CommentsUPRIGHTING THE PLANNING DEPARTMENT-After the Superior Court ruled that Los Angeles’s planning and building officials had, for the past six years, been unlawfully refusing to follow the City’s ordinance regulating second dwelling units (SDUs) and ordered them to stop doing so, these same officials cooked up an ingenious scheme to circumvent the Court’s ruling. The Planning Department would prepare a report proposing that the City Council should simply repeal the SDU ordinance.
The Department’s report, they schemed, would misleadingly assert that repeal was the only feasible choice. In fact, the Court identified three choices. It would confirm that repeal of the adopted standards would hardly make any difference. In fact, the existing standards are the only protections that LA’s single family neighborhoods have against “by right” SDU development.
With repeal and the ensuing application of the state “default” standards, extra-large SDUs that are the same size as many primary residences could be built, and designated “hillside” areas would no longer be protected from SDU development. Importantly, the Department would “fast track” its repeal proposal, giving only the minimum required legal notice so that neighborhood councils and homeowner associations would not have sufficient time to inform themselves about the proposal, let alone develop formal positions and provide useful testimony and input.
A clever but reprehensible scheme, and, fortunately, one that utterly failed. At its August 31 meeting, the City Council unanimously rejected the Department’s repeal proposal. The five Council members (Nury Martinez, David Ryu, Paul Koretz, Paul Krekorian and Bob Blumenfield) who co-authored the motion to reject the repeal proposal -- and their hardworking staffs -- deserve full credit for standing up to protect our neighborhoods. Council members Martinez, Ryu and Koretz, in particular, did the heaving lifting to obtain unanimous Council support, while Council President Herb Wesson and his staff forcefully weighed in to develop the consensus vote for neighborhood protection.
LA’s neighborhood councils and homeowner associations showed they would not be bullied by the Department’s arrogant approach and that they can act quickly and effectively to call, write and meet with Council members. They played a key role in educating the Council about the vital importance of LA’s protective standards against the negative impacts of too-large and poorly located SDU development. They also developed convincing testimony that the Department’s report failed to consider the potentially serious cumulative negative impacts the repeal proposal would have on LA’s already stressed infrastructure. After all, repeal would be tantamount to rezoning all single family R-1 zones into R-2 zones, since the “default” standards would effectively allow, by right, a second, similarly sized residence on every lot.
Altogether it was a very bad day in Council for the Planning Department. Not only did the Council firmly reject repeal, but the Council’s motion makes it clear that -- in stark contrast to the fast tracked, closed and slipshod process the Department followed for its repeal proposal -- it must now, looking to the future, initiate a new code amendment process to develop new SDU standards with a “comprehensive, open and transparent review” process. Take that, Planning Department!
Further, in contrast to the Department’s proposal’s to use repeal to replace LA’s existing local standards with the very permissive “one size fits all” state “default” standards, the Council’s motion directs that the new LA standards must take into account “the unique characteristics of each geographic area of the city that may result in certain limitations and prohibitions” regarding SDU development. On the chin, Planning Department!
And yet the Department’s hubris seems to know no bounds. When Council President Wesson was describing to the new Planning Director, Vince Bertoni, how its motion expects the Department to quickly bring back an “interim solution” that the Council can present to the Court and that the City can enforce until such time as the new code amendment is finalized, Bertoni appeared completely tone deaf.
The Council motion called for the Department to prepare an administrative memorandum similar to the one issued by the Chief Zoning Administrator in 2003. In that memo, then CZA Robert Janovici had invoked the very limited power AB 1866 gives local governments to treat previous discretionary CUP procedures as “null and void” so that SDU permits can be issued “by right.”
Since the City had successfully used the 2003 memo to administer SDU applications for seven years from 2003 to 2010 and since the memo had been explicitly approved by the Superior Court (and even identified by the Court as one of the Council’s three options going forward,) the task of preparing a similar memo to delete the discretionary CUP procedures should likely take about only an afternoon or two of work.
Wesson pressed Bertoni about how long it would take before the new administrative memo would be presented to the Council. Not just a few days, Bertoni responded. He saw it as taking perhaps “several weeks.” Why? Because, Bertoni explained, he and his staff wanted to go behind-closed-doors with the City Attorney representatives in order to undertake a wide-ranging fishing expedition by which the Department would “pick and choose” which parts of the existing SDU standards appear to pass legal muster in the Department’s eyes. After all, the Department wouldn’t want to be administering illegal SDU standards.
As an example of this “picking and choosing” effort, Bertoni focused on the adopted LA standard that allows SDUs only on lots that are at least 7,500 sq. ft. According to Bertoni, most LA single family lots are not this large, and in some geographic areas, only a relatively few lots meet this standard. Bertoni then ventured his opinion that, under state law, a city “can’t completely prohibit SDUs overall in the city or in geographical areas” unless it makes very detailed, hard-to-establish findings. Consequently, after some new fact research, the existing 7,500 sq. ft. standard may not make it into the CZA’s interim standards memo.
Yipes! Does the new Planning Director really intend for us to take him seriously? If so, he shouldn’t be uttering sheer hokum. What’s wrong with it?
It’s a fundamental part of the American legal system that bureaucrats do not have power to “pick and choose” which ordinance provisions they think are “illegal” and refuse to enforce them. They take an oath of office to defend and enforce the laws that have been enacted and, if they disagree with some of those laws, or have doubts about their legality, there are legally acceptable ways for that determination to be made, rather than issuing unilateral administrative fiats.
AB 1866 gave local officials a very limited specific authority to declare “null and void” certain discretionary CUP procedural mechanisms, based on the unique circumstances that had led to enactment of AB 1866.
In preparing the 2003 memorandum, then-CZA Janovici carefully limited his “null and void” determinations only to whether a provision was discretionary or mandatory, and not to undertaking a wide-ranging fishing expedition to question whether there might be any legal or policy issues regarding other standards. Bertoni has missed this fundamental point.
Bertoni also has no idea what the legal standard is. State law explicitly provides cities like LA with authority to establish planning/environmental standards for determining where SDUs can and can’t be properly located, stating that a local second unit ordinance “may do any of the following: (A) designate areas within the jurisdiction… where second units may be permitted.
The designations of areas may be based on criteria that may include but are not limited to, the adequacy of water and sewer services and the impact of second units on traffic flow.” Bertoni’s obscure legal pronouncement seems wrongly derived from a completely different portion of the statute that forbids cities from “totally preclud[ing]” SDUs from their territorial boundaries altogether, unless they can make the findings in question.
Ironically, Bertoni recently left employment as Pasadena’s Planning Director. Pasadena has a 15,000 sq. ft. minimum lot size for SDUs, far greater than LA’s 7,500 sq. ft. size that he now claims presents legal difficulties.
Once Bertoni and his colleagues open the question of excluding SDUs from LA lots smaller than 7,500 sq. ft., their attention would likely next turn to the adopted LA standard that precludes SDUs from designated “hillside” areas.
This standard, too, would be suspect under Bertoni’s described legal criteria. Large areas of the Los Angeles are designated “hillside” for obvious environmental and planning reasons. But Bertoni and his team apparently believe that they have authority to determine that LA’s prohibition on SDUs in hillside areas is inconsistent with state law unless the difficult-to-make “findings” can be applied to those areas.
The existing “hillside” SDU prohibition, of course, is highly valued by many neighborhood councils and homeowner associations, and there is no Department-proposed “pick and choose” exercise that would be more likely to raise their hackles.
Director Bertoni misses the irony in his proposal to go behind-closed-doors to use some conjectured “lawfulness” criteria as the means of preparing the “interim solution” CZA memo. The Council has just vigorously yanked the Department’s chain for its ill-conceived closed, fast-tracked process followed in its repeal proposal, dictating instead that an open, thoughtful and transparent process be used to develop changes in the City’s SDU standards. It looks like the Council now needs to put Bertoni on a very short leash and quickly terminate his weeks-long “picking and choosing” fishing expedition approach for preparing the interim SDU administrative memo.
(Carlyle Hall is an environmental and land use lawyer in Los Angeles who founded the Center for Law in the Public Interest and litigated the well-known AB 283 litigation, in which the Superior Court ordered the City to rezone about one third of the properties within its territorial boundaries (an area the size of Chicago) to bring them into consistency with its 35 community plans. He also co-founded LA Neighbors in Action, which has recently been litigating with the City over its second dwelling unit policies and practices.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
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