Playa Vista ruling won’t be reviewed

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request by Playa Vista to review an appellate court ruling that halted work on the development’s final phase. The 2nd District Court of Appeal had found that the project’s environmental impact report was flawed.

Playa Vista said in a statement that it had expected the result because the state’s high court accepts only a tiny percentage of cases for review. The company said it would work with Los Angeles officials to address the three issues that the appellate court decided needed further analysis.

In September, the appellate court found that the city’s approval of the big, mixed-use development’s Phase 2 was based on an environmental review that was “deficient in its analysis of land-use impacts, mitigation of historical archaeological resources and wastewater impacts.”

The project’s $1.1-billion second and final phase, the Village, calls for 2,600 housing units and 250,000 square feet of office and retail space on 111 acres. The retail space would include a supermarket and other businesses in the hope of reducing traffic outside the development.

Playa Vista’s first phase involved 3,246 housing units and more than 3.2 million square feet of office and retail space. The company is allowed to continue with first-phase construction.

Sabrina Venskus, lead counsel to the environmental groups that challenged Phase 2, said her clients would favor a much scaled-down final phase, with no housing and about 110,000 square feet of retail space. Her clients have recommended that the rest of the property set aside for Phase 2 be converted into a treatment wetland to clean storm runoff before it could reach the Ballona Wetlands and Santa Monica Bay.

Joe Geever of the Surfrider Foundation, one of the organizations that sued the city soon after it approved the second phase in 2004, said the high court’s denial would force the city to think about alternatives for the controversial project just south of Marina del Rey. But he acknowledged that “people living in Playa Vista were promised those amenities, and I think they should get them.”

Steve Soboroff, Playa Vista president, said the company expected to present further analysis of the three issues to the city “in a couple of months.”

“I’m confident it’s going to be remedied so we will get done with our ultimate vision,” he said.

Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said: “Now it’s up to the city and the developer to remedy those [issues]. The EIR conditions are fixable.”

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martha.groves@latimes.com