Planners Begin Environmental Review Reform : Building: Rules unveiled this week will allow city staffers to more closely supervise analyses, but developers will still hire consultants to prepare them.

Under rules released this week, Los Angeles’ often-maligned environmental review process is being overhauled to give city planners more say-so over the reports that analyze the effects of major building projects.

The rules will also allow developers, who have long complained that environmental reviews are too long, to complete the process sooner.

Although the new rules, officially unveiled Tuesday by Planning Director Con Howe, are designed to resolve years of unhappiness with the environmental review process among builders and homeowner activists, some doubts and questions remain.

“These are very tame reforms,” said David Diaz, a UCLA urban affairs doctoral student and member of a citizens panel that helped Howe draft the rules. “Los Angeles remains in the Middle Ages.”

“It’s an improvement . . . but not a major reform,” added Gary L. Morris, a San Fernando Valley-based consultant to developers, who also was a member of the city’s Ad Hoc Committee on EIR Procedures.

The ad hoc committee drafted the procedures, which were mildly modified by Howe and which formally take effect Wednesday, the start of the fiscal year.

To homeowner critics, the new rules are disappointing because they leave intact what critics say is the major flaw in the city’s system for reviewing environmental impacts: Developers will continue to hire and pay for the consultants who do the environmental analyses and write the reports.

“The developers still write the story-line,” said Woodland Hills homeowner activist Gordon Murley, chairman of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns.

According to Murley and others, such as Sylvia Gross, a Sunland-Tujunga activist, the city should hire the consultants, not the developer.

Other California cities, most notably San Francisco, select and hire the consultants.

But others see the rules as a major first step in reforming environmental reports.

“I’m pretty pleased with them,” Planning Commission President Bill Luddy said. “They provide some assurance that the city’s reviews are fair and complete.”

The new rules seek to give the city Planning Department greater control over the production of the reports through a relatively simple mechanism.

Whenever developers meet with their consultants to discuss their projects, city planners must be invited.

If city staff members cannot attend, a summary of the discussions must be provided to the Planning Department within a week, the rules say.

Such rules “put the city in the loop,” said Merryl Edelstein, head of the Planning Department’s environmental impact report unit.

Other new provisions require that the city receive all technical reports on which the consultants base their analyses.

Such disclosures will let the city keep track of the factors going into the analysis of a project, Edelstein said.

Developer representatives say they have no problem with the city looking over their shoulders.

“There’s a sense that there are these clandestine meetings, where we sit with our consultants to find ways to get around the city,” Morris said. “But that’s not what’s happening.”

If having city planners attend the meetings gives the environmental reports greater credibility, that’s good, Morris said.

Paul Clarke, a former Porter Ranch public relations consultant and a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on EIR Procedures, says the new rules are preferable to more Draconian measures originally proposed.

In December, 1991, then-acting Planning Director Melanie Fallon proposed that developers be barred from meeting with their consultants unless a city planner were present.

Fallon’s plan surprised and shocked the building industry.

Under intense pressure from builders and at least one planning commissioner, Fallon rescinded her directive nine days after issuing it and then set up the ad hoc committee--dominated by industry representatives--to advise the city on what changes were needed.

In the new rules, city planners say they hope to have environmental impact reports produced in a year.

Now it can take three or four years to produce a final EIR document--time that developers say inevitably adds to the costs of their projects.

The new rules do not specify how the city will expedite its review of environmental reports.

The EIR process involves collaboration between the city and the developer, with the builder producing draft documents that city planners read, question and correct, often returning them to the developer for clarification or additional information.

The rules set deadlines for thedevelopers to provide the additional information and penalizes them for failing to meet the timetables.

BACKGROUND

Environmental impact reports, required by state law for many major building projects, touch on everything from traffic and noise to air quality and endangered species. They do not endorse or reject a project, but describe its likely impact, good and bad. EIRs are advisory in nature and help lawmakers decide whether to approve a project and, if they do, what measures should be imposed to counter environmental damage.