Monumental Victory

Posted on by HHAdmin
There has been a monumental victory for community groups fighting the Millennium Hollywood Project.
Court of Appeal Demolishes Controversial Millennium Project and its Environmental Impact Report!
Community groups fighting the Millennium Hollywood project celebrated a major victory today when the California Court of Appeal delivered another blow to developer Millennium Hollywood.
“This is a huge victory,” said attorney Robert P. Silverstein, who has represented local community groups against the city council and developer for the last six years. “The Court of Appeal threw out the environmental impact report. The city council and Millennium lost 100 percent of the issues they had asked the court to review,” Silverstein said.
“The court affirmed the trial judge’s 2015 invalidation of Millennium’s illegal project,” Silverstein added.
“Millennium deserves a star on the Hollywood ‘walk of shame’,” said Brian Dyer, one of the leaders of Stopthemillenniumhollywood.com, the lead plaintiff in the litigation. “They are also the developer of the leaning and sinking Tower of San Francisco disaster. Yet the city council and Mayor Garcetti supported this dangerous company and their false claims,” Dyer added.
“It’s Millennium’s fault,” quipped Silverstein, who also noted the State’s 2014 mapping of the active, 7.0-magnitude Hollywood Earthquake Fault directly through the project site.
“Not only did the city council and the developer ignore our coalition of community groups, but they even tried to ignore mother nature by pretending the earthquake fault wasn’t there,” said community activist and Hollywood resident Annie Gagen. “Rules matter. No one is above the law.”
The Millennium project also ran into opposition from Caltrans. Caltrans criticized the EIR’s use of bogus traffic figures and its failure to study the project’s massive safety impacts to the 101 Freeway, Silverstein noted.
While the court upheld all grounds on which the project was stopped at trial, the decision focuses mainly on the EIR’s violation of a core issue under the California Environmental Quality Act, said Silverstein. “The EIR was so blurry, it amounted to a fraud on the public,” Silverstein explained.
“Nobody could actually tell what would be built, where, or what uses it would have. It was just a huge give-away by the city council and Hollywood Councilman Mitch O’Farrell,” Silverstein added.
The court explained that the city council kept the public in the dark as to the most basic details of what Millennium would build: “the public had no idea how many buildings or towers would be built and where they would be located on the project site.” (p. 12.)
It found the project description was so misleading that it “fails to describe the siting, size, mass, or appearance of any building proposed to be built at the project site.” (p. 23.)
The Court went on to explain that because the “EIR did not contain site plans, cross-sections, building elevations, or illustrative massing to show what buildings would be built, where they would be sited, what they would look like, and how many there would be” (p. 25), the whole environmental analysis was impaired, Silverstein said.
“Millennium’s failure to present any concrete project proposal, instead choosing concepts and ‘impact envelopes’ rather than an accurate, stable, and finite project, was an obstacle to informed public participation.” (p. 27.)
Community leader Brian Dyer said he was “especially grateful that the court saw how the EIR harmed the public’s ability to participate in the process.”
Silverstein observed that this victory comes against the backdrop of dramatic FBI investigations of Councilman Jose Huizar, formerly the head of the city council’s powerful Land Use and Management Committee, and Raymond Chan, formerly head of the city’s Department of Building and Safety.
“Chan’s involvement,” said Silverstein, “is particularly troubling. His department approved Millennium’s ludicrous seismic studies. We were complaining that city oversight may have been improperly influenced because the developer’s chief lobbyist had hired Chan’s son at the very same time,” said Silverstein. “Unfortunately, city officials completely ignored us.”
The location for the proposed project is a nearly 5-acre site straddling Vine Street, north of Hollywood Blvd., surrounding the historic Capitol Records Tower.
“Doubling down, Millennium filed a backup application last year, this one even more obscene than the one we just defeated,” said Silverstein. “Now calling itself ‘Hollywood Center’ to try to escape the taint of their San Francisco disaster and their mounting failures in Los Angeles, Millennium now wants city approval to build towers, including 46 stories high, on top of the earthquake fault,” Silverstein noted. “It’s jaw dropping.”
“If Mayor Garcetti and Councilman O’Farrell are foolhardy enough to support this renamed, even more dangerous Millennium project, we will fight them every step of the way,” Silverstein pledged. He added that “the FBI should continue to investigate city officials. Clearly, LA city hall won’t police itself.”
“We are not willing to Manhattanize our landscapes with skyscrapers, much less on top of a 7.0 earthquake fault,” said Aaron Epstein, another of the plaintiff’s leaders. “The public is watching, and so are the courts.”
Contact:
Robert P. Silverstein robert@robertsilversteinlaw.com