Building consensus

GIVEN THE WESTSide’s grinding traffic problems, any major development there is bound to be controversial. But there is no more politically explosive land-use issue in the area than the fate of the sprawling, 387-acre Veterans Affairs campus in Westwood, possibly the most valuable chunk of undeveloped land in Southern California. A bill introduced last week by California’s Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein, should put residents’ minds at ease -- though not necessarily veterans’.

In 1998, Congress ordered the VA to produce a master plan for the future of the property. Opinions differ on what followed: Either the VA ignored the order or it has been taking a spectacularly long time to comply. That makes residents and local politicians understandably nervous. Because the campus is federal land, the VA doesn’t have to follow all city land-use rules, and it needn’t take community concerns into account in its decisions. That isn’t particularly fair to Westsiders.

Feinstein’s bill repeats the congressional order for a master plan on the Westwood property. To give the order teeth, it says the VA can’t make long-term private leases until the plan has been submitted, and it forbids the agency from putting anything on its land that isn’t related to direct veterans services unless approved by Congress.

If this lights a fire under the VA to produce its long-delayed master plan, so much the better. It’s outrageous that the agency has been dithering this long. For years, it has been leasing bits of its land to such private companies as Fox Entertainment and Enterprise Rent-A-Car with no planning or control. Further, the VA created a firestorm when it hired PriceWaterhouseCoopers to analyze possible commercial uses for the land. The consultants’ report in 2005 discussed projects that had nothing to do with serving veterans, such as mixed-use residential developments and biotech campuses -- even though the land was deeded to the federal government in 1888 under the provision that it be used solely for veterans.

Feinstein’s bill has one disturbing element. Homeless advocates have been working for years to lease three unused buildings on the VA campus and turn them into shelters for homeless vets. To get the needed loans, service providers usually need a long-term lease of the kind that Feinstein’s bill forbids. She should tweak it to help such worthwhile projects, which do directly serve veterans, proceed.