REPORT ON ADOPTION OF THE COMMUNITY PLAN IMPLEMENTATION OVERLAY DISTRICT ORDINANCE (CPIO)
On
This new ordinance is enabling legislation which allows the City of
But would such local zoning ordinances actually implement a Community Plan? The answer is: hardly at all. The title of this new legislation misleads the public, in particular because, in practice, CPIO’s could usher in many zoning and environmental changes to local communities which conflict with Community Plans.
This is because the nexus between a CPIO and the Community Plan it purports to implement is tenuous. In fact, the Council’s enabling legislation contains no criteria to determine if a CPIO actually implements a Community Plan or has environmental impacts. Changes to local zoning ordinances enacted through a CPIO could and probably would, therefore, conflict with Community Plans.
The foremost reason for this disconnect is because the City's elected officials, with the Department of City Planning in tow, long ago abdicated their formal, legally required role to plan Los Angeles. For them the “planning” process has become an appendage to the City's Department of Building and Safety, whose primary task is to issue building permits for private projects. Planning is not, therefore, the rigorous preparation, legal adoption, annual updating, and careful implementation of a vision for governing
As anyone who has taken the time to review the City's aging General Plan Framework or one of the 35 Community Plans quickly learns, these plans address 100 percent of the land area in
These portions of the General Plan and its implementing land use element, the Community Plans, address 80 percent of the land area of
Furthermore, only 20 percent of the city's surface area is in the private lots to be regulated by CPIO’s, and only a small amount of the activity on these private lots is new construction whose zoning is reviewed for the approvals granted by the Departments of Building and Safety and City Planning.
More importantly, the CPIO enabling legislation and the local ordinances it will foster totally fail to implement any of the policies and programs for the 80 percent of Los Angeles carefully addressed in Community Plans, but which are under the jurisdiction of the big city departments. These include such important agencies as LADWP, Harbor, Airports, Public Works (Engineering, Street Services, Sanitation), Police, Fire, Transportation, Libraries, and Recreation and Parks.
Instead each local CPIO will streamline the approval of building permits, many with potentially extensive and adverse environmental impacts, while the CPIO ordinances themselves will fall flat in the implementation of Community Plans.
Since City Planning long ago abdicated any role other than processing these zoning permits, they have proposed an ordinance which claims to implement the Community Plans. In practice, however, these overlay zoning ordinances will become a back door for circumventing discretionary zoning permits (e.g., variances, zone changes) and their environmental reviews.
What Los Angeles needs is real implementation of its existing and future adopted city plans, not misleading ordinances which claim to implement the General Plan and Community Plans, but which, at best, do nothing of the sort. Furthermore, at worst, they may actually sabotage the very plans they claim to implement.
An update: a City Watch commentator made two additional claims about CPIO’s which, if correct, indicate that their impacts could be worse than expected.
First, since the City no longer maintains its legally required plans, the real role of CPIO’s is to implement local zoning changes desired by Councilmembers. Despite claims to the contrary, any connection of these local zone changes to Community Plans would be wholly coincidental.
Second, since CPIO’s will become an alternative to the implementation of community plans through zoning and discretionary actions, in practice they will allow real estate investors to utilize supportive Councilmembers to champion local ordinances easing specific zoning and environmental rules restricting neighborhood-level property speculation.
* Dick Platkin is a
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