The 16-member Potrero Canyon Community Advisory Committee will hold its first meeting next Wednesday, February 16 at 7:15 p.m. at the Palisades Recreation Center. At this meeting, which Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski will attend and is open to the public, ‘everyone will be brought up to speed,’ said George Wolfberg, head of the advisory committee. ‘We can then lay the groundwork for the work that needs to be done.’ Two major tasks face the advisory committee, which was selected by Miscikowski and Community Council chairman Norm Kulla to work with advisors and the city. One is the completion of Potrero Park itself, a mile-long expanse which extends from the recreation center to Pacific Coast Highway. Currently, plans call for a riparian habitat and a hiking trail with limited amenities to be built. This final part of the project (Phase III) is expected to cost from $7 million to $12 million. The second challenge for the advisory committee will be how to handle the sale of the city-owned lots in Potrero. To date, the city has spent at least $13 million to acquire 35 landslide-impaired lots and another $17 million to buttress and fill the canyon. However, work was brought to a halt over two years ago when the city lacked the $1.2 million needed to complete Phase II. In an effort to break the logjam, Miscikowski put forth a motion which was approved by L.A. City Council in December to sell two of the lots’both of them on Alma Real (at 615 and 623), both with houses that the city currently leases. These lots have now been declared surplus by the city, with 100 percent of the net proceeds to be deposited in a designated Potrero Canyon Trust Fund. The proceeds, expected to be as much as $4 million, will be used exclusively for completion of Phases II and to ‘begin’ Phase III, explained Miscikowski at the motion hearing last fall. However, the city cannot offer the two lots, which will be sold at public auction, without California Coastal Commission approval, which is currently pending. When the Coastal Commission originally approved Potrero in 1986, it placed restrictions on the sale of the city-owned lots until all three phases of the project were complete and funding for inspections and maintenance had been identified. When it became clear last year that these conditions would be impossible to meet, negotiations began with Coastal staff to clear the way for the immediate sale of the two Alma Real lots to finish Phase II, where work is 95 percent complete. Two landslides still need repairing and there is final grading to be done. The other 33 city-owned lots, which were condemned starting in 1964 when the canyon was first found to be too unstable because of landslides, are located on Earlham, De Pauw, and Friends Street, where nine buildable pads already exist. ‘As soon as all the lots are deemed to be stable [a two-year process], they can be certified by the city and gradually sold off as funds are needed for Phase III,’ Miscikowski said Wednesday. ‘Not only are we going to have to look into the existing deed restrictions and CC&R’s for each lot, but we will have to ensure that they are sold off in an orderly fashion so as to not create problems in the neighborhoods where they are located.’ Another question is whether developers will be permitted to buy the lots and what kind of houses can be built on them ‘so as to not affect existing views,’ said Wolfberg, former chairman of Community Council. ‘Will they still step-down the hillside, as was originally discussed with the Civic League? The advisory committee is also going to look into how best to divide the public from the private space. Where do we end the plantings for the park, for example? There is also the larger question of who is going to be responsible for maintaining the park. As you can see, we have a lot of work ahead of us.’ The park was purchased in 1964 by the Department of Recreation and Parks to provide coastal access to and from Palisades Park. The canyon historically included a natural watercourse through which run-off from the Santa Monica Mountains and runoff from the Palisades community was carried to the Pacific Ocean. Abnormally high runoff from storms in 1978 and 1980 caused extensive erosion, landslides and slippages that led the City of Los Angeles to acquire the privately-owned properties along the canyon rim. Since then, the Departments of Recreation and Parks and Bureau of Engineering have worked with the California Coastal Commission to remediate the problems, which included the installation of a storm drain and subdrain system, as well as landfill to support the canyon walls. (Editor’s note: Ron Weber, an attorney who lives adjacent to the Recreation Center, is on the community advisory committee. His name was inadvertently deleted from the list of members in last week’s article: ‘Advisory Committee to Tackle Potrero.’)
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