its approval to Phase 2 of the controversial Playa Vista development south of Marina del Rey. Can you say Poltergeist?

It’s bad enough for Native Americans that their land was taken and their people were nearly killed off centuries ago. Now government is saying that one’s sacred legacy is subject to the whim and fashion of the power elite of any given era. Who knows? Maybe someday in the distant future, Cyber-Gabrielinos will arrive and build monuments to their contemporary presence on the site of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels or the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. As it is, the burial site at Phase 2, which contained the remains of at least 160 and as many as 391 Native Americans near the Westchester bluffs, has already been excavated, the bones put in onsite storage. Native American activists want the artifacts returned to where they were found and the area to be preserved, but this would require the developer to reroute a manmade waterway that’s part of the Phase 2 site plan.

“It’s the largest burial ground of its kind in modern L.A. history,” says Rob Wood of the California Native American Heritage Commission. “We’re arguing they need to put it back. They need to move their ditch and preserve the site.”

In a 10-1 vote last week, the City Council glossed over burial grounds, traffic concerns, and environmentalists’ fist-shaking (tree-huggers want the area to be redeveloped as wetlands to filter the area’s filthy water runoff). So the next move for defenders of the burial site and for the environmentalists is going to court. Activists foresee at least two likely lawsuits stemming from the development of Phase 2. One will probably come from Native Americans who believe that the developer’s 10-year agreement on artifacts, signed in 2001 with members of Gabrielino-Tongva, is invalid (finding an entire, seemingly intact cemetery was not part of the deal, they say). Another will likely come from environmentalists who argue that Phase 2 would violate the California Environmental Quality Act and federal clean water standards that prohibit pollution of nearby wetlands and the Pacific, more than a mile west.

“The developers made promises 10 years ago concerning protecting the Ballona Wetlands and they’ve now reneged on those promises,” argues Rex Frankel, president of the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project. “Federal law prohibits putting polluted water into federally declared wetlands [which lie to the west]. If you pave over an area, you have to clean up your runoff, and you’re not allowed to put any pollution into any federally protected wetlands.”

The developer, Playa Capital, says see you in court. After all, numerous lawsuits since the early ’90s have been technically unsuccessful. In 2001, the developer did make a deal to sell 192 acres to the state and donated another 291 acres to allow California to preserve the area along Ballona Creek, west of Lincoln Boulevard, as wetlands. A bit of a victory, perhaps, given that environmentalists had argued Playa Vista was paving over one of the last, great natural wetlands remaining along the California Coast – home to the California least tern, the California red-legged frog, and the Riverside fairy shrimp, among other endangered species. The property to be preserved amounts to 70 percent of the land Playa Capital originally intended to develop.

“These same people have one goal, and that’s to stop the project,” says Playa Vista spokesman Steve Sugarman. “They have sued the project 19 times and they have lost every time.”

Sugerman notes that the litigious factions could contradict each other. Some Native Americans want the project’s federally mandated creek channel, dug adjacent to the planned structures, moved to preserve burial grounds. But pressure from environmentalists concerned about the natural flow of creeks in the area, he says, helped push the channel to its present location. “There’s nothing to tell us we wouldn’t find remains somewhere else if we move the corridor,” Sugarman says, noting that the area is rich with artifacts.

Playa Vista and others spin the development, to include 2,600 housing units – apartments, condos and homes – and long-promised retail space of 150,000 square feet, as “smart growth.” The region is expected to grow by 6 million people in 2025, and the present-day housing market is already crammed with prospective buyers and renters who are squeezed by high prices and rents. Nearly 15 percent of the dwellings in Phase 1 and 2 are designated as affordable, with rents starting at $600 a month, and many will be set aside for public workers such as police officers and firefighters, Sugarman says.

“This is a model for how to deal with growth,” he says.

Many area residents – 1,200 of whom packed a meeting about the project at Venice High School last week – are concerned mainly about the traffic generated by the additional housing. Although Playa Vista was first pitched as a self-contained urban center where residents could live, eat, shop, and work, so far Phase 1 has been mostly a bedroom community. Neighbors fume daily over the gridlock that happens along Lincoln Boulevard, from Los Angeles International Airport to Santa Monica. The developer has promised to “mitigate” the traffic by helping to widen Lincoln, adding a connector road to Sepulveda Boulevard and purchasing five buses for nearby Santa Monica and Culver City municipal lines. But some residents are wary. They say Playa Vista hasn’t presented them with a study on what impacts Phase 1 has had on area traffic so far, and so they don’t want to add to the traffic nightmare. Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who’s running for mayor, agrees, and his was the only council vote against Phase 2.

“I had made a promise to people here on the Westside that I would hold off on supporting Playa Vista Phase 2 until such time as Playa Vista Phase 1 was completed and we had the full impact reports on traffic and the environment,” Villaraigosa says. “And I am concerned about the Native American burial site.”

Playa Vista says it has been careful with the remains, consulting with Native American and archeological experts, and will rebury them at an appropriate site nearby. “There are hundreds of pages of documents governing how to handle these remains according to federal and state laws,” says Playa Vista’s Sugerman.

“We have people working on their hands and knees daily,” he says. “The remains will be reburied at the site. We’re awaiting instructions from most likely descendents.”

And while Playa Vista states that its Native American consultants are okay with the reburial, Anthony Morales, tribal chairman and chief of the Gabrielino/Tongva of San Gabriel band of Mission Indians, says there’s widespread support in the local Native American community to keep the remains where they were found. “Everyone’s in agreement to save that cemetery,” he says.

Adds Wood of the California Native American Heritage Commission, “There was a Native American village in that area. What we’ve been saying all along is that we don’t want to stop this project, but we want to preserve the burial ground.”

Perhaps ironically, Phase 2 will be called “The Village.”

© 2003 Southland Publishing, All Rights Reserved