GREEN AND GREENER

Last week, after a closed door meeting with members of the City Council, a stop-work order was lifted for a solar array under construction on a hillside in Northeast Los Angeles. The project, a 429 megawatt photo-voltaic system for a 53-bed nursing home adjacent to Debs Park, polarized residents in the surrounding communities: some decried the desecration of a pristine hillside, others questioned the wisdom of placing such an array in a High Fire Severity Zone; still others saw the uproar as blatant nimbyism.

On the surface, the law seems to favor this last group. The California Solar Rights Act of 1978 and its subsequent amendments, does not allow any governing body to block new solar projects with unreasonable regulation and requires that permits be obtained through an administrative not discretionary process. This means that solar panels can be placed just about anywhere without restriction and without public review. Here in Los Angeles, it’s about the same as getting an electrical permit.

By this standard, the nursing home did everything right. They wanted to be smart about energy costs and they wanted to be green. I really believe that their hearts were in the right place; but I also believe they were hoodwinked the company they picked to install the array. When these guys caught a glimpse of the several-acre open hillside above the nursing home, just there for the taking, I believe they steered their client away from the more difficult task of mounting the PV panels to the buildings and urged them to take advantage of the slope.

There’s green, and there’s green. I think by sizing the array far beyond what could be considered reasonable in anything zoned R-1 Residential, these guys were targeting the soon-to-expire rebates offered by the state – the larger the array, the bigger the rebates – and then the bigger payoff down the line: the nursing home does not own the array, it leases it, so the installers reap the benefits of the power the array generates in perpetuity. As the cost of power goes up, they make more money.

Is this the green economy everyone keeps talking about? Another opportunity for savvy entrepreneurs to make a few bucks in the guise of doing good? Sure, some would say, why not? Green is green; who does it hurt? I think it hurts all of us. Green should be about the big picture, certainly, but it should also be about livable places. I think any solar ordinance for Los Angeles should accommodate how a community chooses to builds itself. Things like the Northeast Hillside Ordinance allow us as citizens to participate, to feel we actually have a stake in shaping our neighborhood. How else are we to establish an emotional commitment to a place?

In our area, this particular corner of Northeast Los Angeles, along the banks of the Arroyo Seco, we want green everything – solar power, wastewater polishing, transit oriented development – but we also want to protect our environment. The bottom line is this: You can put solar panels anywhere; but how can you ever replace open space?

THE BIPOLAR PARKWAY

The recent work on the Pasadena Freeway has been an exercise in contradictions – a beautification that actually renders the scenic byway less beautiful; safety barriers that make the road less safe; and a nod to local history that insults Arroyo Seco culture by reducing its significance to bland, ill-conceived motifs dreamt up in Sacramento and stamped in concrete to last an eternity.

The $17 million project started just as the six-mile stretch of freeway received both landmark designation and a new/old name to go with it. The “Arroyo Seco Parkway,” has, in the course of its renovation, lost many of the elements that made it, the first “freeway” in America, so groundbreaking – the innovative curb and gutter system, the classic wood and steel safety barriers, and the compound curves built for speed (a lightning-fast 45 miles-per-hour); actually the curves will remain. What won’t are the vistas to the series of sycamore-filled parks that line alternating sides of the highway as well as into the Arroyo Seco channel itself.

In place of all this, drivers will be treated to new decorative elements courtesy of CalTrans – concrete side barriers stamped with a pattern attempting to mimic either the rubble walls that characterize the Craftsman homes along the Arroyo or the broken concrete walls that first adorned the route; “historic” lighting that bears no relation to any of the fixtures anywhere in Northeast Los Angeles despite their cloying faux-traditional look (and which, when suspended one hundred feet in the air, look pathetically inadequate); and a concrete center divider stamped with a bizarre design motif of alternating arches intended, apparently, to reference the bed of the channel on the one hand and the parabolic arches of the several overpasses on the other. Some call it the Happy-Sad Highway; I prefer the Bipolar Parkway.

I guess the most irritating thing about the whole exercise is the implication of community input. This is CalTrans: there was none. They took it upon themselves to tell us what we’re about. I say, don’t bother. If you’re going to “restore” the parkway, then really do it – go back to the original drawings and put it back to the way it really was, down to the smallest detail. If you can't do that, then do what you do best – simple clean lines, the latest technology, the most current light fixtures. Anything in between is at best pastiche and at worst a slap in the face.