I’d really hate to have to forgo the affectionate mail I get every time I write about the Ballona Wetlands/Playa Vista controversy. But it seems I can stop beating this particular dead horse for a while. Since the anti-Playa forces’ wrong-way win in federal court – provoking a decision that halted wetlands conservation at Playa Vista but let construction go full speed ahead – the Save-All-Ballona crowd have been placed, to put it modestly, on the defensive.And the news from the bench is only accelerating. On August 21, U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew, who ruled in favor of the original anti-Playa suit, denied a motion by the plaintiffs, CALPIRG-Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, to expand the 16 acres Lew had set aside for study as a restoration. A week later, the defendant Playa Vista developers’ appeal of Lew’s June ruling, which seeks to erase any cloud of judicial intervention, was put on the appellate-court fast track.
Source: Enviro groups lose it at Playa Vista Wetlands | L.A. Weekly