Former Zoning Administrator Harpoons Dennis Zine Over Move To Circumvent Canoga Park Neighborhood Council

I came across this fascinating editorial/commentary/article regarding an apparent move by Dennis Zine to prevent the Canoga Park Neighborhood Council from being able to have input on a zoning variance for a recycling center in Canoga Park at 21616 Roscoe Blvd.  The gist here seems to be that Zine is for the project, but the NC and adjacent residents and businesses are not, so by allowing the ZA to meet prior to the next NC session, their input can be effectively circumvented. It should be noted however, that according to supporting documentation provided in the PDF linked at the end of this post, support in the community is mixed and not exactly as 100% negative as Perica’s missive would have you believe.

CityWatchLA.com reposts an e-mail from Jon Perica, a former Zoning Administrator for the City of Los Angeles:

The announcement Thursday by Councilman Zine to muzzle the Canoga Park Neighborhood Council over an appeal of a public nuisance recycling use adjacent to residential uses is SHOCKING!

Councilman Zine had been persuaded to give the Canoga Park Neighborhood Council an opportunity to conduct their independent public hearing.  The original neighborhood council hearing should have happened in the fall of 2009 so the neighborhood council could have made a decision on the appeal filed for a recycling center to operate 66-ft from adjacent residential uses in lieu of the Code required 1,000-ft (a 93% reduction).

The councilman has suddenly decided that he does not want to get any input from the neighborhood council after having only one incomplete hearing by just their planning committee and not the Board of the neighborhood council!

Zine has scheduled the City Council Planning Committee to meet this coming Tuesday May 4th at 2 pm at room 1020 of City Hall and this Planning Committee will vote to deny the local community appeal without hearing from the Canoga Park Neighborhood Council.

In all the time I have worked at City Hall as a Zoning Administrator and in the 5 years I have been a private consultant, there has never been such an obvious effort to deny the legal right of the neighborhood council to comment on a planning case before the City Council acted.

I think that the councilman realized that there was a reasonable chance that the Board of the Neighborhood Council might support the appeal and he didn’t want to take an action in supporting the recycling use against the possible neighborhood council if they opposed the use.

If you set the City Council hearing before the Canoga Park Neighborhood Council can meet later in May, you clearly prevent the possibility of any dissenting input that would conflict with the councilman’s position.

In effect, the councilman was using the neighborhood council for his own advantage for one neighborhood planning meeting only when it would help him to look good.

When the NC planning committee voted to continue the hearing a month and appeared to have serious reservation about the many adverse impacts caused by the recycling use, Councilman Zine scheduled the next City hearing of the Council Planning Committee on the recycling appeal before the neighborhood council would take their final in late May.

Neighborhood councils were set up to provide the “voice of the community” and the councilman clearly does not want to hear what the Canoga Park community wants to say.

This is an insult to the local neighborhood council and to the whole 10 year old City process that set up 90 different neighborhood councils to provided important input to help the City make better land use decision.

This action by Councilman Zine seems to be an effort to ignore what the “people” have to say. The councilman is telling the 368 residents, business people and customers surrounding the recycling center who signed a petition or wrote letters against this business at 21616 Roscoe, that their voices counts for nothing and only the one lone voice of the recycling operator, who has caused serious public nuisance problems for 4 years, really counts.

It appears that Councilman Zine really doesn’t care about input the neighborhood council or those local people who suffer from daily recycling problems.

In an apparent response from Zine’s office, Jonathan Brand writes:

I have discussed the information presented at the meeting with my boss.  He has instructed me that he wants to proceed with the case and the PLUM hearing on the 4th of May.

I found a PDF about the project on the City of Los Angeles’ website here, which details some of the neighborhood concerns.

Popularity: 2%