Rescue Montana Avenue, Residents To Urge Council

By Jorge Casuso

There was the small ma and pa gift shop, which will be replaced by a Pete's coffee house. And the local dentist office, which has a sign up announcing retail space for lease. And then there is the old mausoleum, which is slated for the wrecking ball to make way for four apartment units and eight stores.

That, neighbors say, is enough. And so on Tuesday night, residents around Montana Avenue will descend on city hall with yellow lapel stickers to urge the City Council to "rescue" their street before it goes the way of the Third Street Promenade, where skyrocketing rents are pushing out local businesses to make way for chain stores.

"We have been asking the city for a master plan, and they have done nothing," said Doris Sosin, co-chair of the North of Montana Neighborhood Association (NOMA). "We're losing the character. We're losing everything."

"Things got shoved to the back burner and stayed there," said Bill Bauer, vice chair of the Wilshire-Montana Neighborhood Coalition, referring to the master plan. But waiting for a plan, he said, "can take a couple of years to get started," and that will be too late.

In a last-ditch effort to rescue Montana Avenue, members of the two neighborhood groups will ask the council to craft an interim ordinance that provides limited controls until a more comprehensive review and master plan can be conducted. The proposed changes to the zoning rules, which were still being fine-tuned by neighborhood leaders the day before the meeting, call for:

· Changing the parking requirements for all new retail establishments to one space for each 200 square feet of floor space, instead of the current 300-square-feet. "Incidental Food" establishments, such as coffee houses, would have to meet the requirements of a restaurant, which call for a parking space for every 75 square feet.
· Requiring a full public review by the Planning Commission for all new commercial construction and for remodeling that costs more than $100,000. The need for this requirement, leaders say, was brought home by the demolition of the funeral mausoleum with no public process.
· Increasing the current requirements for landscaping the area fronting Montana Avenue.
· Providing incentives to encourage the preservation of historic buildings. (The neighborhood groups have submitted pictures of a dozen and a half structures that could qualify for landmark status.)

Neighborhood leaders argue that the new stores, particularly the coffee shops, are increasing traffic and exacerbating an already critical dearth of parking.

"We're saying there's not enough parking already," Bauer said.

Bauer noted that when traffic counts were taken after Montana was re-striped from a four-lane into a two-lane street in the mid-1990s, the greatest number of cars were circulating around the coffee shop on 14th Street. "Traffic literally doubled" around the street, Bauer said. "Cars were circling."

By treating coffee shops as restaurants with far greater parking requirements, some of the potential congestion and parking problems will be alleviated, the neighborhood leaders argue.

Not so, says former planning commissioner Lou Moench. Moench, who owns Father's Office, a tavern on Montana, argues that the proposed changes will backfire.

"Whenever you raise the parking supply, you increase traffic," Moench said. "They're trying to restrict coffee houses, which are the most pedestrian oriented and the ones the neighbors use most often. You have to have a good reason to eliminate the businesses that are most popular with the residents.

"What you're asking for is a little building surrounded by asphalt," said Moench. "That's not Montana Avenue charm. You can't save it by legislating bigger pieces of asphalt."

Merchants also argue that the neighborhood groups are overreacting. Robert Wachs, who co-chairs the Montana Avenue Merchants Association, said he conducted his own survey of clients who frequent Sara, his women's clothing boutique. Seventy-five percent, he said, were Santa Monicans. Most of the rest came from surrounding communities.

"The associations are complaining about the things Santa Monicans use," Wachs said. "Nobody has to drive more than five minutes to find a Starbucks. So it's something that I don't really understand."

Wachs said he had not been notified about several of the proposals the neighborhood groups are making ("Sure he has," Sosin countered). He said the merchants have not agreed to increase the parking requirements for retail or to full public review of commercial construction and remodeling that costs more than $100,000.

"It is a decision by a few neighbors," Wachs said. "If the neighbors have any good suggestions to help the street, we are certainly all for it. We're not looking for a few activists to cut their noses off to spite everybody else's face."

But neighborhood leaders contend they are being forced to do the job the city has neglected to do.

"You have us writing zoning codes," Bauer said. "The city should be doing it."

Earlier this year, Councilman Kevin McKeown, who formerly headed the Wilshire-Montana Coalition, spearheaded a successful motion to draft a master plan. But the plan was not funded in the budget the council approved in June because there wasn't enough staff in the planning department to embark on the process.

"I've always felt we should have a ten year master plan," said McKeown, who added that Tuesday's item has generated an "overwheling" amount of email in favor of the proposed measure. "It took ten years to get the Main Street plan. We don't have ten years."