Valleywide : City May Eliminate Some Public Hearings

A proposal that would allow developers of certain kinds of projects to get city approval without a public hearing took a major step forward on Thursday.

The city now requires significant development projects to undergo a public hearing process. Los Angeles’ so-called “site-plan review” law defines significant projects as commercial projects of 40,000 square feet or more, residential projects that have 35 or more units and projects that will generate an additional 500 or more car trips a day.

The proposal to loosen those legal definitions is one forwarded by Mayor Richard Riordan’s Development Reform Committee. The committee is scrutinizing other city laws and specific plans to find ways to streamline the permitting process as a way to keep businesses from fleeing the city.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Planning Commission voted to rewrite the city’s site-plan-review ordinance so that significant projects would be defined as residential projects with 75 units or more. The changes would drop trip-generation and the square footage of the project as factors in requiring a public hearing under this law.

However, developers would still be subject to a city zoning law that requires public hearings for all commercial and industrial projects that are 100,000 square feet and larger.

Planning officials, who drafted the proposed changes, said that existing city laws and specific plans offer enough safeguards against ill-conceived projects.

Opposing the changes were homeowner leaders from the Valley, Westside and Pacific Palisades, who said that the changes would allow developers to build huge projects without any obligation to take community concerns into account.