Chabad to leave Temescal Canyon*

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Robert Garcia, executive director and counsel for The City Project, sent in a posting early this morning to our blog about the ongoing Chabad saga we mentioned last week and what happened at last night’s emergency meeting.

Sandy Cooney, the state resources agency’s representative on the board, was the sole dissenting vote in favor of renewing the lease, according to those at the meeting. We haven’t been able to reach him today to ask about his vote, but we’ll update this post when we do. *(Update: We were able to reach him Wednesday. His comments are at the end of the post.) His boss, Secretary for Resources Mike Chrisman, wrote that letter to Chabad at the behest of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It includes guidelines on how to deal with the conservancy and suggestions (that Chabad took into account) on how to formulate an appeal for an extended lease.

Addressing the board last night, Chabad attorney Benjamin Reznik asked its members to be flexible with Chabad and allow the group five months to get its paperwork in order, noting that the conservancy for years has used Chabad’s money to help pay for park upkeep. Today, Reznik was pretty matter-of-fact on the phone about the final vote.

‘This is a lot of to do about nothing quite frankly,’ Reznik said. ‘I guess they’ll be looking for an alternative site in the interim.’

He also said that whatever happened with the new Los Liones site for the preschool (which has riled the Getty Villa and a local Mormon church) will likely be ‘more exciting’ and a ‘more interesting case.’ Reznik and Chabad plan to file paperwork (a conditional use permit) next week to allow them to use the site for the preschool. Meanwhile, they also are drawing up road plans to submit to the city.

‘The city is not accepting dedicated roads these days because of a shortage of funds in some areas,’ Reznik said. ‘We’re going to offer to pay for it. So we’re going through that process, designing plans -- Chabad is in the process of doing all that.’

Conservancy Executive Director Joe Edmiston, who denied the lease extension last month, was ‘gratified’ that the board decided to keep to its word and not renew the lease.

‘The board last year said no extensions under any circumstances, and they should adhere to what they said before,’ Edmiston said today. ‘We’re not in the private rental business. We’re in the public park area. How about five more months? Nobody believes they can do what they need to get done in five months. They’re not going to leave in January ...

‘And frankly in January, I’m just going to say it, there’s not a highway patrolman born who will come in and evict the Chabad kids, holding a Torah in one hand and holding onto Rabbi Cunin’s frock coat with the other. It’s never going to happen.’

Rabbi Zushe Cunin, who heads Chabad of the Pacific Palisades, said the organization would not appeal again and sounded resigned to the decision.

‘The board did what it did,’ Cunin said. ‘It’s unfortunate. Our requests were very minimal. We will live with their decision, and we will immediately be identifying any other locations as necessary because we anticipate there may be delays in our CUP process’ beyond Sept. 4, when the school’s fall term begins.

‘It would have been heartwarming to feel a sensitive partnership,’ he continued. ‘But it was not in the cards.’

*New comments below:

Cooney, who was the lone dissenting vote on the Board at Monday night’s meeting, said he’d voted in favor of Chabad’s appeal, but had not made up his mind on whether the lease should be renewed.

‘The item on the agenda put into motion in the discussion, and ultimately voted on, which was to grant Chabad an appeal, in effect overturned Joe’s denial of the lease extension, but it did not convey a new lease,’ Cooney said. ‘What it did was set into motion a new process through which a new lease could be potentially be granted.’

He said the overarching conversation on public access versus private interest was not the ‘issue on the table to be voted’; especially since the Conservancy had previously allowed a non-renewable lease to be extended.

‘Obviously I was completely outnumbered by the entire board …’ Cooney said. ‘In the end, out of fairness and listening to all sides and trying to be as absolutely objective as possible, I felt that we should have moved to the next step, which is grant the appeal, then we should consider the remainder of the agenda and whether or not we should take those steps that would move toward a new lease.’

-- Tami Abdollah