The Comment Period Has Ended

The period of time to submit comments for the Notice of Preparation and Initial Study for South Region High School No.15 (SRHS 15) has ended.

The clock ran out at about 5:00 PM on May 5, 2008, but I am extremely impressed with what I have seen.

The Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, the Palisades Residents Association, NOISE, (hopefully) the Point Fermin Residents Association, and many individuals made comments and/or wrote letters to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) office that will be dealing with all of the comments as they are required to publish them when they issue the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR), sometime in a few months.

I know many of you are going to be surprised and perhaps dumbfounded at the amount of information contained in all the comments and letters you will find later on.

I am more than extremely proud of San Pedrans who took charge in creating letters and sets of comments that were well written, very informed, and to the point.

If there ever has been a comment period for a Notice of Preparation and Initial Study that had as many sets of comments and letters written concerning the documents, I would be very surprised.

When the Draft EIR is published, it will be much, much, much longer than the Notice of Preparation and Initial Study are and it will come with appendices that state the outcome of all the testing done on and around the Upper Reservation of Fort MacArthur.

It will be a huge set of volumes that will need to be addresses as completely as possible, by everyone.

Some NOISE members have been told that the Alternatives to building SRHS 15 at the Upper Reservation of Fort MacArthur may be quite limited and may not have many of the alternatives suggested in our comments and letters.

We should look extremely carefully at the Alternatives sections and the appendices that include the study, or lack of study of the alternatives listed and the alternatives LAUSD and CEQA chose not to include.

The studies for the Draft EIR have been underway for some time now. Traffic counters have appeared and will continue to appear throughout the local area and probably on Gaffey Street, some distance from 30Th Street.

Page 3 of the Notice of Preparation stated locations where the Notice of Preparation and Initial Study could be viewed by the general public. Unfortunately for LAUSD, and hopefully fortunately for NOISE, there were several locations listed that did NOT have the required Notice of Preparation and Initial Study available for viewing and study.

Shame on CEQA and LAUSD.

A letter was written to the CEQA office concerning this matter, but I think we may only see a light apology and a, "We'll never to that again, especially when the EIRs come out."

There is not much we can do right now, but having an historical record that NOISE members found required sites lacking in having the documents available, is yet another item we can put into the files of all the problems we have already had with LAUSD and now CEQA, concerning SRHS 15.

I hope you have saved the date of May 13, 2008. That is the date of the Palisades Residents Association's Annual meeting and election of Board members.

Ms. Janice Hahn, Mr. Rod Hamilton-LAUSD, and perhaps Dr. Richard Vladovic have promised to attend this very important meeting at White Point Elementary School.

One of the issues that information will be provided for, at the meeting, is the Clearwater Program from the L.A. County Sanitation District. If you don't know much about this issue, you may wish to attend to learn a little more.

The Clearwater Program is going to have a new tunnel drilled under OUR community to provide a third outfall system for the treated waste water from the waste treatment plant alongside the Harbor Freeway.

This issue will become very important as the Sanitation District decides where to put the massive shaft that will lower equipment into the tunnel and be the site where the dirt is removed and placed into large dump trucks.

Nobody seems to want the five-acre area which will have a giant shaft going down 500 feet, in their neighborhood. In the Palisades Residents Association area, they have at least three sites on the list of possible shaft sites.

The Sanitation District has on part of its list, Royal Palms area, part of the White Point Nature Preserve, and even on land at Angel's Gate!

It's not so much the big hole in the ground that will be every neighborhood's concern, it is the thousands and thousands and thousands of dump-truck trips and all the other construction traffic involved in a multi-mile tunnel exercise.

Other sites include, but are not limited to: Terminal Island, Eastview Park (Western at Westmont) Ken Malloy Park (Harbor Lake), and a few sites in Lomita and Wilmington.

If you are a restaurant owner, you might want the "big dig" near your place of business, but I think I don't wish to invite getting "shafted" at Eastview Park, even though it is in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Of course, the main item of interest at the Palisades Residents Association is the "elephant in the living room", SRHS 15 at Angel's Gate.