INSIDE LA-Hairdresser Mikell Powell is walking her two dogs in Brentwood along Sunset Boulevard just across the street from the Archer School for Girls (photo left). “I’m opposed to anything that would make driving on Sunset here anymore hellish than it already is,” Powell says as her dogs tug on their leashes.
No question: there’s a 1.2 mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard, roughly from the 405 Freeway on the east to Kenter/Bundy Road on the west, where the traffic pain can be excruciating during rush hour. “I won’t leave my place to drive anywhere between 2:30 [in the afternoon] and 7,” Powell says. “The traffic then is mostly impossible.”
Think anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes to travel a little over a mile at rush hour. It’s a shared misery. The Brentwood studio executive in his Tesla is stuck in the same slow-moving world of traffic pain as the gardener in his Toyota pickup stuffed with lawnmowers, rakes and hoses.
As recently as April, Councilman Mike Bonin, the local lawmaker, called this stretch of Sunset “one of the worst traffic choke points” in Los Angeles. “I can’t drive down Sunset in the afternoon without planning for maddening traffic delays.”
So it was stunning when Bonin recently struck a bargain with the Archer School for Girls and opted to support the private girls school’s massive building project (called Archer Forward) that critics say will seriously exacerbate the current Sunset Blvd. traffic nightmare both during the planned three-year construction period and afterward.
Critics point to the school’s own environmental studies that show the Archer Forward plan would generate 133,000 construction-related vehicle trips, going in and out of the Archer property at 11725 Sunset Blvd. over a three year period.
“The traffic impact would be unimaginable,” says Wendy-Sue Rosen, president of the Brentwood Residents Coalition; Rosen also co-chairs the Sunset Coalition with investment manager and Brentwood resident David C. Wright.
Sunset Coalition was initially formed to fight the new, Bonin-negotiated “compromise” plan for Archer; its larger mission is to protect neighborhoods along the Sunset corridor from the traffic impacts of major building projects. The coalition has already hired traffic, air toxicity and construction experts who have serious questions about the environmental safety and impacts of the project.
“The community has just survived five years of construction-related traffic congestion due to the 405 Freeway widening work,” says Rosen. “And now Archer wants to put us through three more years of a traffic nightmare.”
Still, with Bonin’s late-breaking support, the tiny, elite girl’s school looks like it has out-maneuvered its opponents just days before a Los Angeles City Council vote on the project.
“We hoped that Councilman Bonin would represent the interests of all the residents of Brentwood in evaluating this project and not just those of Archer,” Wright says.
Eric Edmunds, president of the Brentwood Hills Homeowners Assn. which is a member of the Sunset Coalition, says Archer moved to its current location, a historic former retirement home, in 1998 with wide support from the community.
“I personally backed their move at the time,” Edmunds says. “I thought Archer would be a great asset for Brentwood, and I still believe that. But I do not support Archer’s proposed building plan. Traffic is out of control on Sunset already, and the Archer project, as it is now proposed, will only make it worse.”
The project’s traffic will effect 20,000 residents and 1500 businesses in the 90049 (Brentwood) and 90272 (Pacific Palisades) zip codes, thousands of non-residents who travel to and from work on this stretch of Sunset and thousands more beach-going motorists.
The proposed project also would be part of a perfect storm of development in Brentwood’s Sunset Blvd. corridor. Both Brentwood School’s upper and middle school campuses and Mount St. Mary’s College have major building projects planned. A quarter mile section of the corridor is already the venue for St. Martin of Tours Church and its day-school, the Sunshine Pre-School, University Synagogue, Brentwood’s middle school and Archer.
“The Archer project of nearly a quarter million square feet of construction would be the biggest traffic-producing project to happen along Sunset Boulevard from the ocean to Beverly Hills since construction of the Beverly Hills Hotel almost 100 years ago,” says Wright.
With so much at stake, homeowners were stunned when Bonin in early July proclaimed he had negotiated a “ground-breaking compromise’’ on the Archer project with local homeowners.
“This so-called compromise is really no compromise at all because it only slightly reduces the size of Archer’s originally proposed project,” says Wright. “It’s still way too big and too impactful.”
Nor does the Bonin-engineered compromise have the community’s blessing. “This agreement was reached behind closed doors with only a handful of homeowners in the room,” says Wright. “Everyone we’ve spoken to since this ‘compromise agreement’ was announced remains opposed to the project.”
All told, a dozen Westside homeowner groups oppose Archer’s plan and support what’s called “Alternative 2” – a much-scaled down Archer project.
The Archer plan would involve 234,900 square feet of construction, including an extensive remodel of the school’s main 85,000 square foot building. It would also add:
- a new 17,700 square foot, 395-seat performing arts center;
- a new 85,500 square foot underground parking garage with 164 spaces (expandable to 251 stacked spaces);
- a new two-story, 39,300 square foot multipurpose facility with two gyms; and,
- a new 7,400 square foot visual arts center.
Also, the school will be permitted to newly operate a six-week summer session and host a significantly greater number of athletic and special events on campus than it does now.
And the construction-related traffic from the Archer plan is also likely to be significantly worse than Archer’s own environmental studies originally predicted. Under the construction scenario studied by Archer’s traffic experts, the school’s building program would have taken six years to complete. But now it is planned to be finished in three years.
“This means the community will get all the traffic pain compressed into a three year period,” Edmunds says.
After construction, Archer’s supporters – including Bonin - have claimed the school will actually generate less traffic than it does now.
“They’re building more to accommodate more visitors and guests,” says Edmunds. “That means more traffic. It’s unavoidable. Can Archer try to manage the traffic, for example, by having its events before or after a rush hour? Yes, but what they’ll be doing is extending the peak traffic hours.”
The massive Archer project may also be a health hazard for Archer’s own students.
During construction, the negative air quality conditions created by the entire project over the life of the six-year-long construction project were already projected to reach levels barely acceptable under outdated air pollution health standards, according to Archer’s environmental documents.
Sunset Coalition’s expert, Environmental Audit, Inc., has reported that the three-year building schedule is likely to increase the health risk.
Environmental Audit wrote that the air quality “health risk analysis [completed by Archer] is based on outdated” and weaker standards than those now recommended for evaluating the air quality impacts of construction projects on young people.
“The cancer risk is expected to increase approximately 10 fold for short term events, such as construction, under the new guidelines [standards] because of the added sensitivity toward younger populations,” Environmental Audit’s vice-president Debra Bright Stevens and the firm’s air quality specialist, Michael M. Choi, wrote on July 24.
“These air quality impacts need to be studied now – before the project is approved - so parents of children at Archer know what the potential health risks are and can demand ways to mitigate those risks,” says Rosen.
“As a parent would you pay $35,100-a-year to send your children to Archer where they’ll be taught in temporary buildings and exposed to truck traffic and industrial-level air-quality?” says Wright. “I wonder if the parents of Archer students really understand what this could mean for their childrens’ education and health. I don’t think Archer’s giving parents all the facts about these impacts.”
Archer says it needs to modernize its campus in order to provide an excellent educational environment for its 500 female students, in grades six through 12, and for the school to remain competitive with its Westside private school rivals. (Photo left: School bus pulls into already heavy traffic lanes.)
“The school has presented no evidence that its educational program has been harmed because of the size of its physical plant or that is any less competitive because of it,” says Wright.
Sunset Coalition made one more pitch to Bonin’s staff on Friday (July 24) to reconsider. “Our position was that construction is not set to begin until 2017 and there’s still a lot of unknowns about the traffic and environmental health and safety impacts of this massive project, so what’s the big rush all about?” Wright says. “Let’s wait and get all the facts first. Such a review will not delay the start of construction if everything is up to standard.”
But Bonin’s staff seemed unmoved by the coalition’s argument. On August 4, the councilman is likely to lead the fight to get the Archer project approved by the full council.
But even a council approval would not end the controversy. The opponents’ next step would likely be a lawsuit.
The opponents are now being helped by the well-known environmental law firm Chatten-Brown & Carstens. If there’s litigation, the opponents would seek a recirculation of the EIR for the project, claiming that the traffic impacts (especially in light of Archer’s decision to build the project in three, instead of six, years) and the air quality issues were not adequately analyzed in the original EIR.
Likewise, the opponents’ claim Archer’s environmental review was flawed in another respect. “Archer never looked at the possibility of putting their new activities and facilities on a separate campus,” Wright says. “Other schools have done that. It makes sense to us. And we believe the law requires Archer to seriously review that as an alternative to their massive, one-campus project.”
(John Schwada is a former investigative reporter for Fox 11 in Los Angeles, the LA Times and the late Herald Examiner. He is a contributor to CityWatch. His consulting firm, MediaFix Associates, is now assisting the opponents of the Archer project. )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 61
Pub: Jul 28, 2015
