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Strand bike path will not appear on November ballot
by Robb Fulcher
Mayor John Bowler has dropped plans for a November ballot measure to determine whether a bike path should be built alongside the Strand, but he said the measure will resurface on a future ballot.
"It will get on the ballot, it’s just a question of when," Bowler said on Tuesday.
He said he dropped his plan for a Nov. 6 vote on a beachside bike path after city council colleagues told him the measure could hurt the chances of council members running for reelection.
"The thinking was that this is another issue that can take votes away from you," Bowler said. "I’m honoring their wishes."
He declined to say who asked him for the delay. Bowler, Julie Oakes and JR Reviczky all are eligible to run for reelection.
The November ballot also will include a measure that could abolish the city’s 6 percent utility users tax and a "coastal conservation" measure that would place additional restrictions on some community events.
The notion of a bike path — a roughly 12-foot wide concrete strip separating bicycle riders, and perhaps skaters and skateboarders, from the Strand’s walkers and joggers — has simmered on the city’s back burner for the past few years.
Following an exhaustive title search by the city and a courtroom challenge from an ex-councilman, a judge last year determined that a bike path on the sand is allowed under a 1907 deed that gave Hermosa ownership of its beach.
A majority of the city council members have come out in favor of placing the plan before voters for a yes-or-no decision.
Bowler, serving his second term on the council, has pushed for a bike path study since 1993.
"It seemed to me from very beginning that for safety reasons we needed a separate path. But before can do anything, we would have to put this before the voters," Bowler has said.
The issue came to a head once before, in the 1970s, after Los Angeles County officials offered the city $300,000 to build a bike path on the sand. The Hermosa city council reacted in May 1974 by imposing a two-year moratorium on any such construction.
A petition with 1,000 signatures had been presented to the council opposing a bike path, and a standing-room-only crowd had filled the council chambers earlier in the month to oppose any such project. ER