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Formation of Education Committee 1-29-02 meeting and Wilbur expansion

Education Committee

The Northridge community council is establishing an education committee to deal with educational issues in Northridge. Its first project will be dealing with the proposed LAUSD CSUN high school.

The first meeting has a very short fuse and it will be tomorrow (1-29-02) at Northridge Hospital in the basement education conference room at 7:00 p.m.

Any stakeholder may join this committee. We expect a considerable amount of the committee’s work will be reviewing, contributing and collaborating on documents online. The short time fuse would seem to make online collaboration the best way to get the job done while achieving multiple inputs from the community.

The Northridge committee council will be routinely faced with issues that cannot wait until a regular meeting because the city and other agencies are only required to give a 72-hour notice on issues. With the short time notice this seems to be the only way.

Any of you who want to attend the meeting just show up, or to participate online please send an e-mail message.

The first document we will be drafting is a formal response to the traffic study concerning the new school. This will be due on 2-4-02.

The second will be a formal response to the entire project, which has to be presented to the LAUSD board on 2-19-02, one day before our next meeting.

We expect the e-mail traffic from the Education Committee to be fairly frequent. They will typically have Word documents attached for you to comment on. We will be using Word so that you can set it to show you changes by clicking under tools - track changes - highlight changes - track changes while editing - highlighted changes on screen.

This will produce a Word document that shows your additions and deletions from the original document. We intend to post all these proposed revisions online so that the committee members can see the changes as we go towards  the final document. In this way each person has a input in the final document and we can benefit from everyone's diverse opinions and knowledge.

We will be posting, later today,  on the Website information concerning attendance data for the schools in local area. A quick look shows that the residents within a school area will not fill up any schools except for those along the freeway. What is occurring is a sizable amount of students are being transported to fill the empty seats in the schools.

For example, many of you have heard that Granada Hills High will be forced to go multi-track. What you have not heard is that it is solely because 1200 students are being transported into the community. LAUSD, because of it’s inability to build schools in the communities where the students live, is transporting students to other communities. This forces these schools to go multi- track. This simultaneously damages communities by having multi-trick schools for the local students and the students who have to waste hours in a bus everyday.

A separate group headed by Jim Parker, now named the mid Valley Coalition,  formerly the White Oak neighbors, is going ahead independently of the council. We offer to post their proposals on our website and they are of course  iare invited to join our education committee.

We now have on the Web site the revision to the traffic study.

http://www.northridgecouncil.org/lasud/lausdcsuntr2-1.htm

But again, LAUSD refuses to make it available in any reasonable electronic form. Our conversion process from the unusable PDF to HTML damages the tables. If you have a high speed access, we have a link to our site to the 25 meg PDF which is about 200 times as big as our 120K HTML.

See you Tuesday.

Charles Brink, Education Committee Chairman 818-886-5223

Wilbur to be cut through the railroad tracks and turned for a residential street to a major commuter route. LA City claim no environmental effect. It will vastly increase the traffic on Wilbur and reduce some of the traffic on Reseda and Lindley. 

LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL AGENDA FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2001

01-2602 MITIGATED NEGATIVE DECLARATION and COMMUNICATION FROM THE BOARD OF CDs 4,12, PUBLIC WORKS relative to consideration of Initial Study and the & 13 Mason Avenue At-Grade Crossing and Safety Improvements Project. Recommendations for Council action, as approved by the Board of Public Works: 

1. FIND that the Mason Avenue At-Grade Crossing and Safety Improvements Project (Project) will not have a significant effect on the environment, pursuant to the City's Environmental Guidelines and in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970; that the Mitigated Negative Declaration reflects the independent judgment of the lead agency, City of Los Angeles; that the documents constituting the record of proceedings in this matter are located in Council File No. 01- 2602 in the custody of the City Clerk and in the files of the Board of Public Works in the custody of the City Engineer, Environmental Group; and ADOPT the Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND No. SCH 20010410602) filed October 22, 2001. 

2. APPROVE the Project as described in the Initial Study dated October 22, 2001, attached to the Council file, with implementation of preferred Alternative 3. 

3. INSTRUCT the City Clerk to immediately notify the Bureau of Engineering, Environmental Group, of the adoption of the Mitigated Negative Declaration so that the Notice of Determination can be filed with the County Clerk within five business days. Fiscal Impact Statement: The Board of Public Works reports that funding for this project is approved as part of the Transportation Improvement Program 1997 and 1999, Call for Projects, for the amount of $435,000, and $878,000, respectively. Also, $521,000 from local Prop C returns and $400,000 from private funds will be contributed to the project. This action does not have any impact on the General Fund.