permanent end should be put to the experience of the "Playa Vista mistake." Francis pointed out that the City of Los Angeles claims there is an extreme housing shortage, but the city allowed thousands of homes to be bulldozed by Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that operates four city-owned airports. "I implore you to wait - hold off on Playa Vista Phase II - you're hearing from the community tonight," Francis told Miscikowski. Julie Inouye of We CAHRE - a local organization that was organized to keep the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital open -told the audience that she had been part of an early group to study environmental impacts of Playa Vista. "We had great visions of what could be developed here, but after the Playa Capital Company took over and the visitor center went up, those visions of greatness unraveled," said Inouye. Joe Geever, Southern California Regional Manager for Surfrider Foundation, said the city is missing the big picture. The loss of wetlands and water pollution are destroying the coastal environment, Geever said. The city was given eight years to comply in cleaning urban water runoff through the Clean Water Act compliance, said Geever. John Tommy Rosas, a member of the Gabrielino/Tongva Indian Tribal Council told the audience, "You can't live outside of nature." Rosas spoke about Indian burial remains found during bulldozing at the Playa Vista development, alleging that the developers don't recognize indigenous people. Miscikowski said that because of the work of all these groups and individuals, Playa Vista had downsized its original plan, and a methane gas ordinance had been approved. Miscikowski said she had met with Bill Pope, Mar Vista Community Council traffic analyst, and had received information regarding traffic mitigation. The audience interrupted Miscikowski, shouting, "just say no" several times. The councilwoman also praised the purchase by the state of land from Playa Vista for preservation. Miscikowski said the Indian burial remains issue was being handled in a respectful manner. "We can't stop the world," said Miscikowski, bringing loud "boos" from the audience. (for the rest of the story, and another story on the City Council vote, go to www.argonautnewspaper.com)
|
