Group Vows to Renew Fight Against Drug Rehabilitation Center

Just two weeks after Lake View Terrace community representatives said they were ready to negotiate amicably with a drug rehabilitation center that recently purchased a bankrupt local hospital, a breakaway group of residents met Wednesday night to develop new ways to keep the center out of their neighborhood.

Calling itself We, the People, the group had passed out more than 1,000 fliers advertising the meeting, some of which asked the seemingly unrelated question: “Isn’t one toxic landfill enough?”

Attend the meeting, the flier urged, “before you experience a loss in the quality of your life,” apparently trying to capitalize on the neighborhood’s long-running problems with the Lopez Canyon dump.

The fliers were intended “to get people’s attention, and obviously it worked,” said Diana Brkic, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s meeting, pointing to the 50 people who turned out for the gathering.

Officials of the drug treatment center, Phoenix House, were furious about the fliers because of their tone and because they do not mention the facility or its plans. Phoenix House spokesman Chris Policano described the fliers as “repulsive and reprehensible.”

“These are the ugly irrational ravings of a few and do not reflect at all our meetings with the reasonable concerned citizens of Lake View Terrace,” Policano said before the meeting. “No one likes to be called garbage.”

Phoenix House is a national nonprofit drug treatment and counseling group that is seeking city permission to locate a residential center for 150 adolescents in the buildings that once housed the Lake View Medical Center.

At the meeting, residents voiced some of the same fears and concerns that were raised four years ago, when Phoenix House first expressed interest in the 15-acre property.

“Who is going to come to see these kids?” asked resident Janet Jackson. “Relatives come, friends come . . . and they bring drugs.”

The group discussed plans to stage protests, consult attorneys and raise money to fight the installation of the center.

After more than a year of intense community protest, Phoenix House’s controversial plan to build a Nancy Reagan Center in Lake View Terrace was presumed dead in 1989, when the former First Lady withdrew her name and her fund-raising support.

But the proposal was resurrected this spring, after Phoenix House found no better location and after the crippled economy helped drop the price of the property from more than $7 million to $3.2 million.

Phoenix House bought the property in bankruptcy court in early June, and the deal is expected to become final by the end of this month. The center applied for a conditional use permit July 7.

The day the permit application was filed, some of those who had most vociferously opposed the hospital as recently as this spring announced that they were willing to negotiate with Phoenix House. Several said they felt the center would easily gain city approval, and therefore, fighting the proposal was fruitless.

Explaining that turnabout, Joycelin Furginson, spokeswoman for the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn., said that, although not everyone agreed, the majority of the association’s members had concluded that continued opposition would only delay the inevitable.

“And if we did delay it, would we ever be able to open negotiations with them again?” she asked.

But within days, a splinter group of disgruntled residents had begun to form. On July 11, several of them joined a tour of a Phoenix House center in Orange County, and more than a dozen others met the tour group with protests and tough questions when it arrived at the Lake View Terrace facility.

At Wednesday’s meeting, resident Ahmad Tabibi, cautioned the group to beware of giving too much power to their leaders.

“Do not let anybody decide for you like the last time,” Tabibi said. “They said we would compromise. Remember that.”