After more than three hours of discussion and with only four of five members present, the West L.A. Planning Commission failed to reach a consensus last Wednesday on whether to approve or deny an appeal of a Coastal Development Permit (CDP) for a proposed 49-unit apartment building called Sunset Canyon. As a result of the Commission’s 2-2 vote, City of Los Angeles Zoning Administrator Fernando Tovar’s decision to approve the CDP for the high-end apartment complex at 17030 Sunset Blvd. remains in effect. The terraced development, consisting of three fragmented buildings divided by an artificial canyon (hence the name Sunset Canyon),’is proposed for an empty parcel just east of the Self-Realization Fellowship that is located on an active landslide between two apartment houses. The Edgewater Towers Homeowners Association had appealed the zoning administrator’s decision to approve the CDP for Stefano Coaloa’s proposed development in 2011, citing concerns over geology, traffic and other factors. Nonetheless, after reviewing environmental reports and traffic studies provided by Coaloa, City Planning Department staff recommended that the Commission deny the appeal.’ ’I am just flabbergasted to sit here and listen to an hour-long presentation by staff that really should have been written up in a focused EIR (Environmental Impact Report),’ John Murdock, an attorney representing the Edgewater Towers Homeowners Association, told the Commission. The Towers are located above Pacific Coast Highway, below and to the west of Sunset Canyon. In 2010, the Pacific Palisades Community Council asked the City to require Coaloa to complete an environmental impact report to further study the Sunset Canyon site. As reported by the Palisadian-Post, the City said an EIR was not necessary given the scope of the project, and that a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) would be sufficient. ’There was a laundry list of things needed for this meeting’ that should have been provided to the public in a focused EIR, Murdock said. ‘This is a complex project; it’s on a landslide that’s still moving westward.’ Murdock argued that the CDP was approved on the basis of an MND that has been revised and re-circulated so many times that it has rendered’ the initial approval of the CDP as ‘legally deficient.’ Developers are required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to prepare an initial study (MND) to determine whether a proposed project may have adverse effects on the environment. If the study finds that the environmental impact cannot be mitigated, then an EIR must be ordered by the lead public agency, which in this case was the City’s Planning Department. Coaloa’s representatives claimed that CEQA requirements determined that an EIR was not needed for this project. ’It’s not just a given that this project must be approved because it fits zoning requirements,’ Murdock told the Planning Commission. ‘You may conclude that there is no safe way to exit the property, you may say this is not approvable, you may say they have to cut it down to 24 units’there are many options that could come out of an EIR, but none of that is happening.’ The MND is just an initial study that doesn’t even come close to an EIR, said Jack Allen, a longtime member of the Community Council, when he spoke as a Palisades resident before the Planning Commission. Allen said that a full EIR would address a variety of issues that have not been studied. ’One of the reasons we want an EIR is because what an MND does not discuss is alternatives,’ said Allen, a retired attorney. ‘You can reduce the density of a project’that would be something discussed in an EIR as mitigating some of the impacts.’ In response, Coaloa’s representatives argued that a full EIR was not conducted because it wasn’t requested by the Planning Department and that a report of this type is only required when requested by the public lead agency. However, Coaloa’s team did prepare what they called an Environmental Impact Assessment, which is an unofficial and less broadly conducted study than an EIR. Sassan A. Salehipour, geotechnical engineer of the Sunset Canyon project, told the Commission that due to the existence of landslides on the property, they ‘went overboard’ in the study of the site. ’Usually for a geotechnical investigation, between two to six bore holes are tested and that’s the end of it,’ Salehipour said. ‘We drilled more than 30 bore holes for this and neighboring properties.’ The geological stability tests, which cost Coaloa close to $500,000, also included the excavation of two 50-foot trenches. ’By doing these trenches we kept it open for the reviewing agency and determined the exact location of the slide,’ Salehipour said, adding that Coaloa plans to remove soil equaling10 times the weight of the future structure, decreasing the driving force from the slope. Antonio Coco, president of Coco Traffic Planners Inc., told the Commission that he ‘used higher traffic generation rates allowed by the Department of Transportation’ to study the traffic impacts of the apartment building, which is situated at the end of a long uphill curve on Sunset. ’The traffic generation rate the DOT uses for this type of building is so low that in fact it doesn’t trigger the requirement for a traffic study,’ Coco said. ‘I increased the data and assumed conditions that would occur in a freeway environment [meaning a seven-second reaction time].’ Coco said left turns into the building will not be allowed for vehicles heading west on Sunset, nor for those coming out of the building. ’I am usually in favor of an EIR, but when I see the long process of this and the experts they’ve had to look at this, I don’t see what an EIR will do to change our minds about the issues that concern us,’ said Planning Commissioner Joyce L. Foster, who voted against the appeal. ‘This project has been vetted a lot.’ Fellow Commissioner Joe Halper, who voted in favor of the appeal, said the Planning Commission has to be consistent with the language the California Coastal Commission uses to describe the site as a ‘coastal bluff.’ ‘Halper said he didn’t see the difference between this project and other similar projects that were rejected because of their proximity to coastal bluffs and impact on views. ’I think the decision was nice and we will respect the terms,’ Coaloa told the Post. ‘We have been waiting for this for more than a year now.’ His daughter, Victoria Coaloa, the project’s designer and a Palisades High graduate, said that ‘there are still a lot of phases left and a lot of the community’s concerns will be addressed as the project moves forward.’ When asked what she would say to Palisadians concerned about the Sunset Canyon development, Coaloa said: ‘We are an extremely environmentally-friendly team and are people from the community. I was born and raised in the community and I’m concerned about the community’s needs. We just want to make an exemplary green building for the Palisades.’ The Sunset Canyon project still must be vetted by other boards. including the California Coastal Commission, which will further review the Planning Commission’s decision.
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