L.A. Considers Power Over Environment Impact Studies : Construction: The proposal would no longer let developers choose their own experts to prepare reports on the anticipated impact of their projects.

The Los Angeles City Planning Department is looking at tightening its grip over the influential consultants who analyze the environmental impacts of large development proposals by having the city take over from the developers the right to choose the analysts.

Developer-lobbyist Robert Wilkinson, a former north San Fernando Valley councilman, predicted last week that the plan is “going to be objected to by everybody in the development world.”

The proposal would end a little-understood system used at City Hall--and permitted by state law--under which the consultants who prepare environmental impact reports, known as EIRs, are picked and paid by the developers whose projects they study.

The proposal is “only in the thinking stages,” Frank Eberhard, the department’s deputy chief, said Thursday. But, he said, “I like the idea at this point.” However, last week Eberhard told the Construction Services Committee, a council advisory committee, that the plan was being prepared for submission to the council.

Planning Department sources say the council’s views on the plan will be solicited--even though the change could be implemented by the department on its own--because tampering with the EIR process is politically delicate.

While avoiding any admission that the present system has produced biased, final environmental reviews, Eberhard told the advisory committee that having the city select and hire the consultants “hopefully would add to the trust in the city’s environmental documents.”

“Environmentalists and homeowners may feel more comfortable if it’s not done by the developers,” Eberhard said in an interview Thursday.

Many cities and counties select and manage the consultants who prepare the environmental impact reports, billing developers for the cost. Supporters of this method say that when the consultants are chosen by developers, planning officials can’t be sure they are getting proper warning of harmful environmental effects.

Environmental impact reports are critical documents in the approval process for large-scale development projects. The EIRs examine the environmental effects of a project and propose ways to mitigate detrimental impacts. Often the corrective measures proposed can cost developers millions of dollars.

Not only is the city considering hiring the consultants itself to do the environmental reviews, but it is also contemplating regulating the contacts--such as the number and types of conferences and meetings--between the consultants and the developers to ensure that the developers do not skew the process.

Under the proposal, the developers would pay for the EIRs, as they do now.

The entire proposal recently drew sharp criticism from developer-attorney Gail Gordon.

“It means the developers are paying for the environmental preparation but will have very little input, if any, into the documents,” said Gordon, who, like Wilkinson, is a member of the developer-dominated Construction Services Committee, a panel established by city ordinance to advise the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

Eberhard got the developer feedback after he briefed the committee about the nascent plan at its March 20 meeting at City Hall.

At that meeting, Gordon said the proposal would pose a “dramatic policy shift” and warned Eberhard that approval would make developers “very, very unhappy.”

Eberhard said developers should favor the change because it would remedy their complaints that the process is too slow.

City processing of EIR documents is often slowed now by consultants who produce skewed EIRs filled with “paeans of praise” for their clients’ projects, Eberhard said.

Such self-serving efforts invariably waste everyone’s time because the Planning Department rejects biased EIRs and insists that the developer and his consultant prepare a valid document, he said. The documents must be endorsed by the city before construction can begin.

If the consultants are working directly for the city, that will eliminate the tendency to produce overly lenient reports and the final documents can be produced more quickly, Eberhard said. “We can spend up to six months negotiating with a consultant about what we feel is reasonably objective,” he said.

The public also can gain from a faster process, Eberhard said. The costs to the developer of delays are invariably passed on to the public. “You and I end up paying for it all,” Eberhard said.