Review boards respond to public

CITY HALL — As the City Council meeting wore on Tuesday night, several members of the city’s two Design Review Boards sat quietly in the back, editing the scripts that would serve as their public response to widespread criticism of their track records.

That public discontent culminated Aug. 28 when the City Council heeded the calls of Glendale’s homeowners associations to transfer review oversight of single-family homes from the Design Review Boards to city planners.

While that transfer has not officially taken place, homeowners hailed the move as an indictment of what they said was review board members’ inability to accurately gauge a project’s compatibility with its surrounding neighborhood.

On Thursday, Design Review Board No. 1 members set off a flurry of complaints after they sent back half of the projects on the agenda for redesign as they made what many considered retaliatory political assessments of the impending power transfer.

Almost all of those board members referenced the council’s decision at some point during deliberations during their Thursday meeting, and at least two said they could not approve certain projects in light of that decision, even though no changes to the system have officially been made.

Those comments pushed Councilman John Drayman to ask for an explanation even as one set of homeowners who recently had their plans blocked prepared to state their case to the council.

“I know this is a delicate subject to tread,” Drayman said.

But Design Review Board members were there on Tuesday, in the audience and in the City Hall lobby, pacing while making edits to their carefully worded responses to what they say has been anything but a delicate situation.

Vartan Gharpetian, who chairs Design Review Board No. 1, said his board and the work of its members has been a scapegoat for a more fundamental citywide issue — a lack of a unified vision.

His message to council members would be more a warning than anything else — that as long as Glendale is growing, competing visions of what how they see their neighborhoods will continue to create problems for the review process.

The interpretation of his board’s voting record is just that, an interpretation, Gharpetian said.

“I’m sitting on this board to serve my community,” he said.

Additionally, the same public that has fueled the discontent is often unaware of everything that goes into rendering a decision on a set of plans that are often scrutinized beyond what is shown at publicly-broadcast review meetings, said Laura Friedman, who chairs Design Review Board No. 2.

“You can’t even get neighbors to agree on a stop sign,” she said.

It’s unfair that so much attention is focused on the so-called “massing” issue and not on the success the review boards have had in making the design of projects better to the satisfaction of everyone involved, she added.

“The focus should be about design, and everything else should not be part of the discussion,” she said.