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My thoughts
The following is my comments at the meeting, notwithstanding a bit of on-the-spot editing....
Good evening Mayor, Mayor Pro-Tem and council members. I do not envy you your position. You have a very difficult decision in front of you.
I have very mixed feelings about the issue, myself. As someone who works in the environmental field, and on code-related matters, I find its recent track record of violations in both areas disturbing, not to mention the odor issue. But on the other hand, CAL Poultry is a thriving, locally grown business - not exactly common these days, unfortunately - that serves many Rosemead residents and people from surrounding communities, and contributes to our sales tax base.
Even so, the problems with the site need to be addressed. But sometimes the way you do something is as important as what you do. Looking at the near future, going down this road will make a certain number of your constituents happy, and could well resolve the immediate issues, but it will also make many other constituents unhappy, and could expose the City to an expensive lawsuit that it may not win. In looking at the long term, however, I believe you need to think very carefully about what kind of message you would be sending with this action.
As we all know, Rosemead has not had much success attracting commercial development over the past couple of decades, both in general and compared to neighboring communities with similar demographics. For whatever reason, developers and major chains were largely passing us by. But the new General Plan (GP) and mixed-use design guidelines developed in 2007 and 2008 sent a very clear message to developers and prospective businesses that things were different. However, that GP is on the verge of having its centerpiece gutted and most of its zoning reverted to way it was in the old GP in something of a bait-and-switch. And now the City may be about to aggressively act to shut down a locally grown, successful business. From progressive to regressive, to shutting down businesses. What are these actions going to communicate to businesses and developers of all kinds who were considering coming into the city?
Rather than this approach, I suggest that you consider a jointly-developed pathway to compliance - with benchmarks - that will allow and require the business to make necessary modifications to eliminate the issues…and with a failure to attain those benchmarks acting as a trigger to amortization.
In closing, I would also like to suggest that in the future, to forestall sticky problems such as the one we’re faced with tonight, you may want to consider directing staff to develop some type of “amortization ordinance” that would require all legal noncompliant non-residential uses to comply over time with certain code standards or face amortization.