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Like a Good Neighbor...
There's a saying "you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family". I would propose amending that saying to "you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family or neighbors".
We all have neighbors. Some we are happy to have and some not so much. For many years, my wife and I had a next door neighbor who we really got along with. Then one day, he had to move and sold his house. My wife and I waited with apprehension to see who our new neighbors would be. Would they be nice? Would they cause problems? Luckily for us, the new neighbors were a nice, young family who we get along with as well as we did with our former neighbor.
Unfortunately, not all neighbors are as nice or considerate. We have all experienced or heard of the neighbor from hell. The ones who loudly blare their music or hold loud parties until 4 a.m. The ones who leave their yard unkempt. The ones who hold screaming and fighting matches at all hours of the night. The ones who decide that purple and orange are a good exterior color combination.
You know the ones I'm talking about. These are the bad neighbors. And, as much as good neighbors can make your life a delight, bad neighbors can make it a living nightmare. TERA is currently dealing with two issues that illustrate this dichotomy.
On the one hand, TERA believes that Eagle Rock can be a good neighbor by giving small businesses a better chance of succeeding and by making it less risky for newer businesses to come to our community. This can be accomplished by the City making a narrow modification to the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan, which would remove the restriction that prohibits newer businesses from operating before 7 a.m., or after 9 p.m. TERA supports this modification and, as you will read later, progress is being made toward making such a change.
On the other hand, we have an issues where Eagle Rock is dealing with a bad neighbor. For over 50 years, there has been a landfill in the front yard of Eagle Rock - the Scholl Canyon Landfill - operated by our neighbor, the City of Glendale. During that time, we've tolerated the noise, dust, pollution, and road wear caused by our neighboring city, even though Eagle Rockers have been banned from using it for nearly two decades. We patiently tolerated this with the belief that eventually the dump would close. Currently, it is slated to close in the year 2021. But, Glendale, thoughtlessly and arrogantly is trying to expand the landfill and extend its life by as long as two decades.
As you will read below, TERA has and will continue to oppose this expansion. And, hopefully, Glendale will do the neighborly thing and come to their senses. Because, to borrow from JFK, while geography has made us neighbors, it remains to be seen whether we can be friends.
Please Renew Your Membership There are still a number you who have not renewed your TERA membership. Your membership helps us to continue to work towards the improvement of the quality of life here in Eagle Rock. Please, take a moment right now to click on this link and renew your membership. If you are not a TERA member, now is the time to join us. A family membership only costs $35 and you can pay for it online using a credit card through PayPal. If you are more comfortable doing thing offline, we can send you a membership packet. For a membership packet (renewal or a new membership), please send an email to Marina Rimer, our membership coordinator at membership@tera90041.org. ________________________________________  Greg Merideth, President 
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Membership Has Benefits! Discounts are available for TERA Members at participating merchants (see list below.) Look for the TERA Membership Decals at merchant locations. Just show your active membership card. Click on http://www.tera90041.org to see the member benefits offered by each merchant. If you are a merchant and would like to participate in this program, which includes free advertising in the e.letter, please email us at president@tera90041.org. 
Support TERA - Become a Member: Join now at http://www.tera90041.org. Memberships begin at only $15.
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Take Back the Boulevard Update
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Eagle Rock City Hall
Work continues on the restoration of Eagle Rock City Hall. You may have already noticed that the front doors have been rebuilt and replaced. And now the exterior is bathed in brighter lighting and uplit from ground level. This is in addition to all of the interior work that has been completed.
Exterior work is still proceeding. The landscape has been removed and will be replaced with xeriscape and shrubbery or trees will be added to the eastern edge of the lot. It is expected that the landscaping will be completed in November and shortly thereafter there will be a grand re-opening ceremony. Stay tuned.
   272 Trees On September 6th, a ceremony was held at Eagle Rock City Hall celebrating Eagle Rock's largest street tree planting in 50 years. In all, 272 trees were planted in Eagle Rock and Highland Park. The Bureau of Sanitation secured grant funding to acquire 200 of the trees and create sidewalk tree wells in which to plant them. The other 72 trees were funded by individual donors. The Bureau of Street Services was responsible for planting the trees. The majority of the trees were planted in Eagle Rock.
The trees were planted along Colorado and Eagle Boulevards in Eagle Rock and along Figueroa Street and York Boulevard in Highland Park. Community organizations such as TERA, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council, Take Back the Boulevard Initiative, Collaborative Eagle Rock Beautiful, Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, North East Trees and TreePeople partnered with the Council Office and Northeast Trees to ensure that the fledgling trees are watered and maintained for the next two years to allow them to become established. We look forward to enjoying these street trees for years to come.Utility Box Art Project  TERA, the Council Office, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), and The Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council are partnering in an interesting art project for Eagle Rock. A call has gone out for artists to create murals on LADOT utility boxes. Seventeen artists will be chosen and each artist will decorate on of 17 utility boxes. The utility boxes will line Colorado Boulevard between Figueroa Street and the Glendale border as well as Eagle Boulevard between Colorado and York Boulevards. The deadline for artists submissions was September 15th. Once the artists are chosen then work will begin, so be on the lookout for new artwork in the near future.
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Scholl Canyon Landfill Expansion Opposition
 Our opposition to the expansion of Scholl Canyon Landfill continues. As we noted in the last e.letter, on August 20th, TERA conducted a joint press conference with the Council Office and other community leadership including Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Eagle Rock Valley Historical Society, the Women's Twentieth Century Club, and The East Area Progressive Democrats. At the press conference, Councilman José Huizar, TERA and the other community leaders each spoke out in opposition to any expansion of Scholl Canyon.
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Local residents joined Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar, speaking, in protest of the proposed city of Glendale expansion of the Scholl Canyon Landfill. (Raul Roa / Glendale News-Press)
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The press conference generated a great deal of, well, press. It was covered by
television, print, and radio media. The press conference generated enough notice that the Glendale News-Press felt it necessary to run an editorial which essentially accused Councilman Huizar of grandstanding and causing Eagle Rockers to be "unnecessarily worked up into a frenzy...". The editorial went on to paint the expansion plan and the draft environmental impact report as merely preparedness measures, stating that Glendale has no current plans in place to begin work on the expansion.
TERA, along with other community organizations, found this response to be disingenuous and took exception to its characterization of our opposition. Consequently, we jointly drafted and sent a response to the News-Press's editorial. The response read:
Letter: Editorial's stance was disingenuous
In the editorial "Politics may have polluted landfill issue" (Aug. 23), the Glendale News-Press belittles Eagle Rock residents opposing the massive expansion of Scholl Canyon Landfill, by naming them political pawns. This is irresponsible journalism and amateurish propaganda. Eagle Rockers are not worried that our "streets will be worn thin." We worry that our children will die earlier because of pollution from the 700 tons of Glendale-purchased trash that rumbles in diesel trucks near our homes, schools and largest park daily, and concerned about our property values plummeting when a stinking mountain of garbage is erected on our verdant skyline by greedy Glendale politicians.
We were not "worked up into a frenzy" by José Huizar or his staff. With community input, Huizar's stance has evolved to reflect Eagle Rock's absolute opposition to any expansion. The anti-Scholl Canyon press conference was arranged by our coalition of grass-roots groups, and Huizar was invited as a guest.
A single phone call from the News-Press would have confirmed this fact. But instead, the editors invented a political controversy to cloak their pro-dump stance. To insist that "there are no current plans in place to begin work on the expansion" is to parrot word-for-word the city of Glendale's shameful lie that there's nothing to see here. The greed of Glendale politicians who covet the millions of dollars in annual revenue produced by Scholl Canyon, and their fear of losing that easy money when Scholl closes, is what's driving the expansion effort. To dismiss the concerns of Glendale's neighbors in the environmental impact report, and now in Glendale's newspaper of record, is craven politics at its worst.
David Greene President Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council
Greg Merideth President The Eagle Rock Assn.
Eric Warren President Eagle Rock Valley Historical Society
On August 29th, the initial comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) closed. Prior to the deadline TERA submitted a very comprehensive response compiled by board members Michelle Espinosa Coulter and Luis Lopez. The document, which can be read on TERA's website, contains point-by-point responses to many of the elements contained in the DEIR. It also contained the hundreds of petition signatures that TERA was able to collect in opposition to the expansion.
The ball now falls in the City of Glendale's court. Glendale, along with the Sanitation District of the County of Los Angeles, will likely begin to draft a final environmental impact report, including responses to the comments received during the DEIR public review period. Once that final EIR is completed, Glendale will move to consider and approve it.
This means our work is not done. Glendale will be required to hold public meetings before they can adopt the final EIR. There will still be opportunities for us to make our voices heard. TERA will be monitoring the public meeting calendars for the City of Glendale and will notify you when something is scheduled. Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan  At their September 2nd meeting, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council heard an agenda item regarding potentially amending the operating hours restrictions contained in the Colorado Boulevard Specific Plan. During the hearing, Kevin Ocubillo, representing the Council Office, detailed the issues related to the hours restrictions and how amending or eliminating the restrictions might impact the community. In addition, I appeared on behalf of TERA and voiced our support for elimination of the hours. I think that the major takeaways from the testimony were that 1) the hours restrictions make it harder for more recently established businesses to survive and present a barrier to new businesses coming into the community; 2) no other specific plan in the City contains these types of restrictions; and 3) business hours can still be regulated within the entitlement process, such as the conditions imposed on a conditional use permit. At the close of the hearing, the ERNC voted overwhelming to recommend the elimination of the hours of operation restriction. The ERNC subsequently sent the following board resolution to Councilman Huizar's office: 
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Sunday, October 5 from noon to 5 p.m.
For its ninth tour, the Garfield Heights Neighborhood Association (GHNA) celebrates the 15th anniversary of its landmark district designation with a special home tour featuring five extraordinary residences.
Scheduled for Sunday, October 5 from Noon to 5 p.m., the tour will capture the diversity of Garfield Heights' residential architecture. Pasadena's leading architects designed homes in the District, which reflects a variety of home sizes and types including Arts and Crafts, Period Revival, Queen Anne, Italianate, and Transitional styles.
All proceeds from the Home Tour support neighborhood improvement projects. Advance tickets are $20; day of event tickets are $25. Children's tickets (age 10 and under) are free. Tickets may be purchased before September 20 by mail to GHNA, P. O. Box 90322 , Pasadena, CA 91109, or by Pay Pal through the GHNA website, www.garfieldheights.org. Tickets will be held at Will Call at the ticket house, 1207 N. Marengo Ave., starting at 11:45 a.m. the day of the tour.
Garfield Heights is located one mile north of the I-210 (Foothill) Freeway, north of Mountain Street between Los Robles and Marengo Avenues. The neighborhood traces its history to 1881, when two Iowa farmers purchased raw acreage in what is now Garfield Heights. The neighborhood began to take shape by 1893, and the district joined Pasadena in 1904. Many of the area's homes, built between 1890 and 1920, exude the sense of grace that permeates the district today.
For more information, call 626-345-9796 or e-mail ghnaboard@garfieldheights.org. Full details are available for viewing at www.garfieldheights.org.
Eagle Rock Homecoming and Sports Hall of Fame
October 10, 4 p.m.
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Shop Eagle Rock Merchants
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Milkfarm Artisan Cheese Shop
2106 W. Colorado Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90041
(323) 892-1068
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