| (April 14, 2021, 2:45 p.m.) -- At the April 13, 2021 City Council meeting, following a roughly 2 hour 40 minute hearing, Councilmembers voted 7-1 (Uranga dissenting, Saro recusing herself as employed by Rivers/Mtns Conservancy) with Mayor Garcia voicing no publicly stated position to deny an appeal by five grassroots groups who sought an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) as a means to ultimately acquire private property for a park instead of RV parking and commercial storage at 3701 Pacific Place.
The hearing item as agendised is visible here. The appellants were the Riverpark Coalition; Ann Cantrell and Anna Christensen representing the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force; Corliss Lee representing Citizens About Responsible Planning; Juan Ovalle representing the Riverpark Coalition; Renee Lawler representing the Historic Equestrian Trail Association of So Cal; and Robert Gill representing the Los Cerritos Neighborhood Association. The Council vote effectively approved the project...and the next step may now be litigation. Attorney Doug Carstens (of the Chatten-Brown, Carstens & Minter law firm) submitted a 12 page letter to the City Clerk, City Manager, Mayor and all Councilmembers on behalf of the Riverpark Coalition, the River Project and LA Waterkeeper citing multiple legal grounds for requiring a full EIR (not a City Hall-proposed mitigated negative declaration.) To view the letter, click here. The appellants found themselves in a City Council/Mayor conducted hearing confronting unsupportive city staff and CD 8 incumbent Councilman Al Austin likewise unsupportive of their appeal. In addition, someone consumed all the 20 City Clerk allowed public speakers testimony slots within less than three minutes on April 7 by submitting names of individuals who spoke in support of the project and some "ghost" speakers who ultimately didn't speak. (The telephone speaker maneuver was patterned after supporters of Mayor Robert Garcia used a similar phone-packing procedure to consume all public speaker slots to support using LB's Convention Center to house unaccompanied migrant children. There's no evidence Garcia was involved in the phone slot packing telephone maneuver on the Riverpark hearing, and he denied have done so during the April 13 hearing. The result left appellants unable to rebut claims in an April 5 city staff report ("open space acquisition study") that Councilman Austin released on April 7. On April 8, The Riverpark Coalition issued a blistering release charging that City Hall's report contained false and misleading statements, about the alleged infeasibility of the 3701 Pacific Place parcel. It called City Hall's report a "sham and cover-up" and said it "reveals itself as nothing more than a political weapon, a weapon against the activism of residents to save their river for parks and open space." LBREPORT.com coverage >heere. . |
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