Los Angeles football action group takes case to city hall

Michael Griffin is a self-described videographer for Bring Back the Los Angeles Rams, a grass roots, retro-jersey wearing group advocating the NFL’s return to Southern California.
Griffin, a squad of BBTLAR supporters in tow, showed up for the Los Angeles City Planning Department’s public hearing on Farmers Field’s environmental impact report Wednesday dressed in a full Rams uniform complete with pads, helmet, receiver’s gloves, eye black and a belt with a hand warmer.
Griffin, 28, from Garden Grove, did remove his helmet while addressing planning department officials during the hearing at the Los Angeles Convention Center’s West Hall, the very site where the stadium is proposed to be built.
“What we need to do is get football back to Los Angeles,” Griffin told the officials. “Everything else is extracurricular.”
Griffin’s opinion notwithstanding, the details – or lack of details – in the more than 10,000-page draft of the EIR for the $1.25 billion Anschutz Entertainment Group project were at the center of an often-heated debate during the nearly three-hour session, the final hearing before the period for public comment on the document closes next Monday.
While the report was applauded by a parade of labor officials, downtown business groups and Los Angeles nonprofit organizations with long relationships with AEG, community outreach, environmental and legal aid organizations both criticized the document and asked city officials to extend the public review period.
To read the entire report, Pete White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network said, “You would have to read nine pages an hour, 24 hours a day from the time the report was released to final day comments can be made. Money and politics trump the health of our children and our families.”
White was one of several people critical of SB292, legislation passed last year on AEG’s behalf that significantly expedites the environmental review process for stadium projects like Farmers Field. But Jon Foreman, a Los Angeles senior city planner, said SB292 “was silent” on the issue of extensions and that his department has granted extensions for public review period on projects. Earlier this month the planning department granted a two-week extension on the Pico/Sepulveda retail/residential project.
“You can get an extension on this,” said Foreman, who added the size of the Farmers Field EIR was “not uncommon.”
Foreman said there was no timetable on when the planning department would decide on whether to grant an extension. Planning department officials expect a final EIR draft to be completed late this summer. The planning department will then forward the report and its recommendations to the Los Angeles City Council.
Farmers Field supporters, in particular within the labor unions, pressed city officials Wednesday to speed up the process.
Calling Los Angeles a “second-class city,” Robert Smith, an International Union of Plumbers and Allied Trade official, said the community “needs to pull their heads out of their tails and build this and make this a world-class city.”
But critics charged that the report’s research was faulty, and failed to address pollution and traffic issues, and the potential displacement of thousands of low-income residents in the communities surrounding the LA Live area.
“An elaborate 10,000 page pipedream,” said Malcolm Carson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation.
Ted Tanner, AEG’s executive vice president for real estate development, declined to comment after the hearing.
Environmental groups pointed out that AEG’s clean energy use and waste disposal goals for Farmers Field were below levels already attained at other venues currently operated by AEG, most notably Portland’s Rose Garden arena.
Even some AEG’s past supporters within leading environmental groups criticized AEG and the EIR for the lack of detail within the report.
“There’s zero analysis of how (AEG) is going to reach (environmental) goals,” said David Pettit, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council who was involved in the negotiations with SB 292. “They’ve told us their going to do these things but they haven’t told us how.”