Mayor Karen Bass moved on Friday to stop the owners of the burned Lineage cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights from rebuilding it, at least for now. Her executive order tells the Department of City Planning and the Department of Building and Safety to hold any repair or reconstruction permits for the site at 1400 S. Los Palos St. while the city investigates what happened there and what, if anything, should be allowed to stand in its place.
The order came after the company filed plans to rebuild while the cleanup from the fire was still unfinished. "Lineage had the audacity to submit plans to rebuild their warehouse," Bass said, according to NBC Los Angeles. "In my opinion, they shouldn't even think about rebuilding until they've cleaned up the mess they've created." Asked about the company's future in the neighborhood, she added that it would be "very hard for me to imagine the day we would welcome Lineage back."
What the order actually does
The order does not revoke anything or condemn the property. It freezes the permit pipeline and directs the two departments to report back on the site, on what uses might be appropriate there, and on whether future proposals should go through a discretionary review, meaning a public, case-by-case approval rather than an over-the-counter permit.
It also asks the City Council to act. Councilmember Ysabel Jurado plans to introduce an interim ordinance next week that would impose a moratorium on large cold storage facilities close to residential zones and other sensitive sites, LAist reported. A moratorium of that kind would reach beyond this one company and this one block, which is why the coming Council debate matters more than Friday's signature.
The fire and the cleanup
The warehouse caught fire on June 17 with roughly 85 million pounds of food inside, most of it meat and seafood, NBC Los Angeles reported. It was the second fire at the property in two years. What followed has been less a fire story than a decomposition story: residents of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles have spent weeks describing smells and pests spreading from the site into surrounding blocks.
Bass issued an earlier executive order on June 29 setting a 45-day deadline to clear the spoiled food, as CBS Los Angeles reported. That clock runs out on August 14. As of last Friday, Lineage's own public tracker put the removal at 63.4 percent complete, according to LAist.
The county has been escalating in parallel. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has issued six citations since July 23 and raised penalties to as much as $2,000 a day, NBC Los Angeles reported.
Schools reopen before the deadline
The timing that worries parents most is the school calendar. Los Angeles Unified plans to reopen campuses near the site on August 12, two days before the city's cleanup deadline, and has said students may be kept indoors if the odor and pest problems have not cleared by then, LAist reported.
What Lineage says
Lineage has rejected the city's account of its performance. "We strongly disagree with the characterization of Lineage's cleanup efforts and transparency," the company said in a statement to LAist, adding that crews are working around the clock and reporting daily to city officials and regulators.
Bass, for her part, framed the rebuild application as an insult to the neighborhood rather than a routine filing. The commitments the company has made, she said, are "commitments they failed to meet, I should say, are too many to count," according to CBS Los Angeles.
For now, nothing gets built. The next real decisions belong to the City Council, which will take up Jurado's moratorium, and to the planning departments, whose report will shape whether a cold storage warehouse of that size can ever return to a block hemmed in by houses and schools.
