As in Washington these days, we had entered a realm of alternative facts, the transplanted L.A. version of the claim that the Trump Inauguration was greater in size than Obama’s.

The results of the audit were worse than [the author] initially suspected. On a flimsy pretext, LACMA deceptively counted, for example, half of the entire outdoor space under the belly of the elevated structure, all unfenced and unprotected for sculpture, as part of the building’s square footage, inflating the total by 69,000 square feet. In addition, the audit of the new schematic drawing in the EIR revealed that the interior square footage lost to the Zumthor design is actually 143,500 square feet, not the 105,308 to which the EIR in its latest revision admitted. The museum also failed to report that the linear footage of wall space in the proposed museum was 7,500 linear feet shorter than that in the existing museum buildings — about one and a half miles shorter. That meant roughly 1,500 works couldn’t be hung. There were many other serious discrepancies discovered during the course of my audit and interviews. Despite some corrections, not all actually correct, the EIR still conveyed false, flawed, and seriously misleading information. The County Board of Supervisors is now scheduled to vote on April 9 to approve funds based on a deceptive document without having seen a fully documented project or accurate square footage numbers.

Joseph Giovannini/LA Review of Books lareviewofbooks.org

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