L.A. Planner Adds 2 Seats to Task Force : Environment: The advisory panel increases its membership to quell criticism that it unfairly favors developers.

Acting Los Angeles City Planning Director Melanie Fallon, who was criticized earlier this week because an 11-member advisory panel included only one homeowner representative, said Friday she will appoint two additional members to make the panel “better balanced.”

Fallon said she would appoint an additional homeowner representative and an attorney for an environmental group to the Ad Hoc Task Force on EIR Procedures, formed to help rewrite city procedures for preparing environmental impact reports.

“We need them so we don’t have the criticism that it’s unfair,” Fallon said.

Homeowner leaders had blasted the panel selection as “stacked” and unfair when it was revealed Thursday that the task force had only one bona fide homeowner representative--Bill Christopher, head of PLAN/LA, a nonprofit public interest group.

The remaining panelists, except for one city employee, were developers, attorneys for developers or consultants to developers. When asked about the composition of the panel this week, Fallon described the task force as balanced.

Fallon said she has not decided who will fill the two new slots.

Merryl Edelstein, the Planning Department’s liaison to the panel, said members of the task force, in the interest of increasing the credibility of their work, unanimously agreed at a meeting Friday to support the appointment of additional members to represent homeowner and environmental interests.

The panel was set up as part of an effort to reform the city’s process for reviewing the environmental impacts of major building projects.

Homeowners have long complained that the process lacks objectivity because the city allows developers to hire the consultants who do the bulk of the research and writing involved in preparing the environmental assessments.

On the other hand, the building industry has complained just as vociferously that the city’s review of their consultants’ work takes too long and needlessly increases the costs of their projects, sometimes making them financially infeasible.

The criticisms of both factions were given new momentum last summer by a management audit of the city’s Planning Department.

To deal with the problems, the department unveiled new guidelines Dec. 31 for processing EIRs. But some of the new rules caused an uproar in the building industry because they tried to limit the influence that developers wielded over their own environmental consultants.

Within days, Fallon rescinded her directive, saying the rules may have been too harsh.

During a humbling session before an unhappy city Planning Commission, Fallon also said she would collect input from a broad spectrum of the community to help prepare a fresh version of the guidelines. In late January, Fallon set up the advisory panel as part of this process.

Prominent among the panel’s members are Nelson Rising, an executive with Maguire Thomas Partners, a major builder and the current developer of the huge Playa Vista project in Marina del Rey; Paul Clarke, a well-known political operative who worked as a representative for the giant Porter Ranch project; Gary L. Morris, a consultant to major developers in the Warner Center area, and Brian Weinstock, owner of a prominent residential construction company.