A resident holds a sign protesting the road diet on Orange Grove (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)..
As dark clouds had bunched over Pasadena, the Pasadena City Council met Monday night in a perfect storm of current issues: the imposing of a road diet on Orange Grove, the regulations for granny flats (ADU), and the lingering controversy over the beating of Pasadena resident Chris Bellew.
By Garrett Rowlan
The Council’s decision to divide public comment before and after items on the agenda resulted that the first twenty minutes were spent on a dozen speakers, all of whom were concerned with the Orange Grove road diet, and most of whom were opposed to the proposal. Citing current traffic conditions and how this restriction could affect surrounding residential neighborhoods as speeders attempt to bypass the inevitable traffic jam, the speakers brought a variety of perspectives on why they believed it was a bad idea.
In support of ADU at the Pasadena City Council on Monday, March 12, 2018 (Photo – Garrett Rowlan).
The evening’s major discussion concerned the rather complicated snake pit of regulations, fees, and benchmarks for the building of granny flats in Pasadena. The overriding question seemed to be how to facilitate these constructions while paying for the infrastructural and environmental changes that these buildings will cause. As the evening wore on, the discussion at times became nuanced to an almost theological degree, as in the case of how to define family. When Councilmember Victor Gordo suggested using a table of consanguinity to determine what a family is, (in relation to what a “family member” could pay as a renter) the discussion began to slip from the simply nuanced to the bizarre. In the end, the only thing the Council seemed to agree on was to eliminate the family options benchmarks for rent.
Signs depicting black community members who have had disastrous encounters with the Pasadena Police Department (Photo – Garrett Rowlan).
Meanwhile protestors, like a silent Greek chorus, held up signs depicting black community members who have had disastrous encounters with the Pasadena Police Department.
As the evening wore on people left in small groups, as the seating area became less and less occupied, one had a feeling that the discussion within the Council was detached from the public’s input—though, indeed, several Council members praised the input of several prepared individuals regarding the building of granny flats. Still, one had the feeling that the Council members were like pensive Gods, discussing matters on some empyrean plane, maybe waiting for the second round of public input to bring them back to Earth.
> Watch the entire Pasadena City Council meeting here.
A packed meeting of Pasadena City Council on Monday, March 12, 2018 (Photo – Garrett Rowlan).
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