By Jonathan Friedman
Lookout Staff

July 9, 2010 --The six-year process to create the guidelines for Santa Monica’s next two decades of development came to an end Tuesday with the City Council’s unanimous approval of the General Plan’s Land Use & Circulation Element (LUCE). Although no council member endorsed every element of the document, all the City leaders praised the LUCE as an overall appropriate piece.

“We haven’t all gotten exactly what we wanted, but overall it is a document that will serve us well,” Mayor Pro Tem Pam O’Connor said.

She praised the features of the LUCE that call for monitoring and the reporting of progress toward its goals. O’Connor also talked about its promotion of sustainability, and said Santa Monica is “ahead of the curve” for creating a General Plan document with this theme.

The LUCE sets the vision for the City with regards to development and traffic. This version is an update to the 1984 document, which is blamed by many people for causing too much commercial development in Santa Monica. The LUCE takes development out of the existing neighborhoods and encourages it along the city’s boulevards as well as on the east end of Santa Monica. It promises to curb vehicle trips through the encouragement of mixed-use developments and other measures.

Specific development rules will be updated as part of the zoning code revision, a process that will begin in the fall. The City also will create specific plans for various areas of Santa Monica, including the Downtown.

Council member Kevin McKeown said the LUCE “represents more consensus than it does compromise.” But he said he was still “deeply disturbed” by some features. Among them was his belief Santa Monica will be “producing too much commercial and not enough housing.” Also, he did not care for the maximum buildings heights. The City Council accepted most of the Planning Commission recommendations of slight increases over what City staff had recommended.

O’Connor said the increased heights will make for “better designs,” including “a little more livability” for low-income housing with higher ceilings and more engaging storefronts that allow for a “better pedestrian experience.”

One issue that had been controversial was the ratio of housing versus commercial in two LUCE districts that are currently nearly entirely commercial. The council majority had earlier called for the Bergamot Transit Village, which surrounds the future Expo light rail station, to be 60 percent commercial and 40 percent residential. The Mixed Use Creative District, located between the Bergamot district and the city's eastern border, would be 50 percent commercial and 50 percent residential, with the flexibility to go up to five percentage points in either direction for both kinds of development.

But there was confusion on whether these ratios were per-project, for the districts as a whole or for future development in the districts. After some discussion, the council members concluded this should apply to future development. City Attorney Marsha Moutrie stressed these ratios are targets. City staff will report to the council every two years on the progress of meeting these targets.

Also at the meeting, the council again took on the issue of the Village Trailer Park, which is included in the Mixed Use Creative District and slated for closure to make room for a mixed-use development. The council unanimously endorsed a carefully worded statement that the City will “explore means” to sustain the neighborhood.

At two previous meetings, McKeown had attempted to get the council to endorse a measure that would remove the trailer park from the mixed-use district as a method to protect it from closure. He was not able to get a majority to support him. Citing legal advice on which they would not get into specifics, several council members said they feared doing this would lead to quick evictions without the benefit of friendly relocation assistance that the trailer park owner is currently promising.

Last week the council added a statement into the LUCE that acknowledged “the historic burden on the Pico Neighborhood of community and regional infrastructure” and that City officials would “evaluate future development changes in terms of environmental justice and cumulative impact.”

Pico Neighborhood activists had called for this to be included in the document.  (See Pico Neighborhood Activists Call for Environmental Justice, June 29, 2010.)

The LUCE nearly did not receive unanimous approval. Mayor Bobby Shriver said he was angry about the financial analysis regarding community benefits that are required for development agreements when a project applicant wants to go beyond what zoning rules allow. He blasted the consultant for submitting a document in “shoddy shape” only two hours before the meeting.

“Since this analysis underpins one of the great pillars of the LUCE, I find it extremely difficult to vote for it,” Shriver said. “And I view the behavior of this consultant to be … frankly unprofessional.”

He said he voted for it because so many people had worked hard on creating the LUCE, and he was encouraged by McKeown endorsing the document, despite having several "disagreements with what is included in the final product."

"We haven't all gotten exactly what we wanted, but overall it is a document that will serve us well,"       Mayor Pro Tem Pam O'Connor