EAGLE ROCK NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL Lisa Kable Blanchard, President Cyndi Otteson, Vice President Miry Whitehill, Treasurer Matt Hemingway, Secretary Pat Niessen, Communications David Greene, Immediate Past President
CITY OF LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA P.O. Box 41652 Los Angeles, CA 90041 Eric Garcetti MAYOR
www.ernc.la
[email protected]
November 9, 2017 Councilmember José Huizar 200 Spring St. Los Angeles, CA 90012 cc: Dennis Joe, Case Planner Community Development Department, Planning Division Office 633 E. Broadway, Room 103 Glendale, CA 91206
[email protected] Dear Councilmember Huizar, The Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council (ERNC), which represents over 45,000 stakeholders in the City of Los Angeles, objects to the City of Glendale’s Mitigated Negative Declaration for the proposed biogas plant at the Scholl Canyon landfill. We concur with you that the MND is flawed and inadequate, and that public participation has been actively discouraged. Our objections include: -
There was no public meeting held in the City of Los Angeles to provide information about and take public comment on the MND, even though most of the negative impacts from the proposed project will affect Eagle Rock residents. It is incomprehensible that as the Lead Agency, the City of Glendale would provide no opportunity for input to Los Angeles stakeholders on an MND for a project that, as stated in the MND, is “primarily accessed from Figueroa Street in the City of Los Angeles,” and which uses a Los Angeles, 90041 address on its official documents.
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As in the City of Glendale’s 2014 Draft Environmental Impact Report for a proposed expansion of the Scholl landfill, the MND focuses almost exclusively on impacts on the City of Glendale, when the negative impacts of the project -- environmental, health, aesthetic, sound, and otherwise -- will almost exclusively harm Los Angeles residents.
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Also as in Glendale’s 2014 DEIR, the MND uses biased statistics to discount the negative impacts on Eagle Rock: among these are sound readings taken at Eagle Rock residences where ambient freeway noise is at its highest, and selective sightlines that minimize the visual pollution that will result from a natural-gas power plant perched on a ridge that looks down on our homes.
We urge you to use your authority as a Los Angeles City Councilmember to ensure that Eagle Rock stakeholders get a say in this process, and ask that you demand that GWP reject the MND, and start the process over with a full Environmental Impact Report.
Furthermore, we remind you that outside access to the Scholl Canyon Landfill is exclusively via Los Angeles city streets, and encourage you to consult City Council File: 86-1465, in which the City Attorney and Director of the Bureau of Sanitation were instructed in 1986 to “explore all available means of challenging the implementation of the Glendale City Council ban to prohibit the disposal of refuse collected in the City of Los Angeles at the Scholl Canyon Landfill, including consideration of a weight limit on Figueroa St north of the Ventura Freeway.” While this Council motion was passed at a time when the City of Los Angeles did not have the robust waste diversion program it has now, and L.A. no longer needs to dump its refuse at Scholl Canyon, CF 86-1465 set an important precedent by identifying legal and pragmatic means to ban heavy trash haulers from using L.A. streets to reach Glendale’s dump. If this Council file were revived, it could compel the City of Glendale to use its own streets to access its own facility, sending the pollution-spewing trucks that now traverse our neighborhood through Glendale neighborhoods, as originally intended when the dump was first conceived. This would likely cause Glendale’s politicians and department heads to finally take the health hazards of the Scholl landfill seriously, rather than continue dumping those problems in their backyard -- which happens to be Eagle Rock’s front yard. Respectfully, The Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council Board cc: Glendale Mayor Vartan Gharpetian Glendale Councilmember Paula Devine Glendale Councilmember Ara Najarian Glendale Councilmember Zareh Sinanyan Glendale Councilmember Vrej Agajanian GWP Commissioner Sarojini Lall GWP Commissioner Manuel Carmargo, Jr GWP Commissioner Matthew Hale GWP Commissioner Roland Kedikian GWP Commissioner Hrand Avanessian GWP General Manager Steve Zurn Sean Starkey, Deputy, L.A. Council District 14 Greg Merideth President, The Eagle Rock Association Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis
