By Julie BUTCHER

On Tuesday night, the Glendale City Council spent most of its lengthy meeting reviewing a project proposed at 534 and 538 North Kenwood Street in the area just north of downtown.

Councilmember Dan Brotman recused himself from the discussion, noting that he had publicly opposed the project before the city’s Design Review Board in 2019. Mayor Paula Devine disclosed that she serves on the board of the Historical Society of Glendale, the appellant.

The proposal is to build a new three-story 11-unit residential building, restoring the historical 1913 two-story Craftsman-style house at 534 N. Kenwood (which is eligible for inclusion on the Glendale historic register), and demolishing the historic garage and the non-historic one-story house and garage at 538 N. Kenwood.

By right, the property owner could build up to 15 residential units.

“This appeal did not come from the people who live there,” said applicant Hamlet Zohrabians who also noted the petition of support submitted with 75 signatures on it. “Funds are available now to create an attractive project and preserve an historic house.”

Councilmember Vrej Agajanian weighed in.

“I recall a report that there is a 1.3 million unit shortage of housing in California – and 13,300 of those are in Glendale,” he said.

Councilmember Ara Najarian explained the details of the requirement for “substantial adverse impact” to trigger the additional requirement of conducting the full environmental review of an EIR.

“Today we should be celebrating the preservation of this early example of an Airplane Craftsman – the house will remain eligible for inclusion in the local register – after the project is completed, an example of what we used to have here … if we didn’t let people build around old houses,” he said. “Even Pasadena had developed around its bungalow heavens.”

“I remember that house and I worried about it, even as a child, on my way to the batting cages on Colorado,” Councilmember Ardy Kassakhian waxed nostalgic. “Development is going to happen; growth is going to happen. What we can control is how it happens. My dad was born in Jerusalem and my mom in Athens. In both of these ancient cities, the old fits in with the new.”

Mayor Paula Devine disagreed. “This is of more significance than just replacing a dilapidated building. That’s what calls for an EIR, to get an unbiased expert opinion. That way we’d get alternatives. It’s massive and it overpowers the historic resource. You can’t even see it in this drawing,” said Devine who voted against the project, which passed on a vote of 3-1.

Earlier in the meeting, Councilmember Brotman urged his colleagues and the public to “check out” the Museum of Neon Art (https://www.neonmona.org/exhibits/), which is based in Glendale and is open and inviting people in. He noted that the museum has “a lot of new pieces including some from an artist [who] trained there.”

The council approved an amendment to its recycling contracts based on the changes experienced in global recycling markets. The contractor used to pay the city for its recyclables. Last year, the city agreed not to be paid for the materials and, for the coming year, the city will pay $54 per ton.

“This brings this issue to a head,” Brotman observed, “now that it’s real dollars, we need to make it clearer what’s recyclable. We get a lot of ‘wish-recycling’ –stuff that people put in their recycling hoping that it is recyclable.”

Councilmember Najarian pointed out the brochure distributed by the city “in today’s mail” delineates what is and what is not recyclable currently.

Next, the council heard a legislative update. The state budget is anticipated to show a $50 billion surplus on an estimated proposed budget of $227.2 billion. Details will be delayed because this year’s tax filing deadline was delayed. The state senate has introduced a budget proposal called “Build Back Boldly,” and the assembly has introduced its own “Budget of Opportunity.”

City staff specifically noted a group of six housing bills it is watching as well as certain provisions of a statewide broadband deployment effort which raise concerns about possible infringement on local processes for micro-trenching and the siting of small wireless facilities.

The council debated and then voted to apply to be part of a speed safety pilot program testing automated traffic enforcement focused on attempting to reduce speeding in the city. Police Chief Carl Povilaitis expressed his general support for the pilot as a potential additional tool.

“Bottom line is we don’t want to let the perfect get in the way of the good,” he said.

Najarian recalled the impetus for this pilot, initially introduced as a racial justice measure, assuming that a robot would be colorblind.

“It’s not typical that I agree with the ACLU, which is opposing this,” he said. “But the fines are much lower, and it gets treated as a civil violation, no points on your license.”

The council voted unanimously to apply for inclusion in the pilot.

Next the council approved a contract for $99,000 with GPA Consulting for help writing an historical context statement. As city staff explained in its report, the city “invited written proposals from qualified individuals or firms to draft the document for the City with a focus on the theme of race/ethnicity, inclusive of the following subsections: African American, Latinx, Eastern Asian, and Western Asian.”

The report summed up the history of the action: “On September 15, 2020, the Glendale City Council unanimously passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for the racially exclusionary past in Glendale as a ‘Sundown Town,’ making it the third former sundown town in the U.S. to do so, and the first in California. This historic action was taken as part of an ongoing discussion on race, diversity, inclusion, and equity in Glendale.”

Councilmember Najarian asked that the work “go further back and include the indigenous people – the Tongva and the Mexicans – who inhabited these lands.”

Mayor Paula Devine agreed, noting “the entire fabric of our community.”