President Rick Commons announced in an email that there will be four to five public hearings for members of the community to discuss the parking structure project later this spring.
Commons said that concerns about safety, parking and the environment will be addressed in the hearings and hopes that supporters of the project will come to prove how important the structure is to the community.
Save Coldwater Canyon, an organization against the PSA Improvement Project will be represented and is looking to put their concerns and objections forward, President of Coldwater Canyon Sarah Boyd said.
“I also expect that our opponents’ concerns about traffic, environmental impact, and increased school enrollment will be addressed,” Commons said. “Studies show that traffic will only be affected positively, our plans call for planting four times the number of trees that we will remove, and we have no plans or desire to increase enrollment, so I do think the public hearings will help our cause.”
A peer review of the project will show how the parking garage will affect the neighboring community environmentally and present Harvard-Westlake’s research to Save Coldwater Canyon.
“We want the public hearing to address all the community concerns and objections to the project, because in the past 3 years, the school has not addressed the community’s concerns at all,” Boyd said. “In fact, since the community first spoke out against the project back in 2013, the School actually made its project bigger, and its destruction greater.”
Save Coldwater Canyon has created a petition with 2000 signatures that will be sent to Mayor Garcetti and Councilam Krekorian.
“We believe it is important for our elected representatives to see the thousands of LA citizens that oppose this project on environmental grounds,” Boyd said. “The environmental impact is being downplayed by the school, however it is one negative impact that is undeniable.”
Commons said that Save Coldwater Canyon is asking fair questions, but making unwarranted allegations about the school’s intentions.
“I think their fair questions, such as how we will mitigate construction headaches, deserve consideration, Commons said. “Their unfair assertions, such as their suggestion that we plan to increase enrollment, will be discounted and should not cause any difficulty in the approval process.”
