COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:City needed to act years ago

Just when we thought the dust had settled on the contentious showdown between a neighborhood church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, and its neighbors, some of us who live on the other side of the bay can sympathize with their David-versus-Goliath struggle to protect their community from the voracious appetite of unrealistic expansion. We find ourselves facing a similar threat by another church, Our Lady Queen of Angels, whose monolithic expansion plans have been reviewed by the Newport Beach planning department, which in turn has prepared and distributed a notice to homeowners that recklessly claims that “the proposed project would not have an effect on the environment.”

For the record, the applicant, Our Lady Queen of Angels, appears to be intent on breaching a previous agreement “not to expand” similar to that of St. Andrew’s, which in and of itself speaks volumes to the churches’ empty promises. It is proposing to double the size of the seating capacity of the existing sanctuary to 1,170 square feet, double the size its school, including a 10,000-square-foot gymnasium and to exceed the current 35-foot height restriction and build a 90-foot steeple.

Notwithstanding the fact that the proposed plan calls for relocating the major thoroughfares to both the sanctuary and school to a residential street with only one driveway serving the 1,200-capacity sanctuary, the planning department has the audacity to suggest that this proposal will not affect the environment when all evidence is to the contrary.

If the staff members of the planning department would take the initiative to visit the sites on any given school day, or on any Sunday, during the five services, they would see the traffic congestion that already exists and that the streets in the neighborhood were never designed to accommodate the already out-of-control number of vehicles that congest streets like Mar Vista (which only has three lanes) and Domingo, a residential street that is simply not adequate for a project of this magnitude.

Further exacerbating the situation is the unresolved traffic nightmare that Corona del Mar High School contributes to the equation and whose enrollment has far exceeded the capacity it was designed for more than 40 years ago. Adding insult to injury the “new and improved drop-off plan” implemented last fall has only made matters worse by delegating most of the traffic to the east side of Eastbluff. Restricting access to public streets such as Alba and eliminating bike lanes, as the city has, only adds congestion and potential liabilities that the city can neither defend nor afford.

Moreover, having been a homeowner and resident on Amigos Way for more than 35 years and having served on our homeowners association, I can attest to the fact that both the staff of Our Lady Queen of Angels and many of its parishioners have and continue to demonstrate a total disregard and disrespect for the neighborhood and its residents and exhibited disdain for traffic and safety laws. On school days and weekends, parishioners and parents of children who attend the school regularly exhibit a reckless disregard by engaging in three point turns; making U-turns; double parking; blocking traffic by letting children and passengers out; trespassing onto private property; and parking in no-parking zones, much to the detriment and safety of the residents who reside in the immediate vicinity of the property and anyone else who has the misfortune to find themselves anywhere near Eastbluff, Mar Vista and Domingo.

We are neither interested nor do we care about the incessant yammering of those who run to the defense Our Lady Queen of Angels and its unreasonable expansion plans by attacking us, as they have in the past, dismissing our legitimate concerns with their NIMBY childish rhetoric; continuing to confuse the issue of overdevelopment with religion; never accepting the salient fact that the church, which was supposed to be a neighborhood church, has simply outgrown the neighborhood for which it was intended; and never articulating anything but selfishness and, quite bluntly, laziness in demanding that their church be within a certain radius of their own homes; and never considering the consequences that such an expansion will have on other people’s quality of life.

This is not now, nor has it ever been an issue of religion, as some will argue. It is and remains as issue of overdevelopment. Fortunately those who don’t live nearby don’t have to live with the consequences of the costly mistakes of the city’s planning department that didn’t have the foresight to see that a public high school and two churches, both with schools of their own, cannot co-exist as neighbors, nor did they give a second thought of how this might affect the neighborhood.

We would have thought, if nothing else, the city and its planners would have learned from their mistakes. Apparently that is too much to expect. They seem bent on repeating their disastrous decisions, much to the detriment of those of us who have the misfortune to have purchased homes here 35 years ago and who put their faith into their elected representatives and City Hall to protect their investment and the quality of life we all have the right to expect.

To put it in terms that even the planning department and the City Council will understand: The only reasonable solution is to either relocate the high school (which should have been downsized) and another facility built to accommodate the thousands of new homes, many with four and five bedrooms, that the city allowed developers to construct without the foresight to build one new public high school that would have reduced the burden on Corona del Mar High School, or leave Our Lady Queen of Angels as it is, or relocate it to an area that is better suited for a project with such proportions. The plans speak to the very issue that those behind the proposed expansion have demonstrated little, if any, real concern for proportion, and the proposed design is completely out of place in this residential community.

It became painfully obvious more than a decade ago that something needed to be done to address the egregious traffic woes that Corona del Mar High School, Our Lady Queen of Angels and St. Mark’s, all of which are responsible for the problem itself, create. These are issues that the city has and continues to ignore.

That is not what we consider progress. It is negligence.