The Underlying Lessons of Lopez Canyon

Last Wednesday the Los Angeles City Council approved the construction of a trucking academy on the site of a former landfill in Lopez Canyon. In circumventing normal environmental procedures and overriding the voices of local citizens, the Council has yet again confirmed our worst suspicions about the misuse of power Downtown.

"Are you guys totally, absolutely sure you don't just want to stay in the attic?"

First of all, Lopez Canyon proves the abiding impact of local government on citizens — even when those citizens’ elected politicians detach from their communities. Most of the City Council’s agenda is approved on a consent calendar (wherein unless members object, the remaining items pass unanimously without members physically voting at their desks) for a pretty logical reason: changing speed limits, building bike lanes, and funding weed abatement are generally uncontroversial.

But on issues like the City budget — where priorities are actually prioritized — and projects like the Lopez Canyon trucking academy, the decisions have abiding impact. Lopez Canyon, which Carla Hall of the LA Times neatly explains here, is essentially a plan to build a not-for-profit trucking academy on a portion of the site of the former Lopez Canyon landfill, which closed in 1996. Details of a project like this are complicated. Yet what the project reveals about politics in LA is clear.

On one side are the neighborhoods in Lopez and Kagel Canyons — the people most affected by the potential imposition of diesel trucks and beeping noises until 2026. Neighborhoods firstly claim that Councilmember Alarcon (who represented the affected northeast Valley district in his first go-round on the Council in ’96 and still does now) promised the landfill would be open space after it closed. The general rule is that it takes 30 years or more after a landfill is closed to use it for any purpose.

Yet now, pushed by the Chamber of Commerce and the promise of creating stable jobs for academy grads, politicians find themselves pressing back against the very communities they nominally represent. Despite the fact that adjacent neighborhood councils asked Alarcon to find another location for the project — one not on a landfill they were promised would remain open land for both safety and aesthethic reasons — Alarcon pressed ahead.

As with all re-purposing of City open space, the Council needed to change the rules in order to build the industrial-type trucking academy. The Mayor and Alarcon pushed the use of a process called a “variance.” A variance is granted when the current zoning rules regarding a property cause “hardship” to the property owner. Paul Novak, representing long-time LA County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, was reported at a public hearing as stating that “the proposed [industrial-type] use is not comparable to existing uses on the [landfill] site, and would result in new impacts that are inadequately addressed in the [Mitigated Negative Declaration issued by the LA City Office of Zoning Administration] and are unable to be mitigated to acceptable levels” (Page 18 of 22 Jan 2010 Decision Letter).

Novak then suggests that the City’s proposed use of a variance procedure “subverts the planning process, [and] that a General Plan Amendment and Zone Change would generally be required for a project of this type.” In short: the County says the City is violating the normal procedures which govern the re-zoning of land (and ensure maximal safeguards for environmental protection, community input, and political transparency). There is “no practical difficulty, hardship or special circumstances” that validate the use of a variance in this instance, says Novak.

Yet using a variance is precisely how Alarcon and the Mayor pressed ahead. Although Councilmember Paul Krekorian (CD-2) voted against the trucking academy in the Planning and Land Use Management Committee (yes — that’s the PLUM Committee), he was absent in full Council due to a scheduled vacation. The remaining members of the Council approved the project 13-0 last Wednesday.

If democracy is about representation, then politics is about choosing whom to represent. Beyond fire hazards in the Angeles National Forest, methane gas emissions on the hillsides, or noise and truck pollution surrounding Lopez Canyon, the politics here placed business interests against neighborhood citizens. Councilmember Alarcon and the Mayor successfully contorted the political process to hoist their project on a decaying landfill in an already hard-pressed community.

In an interview with Los Angeles and First, Daniel Wright, the attorney on behalf of the Community Alliance for Open Space in the Lopez and Kagel Canyon areas, said:

This is a community that is overwhelmingly low-income and minority, and they have suffered through more than 20 years of a sanitary landfill with rumbling trucks in their neighborhood; now this Council has basically said “you people” will have to suffer a little longer.

When asked why Councilmember Alarcon supported a project so many say is bad for neighborhoods in his own district, Wright replied:

This thing appears to have originated in the Mayor’s office. And why is Alarcon supporting it? Because it’s jobs. All of us agree that the program would be meritorious. But my clients provided the zoning administrator, and the Department of Planning, and Alarcon with multiple, alternate, appropriately zoned sites, and they simply refused to look at them. What this is about is being cheap, because it’s about giving away the citizens’ assets of this city, for free, to a non-profit, in this cause associated with a union, instead of using their federal funding to pay rent.

It’s bad enough for a politician to break a decade-old promise about preserving open land. It’s worse that the promise-breaker is the same politician who made the promise. But it’s inexcusable to use an underhanded process to hoist industrial development in communities who are opposed. The systemic refusal of the City to compromise — for instance, by considering placing the trucking academy at 12621 S. Sheldon Street in District 6 — is plain wrong. It ignores citizens, disregards the environment, and shows pure disdain for transparent procedure. While Councilmember Alarcon reserves a quarter the academy’s places for his District 7 constituents, he ignores the shouts of desperation from those most affected in his district.

I haven’t mentioned that Councilmember Alarcon is under investigation by the District Attorney for not living in his alleged District 7 residence. Not living with the people you represent doesn’t just make voting against them all the more dispiriting — under law, it’s a felony to vote where you do not live. It’s revolting to consider, but it’s possible District 7 (map here) had no real representative to concur with the stentorian objections of community residents and Los Angeles County Supervisors. (Times summary here, LAist backstory here and here.)

Read more and view photos of Lopez Canyon at the LA City Department of Sanitation’s page here.