Dear Editor,
The community meeting on Culver Boulevard will be held at the Senior Center 4095 Overland Ave. on May 15 at 7 pm.
The Culver Median water infiltration and rebuild of the Median Park as part of the Culver Boulevard redesign project is in its conclusive design stages and will be put out to construction bid by the end of this year.
The city has hired Tetra Tech, a major design company, to handle both the storm water infiltration/filtering/reclamation engineering and the road design that includes the redesign of the Culver Median Park.
The landscape architecture team that Tetra tech has subcontracted with to do the design work for the park and their engineering teams that are designing the water infiltration and road work are seeking input from the community at a public meeting. We have been through this many times already, but this meeting is very important as these are the people who will actually be doing the final design work that gets built!
There will be a presentation of the current state of the design and a schematic model of the work so far.
So please come and share your concerns and ideas about the new Park that will be built to replace the current median Park. This is an opportunity to voice ideas and concerns and issues about the new traffic lights and signals, the new south side buffer lane to protect people getting into their cars, and the new narrow additional median that will separate the opposite lanes of Culver traffic.
Understand that the general layout of the work has already been planned and was influenced by those prior meetings and community feedback. So our input DOES HELP. The degree to which they will pay attention to the community is directly related to the people to show up.
As the large scale layout of the project has already been determined, it would be a good idea to focus on the details of the project rather than trying to oppose or change the broad features of the project at this late date . .. The large layout is in place and moving full steam ahead, with this and several more community meetings designed to hone the final look and feel of the project with community input. There are also traffic flow and signal concerns that need community comment and ideas.
The devil is in the details. Let!s try and help out on this and hope for results that we will feel have really improved things.
Some “Details”: Saving trees; maintaining and reestablishing the berm; keeping the bike path and pedestrian paths separate especially so that dog walking is safe; lighting of the roads and park; plantings and trees; road surface of the buffer lane; design of the traffic signals to maximize traffic flow to minimize stationary polluting cars; not overdoing the number of “bump outs ” at intersections so that the loss of parking is kept to the minimum; the look of the new narrow median that separates the lanes of Culver Blvd.
One little known feature of the contracted project is the city will be redoing the sidewalk parkways in front of the homes all along Culver in the project zone between Sepulveda and Elenda. What do you want this to look like?
FYI the Citizen Advisory Committed (Karen Randall, Glenn Spann, Steve Levinson, Steve Siegel, George Young and Zach Bennington.) that was appointed by City Council had its first meeting with Tetra Tech and the city engineering dept on April 26 th. The intended purpose of this committee was to give the community a closer working relationship with the ongoing project. We are scheduled to meet with the design teams in advance of the larger public meetings. The role is vague but it gives us a bit closer venue to ask questions and make suggestions.
One good piece of news that we learned was that storm water from Los Angeles will no longer be included in the design of the project. This allows some downsizing of the water infiltration underground structures from the city’s previous conceptual plan. The happy result is that there will be some flexibility in the location of those underground tanks. this makes it possible to save some clumps of the existing trees in the median park! The health of the trees was surveyed by several parties and selection of which trees may wind up being saved is now under study by the design team. Unfortunately’ the survey of the trees revealed that many are not in good health including the grand old coral tree near Elenda.
If you can RSVP [email protected]. BUT JUST SHOW UP PLEASE.
-Steve Levinson for Save Culver Median Park -Again!
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