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.