On Wednesday, May 2, the Seal Beach Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the Bay City Partners’ request to change the zoning for the property at First Street and Marina. The meeting will be held after the Sun print edition’s production deadline. Details of the meeting will be reported in the Thursday, May 10, issue of the paper.
Planners will review the Final Environmental Impact Report for the project, review the proposed residential housing project, and make a recommendation to the City Council. The council will hold hearings on the project on Monday, June 11, and Monday, June 25.
Members of the Planning Commission are appointed by the City Council.
The Seal Beach Environmental Quality Control Board voted 4-1 to advise the City Council that the Final EIR for the Bay City Partners property is inadequate at the conclusion of a Wednesday, April 25 public hearing. (Details of that meeting may be found in the Thursday, May 3, print edition of the Sun.) Two members of the Planning Commission attended the environmental board meeting. Neither of them spoke. They were Planning Chair Sandra Massa-Lavitt and Commissioner Robert Goldberg.
Like planners, members of the Environmental Control Board are appointed by the City Council.
Nancy Kredall, a member of the city’s DWP Advisory Committee, testified against the Bay City Partners project during the einvornmental board hearing.
Like members of the envornmental board, members of the DWP Advisory Committee are appointed by the City Council.
At the latest meeting of the DWP Advisory Committee, Commissioner Goldberg raised the question of whether the open space provided in the project plan included part of the San Gabriel River. (The photo accompanying this article, taken from the Final Environmental Impact Report, clearly shows that part of the open space does include the river.)
At a previous Planning Commission hearing, Goldberg recommended that the Bay City Partners property be listed as a potential site for so-called low income housing, or “starter housing.” The Planning Commission made that recommendation to the CIty Council, which later unanimously voted to remove the Bay City Partners property from the list.
The DWP Advisory Committee voted 4-1 on Tuesday, April 17, to recommend that the City Council deny the property owners’ request for zoning changes that would allow them to build residential housing on a beach front lot located next to residential housing. The city agency is called the DWP Advisory Committee because the now privately-owned land used to belong to the Los Angeles Department of Water and power. The site plan for the property, which was devised by Seal Beach prior to its sale, is called the DWP Specific Plan.
Mario Voce, chairman of the Environmental Quality Control Board, testified against the Bay City Partners project at the DWP committee meeting a week and one day before the environmental board held its hearing on the same property.
