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TV CITY 2050 - The owners of the Farmers Market Thursday filed a legal action against the city of Los Angeles challenging its environmental assessment of the Television City 2050 project, alleging it underestimated the development’s effects on the famous tourist landmark as well as the rest of the surrounding community.
The A.F. Gilmore Co.’s Los Angeles Superior Court petition accuses the city of granting the developer “a long-term blank check to change its plans, build whatever it wants and answer to almost nobody, regardless of the impact its efforts wreak upon surrounding landowners, streets and infrastructure and neighboring communities.”
The company seeks a temporary restraining order and injunctive relief that would, among other things, vacate and set aside the development agreement as well as the certification of the environmental impact report.
The petition alleges the city has violated its own city code, the California Environmental Quality Act and the Housing Crisis Act. The Gilmore Co. also contends it has been denied due process and a fair hearing.
A representative for the City Attorney’s Office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The project site spans about 25 acres along Beverly Boulevard in the Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. The existing Television City broadcast facility has operated since 1952 and has some 95,540 square feet of sound stage uses, 325,450 square feet of production support uses, 160,090 square feet of production office space and 159,600 square feet of general office space, according to the petition.
The ongoing project is centered around the TVC 2050 Specific Plan through which the developer wants to expand and modernize the existing television broadcast facility, the petition states.
“Inexplicably, however, the specific plan is neither specific nor a plan,” the petition alleges. “It permits more than 1.6 million square feet of commercial uses that might be office buildings, entertainment uses, experiential retail” or other commercial considerations, according to the petition.
Throughout the entire publication and comment process during which the environmental impact report for the project was circulated, the specific plan itself was not available for public review, the petitioner alleges.
What is clear is that the analysis of key impact areas was omitted or based on faulty assumptions in the EIR and that the potential impacts of the project upon the Farmers Market property and the surrounding community “have been understated and have not been adequately analyzed and disclosed,” the petition further alleges.
The Farmers Market has operated on a site immediately south of the development since 1934. The petition predicts there will be increased traffic, noise, vibration, air emissions and other impacts as well as “damaging impacts to historic resources” on the Farmers Market property.
The city and developer released a document for environmental review before the details of its project description and the specific plan were completed, the petition states.
“This backward placement of priorities is nonsensical and ultimately violates CEQA’s primary charge –to trigger full disclosure and accurate consideration of environmental impacts,” according to the petition, which adds, “The city and developer cannot remedy the tortured pathway toward approval of this project with purported technical corrections or modifications.”
(This article was republished from mynewsla.com.) Photo by John Schreiber.
