ANAHEIM : Plan to Move Auto Salvage Firm Denied

After about five hours of discussion before a capacity crowd, the city Planning Commission voted unanimously Monday against a proposal to allow Pick Your Part auto yard to move from Stanton to the site of a defunct landfill and vacant lot.

Nearly 100 residents living in Anaheim and Buena Park neighborhoods next to the lot donned matching yellow T-shirts and crowded the chambers to protest rezoning the area for commercial use, which would allow the wrecking yard to move.

“I personally have a strong feeling that if a project like this were proposed in your back yard, you would be standing where I am today,” Phil Steyerman, representative of the Stop Pick Your Part Committee, a homeowners group, told the council.

Another resident, Thomas F. Brown, who lives north of the site on Lincoln Avenue just east of Beach Boulevard, said: “Everybody knows what a garbage truck sounds like. Well, imagine one parked outside your home for eight hours a day.”

Proponents of the rezoning plan presented videos, slides and artists’ renditions of the revamped lot, hoping to prove to worried residents and the commission that rezoning the area for industrial use wouldn’t necessarily make the area an eyesore.

One environmental consultant distributed to committee members samples of various types of foliage that would be used to decorate the lot to keep it from looking like an ordinary junkyard.

“Pick Your Part is a recycling yard,” said Kent Spieller, another consultant for the auto yard. “It’s not your typical junkyard.”

Phillip Schwartze, a real estate consultant and a main spokesman for the proponents, said he was unsure if Pick Your Part would take the matter to the City Council, but insisted that something needs to be done with the vacant lot.

“We’ve really struggled to try to figure out what to do with this,” he said. “The neighbors don’t like change, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”