City Sets Warner Center Specific Plan Open House

Since 2006, a citizen's advisory council has been working with the city of Los Angeles to create a new Warner Center specific plan. The plan is now ready to share with the public, and the city will be hosting an open house Monday for that purpose.

California law requires cities to have general plans which guide planning and development (see the Los Angeles General Plan here). Within a city, there can be even more detailed or stringent guidelines for particular areas, and these are found in specific plans. Los Angeles has 45 specific plans, one of which is the Warner Center Specific Plan (you can download a copy of the current plan, which has been in effect since 1993, on the Department of City Planning website).

A copy of the proposed plan—dubbed the Warner Center 2035 Plan because it would last until 2035 should the city adopt it—can also be found online, as can the plan's environmental impact report, history and timeline.

According to the city's website, "The Warner Center 2035 Plan is a development guide for the Warner Center regional center, a Transit Oriented District (TOD). The Plan provides a blueprint to give the developer the certainty of what is permitted under the Specific Plan and provides the Community the certainty that a development will provide the necessary public benefits and mitigations prescribed by the Specific Plan ordinance."

The one-and-a-half square mile Warner Center area, named for Harry Warner, the eldest of the Warner brothers, is generally bounded by Vanowen Street to the north, the Ventura Freeway to the south, DeSoto Avenue to the east and Topanga Canyon Boulevard to the west. According to the city's website, the area was originally planned to relieve traffic to and from downtown Los Angeles as well as generate jobs in the San Fernando Valley.

The open house will take place from 5 to 8 p.m. Monday in auditoriums A and B of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center at 5601 N. DeSoto Ave.

There will also be a public hearing for the plan from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 18, also in the auditoriums at Kaiser Permanente. There will be a pre-hearing question and answer period that night from 4 to 5 p.m. at the same location.