Santa Clarita City Council meeting spurs hot debate on collusion between City staff and private developers.

The media outlets are buzzing with the news of this week’s Santa Clarita City Council meeting, where City planning staff was accused of collusion with the developers for the Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital expansion plan.

City staffers have been accused of answering to their prior City planning boss, Jeff Lambert, who now works as a paid consultant for G&L Realty (the developers for the Henry Mayo Hospital expansion plan) instead of their current boss (the City). Staff emails and memos supporting these accusations have been circulating throughout various media outlets, including SCVTalk, for the public to read. There’s also a video of the highlights of this exchange on SCVTV.

These emails and memos were presented by TimBen Boydston at the City Council meeting, where he said "What I see, is I see collusion with members of our planning department."

While some communication between planning staff and developers is normal, plotting with City staff to have items brought to the Council for a vote when certain members are expected to be absent is not. Nor is leaking inside information to outside sources. In light of this, many are calling for the City staff involved in this fiasco to be terminated.

Also interesting to note is that Councilmember Laurene Weste abruptly cut off the presentation of these incriminating emails and memos by calling a 10-minute recess while Boydston was mid-sentence, and refused to let the issue be resumed once the break was complete. There was a lot of shouting and commotion amongst the Council members before and during the break, so clearly this is a hot issue and not all Council members are in agreement on this.

Funny that there’s such an uproar over this, when some City Council members can be accused of self-serving actions themselves with other development projects in the Santa Clarita area, such as the Old Town Newhall Revitalization Project. The similarities between these projects are interesting, since both involve a dispute over whether public use property should be allowed to be converted into commercial development, and both involve the use of eminent domain to get the land needed for the projects.

In the case of the Henry Mayo Hospital Expansion Plan, G&L Realty is being accused of wanting to build the adjacent office buildings so they can then sell them off as non-medical commercial space instead of using them as much-needed hospital space. This is in effect taking a portion of a public use project (the hospital) and turning it into a commercial for-profit venture.

In the case of the Old Town Newhall Revitalization Project, the City planners initially said that they wanted to build a 65,000 square foot mega-library at the corner bordering Lyons Avenue, Spruce Street and San Fernando Road. Now that it’s not clear there will be a library at all, that too will become commercial space to be sold off to some unknown developer to build for profit. And even if there is a library, the City has already restated the size requirements down to a maximum of 24,000 square feet, which is only about 37% of the total planned structure, meaning that 63% of that space will be commercial space instead of public use property.

See the similarities here? The only difference here is that the City controls one project (Newhall Redevelopment) and not the other (Henry Mayo Hospital Expansion). And of course City Council members don’t have ownership of the land involved in the Henry Mayo Expansion Plan, where some of them DO have ownership of undeveloped land in the Old Town Newhall Revitalization area (Laurene Weste is one of these landowners). Hmmmm…. suspicious, huh?

Of the three office buildings proposed as part of the Henry Mayo Expansion Plan, Councilman Frank Ferry said, "This isn’t retail space. This isn’t the Hallmark store. I need to know what this is. We’re sort of disengaging what goes on in this space." Frank, what about the Newhall "library project" with the ever-shrinking (or maybe even non-existent) library - this isn’t supposed to be a Hallmark Store either!

Shades of Robin Hood here… The Henry Mayo Expansion Project wants to rob from the more affluent Valencia neighborhood surrounding the hospital by taking homes via eminent domain so this commercial development in disguise can move forward.

The Newhall Revitalization Plan works in reverse: It wants to rob from the poorer Newhall neighborhoods and give to the rich developers via the eminent domain process, which is already well under way. Well, that’s one way to circle the wagons and chase out the less-desirable low-income, non-english-speaking population that lives in that area, as well as the less-attractive automotive service businesses (and a tattoo parlor) that populate the area. Trouble is, many other viable and "socially acceptable" businesses are being caught in the crossfire as well, and thus far these long-standing businesses are not getting the warm and fuzzies about how this whole situation is being handled.

The City is carefully avoiding any public presentation of the updated eminent domain laws as required by Senate Bill (SB) 53, and publicly City staff is stating that eminent domain will only be used as a "last resort". But their procedures clearly indicate that they’ll file eminent domain actions within 30 days after presenting buyout offers to current property owners (businesses and residences), so any negotiations between the City and these property owners will be under the dark cloud of an active eminent domain lawsuit. And the City also provided itself an avenue to evict current property owners BEFORE negotiations are complete… verrrrry sneaky!

Property owners who are concerned about these eminent domain actions and other development concerns can make themselves heard by attending the public City Council meetings. The next meeting will be June 26 at 6pm in the City Council Chambers. Per the City’s website, "Members of the public may address the Council on the topic of their choice under Public Participation. Speaker cards must be completed and turned in before Public Participation begins and there is a three minute time limit per person." And, of course, in the case where a lot of property owners may be affected by a development project, each can request to have their say rather than limiting themselves to only one 3-minute presentation for the entire group.

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