Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition

We are a small group of activists (it always is a small group determined to bring about change, right?), the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition. We focus on projects on or near Crane Boulevard in Mt. Washington. Our concerns are mostly focused on safety related issues including:

• Fire safety (access, ingress, egress) in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone
• The substandard and inadequate roadways
• Inadequate geology reports and enforcement
• Non-enforcement of protected tree ordinances
• Non-enforcement of the local Specific Plan requirements with respect to building size, landscaping, and other public

Recently, the Mount Washington/Glassell Park Specific Plan area had more than 150 house project applications pending, some of them speculation developments by foreign investment groups. We appealed a series of house projects to the Area Planning Commission and to the City Council as the City approved 8 house projects (and dozens more in the adjacent community) within a block of each other with no environmental review of the safety impacts of concurrent construction projects on steep hillside high fire hazard terrain and narrow winding streets.

At the hearings, we watched City Council members appear to vote on our land use and appeals under the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”) as if they had read nothing. Have you witnessed these phenomena in your interactions with the City’s planning commissions or the City Council?

The Coalition filed a lawsuit on one of the projects mentioned above (464/466 Crane Blvd.). This project has both local Specific Plan issues as well as larger, Citywide due process and unfair hearing claims.