Council Approves Massive Downtown Development

The Los Angeles City Council gave the go-ahead Friday for a $650-million development project bordering the Harbor Freeway, despite protests from some council members that it will add congestion to already overburdened freeways.

The council approved, 9 to 4, an agreement between the Community Redevelopment Agency and City Centre Development, clearing the way for the first phase of construction on Metropolis, a massive downtown complex that will comprise three office buildings, a hotel and a retail center.

But several council members denounced the project, saying the 2.3-million-square-foot development bounded by 8th, 9th, and Francisco streets and the Harbor Freeway will only worsen a clogged freeway system.

“It’s going to strangle the city,” Councilman Marvin Braude said of the development. “We have to ask the fundamental question, ‘What’s happening to our city?’ Congestion has overpowered it.”

The downtown stretch of the Harbor Freeway is the most congested in California, and with the construction of Metropolis and other such projects, peak rush-hour traffic is expected to increase 150% by the end of the 1990s, said Bob Rogers, chief hearing examiner for the city’s Planning Commission.

Planning commissioners believe, however, that “the benefits of the project overrode the traffic impacts,” said Rogers, adding that the project’s developers will pay $34 million for undeveloped Convention Center space--half of which will go toward the center’s expansion and the other half for city uses including housing, transportation, child care and open space.

With the city about to consider an ordinance that would make downtown developers pay for the traffic problems caused by their projects, several council members expressed concern that Metropolis’ first phase of construction had a built-in exemption from such a law.

Steve Valenzuela, director of operations for the CRA, said it would be unfair to impose the traffic reduction improvement fee on the first phase of the development because the developers were negotiating with the agency long before such an ordinance was considered.

He said that if such a fee were approved, Metropolis’ builders would have to pay it for each of the development’s four later phases.

The first phase of the project will probably begin in January, with completion of the complex expected about the year 2001.