CSD stands for Community Standards District, and is a zoning overlay for a particular area or region that legislates what can or cannot be built or how how a business can or cannot be run in that given area. In the context of the PXP Oil Environmental Impact Report, the CSD says how the oil company that leases the Baldwin Hills Oil Fields can and cannot extract oil from the ground, what they must do to be in compliance with laws, etc.
A way to think about the CSD vs. the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) is to use the analogy of building a large building, e.g. the Entrada office towers, Playa Vista, etc.: the applicant (the builder, or in our case PXP Oil), submits a project for consideration. The project is the CSD: it says what they’re going to drill, where they’re going to build, etc. Then comes the EIR, which looks at the CSD and figures out what kind of damage the project will create. It then recommends mitigation measures that will defend against the potential environmental damage. The planning commission then takes the data in the EIR and hopefully rewraps it into the CSD, upgrading the CSD so that the mitigation measures are built into the legislation. Repeat once or twice, and ultimately it goes in front of the County Board of Supervisors, of whom there are five individuals each covering a portion of Los Angeles. In our case, the Baldwin Hills Oil Fields fall under the territory of outgoing Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke(thus our interest in who is going to be her successor).
The Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning CSD for Baldwin Hills
Culver Crest Neighborhood Association 