EVERY application that goes through planning departments in California requires an environmental review to determine if an Environmental Impact Report is needed. That’s the law, not a smokescreen.

It doesn’t matter if the Lakers or anyone else played or plays across the street, the point of an ER and an EIR is to look at how the proposal will add to the existing traffic and change traffic patterns, and a Wal Mart supercenter most certainly will do both of these in significant amounts; not just for the few blocks around it, but for the whole area.

And, of course, traffic was just one example: sewage, electricity, garbage, etc. are good ones also.

Businesses have rights. So do residents. There needs to be a system where competing rights can be judged. I won’t claim it’s a perfect system. But, just letting any company build anything it wants whereever it wants (yes, I know this is an extreme, as well) isn’t a good solution, either. Money and power should not be able to purchase all the votes.

In addition to Lakers and Kings games, the Forum used to host all sorts of other events: concerts (Kiss Alive II was recorded there), circuses (the only time I’ve ever been to a circus was the Ringling Bros. at the Forum), and the like. Again, the traffic for such events had to be much worse than the WalMart could generate.

I think the whole call for an environmental review is a smokescreen.

In the end, if you make it hard to do business you will get less of it.

Please try not to get you news from the Daily Show.

The purpose of an environmental review, in cases like this, would be to determine how much of an increase in traffic the store would generate and how much the roads would need to be improved throughout the city to accomodate said traffic. Stuff like that.

FYI: In most (all?) of CA an enviromental review is different from an Environmental Impact Report. All applications that are big enough to require planning (and not just building) deptartment approval require an environmental review for reasons such as those mentioned above, and to determine if further study (an EIR) will be needed.

If you want to build anything in most parts of Oregon, you need to get permission. If the area is already zoned for what you want to do, most of the process is done. But, if you want to build outside of that area, you need to get the corps of engineers to do an impact study, first.

It’s a balancing act, I agree. But I think it’s a good thing that we put a check on greed.