The Home Stretch & the View Ordinance
This entry was posted on 3/27/2007 9:13 PM and is filed under elections.
The City Council has been pretty quiet the last few months, vis-a-vis annoying the general public. Guess they all knew an election was coming up. In January, predictably, Manoukian, Yousefian and Najarian voted to allow the Sleepy Hollow project to proceed with an arbitrarily smaller design, while Weaver and Quintero voted to kill it. 7 people spoke against the project (2 HOAs represented), and only the applicant and her architect spoke for it. Of course the pro-builder faction voted for the project in spite of public input.
Well, this week is the Home Stretch for Weaver and Manoukian. They're off to a stumbling start.
Last week Yousefian, Manoukian and Najarian all tried to avoid the subject of the proposed view ordinance by missing the meeting - the public outcry in the paper was loud enough that all 5 showed up tonight.
Tonight it was pretty obvious who was for the homeowners whose property values are being hurt by inappropriate building, and who was pro-builder.
Builder Bob was, of course, unashamedly pro-developer - he defended them, he wanted to spend about as much time as the Palestinaian Peace Process studying a "holistic" approach to the problem. No surprise there. Do nothing, let all his buddies develop in the mean time.
Weaver, no doubt seeing the handwriting on the wall and the almost total lack of Weaver signs in any of the hillside areas, now suddenly favors more restrictive FARs (as opposed to his long time support for reducing the front setbacks to make it easier for developers to build on steep hillsides instead of limiting the size of the house via FAR.) Weaver was on his usual stressed-out, rude and testy "best behavior" of course. Leave It To Weaver? Leave it to Weaver to talk out of both sides of his mouth, and vote for variances where the findings can't be made. Guess he gets credit for trying to vote down the Sleepy Hollow project in January, but reading over the record, he blows with the wind and isn't the kind of leadership we need on the Council.
Frank Quintero made the most sense of all of them - he favors fast action to settle this issue before a horde of developers flood the city with plans for their second story additions and 3 story houses on steep lots. He also favors a moratorium on building until the view protection codes can be put into place.
Najarian favored a view ordinance, but wants to be careful to do it right. He definitely didn't favor a moratorium; however he did grasp the concept that one speaker brought up that even a 1 story house in the wrong place can be objectionable, so there's more to a view protection ordinance than just height.
Manoukian - well, Daffy Rafi started out by saying he wouldn't vote for a moratorium, then he went on to insist that we take this slow, since, as he claimed, hasty decisions like lowering the FAR didn't work (!!!) - his illogical and rather stupid comment was that the reason "FAR didn't work" is that the Council told some developers to come back with a smaller house, and when they did, the houses looked about the same. Since the directed reductions in size were along the lines of a few hundred square feet in some cases, there wouldn't be much of a visual impact unless you did story poles, and looked at before and after very carefully. In the case of at least one project where the square footage was reduced by something like 800 square feet, the house was drastically smaller, the neighbors views were protected and a much more satisfactory result was promised. FAR is certainly an important tool for managing house sizes - that's why virtually every city in California has FAR regulations. Manoukian is pro-builder, has listened only to the hordes of architects and contractors in the city who want no building restrictions whatsoever. Raffi seriously needs a new job.
So tonight it was pretty clear. Weaver is desperate to win back some homeowner votes, Manoukian thinks he's got the election sewed up so he doesn't care about homeowners or the view ordinance (or he wasn't smart enough to even pretend to be interested.) The rest don't matter next week - but Yousefian wants to study it for years until we finally define the exact permissible house by code with no public review process at all, Najarian seems genuinely interested in protecting views and defining compatibility, but also wants to go slow, and Frank Quintero is the only one who is firmly on the side of homeowners and wants fast action.
Seems to me Dave and Rafi need to be put out to pasture. If any reader has a different opinion or saw the CIty Council meeting in a different light, please comment!
Who to vote for? Who to endorse? Well, Drayman made a pretty good showing at several Candidate's Forums - he's the only one this writer is certain about. Molano? Well, remember his lawsuit against the City for the Downtown Specific Plan - old Green Herb is miffed because the city didn't put in a plan to buy $65M worth of private property in downtown (with your tax dollars), demolish a couple of office buildings and put in a 5 acre Central Park. Molano scares me a bit - he strikes me as a bit of a loose cannon. The others? Tough choice - Krikorian comes across as arrogant and clueless about issues; Keuroghelian has some unfortunate baggage from his domestic violence incidents a few years back; Agajanian seems to have his heart in the right place, but he's not a very good communicator, at least in English. Don't even remember who the other are. Going to be an interesting election!
