Homeowners Critical of Review Panel Makeup

An 11-member committee set up to recommend improvements in the city of Los Angeles’ often controversial environmental review process has only one bona fide representative of homeowner interests on it--a fact homeowner leaders call outrageous.

The homeowner activists also say that the committee itself was created after developers complained about a new city policy that weakened the influence builders could wield over the environmental review of their projects.

“This isn’t fair,” complained Barbara Fine, a vice president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., the city’s oldest homeowner federation. “It amounts to stacking the deck.”

Gordon Murley, president of the federation, said he will demand that the city’s new planning director, Con Howe, whose appointment was confirmed Wednesday by the Los Angeles City Council, scrap the panel and revamp its membership.

“It’ll be a test of whether Mr. Howe is going to be an independent planning director or a tool of the mayor’s office,” Murley said.

The advisory panel was established by Melanie Fallon, then the city’s acting planning director, after the building industry and the city’s Planning Commission loudly objected to a directive that Fallon had signed and unveiled Dec. 31, outlining new procedures for preparing environmental impact reports on major building projects.

The most controversial of the proposed procedures called for city planning officials to regulate all contacts between developers and the private consultants they hire to do the reviews. Under the city’s procedures, the EIRs are primarily prepared by these consultants and reviewed later for objectivity by city planners.

Fallon, seeking to still the uproar that occurred as she was trying to secure the appointment of permanent planning director herself, rescinded the guidelines within days.

In late January, before Howe was named director, Fallon agreed to set up the advisory panel to help draft the department’s new EIR guidelines.

The lone homeowner representative on the panel--meeting weekly for the next two months to draft new environmental guidelines--is Bill Christopher, coordinator of PLAN/LA, an umbrella group of homeowners from throughout the city.

Among the committee members are two prominent developers: Nelson Rising, an executive with Maguire Thomas Partners, now involved in developing the huge Playa Vista project in Marina del Rey, and Brian Weinstock, a major Southern California home builder. Among two developer attorneys is Cindy Starrett with the firm of Latham & Watkins, a firm that represents major builders in Central City West and Warner Center.

Also on the panel are lobbyists and developer representatives, such as Paul Clarke, who most recently handled public relations for the giant Porter Ranch project in the San Fernando Valley; Gary L. Morris, a consultant who represents Warner Center property owners, and Dwight Steinert, a consultant with Engineering Technology Inc., a firm that represents developers.

Fallon acknowledged Wednesday that she named the panelists on the committee, known as the Ad Hoc Task Force on EIR Procedures, and that she had “struggled hard” to see that it was balanced.

Morris and Starrett said they thought the panel was balanced too.

Christopher, who is a Mayor Tom Bradley appointee to the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, refused to comment when pressed to say flatly whether he believed the panel was balanced. “I’m there to represent the views of community groups,” he said.

Environmental activists and homeowners have complained for years that allowing developers to hire the EIR consultants produces biased reports that mask problems. “The consultants know which side their bread is buttered on,” Fine said. “They’re going to put the project’s best foot forward for their client.”

By regulating the contacts between the developer and the consultant, the city’s Dec. 31 directive sought to reduce, at the very least, the impression that the developer has undue influence over the consultant’s environmental assessment.

Homeowners and developers have widely disparate views of what’s wrong with the city’s EIR process.

The homeowners say it lacks credibility because the developers hire the consultants, but the building industry complains that the environmental review process is so slow that it discourages development in Los Angeles or makes it more expensive.

To Starrett, the objectivity of the city’s environmental impact reports is not in doubt. Rather, the problem lies in removing the inefficient procedures that cause delays in the processing of EIRs, she said.