With the L.A. Department of City Planning seeking input on proposed changes to the city’s zoning code by January 13, the Pacific Palisades Community Council unanimously adopted a list of recommendations at last Thursday’s meeting. ’The ordinance that has been proposed by the city may dilute our community and specific plans and reduce some of our protections under existing regulations,’ Council member Chris Spitz said. ‘Modifications to the ordinance are necessary to preserve these protections.’ Two years ago, the Planning Department launched an initiative to rewrite selected provisions in the city’s zoning ordinance in an effort to simplify the document. The zoning code went into effect in 1946 and has been amended so many times that it has grown from 84 to more than 600 pages. The Planning Department is now developing six ordinances, all designed to streamline the process for discretionary land-use approvals such as variances, conditional use permits and zone changes. In 2011, the ordinances will be presented separately to the Planning Commission for approval. On October 14, the Planning Department presented one of the proposed ordinances to the L.A. City Planning Commission for approval. The ordinance would revise the ‘findings’ for conditional uses, adjustments and other quasi-judicial land use approvals. When making a land-use decision, a zoning administrator must explain how a project complies with a specific ‘finding.’ For example, a decision-maker may be required to articulate how a project will relate to the size and scale of surrounding properties. Administrators must explain their rationale and use evidence when making their determinations, which serve as a record in possible future litigation. There are 349 findings in the zoning code for 113 procedures and entitlements. The City Planning staff has rewritten 39 findings, deleted 37, and relocated seven; the remaining 266 are unchanged. ’The proposed ordinance consolidates findings that have the same intent and are located in the zoning code more than once into seven commonly used ‘core’ findings,’ according to the recommendation report. ‘This consolidation removes duplication and organizes various sections more coherently.’ At the October 14 Planning Commission meeting, Los Angeles residents, including Council Chair Janet Turner and Council member Jack Allen, asked for more time to review the proposed ordinance, and the Commission responded by unanimously voting to wait three more months before approving any modifications. Last Thursday, the Council voted to strengthen some of the language in the seven ‘core’ findings. For example, they are asking that the project compatibility core finding be changed from ‘That the project’s location, size, height, operations and other significant features will be compatible with and will not adversely affect or further degrade the surrounding neighborhood’ to ‘That the project location, size, height, operations and other significant features shall be compatible with the scale and character of and not adversely affect or further degrade the adjacent and surrounding neighborhood or the public health, welfare, safety or physical environment.’ Council member Barbara Kohn, who lives near the Getty Villa, explained that it’s important to add ‘adjacent neighborhood.’ In the case of the Getty Villa, the surrounding community would be Pacific Palisades and Malibu, but the adjacent neighborhood would be Pacific View Estates and Castellammare, and the impacts of the Villa are different for both groups. The Council is asking that all hillside-related provisions to the ordinance be stricken until after the Baseline Hillside Ordinance (BHO) is passed and the Planning Department has the opportunity to examine the proposed changes in light of the new ordinance. The City Attorney’s Office is currently preparing an official BHO, which must ultimately be adopted by the City Council and signed by the Mayor. In the motion passed last Thursday, the Council also recommends that all six ordinances the Planning Department is developing be implemented at once. ’In the interests of fundamental fairness, due to process and notice, the Council is very concerned about the unknown impact of the remaining five to-be-proposed ordinances which Planning staff indicates are ultimately to be viewed in consortium with the ordinance; however, none of these five proposed ordinances have yet been drafted or examined by the public.’ The Community Council’s Land Use Committee made the recommendations to the full Council. The members ‘ Kohn, Spitz, Allen, George Wolfberg, Stuart Muller, Jennifer Malaret and Paul Glasgall ‘ attended city workshops and spoke to other neighborhood councils and homeowners associations. ’I would like to thank the committee for spending several hundred hours researching this topic,’ Turner said.
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