Should developers’ role in environmental impact reports be changed? : AGAINST : DAVE BROWN

BACKGROUND

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has proposed changing a controversial system that allows developers to hire the consultants to evaluate the environmental impact of their proposed projects. Under the mayor’s plan, whose aim is to make EIRs more impartial, developers’ projects would be handled more quickly if the city chose the consultant. But critics believe all consultants should be selected by the city.

Dave Brown, 56, is a history professor at Los Angeles Valley College and vice president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation. He is also chairman of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains Task Force. He has lived in Calabasas 24 years and has two grown children.

Q. What is your opinion of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s plan to allow builders to speed up their projects if they allow the city to select an independent consultant to write the environmental impact report?

A. I think the city should pick the consultant every time. If it’s the right thing to do, they should do it. They shouldn’t create voluntary incentives to get people to do it. Just giving the developer some little promise to speed up a development isn’t solving the problem. The builders who don’t want to do it right will have the muscle to speed up their projects anyway.”

Q. Do you think many developers would take advantage of the mayor’s proposal?

A. “I would think most of them would ignore it. It’s not enough. It’s a scrap of meat being thrown to the wolves so to speak and it isn’t going to really change the situation.”

Q. Do you think the city and county should select consultants to perform the environmental reviews and then require the developers to pay for them?

A. “I think that’s the best way to do it. Then you won’t have the consultant beholden to the developer for his business. If we’re really going to have a serious environmental review process, the public agencies should take a much bigger role in it.”

Q. The builders contend that public planners already exert a great deal of control on the EIR process. They say planners frequently kick back environmental reports that are incomplete or inaccurate. True?

A. “The planning staffs are supposed to check out the arguments raised by opponents and proponents of a project and make an independent recommendation. But the county virtually has the developer write its staff report. The staff report contains mostly propaganda from the developer. So the watchdogs are virtually providing no oversight.”

Q. Why are well-researched environmental impact reports important?

A. “Because any new subdivision impacts a community far beyond its immediate neighborhood. And the EIR is supposed to be a planning tool that details those potential impacts. It’s not supposed to be used by itself to deny or support a project. It is supposed to give you information on the project’s effect on traffic, schools, hillsides, fire and police protection, and it should also address any criticism or questions.

“That’s the kind of information a citizen has to have to give intelligent testimony about a project. Otherwise, he just gets up and says, ‘I don’t like it.’ But if the developer does the EIR, several things happen. First, the developer is basically evaluating the impact. When the public cries out loud and clear that the impacts aren’t being evaluated, the developers’ consultants just ignore it, and the final EIR is misleading.”

Q. Can you provide an example of when a consultant supposedly skewed an environmental report?

A. “We encountered a case where we believed a proposed subdivision would greatly impact on federal parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains. The builder proposed filling in a flood plain that would have narrowed and increased the velocity of a stream. We asked, ‘How will that affect the National Park Service property on the other side of the creek?’

Filling his side of the flood plain would obviously divert water over to the Park Service land and flood parkland. We wanted to know how much land the Park Service would lose through erosion or flooding. The builder never addressed that in the report. What he wrote was, ‘My houses will be safe from flooding.’ But that wasn’t the issue. What he did was answer the question in a way that made him look good.”

Q. So do you think environmental impact reports are meaningless today--at least in this area?

A. “In Los Angeles, they often are, but they don’t have to be. A lot of times, in fact, Los Angeles County doesn’t even require an EIR when it should.”

Q. Do you think Ventura County’s system, of having the public agency choose the consultants to study the environmental impact, is more responsible?

A. “Yes. Ventura County has the system where the county hires the consultant. My impression is that Ventura County’s environmental impact reports are enormously more detailed, and more intelligent information is generated.”