Photo by Chuck Larsen Photography
By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief
During its most recent board meeting on Thursday, June 13, Pacific Palisades Community Council hosted a presentation by City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering regarding the Pacific Palisades Pedestrian Trail—formerly known as the Lateral Trail.
When complete, the trail will extend from the bottom of George Wolfberg Park at Potrero Canyon along Pacific Coast Highway to the Temescal Canyon Road crosswalk light, “in order to provide safe passage from the park to the beach,” according to PPCC.
Project Manager Kristen Ly spoke during the June 13 meeting, answering a series of questions posed by PPCC—including regarding the timeline Bureau of Engineering has in mind, the projected cost and expected outreach process—as well as from meeting attendees.
“This trail … is currently required as part of the Coastal Commission permit for the park and is expected to be constructed in order to provide parkgoers with beach access,” Ly explained.
The trail was given $1.15 million in federal funding, Ly reported, thanks to the efforts of the office of Council District 11 and then-Congressmember for Pacific Palisades Ted Lieu.
“A couple of notes about this federal funding: I do want to make it clear that it requires quite a bit of paperwork,” Ly said. “We have to go through the state in order to access that, and even then, it’s not like they just deposit that money into an account that we are free to use. There are a lot of requirements that go with it.”
A previous “rough layout” of the trail created in 2016 is “no longer feasible,” Ly explained, as it was based on information from 2012. Later in the meeting, a question was posed to Ly about what changed in the area from 2012 to present day that makes the previous design unusable.
Ly explained it was a combination of erosion and construction activities in the area, including the construction of the park itself. The consultants will take into account creating a design that is “usable” and “relatively maintenance free” that will not “erode away,” according to Ly.
At the time of the June 13 meeting, Bureau of Engineering had secured funding to hire Geosyntec—“the consultant company that will undertake the predesign and community outreach phase of the project.”
“They will be getting a new survey and they will be establishing a preliminary layout,” Ly said. The report is “not necessarily the final decision,” that will come during the design phase, which will be “through a different consultant later down the road.”
According to Ly, the community can expect a meeting, as well as the start of the outreach process, in late summer or early fall. The overall project will take a “significant amount of time,” Ly explained, “as in years kind of time.”
“The project still requires an agreement between LA City and Caltrans, which owns the land where the path will be laid,” PPCC wrote. “This process has been long unfolding, and once a preliminary layout is established, the city will begin talks with Caltrans in earnest.”
Ly said she wanted to make it clear it is “really hard” for Bureau of Engineering to “come up with a definite timeline and the cost estimate until” the report is done.
George Wolfberg Park at Potrero Canyon is a 46-acre passive park that spans from Palisades Recreation Center to Pacific Coast Highway. It opened, after decades of planning and construction, on December 10, 2022.
The Pacific Palisades Pedestrian Trail project is separate from the Potrero Canyon Pedestrian/Bicycle Bridge project, which is currently in its public outreach phase and would develop a bridge that connects Will Rogers State Beach to the park.
“We are aware of each other, we’re all sharing the same space,” Ly described. “So the [project manager] for the bridge project and myself are working pretty closely to make sure that we’re working together on this.”
For more information, including a link to a video of Ly’s presentation, visit pacpalicc.org.
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