The City Council’s Planning & Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee voted late Tuesday to support the Planning Department’s proposed R1 Variations Ordinance and specific R1 varieties for about 20 different neighborhoods. But rather than forward that recommendation to the City Council for a full vote, PLUM voted to send those draft ordinances along with the previously endorsed revisions to the Baseline Hillside Ordinance (BHO) and Baseline Mansionization Ordinance (BMO) back to the City Attorney’s Office. The CAO will combined all of these draft ordinances into one, large ordinance for the City Council to vote on.
 
Because of this extra step, it appears highly unlikely that any changes to the BHO/BMO or any new R1 variations will take effect before mid-March. The City Council and Mayor still are expected to approve these proposed changes before several ICOs expire on March 25; it’s just looking more and more likely that it’ll be hours or days before that March 25 deadline, not weeks.

The proposed R1 Variations Ordinance – which would create 16 different varieties of the R1 zone – is on today's agenda of the City Council’s Planning & Land Use Management Committee (PLUM). Also on the agenda is an ordinance that would establish one of these new R1 varieties for 20+ neighborhoods, mostly in West LA.
 
PLUM previously considered and approved draft versions of these proposals from City Planning last month and forwarded them to the City Attorney’s Office for creation of the final, proposed ordinance. These two ordinances – the R1 Varieties and the neighborhood-specific recommendations – are part of City Planning’s overall rework of the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance and will replace the Interim Control Ordinances (ICOs) that the City Council approved in March 2015 and which expire on March 24 of this year.
 
The ordinances being considered at today’s PLUM meeting are:
 
R1 VARIATIONS:
http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2016/16-1460_misc_02-10-2017.pdf
 
NEIGHBORHOOD CONSERATION ZONE CHANGES:
http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2016/16-1470_misc_02-10-2017.pdf
 
A couple of key points:

1. They have urgency clauses attached to them. That means that theoretically these could be approved by PLUM, the City Council, and the Mayor in just a couple of weeks and enacted just a few days later, which could make end-of-this-month possible. The key word is “could.” It is still more likely that the changes to the BMO, Baseline Hillside Ordinance and R1 zones won’t become effective until March. Exactly when is still unknown other than that it’ll be before the ICOs expire on March 24.
2. The ordinance to establish a Hillside Construction Regulation Area for the Bel-Air area is not included on tomorrow’s agenda. Apparently, the City Attorney’s Office is still working on the final version of that proposed ordinance. That’s significant because that’s a key element in the update of the BHO, and the PLUM chairman (City Councilman Jose Huizar) said last month that the ‘package’ of ordinances would be voted on together by the full City Council. So it is possible that even if/when PLUM votes to recommend approval of the draft ordinances on today’s agenda, the full City Council won’t vote on these proposals and the BHO/BMO updates until the Bel-Air Hillside ordinance is passed by PLUM. The ETA for that is currently unknown (other than it’ll happen by March 24 at the latest)