New Suit Seeks to Block Plan for Playa Vista

For the third time in the last decade, environmental activists went to court Monday in an attempt to stop the Playa Vista project near Marina del Rey, which recently was chosen as the home for the DreamWorks SKG studio.

Two environmental organizations joined a homeowners group and the Shoshone Gabrielino Indian tribe at a news conference in Playa del Rey to maintain that the city of Los Angeles failed to consider the increased impact on the environment of converting a previously planned office park into the entertainment studio.

A lawsuit raising many of the same issues was rejected 16 months ago by a Superior Court judge, who ruled that the city’s environmental review was adequate.

But the Earth Trust Foundation, the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust and other groups filing the new action said the arrival of DreamWorks on the property necessitates a new review. The first new studio in Southern California in more than half a century will bring a host of problems, they contend, including eliminating previously proposed public open space in favor of a private artificial lake. It also will increase helicopter traffic in the area to and from the property’s proposed helipads and will damage sensitive parcels not studied in the initial environmental review, the groups argue.

Marcia Hanscom of the Wetlands Action Network and many of the other speakers at the news conference said the project would amount to an “environmental disaster.”

Los Angeles transportation engineers have said their projections show that the revised plans for the project will create less traffic than projected under previous plans.

Several other environmental groups that have been studying the Playa Vista project for years, including the National Audubon Society and the Friends of Ballona Wetlands, have praised its plan for setting aside about 270 acres of wetlands and spending $12.5 million for environmental restoration.

Most of the eastern portion of the site, where the studio is to be built, is currently occupied by aircraft hangars once operated by Hughes Aircraft, or was once paved over for use as aircraft runways.

Mark Gold, an environmental scientist who heads Heal the Bay, said portions of the Playa Vista property where the studio would be built have “very little natural resource value.” The environmental group is continuing to work with the project’s developer on plans for the wetlands restoration. It has withheld judgment on future growth on portions of the 1,000-acre tract closer to the ocean.

Among the new claims raised Monday were those by Vera Rocha, chief of the Shoshone Gabrielino tribe. Rocha said that cultural artifacts from her tribe have been found on the Playa Vista property and that the project would spoil one of the few undeveloped pieces of land along the coast.

Doug Gardner, director of the project for Maguire Thomas Partners, said he was surprised by the opposition from the Native American group, since an agreement previously was signed by the tribe and the federal government to establish extensive monitoring of construction.

Gardner said he is confident that the environmental review of the project will withstand legal scrutiny. “We don’t expect this will delay us in any way,” he said.

On another front Monday, a Dreamworks-inspired proposal to put together incentive packages for other job-generating firms got its initial airing at City Hall.

The Economic Development Incentives Task Force, created by the City Council to consider ways of extending citywide the types of tax breaks and other incentives offered to DreamWorks, released its report.

The report’s recommendations were generally well received, particularly by the handful of prominent business leaders who attended Monday’s hearing by the council’s Community and Economic Development Committee.

But even the program’s most ardent advocates cautioned that the city has a long way to go in refining the program to ensure that it is flexible and a good deal for the the city and prospective and current Los Angeles firms.

Ray Remy, a deputy mayor under Tom Bradley and now head of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, described the incentives package proposal as a “constructive thrust” in a city that has long been regarded by many employers as hostile to business.

Considerably less enthusiastic, however, was a spokesman for the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of liberal, public interest-oriented attorneys.

Loyola Law School professor Robert Benson told the committee it is asking for trouble, both legally and politically, in forwarding a program he said smacks of a “pro-corporate ideology that goes so far as to turn over the public treasury to private corporations.”