Playa Vista Wins Wide Backing, but It’s Not Unanimous : Development: Civic and business groups voice their support at public hearings. But two key officials express concerns about the project’s effects on traffic and air quality.

The first stage of the vast Playa Vista development near Marina del Rey won powerful backing Wednesday from Los Angeles civic, labor and business interests, but two key elected officials continued to express major concerns about the project’s environmental impact.

Near the end of an eight-hour public hearing in Westchester, where Playa Vista supporters easily outnumbered opponents, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter voiced her objection to the city approving the initial phase of the residential, office, hotel and retail development.

Galanter said the project lacks enough affordable housing to guarantee that developer Maguire Thomas Partners’ concepts will work to discourage commuting and encourage walking and transit use. And she demanded that the project’s effect on traffic and air quality be fully offset.

“I am not prepared to recommend approval of the project at this time,” Galanter said. “I hope we will get there.”

The project’s first stage--about a quarter of the total development--would involve constructing 3,246 residential units, 1.25 million square feet of office space, 35,000 square feet of retail space and 300 hotel rooms.

Plans call for Playa Vista to ultimately be far larger--home to 28,625 residents and a workplace for 20,000 people.

Galanter’s concerns are important to the project’s fate as it moves through the city’s approval process because she represents the coastal area where the development would be built. A recommendation from a city advisory agency, which conducted the hearing in Westchester, is expected within a month.

The project drew harsher criticism from state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who warned in a letter that Playa Vista would cause gridlock and air pollution.

But Galanter’s and Hayden’s comments were overwhelmed by an unprecedented outpouring of support for the project. After more than four years of planning and voluminous environmental impact reports, Maguire Thomas’ plan for much of the open land between Marina del Rey and the Westchester Bluffs was hailed as a model for future development in Los Angeles and Southern California.

Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, spoke in glowing terms of the vision that Playa Vista represents. “No other project in the United States approaches its breadth and sophistication in addressing the social, cultural, environmental, housing and transportation issues which define sustainable managed growth,” he said.

Weinstein and others expressed the view that approval of Playa Vista may help a troubled city regain confidence in its future. He said the project may help “alter the punishing perception of a fragmented, ungovernable, selfish, fear-obsessed community that has lost the power of invention.”

Robert S. Harris, director of graduate programs in architecture at USC, joined the chorus, saying Playa Vista represents an alternative to environmentally destructive urban sprawl that keeps pushing the boundaries of the metropolitan area farther out into distant valleys.

Harris said Playa Vista will create an attractive place for people to live and will assist the city in recovering from its urban ills.

Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said Playa Vista is important to turning around the area’s tarnished image. “This city is hurting,” he said. “We need positive steps, we need positive images.”

Approval of the project’s first phase will create jobs and help change the impression that Los Angeles is not a friendly place for business, he said.

Jim Wood, executive officer of the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, spoke of the positive effect that Playa Vista could have on a depressed local economy. One after another, representatives of the construction trades said the project would put thousands of people back to work.

The potential economic benefits were cited by a parade of speakers from local chambers of commerce and small businesses. Some property owners and community representatives also spoke.

But the pro-development sentiment was by no means unanimous. Residents of the Del Rey neighborhood on the project’s eastern flank voiced opposition to Playa Vista’s size, density and potential traffic.

Representatives of the Sierra Club’s Angeles chapter warned of the loss of open space and the potential hazard posed by building a new community next to an underground natural gas storage basin.

Los Angeles County planner George Malone said he had “serious concerns” about the impact of growth in the Playa Vista area on nearby Marina del Rey. Without adequate efforts to ease the effects of the project’s traffic, he said, public access to the coast could be severely curtailed.

But Malone said the county does not oppose the project and is pleased with design changes that would widen streets, construct roadways and link the project to the Marina Freeway to ease the impact on traffic.

Friends of Ballona Wetlands, the environmental group that successfully fought an earlier plan to develop the area, joined the project’s supporters. Chairwoman Ruth Lansford said she believes that the development and an array of environmental protection measures will lead to restoration of the largest remaining wetland in the county.

Nelson Rising, Maguire Thomas’ senior partner, said the development is “an environmentally and ecologically sound project” that offers “an alternative to urban sprawl.”