U.S. appeals court stops work on modular shelters on the VA’s West L.A. campus

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an emergency stay stopping work on the installation of more than 100 units of modular housing on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles campus.

The stay blocks purchase of the modular units and prohibits a development team assembled by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter from accessing three parking lots on the 388-acre campus to begin the site preparation.

After a four-week trial in August, Carter ordered the VA to produce 1,800 new supportive housing units on the campus and 750 temporary housing units. His ruling also invalidated leases of VA property, including to UCLA and Brentwood School, and ordered the VA to increase its outreach staff. He subsequently backed off that number of temporary units, while issuing an emergency order to immediately build up to 200, including 32 on the parking lot of UCLA’s Jackie Robinson baseball stadium.

The order suspended the VA’s extensive procurement requirements and ordered the agency to pick up the bill. Plaintiffs’ expert witnesses Steve Soboroff and Randy Johnson, the developers of Playa Vista, worked with VA officials to select a modular vendor, and a purchase agreement for the first units was set to be closed Tuesday.

The VA appealed the order to the 9th Circuit in October and requested a stay, writing that “the district court’s sprawling injunction upends VA’s carefully considered judgment about how to pursue” its goal to “fulfill President Lincoln’s promise to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors.”

“No one is more committed than the VA to addressing the needs of veterans with disabilities,” the motion for a stay said. But, the district court “went awry in attempting to impose its own judgment about how to address those concerns.”

In its ruling Friday, the appeals court separated Carter’s emergency order to build the modular units from the appeal of his entire judgment allowing it to be decided on an emergency basis, said Mark Rosenbaum, attorney for the veterans. First, Carter will consider the VA’s motion for a stay in a hearing he previously scheduled for Wednesday.

Assuming he denies the stay, the order would go back to the appeals court for an expedited hearing while it conducts what could be a lengthy review of the remainder of the judgment, Rosenbaum said.

Whatever the outcome of that review, the work stoppage will be a setback for Carter’s goal to have more than 100 units occupied by early next year, Soboroff said.

Working to meet that goal, Soboroff and Johnson had brought in the global architecture firm Gensler to design modular projects at several sites on the campus and the engineering and environmental firm Psomas to assess the sites.

“There were four crews out there doing surveys, site analysis, for safety, for soils compaction, for environmental issues, utilities issues,” Soboroff said. “They did this with days notice. They had other stuff to do and they dropped other things. They started because of the emergency order and they believed in the veterans, wanted to get them off the street into these units.”

Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who acts as a spokesman for the plaintiff veterans, said they are upset but not discouraged.

“We’re not giving up hope,” Reynolds said. “We’ve had setbacks before. We’re going to keep fighting and pushing forward no matter what.”