Father Sarducci, Please Call Home

—Christine Pelisek

PLAYA VISTA SETBACK

Activists fighting the proposed Playa Vista project at the Ballona Wetlands are ecstatic over state Controller Kathleen Connell’s New Year’s holiday decision cutting off the developers’ option to buy 73 acres of the environmentally sensitive land from the state.

“This is the closest the public has ever gotten to owning land at Ballona,” says Marcia Hanscom of Citizens United To Save All of Ballona, a coalition of more than 100 environmental groups.

The battle isn’t over, however. The Sierra Club and other groups are looking for a local legislator to carry a bill making the 73 acres a state park. But Playa Vista executives could introduce legislation of their own “swapping” the land, which is known as Area C, for land west of Lincoln Boulevard that cannot be developed, or try again to buy the land from the state.

“Playa Vista still expects to make Area C part of its overall development,” says spokesperson Coby King.

Connell, who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, has called Ballona the “last piece of major land intact in the city of Los Angeles” and a potential park site, but she also has expressed concern for the city’s low-cost-housing crunch, which Playa Vista developers claim to address. The controller says she wants to hear from the public at a meeting on Wednesday, January 17, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., at Loyola University’s St. Roberts Hall Auditorium.

—Bill Gibson