Panel OKs Wilmington Zoning Plan

A Los Angeles City Council committee unanimously approved changes in the long-awaited Wilmington-Harbor City community plan Tuesday, paving the way for the plan to come before the full council sometime next month.

However, the Planning and Land Use Management Committee delayed action for three weeks on a proposal to limit the number of oil wells in the Wilmington Oil Field and on two proposed zoning changes in Harbor City.

Mario Juravich, deputy for City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, whose district includes Wilmington and Harbor City, said the delays should not affect the plan’s progress.

“We think we can have this before the full City Council in five weeks,” Juravich said after Tuesday’s hearing.

A proposal to create a Historic preservation overlay zone in the area south of Banning Park was not addressed Tuesday. The proposal, which has divided residents in the neighborhood, must go through a number of separate committees and public hearings.

The updated community plan, which will govern growth of the area until 2010, has been winding through the city bureaucracy for more than six years. The revision would significantly alter a 1970 plan that has allowed new factories and heavy industry to be built alongside residential neighborhoods in Wilmington.

About 20 Wilmington residents attending the hearing were ecstatic at the committee’s strong support of the plan.

“I think we have to call this a first for us. We are actually going to get some real planning happening for Wilmington,” said Peter Mendoza, president of the Wilmington Home Owners, the largest neighborhood group in the community.

Wilmington residents have contended for years that their community is the “poor stepsister” of Los Angeles, and planning officials acknowledge that Wilmington has the highest concentration of land zoned for industry of any community in the city.

The revised plan approved by the committee Tuesday seeks to reduce the impact of industrial development by creating buffers around residential zones and by changing zoning in east Wilmington to allow only single-family homes in several mostly residential areas. The plan allows the city to set up timetables requiring incompatible industries to move. The plan would also encourage industrial development in an area farther east of the residential neighborhoods.

Wilmington residents expressed particular pride Tuesday in their successful efforts to persuade the Planning Commission to extend the residential-only zoning to several neighborhoods that were not included in previous drafts of the plan.

“We are very hopeful about the decision to change the zoning to (residential) in east Wilmington. That has always been one of our goals,” said Joann Wysocki, vice president of the Wilmington Home Owners. “Our aim is to start improving the area, to get people to live there and upgrade it.”

Although Councilman Hal Bernson indicated early in the hearing that the committee would probably approve the revisions, an attorney for Exxon persuaded the committee to delay discussion on the oil field for three weeks. Joan A. Wolff told the commission that reclassifying the Wilmington Oil Field as an urbanized area, as proposed in the plan, would force the company to cap several operating wells. In an urbanized area, fewer oil wells per acre are allowed to operate.

“Exxon cannot simply pick up its oil wells and move them to a different location,” Wolff said.

In an interview Wednesday, Wolff said she could not say what the potential effect of the reclassification would be.

Three other representatives of businesses that could potentially be affected by the proposed restrictions also spoke in opposition. The owner of an auto salvage yard said the plan would prevent expansion of his business, and an attorney for Gunn Van Lines, a moving and storage company in a residential neighborhood south of Pacific Coast Highway, complained that new zoning could force the company to relocate.

The committee delayed action on two proposals involving height restrictions in the Harbor Pines area after a resident said she needed more time to find out how they would affect her neighborhood.