Looking ahead to 2017

The City Council will have a full plate of legal and civic issues to tackle next year, culminating in the celebration of the city’s 100th birthday in September and the implementation of goals outlined during a strategic planning retreat in 2016.

The strategic plan has six long-term goals that city leaders will work on in 2017 and over the next several years, said Mayor Jim Clarke. They also include a number of community discussions on topical matters of community importance, starting with a town hall on creating affordable housing and related matters on Jan. 28th.

The town hall on affordable housing will bring back a topic that was discussed at length by city council candidate Daniel Lee, who came in fourth place during the 2016 municipal election.

“This issue has become resonate with people who don’t always agree with me politically. For a lot of people, this is getting ready to pop,” Lee said during a campaign interview. “It’s an issue of both will and priority [for a city council.]”

“Also, we will be breaking ground in 2017 on three of our major development projects – Parcel B (next to the Culver Hotel and The Culver Studios), the transit oriented development at the Culver City Expo Station, the first such project on the Expo line and the Market Hall development at Washington [ Boulevard ]and Centinela [Avenue]”, Clarke added.

“We will commence a major visioning study of the impacts of traffic and development in the area around the Expo station. Also, a consultant study of the impacts of mansionization on our neighborhoods and remedies.”

At its last meeting of 2016 on Dec. 12, the City Council gave its staff the green light to pursue an ordinance that will ban the use of polystyrene in restaurants in Culver City.

The long awaited oil drilling ordinance for the wells on the Culver City side of the Inglewood Oilfield is also on the council’s radar and could possibly be one of the most talked-about issues of 2017.

“We will also continue to pursue our lawsuit against the [Federal Aviation Administration] FAA for the changes in the flight paths and we hope to successfully reach a settlement in our lawsuit against LAX over their development and expansion plans,” Clarke said.

Culver City filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on Oct. 28 to contest the environmental analysis of the federal government’s Southern California Metroplex system, a new flight pattern system that will replace dozens of existing conventional air traffic control procedures with new satellite-based procedures.

“The city believes there are significant errors in the SoCal Metroplex [review], which will result in further impacts to residents, who already have experienced an increase in noise and air pollution from planes flying at lower altitudes along narrowed flight paths,” states a city press release from October.

Clarke said the council should complete its fiber optic network in 2017, which he says will provide “state-of-the art internet services to our municipal buildings, schools and business hubs.”

“And thanks to our voters last November, we will have the financial resources to begin to address the issue of stormwater and urban runoff mitigation which will be a long-term process,” the mayor said.

Clarke was referring to the city’s voters approving the stormwater prevention initiative Measure CW in November.

The City Council plans to examine another topic in 2017 that is bedeviling Los Angeles city leaders next door: short-term rentals.