SAVING LA-The Los Angeles City Council next Tuesday is expected to ratify a decision that – unless challenged - will result in the demolition of a 100 year old house in Los Feliz to make way for a six-unit, townhouse-style project. You might well say: No biggie. Happens all the time.
But that decision, if allowed to stand, would go well beyond business-as-usual at City Hall. That decision would condone and sanction a seriously flawed, if not illegal, environmental review of a project, proposed by a developer who counts among his allies one of Mayor Garcetti’s top fund-raisers, Gabriel Eshaghian, a city airport commissioner.
On Nov. 8, 2013, developer Elan Mordoch got the green-light from City Hall’s planning authorities to proceed with his Los Feliz project.
But what was glaringly missing in this approval process was a disclosure that the project’s unmistakable collateral damage would include demolition of a 100 year old house designed by one of the city’s best-known, early 20th century architects, A.C. Martin, five of whose works in LA have been recognized as historic-cultural landmarks (including City Hall itself) and that A.C. Martin designed the house for a personal friend, Oswald Bartlett, a rather large figure himself in the LA’s commercial life.
That was a huge oversight that undermined the protections of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Based on the developer’s representations and his flawed environmental review, several neighborhood groups gave their blessing to the project, not realizing until months later that they had unwittingly signed up to demolish the so-called Oswald Bartlett House, a cultural gem. Upon learning of their mistake, these groups did a 180-degree turn-about.
So what if the city planning authorities in late 2013, while reviewing Mordoch’s vesting tentative tract map application and his zoning variance requests, had known – based on a faithfully accurate environmental review – the house on Mordoch’s property was an A.C. Martin? How might they have acted differently?
Take a look at some of the caveats and conditions imposed on the developer – all based largely on the environmental review of his project. Here are a just a handful: Mordoch was warned that his construction activities should not interfere with any birds during their March 1-Aug. 31 breeding season; the approval mandated that any trees of greater than 8 inches in diameter that might be removed during construction had to be replaced on a 1-to-1 basis; and it required the halting of construction in winds greater than 15 mph to minimize the dust impact on local residents..
If so much care was taken to protect birds, trees and neighbors, how much more would have been taken by these same planning authorities if the environmental impact document before them had faithfully disclosed that a 100-year-old A.C. Martin-designed home was located on the property?
Would these same planning authorities have required the developer to preserve the house, or elements of it, in their project; required the developer to transplant the house to a new location; required the developer to pay mitigation fees, contribute money to a historical society as the price for being allowed to demolish the house? We’ll never know.
Certainly we do know if the developer’s environmental review had been honest and accurate the community would have known about the real stakes involved in Mordoch’s project and early on could have urged city planning authorities, at public hearings, not to ignore the significance of the Bartlett house in their deliberations and possibly appealed any city decisions with which they disagreed.
But those opportunities to demand that the authorities protect the house or mitigate the project’s impact on it were lost because Mordoch’s environmental review document was woefully inaccurate, if not dishonest.
It is telling what happened months later –long after the developer got his land-use entitlements, at a time when community groups were madly scrambling to play catch up and block demolition of the house by asking the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission to declare it a historic-cultural monument.
At that time, in September 2014, a Cultural Heritage Commission member stated in a public hearing that it was not feasible to designate the A.C. Martin house as a monument – not because it wasn’t a significant landmark – but because the developer had already spent so much time, effort and money obtaining his land-use entitlements. If only the commission had known months earlier, the commissioner lamented.
What the commissioner failed to appreciate (or chose to ignore) was how the developer obtained those entitlements: by not truthfully disclosing – as required by the environmental review process - that he had a gold-plated, genuine, 100-year-old A.C. Martin-designed home in almost pristine condition sitting on his property.
Did the developer intentionally dupe the city and the community by failing to disclose the old house was an A.C. Martin on the environmental checklist he filled out? Or was he misled by City Hall officials – as he has claimed - about the possible historic-cultural significance of the “old house”?
Ultimately perhaps it does not matter.
What does matter is that city decision-makers in the planning department did not have an honest and accurate environmental review document before them when they granted the developer his entitlements.
What does matter is that the community was caught off guard by the flawed representations made to them about Mordoch’s project and lost early opportunities to mobilize and make their voice heard at City Hall about the true impacts of Mordoch’s project at public hearings before planning officials.
And what does matter is that Mordoch’s proposed demolition of this house should not be allowed to go forward. If the developer is allowed to proceed under these illegal circumstances, it would make a mockery of the environmental review process. That process, like the A.C. Martin house, is worth saving.
(John Schwada is a former reporter for Fox 11 in Los Angeles, the LA Times and the late Herald Examiner and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 100
Pub: Dec 12, 2014
