Council Juggles Capital Projects to Pay for New Library

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

March 26 -- The City Council Tuesday night held up $21 million worth of capital projects -- from upgrades to Downtown parking structure lobbies and bathrooms to traffic calming to the seismic retrofit of City Hall -- to help pay for the $72 million new Main Library.

After hearing from education advocates who said the library money would be better used to fund the cash-strapped school district than to "build a monument," the council grudgingly voted 6 to 1 to keep the library project on track.

"Even if we were to stop with the library project," said Councilman Ken Genser, "it would be at tremendous cost, potentially delaying it past our lifetimes, and most of the funds could not be used for other purposes, such as funding schools."

But Councilman Michael Feinsein, who cast the lone dissenting vote, warned that making any final decisions would tie the council's hands when it hammers out a budget in June that will have to deal with a projected shortfall that could reach nearly $17 million.

"I am uncomfortable making these decisions tonight without community input" from the groups who lobbied for the programs being put on the backburner, said Feinstein.

"My gut tonight is ensuring the library moves ahead, but part of me says we don't know what kind of tradeoffs we'll be asked to make in June, when we'll have a lot of mixing and matching."

Revisiting the mix of projects initially deferred two months ago, the council voted to move ahead with the $2.095 million project to restore the breakwater, the $520,000 to replace restrooms in parks, the $250,000 improvements to Euclid Park and approximately $740,000 of the $1.1 million to improve crosswalks.

To bridge the funding gap for the new library and adjoining parking lot, the council earmarked the following monies slated for capital projects:

• $6,738,7810 for Santa Monica Boulevard improvements
  
  
• $3,162,700 for the seismic retrofit and expansion of City Hall
  
  
• $2,675,986 to rehabilitate and upgrade the Downtown parking structure lobbies and restrooms
  
  
• $1.4 million in addition to the of the $3.065 million already tapped from the Civic Center's redevelopment fund
  
  
• $1.3 million to landscape the Airport Avenue park project
  
  
• $940,000 no longer required for the Main Library seismic retrofit
  
  
• $991,462 to close out various capital improvement projects
  
  
• $520,000 by reducing the sign replacement program
  
  
• $400,000 by reducing slated neighborhood traffic measures

While the new two-level library was hailed as a major "community enhancement," -- doubling the floor space and tripling the parking space of the 1965 original -- it came under fire from education advocates. With a growing budget crisis facing both the City and the district, they said, "this is not the time to build a monument."

"There is no library emergency in this town," said John Petz, a member of the Save Our Schools parcel tax committee. "And yet at the same time we are talking about $21 million (to build a new) library, we have an education crisis in this city. It makes sense not to build a library now. Let's stick close to home. This is not the time to build a monument. We got real needs. "

Tricia Crane, chair of the Special Education District Advisory Committee and a mother of two school-age children, agreed.

"It is at least unseemly that while our children's reading specialists are given pink slips we are discussing building a newer, nicer library and demolishing a perfectly good one," Crane said.

Genser responded by noting that the council was not faced with an either/or dilemma. The diverted money, he said, is restricted to capital projects, adding that the time to lobby for school funding will be at the adoption of the budget for the upcoming fiscal year in June.

"Even if we wanted to give more money to the schools, which most of want to, we can't do it tonight," Genser said.

Jonathan Arenberg, chair of the Friends of the Santa Monica Public Library, said it "pains me that this has been cast as an either/or issue.

"The library is not a luxury, it is a necessity in a democratic society," Arenberg said. "Recent events have shown the importance of citizens to have open and free access to information of all types so that they can make up their own minds about events large and small."

Along with being a bastion of democracy, Genser reminded the audience of the library's more pedestrian functions. "This not only a library," he said. "This is a library and a public parking structure."

The three-level, 559-space subterranean parking lot will be needed to compensate for the Downtown parking structures that will be closed for replacement and seismic rehab, Genser said.

By building the parking on the library's publicly-owned land, the City is saving a "good chunk" of the $13 million parking project fund that would otherwise be spent on land, he added.

The biggest debate of the night centered on whether to keep on track the Breakwater project, which would restore 900 feet of the 10-foot-high breakwater built it 1934 and rebuild the old harbor with 12 moorings to bring back ships and commercials vessels to the pier.

Genser advocated saving the project, because "unlike the other projects we could defer and come back to, we're putting $4.5 million (in federal matching funds provided by the U.S. Core of Engineers) at risk," which "we'll probably never again going to get."

Genser said his push for the breakwater was fueled by the prospect of Santa Monica again having a harbor and allowing fishing boats to return to the pier. The breakwater, he said, "connects a maritime character to the pier, a quite beautiful connection to the ocean."

Councilman Robert Holbrook said the City needs a breakwater to protect the pier from the kind of storm that destroyed it 20 years ago and "will destroy the pier there right now.

"If 30-foot waves hit the front of it, they will knock it right down back to the beach," Holbrook said. "Every year we delay doing this we run the risk of losing the pier yet again."

Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown waxed nostalgic about the yachts he saw in the harbor years ago, and recounted standing in the rain two decades ago and watching the waves sweeping away the pier.

"I saw the pilings of our pier get swept down to Pico Boulevard and just cast along the beach like match sticks, and I never want to see that happen again, especially knowing that I sat here tonight and let it happen," McKeown said.

Citing his experience with the lengthy federal bureaucratic process he encountered working on the project while on the Pier Restoration Corporation board 21 years ago, Councilman Herb Katz questioned the certainty of the federal funds promised for the breakwater.

"It had to go through a whole litany of things…all the way to the Pentagon and back again," Katz said. "What year might we get this? It could take 10 years before we get it built, if then, the way this thing's been moving.

"I don't think it's something we can count on now," Katz said recalling a Core of Engineers colonel promising to streamline the progress on the breakwater project 14 years ago.

"It is uncertain at best if those funds will disappear," said Susan McCarthy, who admitted that while a preliminary design is in place, the Environmental Impact Report is not finished yet, and that once approved locally, it has to go to Washington D.C. for the final go-ahead.

McCarthy also conceded that once built, there would be the cost of running a small boat harbor, which not only includes standard operation and maintenance, but also regular dredging of the harbor, which is "not an insignificant undertaking."

Feinstein said he was the "least inclined to vote" for the breakwater, citing concerns over water and pollution issues tied to the boat harbor. Like Katz, he too doubted the promise of federal funds, and he countered Holbrook's argument that it would save the pier from a storm.

"This isn't the thing that will save the pier," Feinstein said. "This would be to save the things on top of the pier. The current set-up we have will protect it from the kind of storm we had."

Feinstein said he would rather wait until the year-end budget review in June before deciding what to do with the $2 million, which is the first installment of a $4 million bill the City must foot for the breakwater.

He urged the council to wait "and see what buys us what at that time, and see if that $2 million gets us something hard and fast compared to here, where it's just a wing and prayers for what might happen down the line."

Moving ahead with the Breakwater project would leave a $2 million gap, which Genser suggested filling by postponing the streetscape part of the Airport Avenue park project, saving $1.3 million, without slowing down any work on the actual park. He also suggested shifting over $1.4 million by delaying the Civic Center development.

The two actions, which were approved by the council, "would not be putting anything at risk," Genser said.

McKeown successfully pushed to divert the Airport streetscape funds towards finishing the Pedestrian Safety Program, "because the public safety component" of making crosswalks as safe as possible takes precedence over the "aesthetic" goal of the streetscape.

Calling Genser's argument for the breakwater "meaningful," Mayor Richard Bloom agreed to preserve the funding. But he said that replacing the restrooms in the parks was at the top of his priority list, and successfully advocated for maintaining the Park Building Replacement Program on track.

"We don't hear a lot about it as Council members, but as a parent going for years to soccer games and little league games in the various parks, the discussion amongst parents is the disrepair in many of the restrooms in the community," Bloom said.

While the worst of them have been replaced under phase one of the project, Bloom said, "if we don't move forward with this (in phase 2) those (remaining) restrooms will continue to deteriorate over time."