Marisa Tomei: “Please honor this building and its architect, Kurt Meyer, with a Historic Cultural Monument designation.”I reported briefly last week on the whole to-do about the City’s wanton approval of a Frank Gehry megaplex at 8150 Sunset and, more recently, on the extremely weird fact that the Council’s PLUM1 Committee forwarded proposed historic-cultural designation of the Lytton Savings building on to the full Council without a recommendation, even though CD4 Councilmember David Ryu explicitly favors the designation. This is just a brief update with links to more documents.
Julia Duncan, David Ryu’s planning deputy, spoke at PLUM in favor of a historical designation for the Lytton Savings building, but the committee forwarded the matter to Council without a recommendation. What can it mean?Oh, the irony! Here’s the deal. It’s well known that Los Angeles City Council members never vote against land use matters in one another’s districts. This allows them to guarantee their campaign donors that they’ll be able to get their projects approved. The principle is called “deference” — they defer to one another with respect to their districts. This corrupt system is the basis for a lawsuit against the City by some Valley residents. In their pleadings they quote Councilman David Ryu’s disconcertingly honest explanation of how it works:
Councilmember David Ryu has described the Vote Trading Pact as one of “respect” for other Councilmember’s Council Projects and in return he expects the same “respect” for his Council Projects.
“For someone to come in at the tail end and to disagree with my recommendation after meetings with the community on dozens of occasions and with other city departments and after I have involved stakeholders,” doesn’t make sense, he said. “I might make a decision…and my colleagues respect it. Even if they might disagree with my decision, they abide by it because they were not there during those community meetings.” Los Feliz Ledger September 1, 2016
8150 Sunset Blvd. rendering.Although I don’t really have time to cover land use issues here, sometimes they have an intersection, however tenuous, with public records activity. Also, since BIDs are universally in favor of all development, no matter how illegal or stupid it might be, and they talk about it incessantly at their meetings in between planning to deport homeless people to Manzanar or whatever, it seems useful to collect some material on these issues here. One such instance is the stupidly huge development at 8150 Sunset Blvd.,5 recently approved by the LA City Council over the objections of freaking everybody.
So an organization called Fix the City6 sued the City on Thursday7 over various aspects of the 8150 Sunset project.8 I’m going to collect the filings on this case, starting with the verified petition filed Thursday, and you can get them via the menu structure or also:
