By Jonathan Friedman
Lookout Staff

June 29, 2010 -- The final two City Council hearings on the draft Land Use & Circulation Element (LUCE) of the City’s General Plan will not be quiet affairs. School board member and Pico Neighborhood activist Oscar de la Torre said he plans to bring at least 300 people to the hearings to demand council members include “environmental justice” protection for the Pico Neighborhood in the LUCE, a document that will set the guidelines for the next 20 years of Santa Monica development.

The Pico Youth and Family Center (PYFC), the anti-violence and social justice nonprofit headed by de la Torre, hosted an event at Stewart Street Park on Saturday to prepare for the council hearings. The event included speeches from activists and theater performances by local young people about environmental issues. These performances included satire of the local government and what they consider to be its failure to give attention to environmental threats in the Pico Neighborhood.

Local youth performed skits about environmental justice for the Pico Neighborhood during an event on Saturday at Stewart Street Park.

“Part of where we’re at today belongs to a history,” said Johnny Ramirez, PYFC’s program manager. “There has been a history of environmental injustice in this community. This community hasn’t had an equitable voice within City government.”

Ramirez, de la Torre and other speakers talked about what they called the Toxic Triangle in the Pico Neighborhood. This includes the I-10 Freeway, the City waste transfer station and recycling center as well as the Expo light rail maintenance facility planned for the corner of Exposition Boulevard and Stewart Street.

“Historically this community has been where a lot of the polluting entities have been placed,” de la Torre said.

De la Torre, a two-term school board member who is considering a run for City Council in November, said the PYFC has three demands for items that should be included in the LUCE. One is increased environmental protection, for future development as well as impacts currently existing in the community.

Another demand is for more green space. De la Torre said it must be something different than Stewart Street Park, which is built on a landfill and is consider a methane poison danger by many locals.

“We want green space, but we don’t want the green space that this park represents,” de la Torre said. “We want something smarter, something cleaner, something that’s healthier for the environment.”

A third demand is for protection for residents from losing their homes. A specific threat was discussed regarding the Village Trailer Park, which is located at the corner of Stanford and Stewart streets. The owner of the property, Village Trailer Park LLC, has proposed closing the trailer park and building a 353,000-square-foot mixed-use development on the property. Although some of the residents could be moved into low-incoming housing units that could be included on the site as part of a development agreement, many of those residents will be forced out of their homes if the development goes through.

Support was evenly divided on the council last week for changing the district designation for the trailer park, which would protect the residential neighborhood. Some council members said they wanted to know the full impact of changing the district designation before voting for doing that. See: Housing Commercial Ratio Debated at LUCE Hearing, June 6, 2010. The neighborhood has a diverse residency, including many elderly people.

“When you relocate those kind of (elderly with health issues) people, there is even a medical term for it, they die,” trailer park resident Catherine Eldridge said. “They die because they can’t hang on anymore and nothing makes sense anymore. And because the living space they are (moved to) doesn’t support them.”

Fellow resident Gail Cooper told stories about three trailer park residents who died – two by suicide and one through pneumonia—because of reasons she said related to the threatened closure of the neighborhood.

Eldridge, a development critic, said it is important for people to get involved as the LUCE hearings near conclusion. She also criticized one of the significant arguments for major development, which is that tax money generated from it as well as the perks coming from development agreement support various City programs.

“If you look around … you see free events at the pier,” Eldridge said. “But you’re paying for that every time a new building goes up that’s four or five stories or you find that two or three houses in your neighborhood have been cleaned out so something else can be built there.”

De la Torre said if the council does the right thing, it can ensure property owners can make a profit while being considerate of the health and safety of the residents.

“The City of Santa Monica has been known worldwide for being progressive in terms of how it protects the environment,” he said. “But we don’t want the slogan of the City to be ‘Save the whales and save the trees only.’ Save the people too. We want to make sure that message is heard loud and clear by our City Council and they do the right thing.”

“Part of where we’re at today belongs to a history, There has been a history of environmental injustice in this community. This community hasn’t had an equitable voice within City government.”
   Johnny Ramirez, PYFC’s    program manager

“Historically this community has been where a lot of the polluting entities have been placed,”
   Oscar de la Torre,
   head of PYFC