Protests Stall Growth Plan

Faced with protests from slow-growth advocates, the City Council balked Wednesday at adopting a blueprint for accommodating the projected addition of 611,000 people to Los Angeles’ population by 2010.

More than a dozen neighborhood activists from Pacific Palisades to the San Fernando Valley objected that the Citywide General Plan Framework fails to adequately protect the city from the impact on traffic that a 16% growth in population would cause.

The council voted to delay consideration of the plan for one week after hearing 20 minutes of testimony calling the plan inadequate, and receiving a letter from an attorney for the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. raising legal objections.

The federation, which includes homeowner groups from Woodland Hills to Bel-Air, charged that the city failed to show how any proposed improvements to local freeways and streets to accommodate the population growth would be funded by the county, state and federal governments.

“Your planning document has no mechanism for downsizing or limiting development in the event that funds from other levels of government cease to exist to pay for traffic mitigation,” said Lawrence Teeter, an attorney for the federation.

Land use in Los Angeles is regulated by 35 community plans, which take their cue from the General Plan Framework, an overarching policy statement that outlines the city’s plans to provide the infrastructure to accommodate population growth.

The homeowners federation successfully sued the city earlier this year, charging that a General Plan Framework previously adopted did not take adequate steps to show it would protect Los Angeles from the impacts of major population growth.

The judge in that case gave Los Angeles officials three options: Curtail development, increase mitigation measures or adopt a legal finding that says certain negative impacts on traffic and air quality may not be avoided but are acceptable when balanced against the social and economic benefits.

The new plan under consideration adopts the legal findings, noting that the city cannot guarantee that it will continue to get as much as $240 million in local, state and federal funding annually to pay for transportation improvements related to population growth.

“The other choices were [to] stop all growth until we can accommodate it or put all the regional costs of transportation improvements on new development,” said Frank Eberhard, a city planner.

Activists including Joan Luchs, head of the Cahuenga Pass Neighborhood Assn., demanded that the city go further than adopting the legal findings, either by adopting a slow-growth plan or creating a mechanism to reduce development if adequate transportation funding does not come through in the years ahead.

Councilman Hal Bernson said the General Plan Framework provides constructive proposals for how the city can lessen the impact of growth.

Bernson was perplexed by the objections of growth-management proponents, saying, “Some people have to object to everything.”

Some of Bernson’s newly elected colleagues, however, said they want a week to consider the concerns of the activists.

Councilman Eric Garcetti sought the delay, saying he wants to make sure there is periodic review of population growth to make sure the city is doing all it can to reduce negative impacts.

“This is a visionary document, but vision without implementation is just that,” Garcetti said.