Dear Editor,
A week ago the Culver City Council voted to cut back on requiring developers to hold community meetings!
After seventeen years of requiring developers to hold three community meetings, the bureaucrats in the CC Planning Dept snuck a poison pill to effectively kill community meetings into the General Plan 2045 that the City Council is now considering. The bureaucrats (and developers) want just one meeting, which would of course be just a dog-and-pony show: worthless. The Council, totally blind-sided, agreed to a “compromise”: cutting the community meetings requirement from three to two—and giving ALL power of enforcement to those very bureaucrats who are on record with their outright contempt for the whole process in the first place!
Slimeball bureaucrats, in the pocket of Big Money Developers, did NOT consult with the Council in advance. They did NOT ask for input from Culver City residents! And they were able to sneak their attack on our community meetings by the Planning Commission. And now this City Council may end up being the first city council ever to actually take rights AWAY from residents, WEAKEN our protections!
Three Community Meetings are the bedrock of a system that forces developers to engage with residents. It is not a ‘courtesy’—it is a legal requirement. It gives you and all of us the right to know what rapacious big bucks real estate developers plan to do to our neighborhoods and to our city. It let’s us hold their feet to the fire and makes them come clean from the very beginning—before it’s too late, before the train has left the station! One or two meetings is not enough—and having three has worked for almost two decades, since 2007.
Tell Culver City Council members you want them to stand with you! Not with devious city hall bureaucrats and big money developers!
Email them! Phone them! Text them! Tell them in person! They’re people who were simply blind-sided by smarmy insider bureaucrats, and they’ll listen if we let them hear our voices.
Tell them to stand with the people fighting to protect our rights and our city—not with those trying to undercut and destroy them!
Michael Koppy,
one of several activists in Culver City and Del Rey Residents, an informal group of committed citizens
Contact: [email protected]
