Community Commentary:

I was watching the Channel 6 broadcast of a Design Review Board No. 2 session two weeks ago when I was shocked by Design Review Board member Michael James’ aggression toward a neighbor speaking out against a proposed project in their neighborhood.

James said something along the lines that he objected to the neighbor’s presence at the hearing because the neighbor didn’t live right next door to the project but a block away.

It is my understanding that the Design Review Board was put in place to protect Glendale neighborhoods from continuing to be ruined by out-of-scale and unsightly designs that were better suited for a new tract development in Valencia than in Glendale’s period and architecturally defined neighborhoods.

The design review hearings are purposefully public in order to encourage open discussion and transparency.

Shouldn’t neighbors have the right to voice their concerns about a proposed design regardless if the board member agrees with them or not? And when did Glendale residents become the bad guys for expressing their opinion that a proposed design is not compatible to the neighborhood standard?

It has been clear to me, since I moved to Glendale six years ago, that the design review process in this city is broken. I personally believe that it is broken mainly due to the inability or refusal of the majority of current Design Review Board members to insist on successful designs.

They instead tend to not to want to inconvenience the applicant to come up with a better design and prefer to try and just tweak bad designs to make them marginally more palatable. The increase in neighbors speaking out against bad design and the number of cases appealed to the City Council speak directly to the inadequate job that the Design Review Boards are doing.

Fortunately, the City Council has finally taken notice and has admitted that there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and it quite frankly can’t come fast enough.