Annenberg Listens to the other side (or at least does what we told them to do, whether they care what we think)

Annenberg Never Needed to Build Massive Private Complex on Ballona Wetlands Preserve

By Rex Frankel

BIG NEWS for June 2015: I've just learned that the Annenberg Foundation has made a deal to locate their HQ and animal adoption complex in the middle of the Playa Vista office park in a developed area. This is a big turnaround from their previous plans to locate in the fragile Ballona Wetlands wildlife habitat area which taxpayers spent $140 million to purchase in 2003.

The proposal to massively alter the Ballona Wetlands with fleets of earthmovers in order to do what some wrongly called a "restoration"project has seen a lot of the wind in its sails disappear recently

In the last year, the state bureaucrats who secretly negotiated the deal 3 years ago to turn over a major chunk of the Ballona Wetlands State Preserve to the private Annenberg Foundation have all left the state agencies and are now off the public payroll.

The director of the project resigned and set up a private website to advocate for the massive bulldozing project still: that website is empty. See it: https://accessballona.wordpress.com/

we wrote more on this here:
http://ballona-news.blogspot.com/2014/12/sometimes-money-is-not-enough.html

Who is actually running the project currently is a bit of a mystery, as this ad posted by the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust in the Argonaut Newspaper June 11th asks:

Regardless of who is in charge, we continue working to keep the Ballona Wetlands restoration proposals easy on wildlife and historically accurate, for recreation and wildlife, not privateers and polluters.

A public hearing by an L.A. City Associate Zoning Administrator is scheduled for July 30, 2015

See their brochure:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5SGRAMv8RXubERzWmVwbFpza1E/view?usp=sharing