Meet Planning Commissioner Pugh

By Jorge Casuso

Jan. 16 --If the City’s Planning Commission ever needs a first-hand account of what it takes to navigate the Planning Department bureaucracy, it need no longer look farther than the dais.

Prominent architect Gwynne Pugh, who was appointed to the commission on Tuesday, has plenty of experience ushering projects through a maze critics say is costly, time-consuming and unpredictable.

“The fact that it takes six to eight weeks to get a permit is insane,” said Pugh, whose firm Pugh + Scarpa Architects has built numerous commercial and housing projects in the city over the past two decades. “It can be harrowing.

“My experience in the city has been very, very diverse,” Pugh said. “I’ve worked for developers, I’ve worked for the City, I’ve worked for non-profits and I’ve built my house here. These are very divergent perspectives.”

As a commissioner, Pugh would like to help balance the concerns of residents and developers to make Santa Monica a more vibrant, sustainable community and help grease the bureaucratic wheels that applicants have long complained grind far too slowly.

The complaints have spurred a department audit approved last year by the City Council at the behest of the Planning Commission and an independent study unveiled this week by a Master of Business Administration class at USC.

“I’m not trying to change the nature of what we have too much,” Pugh said. “I’m just looking to make the process more effective.

“The question still remains as to what extent as a commission we can do that,” Scarpa said. “Sometimes it (a project before the board) can catalyze a discussion.”

The City’s planning process is not only frustrating for applicants, but Scarpa believes it can discourage world-class design in a City that is home to some of the world’s top architects, including Frank Gehry.

“Unfortunately some of the best architects and engineers refuse to work in Santa Monica,” Pugh said.

The amount of input from residents, City officials and members of boards and commissions, Pugh believes, results in “almost a design by committee and administration.”

“You tend to end up with compromises,” Pugh said. “Of course you also don’t get the worst of the worst.”

So how has an award-winning architect like Pugh -- whose firm designed Community Corporation’s model 44-unit sustainable housing project at 5th and Colorado and helped develop Bergamot Station -- managed to last so long in Santa Monica?

“Bloody mindedness and persistence,” said Pugh. “But it has cost us. It has been very difficult to process plans, and it has not always been consistent.”

Pugh -- who grew up in England, where he obtained an engineering degree at Leeds University before attending UCLA -- envisions Santa Monica as a vibrant community where needs can be met within a short stroll.

But to truly achieve that vision, City officials must stop viewing density as a bad thing and embrace the excitement it can bring, Pugh said.

“I’m not adverse to density,” he said. “There is excitement to density that allows a lot to happen. Density done correctly enhances the pedestrian activity.

“Walking two blocks to do everything you want to do is a wonderful experience. At some level, Downtown Santa Monica has taken on that aspect.

“Basically, I’m an advocate of small growth,” Pugh said. “We want to provide a model of how we can do it in Santa Monica.”

To achieve those goals, the board will have to walk a fine line and engage in a spirited, open discussion, Pugh said.

“How can the community preserve its values?” is one part of the equation, Pugh said. The other: “How can developers implement those values?”

“It has to be done a little bit subtly, through discussion,” Pugh said. “You need to shift the agenda. At times confrontation may be necessary.”

Scarpa, who was involved in “community activism” in the local public schools his children attended, said that now that they have graduated he has the time and energy to tackle his new community task.