Last year, our law firm sued over one house project in Mount Washington, but the challenge included not only the pattern and practice of the improper interpretation of our Specific Plan, a parochial issue, but also it included two challenges that could impact the residents of the entire City. The case challenges these potentially city-wide issues too:

1. Unfair Ordinance Drafting By City Attorneys. The City’s pattern and practice of writing City planning notice and appeal ordinances (the Density Bonus Implementation Ordinance, Protected Tree Ordinance, CEQA Appeal Implementation Ordinance, Processes and Procedures Ordinance, etc.) that cuts out a right to notice of Project approvals that may impact constitutionally protected interests of affected persons, and that deny the right to appeal certain actions to persons negatively affected by Project approvals. For instance, the Density Bonus law allows only persons owning or living immediately adjacent to a project site to file a land use appeal, but if you live two houses away, you are given no right to appeal and protect your interests from the project impacts.

2. A Secret Pre-PLUM Process As Pattern and Practice And Impacting Approval of The Particular House Project Challenged. Our lawsuit alleges that the City has a secret pattern and practice of communication of the Councilmember’s desired outcome of a land use or CEQA appeal before the meeting begins, including possibly in the individual project challenged in our case.

We are in a unique position to help reveal the extent to which City Council deputies communicate positions of other councilmembers to their bosses because we are pursuing discovery to obtain the documents the deputy City Attorneys are trying to withhold from the Court, us, and the public. If the deputy City Attorneys have nothing to hide, then why are they claiming that these documents, which appear to largely consist of already public information summarized, and perhaps the unlawful communication of the positions of other Councilmembers, cannot really be privileged as they claim.

And think about this: Jose Huizar has admitted he used his official authority to manipulate the disposition of land use and CEQA appeals before the PLUM Committee. How did he do that if he was only one vote out of five members? We contend that he relied on this complex pre-meeting process and a tradition of City Hall deference to a Councilmember’s preference to have the confidence that he could deliver the desired outcome to his bribing developer sponsors. The US Attorney may have removed Jose Huizar and his gang of other City employees, developers and lobbyists, but the City bureaucracy still operates a secret pre-meeting and possible communications channel that helps existing councilmembers to continue to have confidence that their own preference will be simply adopted by their colleagues without bothering to read land use appeal documents or really seriously listening to much at the public PLUM Meeting. If the evidence we are seeking in discovery, bears this out, it violates fundamental due process rights to fair land use and CEQA appeals. This has negatively impacted all land use appellants including in this particular case.

These issues are large and our group is small. We think these issues require more eyes and more involvement than just our group. We think collective action is needed. We think the City has no business conducting a pre-PLUM meeting that involves anyone on the PLUM Committee, especially the Chair of the PLUM Committee. (For instance, if the City Planning Department staff meet in advance of the PLUM Committee meeting to be prepared to present their cases publicly, that appears to be lawful so long as it is not a mechanism for communication of City Councilmember positions.)