The Brief

When public officials tasked with holding criminals accountable cheat to win a conviction, it can lead to reduced sentences — even freedom — for other convicted criminals, sometimes dozens of them. It can also give people who were wrongfully convicted a shot at redemption.

A new tally released earlier this month lists criminal cases against 57 Orange County defendants that were tainted as a result of official misconduct uncovered in the trial against the county's deadliest mass shooter, Scott Dekraai, who gunned down eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011.

In these cases, which include 35 homicide cases, charges against a defendant were dropped or lessened, or the defendant was granted a new trial. For five defendants, all charges were dismissed.

"Either an innocent person was charged or a guilty person went free, neither of which we like as a society," said Maurice Possley, senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations.

The tally was done by Scott Sanders, the O.C. assistant public defender who, nearly a decade ago, was largely responsible for exposing the county’s notorious "snitch scandal." The number of cases tainted by the scandal is much higher than previous, publicly released estimates. And Sanders said there could be many more.

"I'm not saying it's complete by any nature," Sanders said of the list. "It's not."

On top of the cases already impacted by the snitch scandal's long reach, Sanders outlined dozens more cases in a recent court filing that could be revisited because of new evidence of potential misconduct. That misconduct, Sanders alleges, was carried out by O.C. law enforcement officers and a former top prosecutor who is now a superior court judge.

"Whether those cases get justice is very much in question at this moment," Sanders told LAist.

The O.C. District Attorney's Office has yet to file a formal response to Sanders' allegations, which the public defender says justify dropping murder charges against one of his clients. An initial court hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in San Diego.

Here's how misconduct uncovered in one case can affect so many other, seemingly unrelated cases.

Assistant public defender Scott Sanders (right) surfaced evidence of a secret, unconstitutional jailhouse informant program while defending Scott Dekraai (left), accused of killing eight people in a Seal Beach beauty salon.

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Mark Boster-Pool

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O.C.'s snitch scandal, a recap

The official misconduct uncovered in the Dekraai murder case, which has been confirmed by courts, internal investigations and the Department of Justice, was twofold: misusing jailhouse informants, commonly known as snitches, and hiding information about it from defendants.

The misconduct happened under the previous O.C. district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, who lost his re-election bid to current district attorney Todd Spitzer in 2018. Spitzer has implemented reforms and pledged not to tolerate cheating among prosecutors and law enforcement.

Rackauckas, who is now in private practice, did not immediately return a voicemail left on his cell phone asking for comment.

Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff said jailhouse informants are a common feature of the U.S. criminal justice system. But the way the system works, and its abuses, are often kept quiet.

"Every once in a while there's an enormous debacle … that shines a light not just on an individual jailhouse snitch, but the marketplace within that particular jail," she said.

That's what happened in the Dekraai case.

"Orange County, I think, can fairly be said to now be the poster child for the institution-wide jailhouse snitch scandal model," Natapoff said.

It's not illegal for authorities to use confidential informants — in or out of custody — to collect information. But once someone has been charged with a crime, the Sixth Amendment and subsequent court decisions guarantee them the right to have an attorney present during questioning by a law enforcement representative, including an informant secretly working for law enforcement. This is sometimes called the "Massiah" rule after a Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors must also turn over evidence from, and about, jailhouse informants used in a defendant's criminal case because it could help the defendant question the informant's credibility. Failing to do so violates the 14th Amendment and related court decisions, which require prosecutors to share with defendants any evidence they have that could help them prove their innocence. This is sometimes known as the "Brady" rule after another Supreme Court case.

The origins of the snitch scandal

In 2014, Sanders was defending Dekraai and another man, Daniel Wozniak, who was later convicted of double murder, when he began to uncover evidence of a secret informant program in O.C. jails.

The mass murder case against Dekraai should've been a slam dunk — he confessed to the crime soon after the shooting. But deputies decided to put him in a jail cell with a confidential informant, motivated by the possibility that Dekraai might try to plead insanity, according to a 2020 audit of the misconduct commissioned by Spitzer.

Then, prosecutors hid evidence from Dekraai's defense team about the informant and his work on behalf of law enforcement.

Dekraai pleaded guilty in 2014, but his sentencing was delayed for three years while the court investigated police and prosecutor misconduct in the case. Eventually, courts removed the entire Orange County District Attorney's Office (OCDA) from Dekraai's case and ruled that he couldn't be sentenced to death because of the misconduct.

After that ruling, Paul Wilson, whose wife Christy was among those killed by Dekraai, told LAist: “They’ve taken the largest mass murder in Orange County history and they have completely and utterly screwed that case up.”

News of misconduct spreads

As people in custody and their lawyers found out about the debacle, which was extensively covered by local and national media, some discovered their own cases involved the same methods and actors as the ones behind the misconduct in Dekraai’s case.

"If you're sitting in state prison, you're going to probably know about it, you're going to hear about it," Sanders said about early news of the snitch scandal. "People would write in. People would say, 'Hey, I want to have my case addressed.' All sorts of things like that."

Some realized that police officers or sheriff's deputies who testified in their cases were associated with misconduct in the Dekraai case, giving them grounds to question those officers' testimony.

Others came to suspect there might be evidence about informants used in their case that hadn't been turned over to their defense team.

Ramon Alvarez was among those who successfully challenged his conviction. He had been found guilty in 2012 of shooting a man in the head and then storing the body in a Santa Ana yard in a kiddie pool full of ice.

His murder conviction was dismissed last year after he presented evidence that a known jailhouse informant had lied in his case in exchange for an $11,000 check from the Santa Ana Police Department. An assistant district attorney had told the jury in Alvarez's trial that the informant had not been offered anything for his testimony.

A report last year from the Justice Department confirmed that failing to disclose the police department’s payment violated Alvarez's constitutional rights. Federal investigators also pointed to the prosecutor's motive. "The prosecutor conceded during our interview that he could not have successfully prosecuted Alvarez without [the informant]’s testimony," the DOJ investigators wrote, adding that "the only reason for the jury to believe [the informant], who 'had a rap sheet a mile long,' was that he was getting nothing for his testimony."

Judge Ebrahim Baytieh, who has been accused of misconduct while a prosecutor in the O.C. District Attorney's office, now runs Orange County's CARE Court, a court-mandated mental health treatment program.

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Lauren Justice

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Snitch Scandal 2.0?

In some of the cases revisited because of alleged misconduct, O.C. sheriff's deputies refused to testify about their use of informants in order to protect themselves from self-incrimination. In other words, they pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

That's what led a judge to throw out a murder conviction against Paul Smith in 2021. Smith was convicted in 2010 for allegedly stabbing his childhood friend Robert Haugen to death in 1988 and setting his body on fire in Haugen's Sunset Beach apartment.

But a judge ordered a new trial after deputies refused to testify. Spitzer, O.C.’s district attorney, said at the time that top prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, who's now an O.C. Superior Court judge, failed to turn over evidence of the informant use to the defense.

Spitzer fired Baytieh in February 2022, but the former prosecutor went on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

In a lengthy court document filed last month in Smith's case, Sanders now alleges that Baytieh was at the center of an "enormous web of deception" designed to cover up misconduct that helped prosecutors win cases while cheating defendants out of their right to a fair trial.

[Read our story: OC Snitch Case: Former Top Prosecutor, Now Judge, Accused Of Criminal Cover-Up By Public Defender]

"As detailed for the first time in this motion, Baytieh energetically worked to prevent both the informant program from being uncovered and evidence about specific informants being disclosed because he knew that these disclosures would make it more difficult to win particular cases," Sanders wrote.

Sanders also alleges that Baytieh — who had been lauded for his ethics at the district attorney's office and put in charge of determining which evidence prosecutors needed to disclose — was in fact among the worst offenders in the jailhouse snitch scandal.

A spokesperson for Orange County Superior Court has said the court and judicial officers are prohibited by ethical rules from discussing active cases. The district attorney's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.

In the motion, Sanders cites an additional 98 cases — 45 of them involving murder charges — where he said defense attorneys should have been handed evidence that could help their clients' cases.

Sanders argues that the misconduct is so egregious that the murder charges against Smith should be dropped.

How common is this kind of misconduct?

Possley, from the National Registry of Exonerations, said we don't really know how common it is for law enforcement officials and prosecutors to withhold evidence because it's a "hidden crime."

"What we know is that sometimes this stuff comes to light decades later," he said.

The National Registry of Exonerations found in a 2020 report that official misconduct, usually by police officers or prosecutors, contributed to false convictions in 54% of cases where the defendant was later cleared of charges. Black exonerees were more likely than white exonerees to have faced misconduct in their cases, especially when charged with murder or drug crimes.

The report found that hiding evidence that could have helped a defendant prove their innocence was the most common type of misconduct, having been involved in 44% of the cases they examined.

The researchers didn't specifically look at how often the use of jailhouse informants was tied to the misconduct. But a review of the registry's database turns up 164 out of 3,385 cases in which official misconduct and jailhouse informants played a role in a person's exoneration.

The registry, which has been collecting data since 1989, defines exoneration as being completely cleared of charges based on new evidence of innocence.

Not all snitch scandals have such a far reach

Orange County is certainly not the first place to get caught up in scandals over jailhouse informants. The problem goes way back and wide — across the country and right next door in Los Angeles.

L.A.'s own jailhouse informant scandal, which came to light in the late 1980s, blew up when a prolific informant named Leslie White showed authorities how he could fake a murder confession from a defendant in jail by impersonating officials to get information about a case. He would then finagle placement in the same room as the target so he could make a confession look plausible.

"Perjury has been committed," White wrote from jail in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "That is a fact, not a possibility."

At the time, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said it planned to review every case in the preceding decade in which a jailhouse snitch testified to getting a confession.

A few years later, a grand jury investigating the scandal reported there were between 150 and 250 criminal cases in which jailhouse informants had testified over the previous decade. But it's unclear how many of those cases were reopened because of the damning revelations about informants in L.A. jails.

The National Registry of Exonerations includes nine people in L.A. County whose ultimate finding of innocence was at least partially due to official misconduct and the use of a jailhouse informant.

But unlike Sanders' list of cases affected by misconduct in the O.C. snitch scandal, LAist could find no record of the total number of cases impacted by L.A.'s snitch scandal, including cases in which sentences were reduced or a new trial was ordered.

Why the apparent difference? Possley said a big reason is Sanders. In L.A., there was no similarly determined defense attorney working to identify and revisit cases that may have been tainted.

"Sanders has had to swim upstream the whole goddamn time," Possley said.

He said there has historically been resistance among criminal justice officials to make the kinds of misconduct connections that Sanders has among disparate cases. "Because they know that there's a problem and that starting to tug on that string might unravel a pretty big piece of fabric," he said.

Sanders himself credits the O.C. public defender's office for giving him and other colleagues the time and resources to investigate the extent, and effects, of misconduct.

"Our office has encouraged and allowed me and others to do this work now for nearly a decade," Sanders said. "We're going into the second decade here. … And even with that, it's going to be difficult for all of the cases to get addressed in the way they should."

Natapoff, the Harvard scholar who's an expert in snitching, said the O.C. scandal is "both a cautionary tale of what happens when we leave the informant market unregulated and also a sign to us that without public defender offices and attorneys willing to spend the resources to uncover these kinds of scandals, we are likely never to learn about them."

A new conversation about criminal justice

Natapoff says informants are just one aspect of a system that has turned criminal justice into a marketplace.

"The people who run the jails understand that this market is robust, that information can be obtained — fabricated or not, as it were — and prosecutors understand that there is a machinery for producing information in the jails, which comes with its own baggage," she said.

Incarcerated people — and most anyone who's spent time in custody — also understand "that if they can produce information about a cellmate or someone else in the jail, that a reward will be forthcoming," Natapoff added.

One of the reasons the public doesn't hear more about the misuse of jailhouse informants, she said, is because the vast majority of criminal cases — about nine in 10 — end in plea deals, not trials.

"In effect, the informant market is the sort of under-the-table, black market version of our general plea bargaining system, which says we negotiate all cases, we negotiate all guilt," Natapoff said. "We almost never litigate the facts anymore."

In a system that runs on deals, she said, “law enforcement is incentivized, even systemically encouraged, to engage in all kinds of deal-making with suspects and defendants who might be useful to them."

But as informant scandals have emerged over the years, an increasing number of jurisdictions have enacted reforms, which Natapoff chronicles on her website.

Plus, she said, the conversation around criminal justice has changed over the years.

"Twenty years ago, we did not have the so-called bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration is a terrible idea. Twenty years ago, we were not having a conversation about Black Lives Matter or debtors' prison or all the conversations that we now have about the unfairnesses and the dysfunctions of our criminal system," Natapoff said.

Innocence projects have increasingly sprung up to help people who were wrongly convicted challenge their fate. On the institutional side, many district attorneys' offices, including Orange County, have opened "conviction integrity units" to investigate claims of innocence.

But because of the decentralized nature of criminal justice in the U.S., reforms tend to be piecemeal, Natapoff said, and uncovering misconduct is often up to outsiders.

"The criminal system itself does not divulge these facts," Natapoff said, referring to the big informant scandals of recent decades. "It was advocates, it was the innocence movement, it was journalism starting to chip away at the culture of secrecy."

L.A.’s homeless services agency has not completed any internal audits in years — and one that was started two years ago is still incomplete because management is taking months to provide responses, officials said Monday.

The delayed audit has been looking into why the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, failed to spend $7 million in federal dollars it was granted to house and serve people in need. The roughly six-page audit report hasn’t been released because it’s missing LAHSA management responses that were requested over two months ago, officials said.

Internal audits are considered critically important to protecting taxpayer dollars at every level of government. L.A. County auditors, for example, issued about 100 reports in a recent fiscal year.

“ We haven’t gotten anything,” said Erum Shahnawaz, LAHSA’s chief internal auditor, referring to the lack of response from LAHSA management at a meeting of the agency’s audit committee on Monday.

“That’s the only thing that's holding us from issuing the final report,” Shahnawaz said of the underspending audit.

That audit is examining a repeat problem. A previous, external audit in January 2022 found LAHSA had left $3.5 million in federal grants on the table by not using them.

Shahnawaz flagged management’s delays to the LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa, Szlasa said. He chairs the commission’s audit committee, and has repeatedly called out LAHSA executives’ delays in providing information about taxpayer spending over the past year.

“ I've been trying to intervene and use whatever I can to try to help provide support,” said Szlasa as he described his attempts to get the auditor the answers needed to complete the report.

Szlasa was appointed to the commission by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

 “It shouldn't take us two months to receive a…management response to an internal audit,” Szlasa said at Monday’s meeting. He said the industry standard for internal audits is eight or nine weeks from start to finish. That compares to the two years — and counting — for LAHSA’s federal underspend audit.

“We haven't had a single internal audit completed here in the last couple of years, which is nuts,” Szlasa added. He called for internal audits to happen much more frequently.

Long delays to LAHSA audits also are not new. In November 2024, the county issued a widely-seen audit that included findings that LAHSA was failing to complete internal audits.

Half of LAHSA’s governing commission is appointed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and half appointed by each of the five county supervisors. Bass is also the only elected official on the commission. She served on the audit committee for several months last fall. Records show she was absent for all of the meetings during that time.

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said management’s responses to the audit on underspending haven’t been provided yet because LAHSA leadership did not have clearly defined roles for who is supposed to coordinate responses to internal audits.

“ We need to work on clarifying that role internally,” Lim said.

 “The last two months have been probably some of the most stress-filled two months that we've had at LAHSA,” said Paul Rubenstein, chief of staff to LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neil, pointing to mass layoffs.

Szlasa said there’s not that much in the audit for management to respond to.

“It's like, six pages or less,” he said.

Szlasa said  another option is to “just say we've asked management for responses and we're awaiting management response. We can publish the results.”

In response, Shahnawaz said that if management doesn't have an updated timeline for a response, then she’ll go ahead and issue the report without the response.

Once they floated that idea, Lim committed to providing the responses by next Tuesday.

LAHSA’s leadership has downsized the internal audit team — dropping from a staff of three to just one in the agency’s proposed budget up for approval Friday.

Delays in getting access to financial records

The delayed responses from management are not the only thing that’s been slowing down audits, Szlasa said at the meeting.

LAHSA policy, approved by its governing commission, says internal auditors are “ authorized to access all organizational records, personnel, and systems necessary for conducting audits,” he said.

But the auditor has faced challenges in actually getting that access, Szlasa said — including delays in being allowed to view LAHSA’s databases that show contracts and financial payments.

 ”We finally were granted access, but it wasn't, it wasn't easy, it wasn't immediate. It was slow,” Szlasa said.

Many failed outside audits

The delays on the internal audit come even after LAHSA failed multiple external audits in recent years, which have found the agency — overseen by city and county elected officials — has neglected to properly track billions of dollars in spending.

Largely in response to earlier audits, L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from LAHSA and are having the county instead oversee it directly. L.A.’s mayor and City Council have continued to have LAHSA manage the city’s homeless spending while the council delays plans to start studying a possible plan to transition away city tax dollars.

Signatures under scrutiny

LAHSA is also in the midst of a different internal audit — expected to finish in late August or early September — examining whether top officials followed requirements when signing contracts and letting others sign. It was launched in the wake of LAist reporting that found LAHSA’s then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum’s signature finalized a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer.

LAist also discovered Adams Kellum’s signature, as LAHSA’s CEO at the time, finalized a quarter-million-dollar contract between LAHSA and a longtime service provider she led up until two months earlier.

That contract was signed so soon after she left the service provider — St. Joseph Center — that the contract paperwork still listed her as one of St. Joseph Center’s points of contact and authorized signers.

She is currently under a state ethics investigation into whether her actions were an illegal conflict of interest.

When Bengara opened in Los Angeles' Arts District earlier this year, its owner and head chef had something special lined up in their kitchen arsenal.

It was genshiyaki, a rare traditional Japanese grilling method that dates back 1,500 years.

Chef and co-owner Tyler Burges had only encountered it once while traveling in Japan at a robatayaki spot in Fukuoka, a port city on the island of Kyushu.

Robatayaki, a style of slow, ember-cooked grilling rooted in Japan's rural coastal kitchens, usually centers on an open charcoal hearth. But the restaurant Burges visited had something even more noteworthy: a genshiyaki pit, a gentler, ambient method of cooking that uses radiant heat instead of direct flame.

Loving the unusually subtle, delicate flavor and texture it produced, he and head chef Phil Mireles decided to bring genshiyaki back to the U.S. and build their Arts District restaurant around it. The genshiyaki pit is a rare enough technique that Burges had to work with fabricator Phil Roxworthy for six months just to get the grill built to spec.

It's Burges' and Mireles' first L.A. project. The pair are also behind Smoke Door, their acclaimed Lake Tahoe restaurant, and Bengara brings a more casual, day-to-day take on the same fire-driven cooking.

All roads lead to the Arts District

Chef/owner Tyler Burges (left) and head chef Phil Mireles at Bengara.

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Wonho Frank Lee

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Burges and Mireles both got their start at San Francisco's Saison and Angler under chef Joshua Skenes — who's now just down the street in L.A. at LYNX with fellow alum Brandyn Tepper.

Burges traces Bengara's DNA back to two mentors: Ron Siegel, who introduced him to Japanese ingredients and technique in his mid-20s, and Skenes, who taught him to cook with live fire. It was Skenes, Burges said, who showed him that fire didn't have to mean char and bravado.

"The one thing I loved about wood-fire cooking is you get this subtle, sweet barbecue flavor when you cook correctly over embers, and you don't cook directly over the fire," Burges said. "Most places, when you think about grilling something, you think of char, bold flavors, masculine flavors. But Chef Josh — it's like a master art, getting really delicate, subtle flavor using that grill method."

The uni kiritampo, Bengara's take on a traditional Akita-prefecture rice skewer, finished with scallion.

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What sets the food apart

Take their luscious miso cod. On a normal grill, the marinade's sugars would blacken before the fish cooked through. On the genshiyaki pit, the cod sits at a distance from the embers, cooking gently until the very end, when it's given one last pass directly over the coals — what Burges describes as a final "kiss" of heat before it hits the plate.

To fuel genshiyaki's slower, ambient style, ordinary charcoal or wood is replaced with binchotan, an ultra-dense, pure-carbon hardwood charcoal traditionally made in Japan, which burns hotter and cleaner.

The signature dish

A perfect example of how this cooking style comes together is the uni kiritampo, the Akita prefecture rice skewer, reimagined with uni and cooked via genshiyaki — born of an offhand kitchen conversation with one of the restaurant's Japanese chefs about regional dishes cooked over fire.

Once they realized genshiyaki was the dish's original, historic cooking method, the rest fell into place.

"It's like the most delicious thing," Burges said. "I don't know why it never made it over to the United States earlier."

Bengara's Arts District dining room pairs industrial bones with warm, low lighting and long communal tables.

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The chewy exterior, with just a hint of smoke, gives way to a creamy inside, like a caramelized custard, that’s topped with a decadent amount of uni, providing a semi-sweet finish — one memorable bite.

Tasting menu option

Bengara recently added a daily eight-course tasting menu ($98) that doubles as a greatest-hits tour of the kitchen — Toyosu carpaccio with chili coffee oil, pork belly "tacos" wrapped in mochi crepes, miso cod, Mary's half chicken, and handmade citrus soba, with optional wagyu and uni add-ons.

The price includes a beverage pairing, with a full non-alcoholic option alongside the boozy version. Walk-ins are welcome, and reservations can be booked via OpenTable.

Topline:

Why it matters: Museum officials said you will “likely experience high demand and long wait times in the queue" and thanked people for their patience.

LAist saw estimated wait times up to 6 hours, and it took a little more than 4.5 hours for this reporter to get through. On the bright side, there were still plenty of tickets left, including for the first day. Do not refresh the page or you may lose your spot.

The details: All tickets are timed entry. Tickets are $25 for adults and $21 for those 65 and older. Children, members, active-duty military, personal aides or attendants and EBT cardholders have free entry. Museum neighbors in the LM37 program will also be free, with that pass opening in August.

But how do I buy: Each person is limited to nine tickets, and you’ll have 20 minutes to check out once they’re added to your cart, according to the museum. You can find the link here.

What's next: The grand opening is Sept. 22.

Go deeper: How to secure Lucas Museum of Narrative Art tickets ahead of the fall opening

Inglewood officials are working on a full rewrite of the city map for the first time in nearly 40 years, laying out how they want the city to grow and change for the next two decades.

Along part of Manchester Boulevard, city planners are setting up an option for developers to rebuild rows of small storefronts with a mix of homes and commercial space. On La Brea Avenue, south of Centinela Avenue, they envision the possibility of dense housing and business blocks as high as six stories.

Jerome Johnson, an Inglewood local, said he’s lived through three decades of change in the city. He recalled watching a “raggedy market” at the corner of La Brea and Centinela make way for the two-story shopping center that’s there today. He said the potential developments around the intersection could be a catch-22.

“There’s a shortage of housing,” Johnson said. “But you don’t want it to turn into New York City.”

It’s all part of the ongoing process for Inglewood’s new general plan, the foundational guide that governs things like what kind of buildings can be built where in the city and how they need to look. A draft land-use plan will go before the Inglewood City Council on Tuesday, then go into the environmental impact review process.

“This is really a historic milestone for the city,” Bernard McCrumby, Inglewood development services director, told The LA Local. 

McCrumby said planners are aiming to open up room for new housing and to revitalize some of the city’s flagging business corridors, without changing the city’s existing residential blocks or sacrificing the grocery stores, barbershops and local restaurants that make neighborhoods tick.

“The stadiums and arenas are here, they’re not going anywhere,” McCrumby said. “Now we can plan around those.”

The last time the city did a full update of its general plan was 1987, when horses were still racing at Hollywood Park and the “Showtime” Lakers were winning championships at the Forum. Edward Vincent Jr., the city’s first Black mayor, had only been in office for four years. 

The city has made intermittent updates to its planning guidelines since then — notably remapping a band of Inglewood along the Metro K line before it opened — but city documents indicate planners spent the past couple years working on a comprehensive rewrite. 

The new update to the general plan could set the city’s direction until 2050.

Planners hope to change some of the city’s commercial corridors into mixed-use zones that allow for housing and businesses alongside each other or even stacked on top of each other.

Those zones could go in place along Century Boulevard and Arbor Vitae Street as well as Manchester, Centinela and La Brea.

The rest of the update, McCrumby said, is aimed at lining the city’s zoning regulations up with state law and the city’s current reality on the ground.

City staff held several community meetings over the last year as they put together the draft and still aren’t done gathering feedback. 

The next year will see at least one more community meeting and a 45-day public review period, according to city documents. McCrumby said that, with the anchor of the land-use map in place, planners will continue to work on the rest of the general plan, targeting final City Council approval of the plan and accompanying environmental impact report next spring.

You can get all the details on the general plan at nextlevelinglewood.com and attend the City Council meeting at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to give a public comment.

We also want to know what you think of the proposed changes. Email isaiah@thelalocal.org with your questions or thoughts.