LETTER TO THE EDITOR

PPCC Letter to CAO

The Pacific Palisades Community Council Executive Committee sent a version of this letter to Richard H. Lewellyn, Jr., city administrative officer, and Matt Szabo, CAO appointee (effective July 4)/current deputy chief of staff to Mayor Eric Garcetti. It has been reprinted here with permission. To see the full version of the letter, visit pacpalicc.org.

Pacific Palisades Community Council has been the most broad-based community organization and the voice of Pacific Palisades since 1973. Pacific Palisades is a coastal and hillside residential community in the wildland-urban interface with the Santa Monica Mountains, situated entirely within the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.

Will Rogers State Beach is a California State Park located in Pacific Palisades. For more than 75 years, our community has been privileged to welcome countless visitors from all walks of life throughout Los Angeles and beyond, who regularly use the WRSB parking lot in order to access the beach and ocean for recreation and enjoyment. The WRSB lot is also routinely used by city, county and state first responders for critical command, staging and evacuation during frequent local and regional wildfire emergencies.

The WRSB lot is one of the sites that the City Council has now directed the CAO to evaluate as a homeless housing site. For many compelling reasons—including the overriding Coastal Act public access mandate, legal and jurisdictional obstacles, homeless safety and service issues, and substantial environmental and public safety concerns such as the potential loss of the lot for fire emergency use—PPCC maintains that the WRSB parking lot is entirely infeasible and strongly opposes its use for homeless housing of any kind.

PPCC agrees that homeless housing and services are urgently needed in Los Angeles. However, we disagree that a sudden, new emergency or extreme crisis exists that would justify use of clearly unsuitable public recreational sites, such as State Park or State Beach parking lots reserved by law for other purposes, for housing for any length of time.

Simply put: Using the WRSB parking lot and/or obtaining the required multi-jurisdictional review for its use as homeless housing cannot be easily or quickly done, nor is it practicable or feasible, whether based on a claim of urgent need or emergency, or otherwise.

Even more importantly, should homeless housing be placed in the WRSB lot, its effective removal from use by first responders for vital wildfire fighting and protection efforts would have severe regional/multi-jurisdictional impacts.

Its loss would pose a grave risk of harm to the public, not only in Pacific Palisades, but also in the wider region of Los Angeles County subject to devastating wildfires, including the communities of Calabasas, Malibu and Topanga Canyon as well as extensive federal and state parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains. Such action would violate public safety protections guaranteed to citizens, both housed and unhoused, by the California Constitution.

We invite you and CAO staff to meet at WRSB for a site visit with PPCC representatives, Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness volunteers and our LAPD beach detail officers. It is imperative that the CAO see first-hand the conditions at WRSB and the surrounding area—and to obtain input from individuals who interact daily with the homeless at WRSB and in our nearby bluffs and canyon areas—in order to better understand why the proposal to use this lot is infeasible and dangerous.

Thank you for your consideration and anticipated serious attention to this important matter.

Executive Committee, Pacific Palisades Community Council
David Card, Chair
Christina Spitz, Secretary
David Kaplan, Vice-Chair
Richard G. Cohen, Treasurer
John Padden, Organization Representative (P.R.I.D.E.)
Joanna Spak, Elected Representative
(Area 1; Castellammare, Paseo Miramar)