University Park Estates Neighborhood Association

Graffiti - We have been in contact with the Long Beach Department of Parks and Recreation and they have had the graffiti in Channel View park Painted over. We informed them the that painted over graffiti was done in such a way with non blending paint and that it makes the park look bad. We are waiting for a response.

Graffiti painted on the bridge over Loynes is on Los Angeles County Land and Long Beach can only ask them to paint it over. We have painted it out on our own but it really needs to be done by the county. We will contact our councilman Gary Delongs office to see if they can expedite the process in the future. We will let you know what they do.

There is fresh graffiti on every lamp post trash can also on our walk ways, trees and the back of the UPENA sign. The Loynes bridge was also tagged again.

This continues to be a problem. I reported it to the city, lets see how soon they react. I will not post pictures of the graffiti so as not to glorify the kids art work. I have also taken the pictures off of their previous work.

Once again if you see them doing it or after its done, report it to the graffiti hot line.

5/21/07 These little artists are so proud of their work. We are happy to see it go.

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive EditorMore housing on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway north of Second Street and no housing on the parcel where SeaPort Marina Hotel is are just two recommendations in the draft SEADIP Development Standards being unveiled in public meetings this month.

SEADIP (Southeast Area Development Improvement Plan) has been the primary land use document in the area for more than 20 years. However, most recent projects have sought, and won, variances and conditional uses from the original plan.

That and two major projects a proposed Home Depot Center on Studebaker Road at Loynes Drive and a Lennar Homes multi-use project with residential units at the current SeaPort Marina Hotel prompted Third District Councilman Gary DeLong to form a study committee. The group has been meeting privately since November.

A draft revision was completed early this month, and DeLong has scheduled a series of meetings with community groups as well as two public meetings and hearings before the Planning Commission.

Were trying to go through a process so when development comes, the community gets what it wants, not get stuck with something they dont want, DeLong said. I want to stress that this is a draft proposal, as in changes can be made. Thats what these meetings are for.

Both the Home Depot and the Lennar Homes projects are stalled, waiting for action at the state Coastal Commission. DeLong said he was uncertain whether projects in the pipeline would be impacted if the revisions are approved, but noted that both already are seeking variances.

DeLong had been criticized for conducting the committee meetings behind closed doors. He countered that the committee was a diverse one, and the small group made it possible to get things done. Public opinion is the phase taking place now, he added.

The revision breaks SEADIP into 15 distinct use areas, with some described under current use and others by owner. They also correspond roughly with original SEADIP Subareas.

The parcel identified as SeaPort Marina Hotel is suggested to remain with a hotel as the only allowable use. That area would have a height maximum of 60 feet.

The proposed Home Depot site, now known as the Tank Farm and zoned for general industrial use, would change its allowable use to community serving retail. It is uncertain whether the proposed center would meet the definition for that use.

Perhaps the most drastic change in use being proposed is at the parcel east of Loynes Drive along the north side of Pacific Coast Highway. The property currently is leased for commercial use, and is the site of the Gaslamp Restaurant and the Golden Sails Hotel.

According to DeLong, that lease has less than a decade to run. If it is redeveloped, the SEADIP revision would have its allowable use change to multi-family residential. It also would have a 60-foot height limit.

Another place to add housing, according to the revision, would be the triangular piece of open space on the southeast corner of Loynes Drive and Studebaker Road. That parcel could accommodate up to 79 single-family homes.

That proposal is sure to be fought by environmentalists. It is across the Los Cerritos Channel from the Los Cerritos Wetlands and many consider it either a degraded wetlands or important buffer land.

Residents at Belmont Shores Mobile Estates likely will be happy to hear that the revision would maintain that use.

Bixby Ranch Company holdings currently are degraded wetlands and an active oil field, but portions are earmarked for a business park and residential development under the original SEADIP plan. The revision says only that a Joint Powers Authority is in negotiations to buy the property as wetlands.

DeLong and his group have three meetings with neighborhood associations in the next week, then will conduct a public study session with the Planning Commission at noon next Thursday (April 19). There will be two public meetings at Lowell Elementary School, with the first at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 28, and the second at 6:30 p.m. May 9.

Andy Kincaid chaired the SEADIP Advisory Committee. Other members were Bob Alperin, Colleen Bentley, Sandi Hill, Peter Hogenson, George Jones, Leslie Turpin, Rich Turrentine and Gary Woodruff.

For details about SEADIP or the public meetings, call DeLongs office at 570-6300.

A flock of birds flies over the Los Cerritos Wetlands on Tuesday. At left, a view looking west toward Second Street inside Bixby Ranch land. Theres some traffic on nearby streets. Pat Towner, a local activist, is concerned that development in the area will prove dangerous for the sensitive Los Cerritos Wetlands.
(Photos by Stephen Carr / Staff photographer)

When Pat Towner glances across Los Cerritos Wetlands on the Eastside of Long Beach, she sees dark clouds on the horizon, in the form of high density populations and buildings double their current size - all dangers, she contends, to the sensitive wetland ecosystems.

And all dangers, she adds without a pause, to her, to her family, and to neighbors and nearby neighborhoods, thanks to potential pollution from bumper-to-bumper gridlock traffic.

The high density populations and taller buildings are being mapped out in a proposed revision of the Southeast Area Development and Improvement Plan - a policy that governs development codes for the area. The effort is being led by 3rd District City Councilman Gary DeLong, who has formed a committee to advise him on a draft of the revision.

The revision has been hammered out behind closed doors, and Towner has been pushing - even with a formal complaint to the City Attorney's office - to force the advisory committee's proceedings into the public arena. To date, her plan has had no success.

However, Towner isn't throwing in any towel, although the proposed SEADIP plan should be made public Friday, allowing for public review before workshops now scheduled for the

city's Planning Commission meeting April 5.

By then, Towner predicts, people will be allotted three minutes at the commission podium - limiting, she said, a speaker's ability to discuss a complicated planning policy and ending up with high population density, traffic gridlock patterns, threatened wetland ecosystems and potential health hazards.

Not so, according to DeLong, who said residents will embrace the final plan.

"Neither the city or committee are the final decision

A heron flies over the Los Cerritos Wetlands on Tuesday. A plan for taller buildings in the area is being mapped out in a proposed revision of the Southeast Area Development and Improvement Plan, which governs development codes for the area. The effort is being led by 3rd District City Councilman Gary DeLong.
(Stephen Carr / Staff Photographer)

(makers)," he said, adding that he expects the SEADIP plan to evolve. "The plan will be what the community wants, at the end of the day."

Towner training

Towner's concerns about closed meetings are rooted in processes she recalled as always being open to public scrutiny.

She had the ear of former Councilwoman Jan Hall, who chaired a committee's drafts of the original SEADIP policy.

Towner also was among the authors of the city's Local Coastal Plan, which involves a larger area and includes the SEADIP area mostly along Pacific Coast Highway near the city's eastern border.

And she served a short stint as a member of the South Coast Coastal Commission, in the days when the panel was split between the northern and southern parts of the state.

As a member of the commission, she had been a persistent proponent of public access to coastal resourcesand to the process of policy development and decisions. Open forums, she said, provide for clear consensus, even from diverse groups such as developers and environmentalists.

"It was really contentious," she recalled of public meetings at Bixby Park in the late 1970s, when the LCP and SEADIP were hammered into policies that have dictated development standards for three decades.

Back then, the breakthrough to setting the growth guidelines was the willingness of developers to sit down at the negotiation table, Towner recalled.

"We all owned it," she said of the LCP and SEADIP policies. "We didn't all like it, but we all owned it."

New vs. old

The revised SEADIP policy is evolving, but one map details potential zone changes that would allow new height limits that double the current 30-foot limit, including the SeaPort Marina Hotel site at Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway, and north along the highway near Loynes Drive near the Golden Sails Hotel and Gaslamp restaurant.

Towner and critics contend that would block views of the ocean, including between structures.

DeLong counters that there would be variety of structures, instead of one flat look to the area.

Heights would range between four and seven stories, he said.

"There's no discussion to just increase the height across the board," he said.

The map also suggests zone changes for a block of undeveloped land south of the Marketplace, known as the Pumpkin Patch, because pumpkins are sold during Halloween, and Christmas trees are sold during the winter.

Environmentalists consider it to be part of the Los Cerritos Wetlands - and they want it to remain undeveloped.

DeLong noted that it is now zoned for light industrial use, and the zone designation could be changed to office-retail, adding that no final decision has determined that the property is wetlands.

If the land is determined to be wetlands, he said, then there will be no development. If it isn't, he added, then a different form of development could be done.

"At the end of the day, no matter what it's built for, you can't build on wetlands," he said.

Open dialogue?

The current SEADIP review process has not been open to the public, and that's the way DeLong wants it.

The rookie councilman appears sure-footed when deflecting criticisms from Towner and others.

He kept the review committee to nine members.

"We tried to keep it to manageable size," he said.

DeLong emphasized the plan would reflect the input of the community.

"This plan is going to evolve," he said. "This needs to be a community plan."

Towner said she's asked repeatedly to be in on the revision review sessions, but she's been rejected.

Last week, in her letter to the City Attorney's office, Towner contested DeLong's closed-door strategy, saying it violated the state open public review Brown Act regulations.

"If we are only allowed to react and not allowed to have any input from the beginning, as residents of this area, we are at a distinct disadvantage," she said in a statement prior to sending the complaint.

However, the City Attorney's office promptly dismissed Towner's assertion of wrongdoing.

City Attorney Bob Shannon's letter states, in part, that the public access Brown Act applies to advisory committees of a local agency, such as the City Council, which needs to form the committee through a formal vote.

"Since the SEADIP Advisory Committee is only advisory to Councilman DeLong, and was not formed pursuant to an action of the City Council, the Brown Act is not applicable to its meetings," Shannon stated.

Even the reports, including a map pinpointing the areas of growth, were out of reach of the public's view, because they had not been finalized by the nine-member SEADIP revision committee, according to Suzanne Frick, director of the city Planning Department.

"Those are typically not available, when we're working on a draft," she said.

Joe Segura can be reached at joe.segura@presstelegram.com or at (562) 499-1274.

	SEADIPs Revision To Public

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive Editor

For the last 20 years, the phrase SEADIP has been invoked any time anyone attempted to build anything in southeast Long Beach.

But in 2006, two major redevelopments a Home Depot Center on Studebaker Road at Loynes Drive and the SeaPort Marina mixed-use project at Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway headed for city approval. Both sought relief from SEADIP restrictions as well as other zoning changes.

Also in 2006, Gary DeLong was elected the councilman in the citys Third District. Home Depot and SeaPort Marina both were in the final stages of Environmental Impact Report approval, but DeLong said he wanted to review and update the rest of the SEADIP (Southeast Area Development Improvement Plan) document.

To that end, he formed a nine-member study committee. They have been meeting every two weeks since November, and now are ready to come forward with a draft for residents to comment on.

We focused on parcels that are ripe for redevelopment in the next decade or two, DeLong said. For example the leases for the Gaslamp (restaurant) and Golden Sails (Hotel) are both up within the next 10 years. We are trying to look at it with a master plan approach.

SEADIP essentially is a Planned Unit Development (PUD) with specific zones set aside for specific uses. It is part of the citys Local Coastal Plan, and as such, changes must be approved by both the city and the state Coastal Commission.

The public phase of that process will begin on April 5, when DeLong has scheduled a work session with the Planning Commission. He said public comment is welcome there, and that he would host public meetings for more debate before submitting anything for final approval. A May or June hearing before the Planning Commission is a target, he added.

SEADIP includes the area roughly along and east of Pacific Coast Highway and south of Loynes Drive, including the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Three parcels the Home Depot site, the SeaPort Marina Hotel and the portion of Marina Drive past the West Marine building were left out of the current study because those projects are either already in the pipeline or under a master lease.

Weve talked to the stakeholders, the Coastal Commission staff, land owners, the (Los Angeles and San Gabriel) Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, DeLong said. We did invite a couple of members from the Los Cerritos Wetlands Trust to the last meeting.

Our two major goals in the process are restoration of the wetlands and traffic mitigation for any future development. Any development that moves forward is going to need to develop some community-serving amenities; theres got to be something in it for the people to fly.

DeLong has been criticized by some for the closed nature of the committee, which met without public notice. He said the private meetings allowed the group to concentrate on issues, and noted that a number of different perspectives were represented on the group. For example, several committee members testified against the SeaPort Marina redevelopment proposed by Lennar at last weeks Planning Commission meeting.

The majority (of committee members) were selected by them saying they were interested in participating, DeLong said. George Jones, for example, is an appellant on the Home Depot project (at the state Coastal Commission). But I talked to him after our hearing (to certify the EIR), and he said he wanted to be involved. I wanted to hear his opinions, so there he is.

In addition to Jones, the committee members were Bob Alpern, Colleen Bentley, Sandi Hill, Peter Hogenson, Andy Kincaid, Leslie Turpin, Rick Turrentine and Gary Woodruff.

The April 5 study session will be open to the public and likely will start at 10 a.m., although that time is not certain. The meeting takes place in council chambers at City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd.

And its in our neighborhood. Lets do our part to report graffiti when you see it. Put this hot line number on your cell phones and when your out walking or driving in our neighborhood, call right away, 570 2773. If you see kids in our area doing this and you know who they are, contact us we will help get the word out to the parents.