Community Commentary:

If Stanton Price had read the pleadings in Conquest Student Housing and Herbert Molano v. city of Glendale, it is unlikely he would have written “Maybe city’s nipping it in the bud” posted in the Community Forum on June 25.

Asserting that Molano has been victimized by the city government of Glendale is akin to blaming a shooting victim for not getting out of the way of a bullet. From the beginning, it was the city and not Molano that was in the cross-hairs.

What Price does not know is that this was not solely Molano’s lawsuit. He opportunistically hitched his agenda on to Los Angeles-based Conquest Student Housing LLC, the multimillion-dollar private corporation that sued the city in order to invalidate the city’s award-winning Downtown Specific Plan and its environmental impact report and thereby foil a competing private developer from Los Angeles — a developer of the Verdugo Gardens project.

Conquest Student Housing needed a local citizen taxpayer with standing to sue the city and gut its competitor’s plans, and Molano joined as a willing participant without cost.

In fact, Conquest was suing its competitor and cities throughout California and Washington because the competitor dared to build a project close to Conquest’s developments near USC.

Unfortunately, Glendale happened to have approved its Downtown Specific Plan environmental impact report at about the same time a Conquest competitor was considering a Glendale development downtown. Conquest chose to attack the downtown plan in order to invalidate the new zoning for the area instead of waiting to challenge the competitor’s project. Molano, in turn, chose to use Conquest as a powerful means to leverage his personal agenda.