The city is running out of time to bring the highly controversial draft Wildlife Ordinance for a vote before the year ends. It’s exceedingly likely that it won’t come back until the new year.
As anyone who has been tracking the ordinance knows, if approved, the Wildlife Ordinance will impose more significant limitations on allowable floor area, building heights, grading, setbacks and lot coverage than any of the city’s current development overlays.
In late June, the City Council’s Planning & Land Use Management Committee (PLUM) voted unanimously to approve the Planning Department’s draft ordinance and instruct the City Attorney’s Office to turn that document into a draft legal document.
The City Attorney’s Office has yet to release that draft legal ordinance. Once it does, the document will return to PLUM for a review and vote.
However, PLUM held what was likely its last meeting of the year yesterday. Each of the last three years, PLUM has held only one meeting in the month of December. Meanwhile, the City Council always takes off the last couple weeks of the year and the first week of the new year; this year, that break is Dec. 19-Jan. 7.
Ultimately, once the City Attorney releases the draft ordinance, it will take positive votes from PLUM and the full City Council and then the signature by Mayor Bass to become a law. Even then, the ordinance still won’t take effect for more than a month because of city notification laws.
So at this point, presuming that the draft ordinance is released in early January, it appears that the earliest the ordinance could become law is mid-March. Every week longer that it takes for the City Attorney to release the draft document is another week later that the ordinance could become law.
The initial ordinance will cover Hillside neighborhoods east of the 405, north of Sunset Boulevard, south of Ventura Boulevard and west of the Cahuenga Pass (Bel-Air, Beverly Crest, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Hollywood Hills and the Bird Streets). Here’s an interactive map created by the city so property owners can determine if their parcel will be impacted by the ordinance. But the Planning Department’s draft ordinance was written so these restrictions could be added to other Hillside areas of Los Angeles, with most observers believing that areas west of the 405 would likely be next.
