Current News

BHA Hosts First Candidate Forum for CD11 With All Seven Candidates

Thank you to the 350 friends and members who signed in and showed up to our annual meeting. The night featured the first CD11 candidate forum with all seven candidates who qualified for the ballot. Moderated by Josh Haskell of ABC7 Eyewitness News, the candidates offered their views and opinions on congestion pricing, crime and public safety, development in high fire zones, and homelessness. If you missed it, you can watch the video HERE. More information about the candidates can be found HERE.

Read Our Newsletter

All members should have received our newsletter in the mail by now. You can read it here.

Mount Saint Mary's Wellness Pavilion Project

We believe Mount Saint Mary’s University (MSMU) students deserve a better gym for their use.  We also believe that MSMU can build a new gym for the use of the students, faculty and staff of the University’s Chalon Campus that also affords reasonable fire safety and traffic protections for the surrounding residential community.

However, in approving the Project, the City Planning Commission stated that the residents should bear the burden of MSMU’s increased operations from the Wellness Pavilion. That is why BHA submitted a letter appealing the Commission’s decision, which put Mount Saint Mary’s interests above the safety and interests of BHA’s members (read our letter).

Final approval of the project will now come before City Council where Councilmember Mike Bonin can hold MSMU to the same standard as Archer School and Brentwood School.  These are the facts we ask him to consider:

• Councilmember Mike Bonin required all other schools on Sunset Blvd seeking expansion of facilities to significantly reduce vehicle trips below the trip numbers existing at the time—NOT six years earlier.
• Councilmember Mike Bonin supported conditions for other schools in CD-11 that included caps on enrollment, reduction in daily vehicle trips from current levels, limits on outside use of school facilities, and limits on programming during evenings, weekends and summer months.
• BHA knows of no school or university in the City existing in a residential zone that does not have an enrollment cap (including Archer School for Girls and Brentwood School in Brentwood and comparable schools such as Loyola Marymount University and Pepperdine University).

Please email, write, or call Councilmember Bonin and ask him to impose the following conditions to balance the safety and legitimate interests of his constituents with the needs of the University:

1. Enrollment cap of 1,072;
2. Average daily vehicle trip cap of 1,600;
3. Construction time period limited to 20 months;
4. Use of Wellness Pavilion limited to the purpose stated by the school -- only for Chalon Campus students, faculty and staff—NOT outside guests;
5. No summer camp program or any other programming in the summer months:
6. No smoking, including electronic devices, in any school facility or building or on any school grounds and property.