Griffith Historic Ap Moves Forward with Last Minute Deal-Making

The City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee moved the Griffith Park Historic Monument application forward with a number of last minute changes brokered by LaBonge's office, the Griffith Trust, the Autry, DWP, and the Department of Recreation and Parks.

The standing room only crowd was fairly quiet after the vote, obviously confused by the last minute legal wrangling that the PLUM committee chose to include in its recommendation to the full council. Autry lobbyist Bill Delvac described his portion of the wrangling in his public comment as both 'excluding all non-contributing element projects already in the pipeline at the time of the historic application', and as simply excluding any project related to non-contributing elements (regardless of when they are initiated) ... So which is it, Bill?

In the last allowed public comment, a lawyer for the Griffith Trust said that they had just then agreed that Toyon Canyon - where LaBonge has wanted to build ballfields and cable cars - was to be excluded from the designation as was the Autry and the DWP's pending Headworks project. (All of these are on land that is truly part of Griffith Park.) Rec and Parks maintenance employees were to be granted six months training time to understand exactly what the designation would mean to their protocols.

No public comment was heard on these changes since no language was available for anyone to look at prior to the hearing, including the PLUM committee members themselves. However, given that Jack Weiss didn't even bother to sit up from his perpetually-bored and uninterested chair slump the entire meeting, it's pretty clear this so-called last minute wrangling was pre-planned.

Next stop for this issue -- and the only time the public will be able to comment on the new exclusions -- is the full City Council on Jan 27th.

LeBong in Secret Meeting: "Oppose Griffith Park Historic Designation!"

The Autocrat of Griffith Park is at it again. Recently calling all General Managers in this City to a secret meeting at his office, LeBong then ordered all their respective departments to oppose the Historic Designation application for Griffith Park.

The Historic Designation application was filed by the Griffith Trust, a family foundation run by Van Griffith, the great-grandson of the man who created Griffith Park and donated the land to the City, Griffith J. Griffith. The application is in direct response to the continued carving up of the park by LeBong for development by his personal friends and donors, and to the violence which he sometimes responds with when questioned by his constituents.

While away in Germany ostensibly on City business yet again, through his sock puppet proxy, Rory Calhoun, LeBong told all the GMs that the application was filed because the community has no confidence in the Department of Rec and Parks. The reality is that the public is completely fed up with LeBong continually concocting schemes for handing over chunks of the park to his buddies, big money donors like the Autry and prominent members of the Korean business community, to name just a few.

Actions by LeBong make it pretty clear that the Clowncilman thinks Griffith Park is his personal backyard. He completely rewrote the version of the Griffith Park Master plan that the community opposes so strongly in the image of Disneyland, complete with a pleasure pier, two funiculars (cable cars) -- one from the Observatory to Mt. Hollywood and one from Mineral Wells to the top of Toyon Landfill -- multilevel parking structures, and new baseball fields on top of the landfill when current closure plans for the landfill call for its restoration to natural habitat.

LeBong also recently promised his Korean financial supporters that they could take a substantial chunk of natural habitat and create "Busan Point" -- a Korean garden of their own design and use. Bypassing official processes and Rec and Parks approval, LeBong often orders or pushes around Rec and Parks employees to build or bulldoze whatever his whim is at the moment. It could be a monument to George Harrison 'here' or a tree for victims of the 1933 Griffith Park fire 'there'. But in the case of 'there', the tree is actually no where near the location where the victims fell, but instead at a location that allowed LeBong to have the absolute biggest press conference possible. It seems that the Clowncilman's sense of propriety with regards to Griffith Park is what the public, and the Griffith family itself, is tired of fighting.

It's worth noting that the "Busan" in LeBong's "Busan Point" promise is one of the Sister Cities of Los Angeles. Contrary to popular belief, the Los Angeles Sister Cities program is not a City program. It's run by a private foundation funded by some of the biggest financial movers and shakers in Los Angeles, including the powerful Korean business community. LeBong has already built the "Berlin Forest" in Griffith Park for yet another Sister City. At last check, there were 27 Sister Cities of Los Angeles, and the number continues to grow as more ethnically linked members of Los Angeles' business community jump in the game. If left unchecked by such efforts as the Historic Designation proposal, LeBong will be handing out chunks of Griffith Park to all of them.