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.