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The Heart of the City plan moves ahead
Public hearing will consider environmental impacts, staff recommendations for specific plan
by Mark McDermott
Things are about to heat up in the Heart of the City redevelopment debate.
City staff will present its recommendations before the Planning Commission at what is sure to be a jam-packed and contentious public hearing 7 p.m. Dec. 10 in the Civic Center council chambers.
"This is the first mile of a marathon,"said City Manager Lou Garcia. As for the two years of Heart of the City hearings, analysis, and voluminous documentation up to this point? "That was training," said Garcia.
The city planning staff has made amendments to the Heart of the City Specific Plan and will now attempt to move the plan forward. The Planning Commission hearing is the first step towards what staff hopes will be the adoption of the plan by the City Council, and eventually the California Coastal Commission.
Some of the amendments the staff will recommend be made to the draft specific plan are the following:
--In terms of buildout, the staff recommendations put caps at a net increase of approximately 657,500 square feet of commercial development and 2,998 residential units (of this total, 276,000 square feet of commercial development and 1823 residential units could occur on the AES generating plant site). The draft plan’s most intense scenario permitted 2,380,000 square feet of commercial floor area.
--There are numerous changes in permitted uses. The draft specific plan permitted offices in the Catalina Avenue corridor and limited bars and nightclubs to the village core, while the proposed amendments would not permit offices in the corridor east of the AES site (except the existing Information Technology Center and the King Harbor Shopping Center) and would permit bars and night clubs on the Pier and International Boardwalk. Also, Mole B is designated in the draft specific plan as a Park, Recreation, and Open Space, while the proposed amendment makes it part of the Waterfront District and permits use for boating facilities.
The public hearing also will consider the Environmental Impact Report. While many groups have expressed concerns about the increased density and traffic that the redevelopment would bring, this week the Redondo Unified School District stepped into the fray.
"We have some concerns," said Superintendent Bill Nunan. "We have to make sure as this process moves forward, that development doesn’t occur in such a way that education suffers."
Nunan said that some of the projections for increasing student population in the EIR don’t make sense. "They’ve got one kid for every 12.4 units," he said. "That would never happen."
"The city calculated 204 additional kids," said RUSD spokesman Jerry Klein. "The district is saying we don’t know where they got those figures. There is a big difference between the city and school district numbers."
In a letter to city planning department, the school district shows calculations of up to 1,859 new students generated by the maximum residential development allowed.
"If our figures are correct, there’s got to be a new school," said Klein. "We can’t put any more trailers on the ground. I know they keep saying that this is a worst case scenario, but we can’t go to a worst case scenario."
"We don’t quite understand their concerns because in the letter they sent us they didn’t include the supporting documentation as to how they arrived at their numbers," said Garcia. He pointed to the 1,139 residential units that exist as condominiums in the old downtown area. "You have 1,486 people that live there, and only 74 of those are under 18 years old." He also noted that the city would be required under law to mitigate any impacts the plan would have on the school district.
Garcia said that the EIR has generated confusion among many observers, but that it is important to remember that it is only a theoretical analysis of what would be possible under the proposed plan. The maximum residential build-out, he noted, is something that could only occur over the course of 20 to 30 years. "I think when a lot of people who are not used to all the intricacies of planning law see this they say, well, the city is proposing 1,800 units. We are just saying, this is what could be built, based on our EIR analysis, with the mitigation that would have to be done. This would assume that there would be absolutely no power plant there. This is not to say that we are going to get that many or we want to build that many."
"The great advantage of this plan," said assistant City Manager Sue Armstrong, "is that the impacts for that entire area are set forth, whereas without this plan perhaps these proposals would come in, and perhaps some of them would be good and some of them would not be, but it would be this piecemeal problem that we had for so long that results in this hodgepodge."
Garcia said he is proud of the work the city staff has done and is confident that the plan reflects a consensus of what the community wants.
"Let’s face it," said Garcia. "Look at what we’ve got down there. We’ve got an ugly, obsolete power plant. It’s not even a good power plant, not a modern, efficient one. That’s 52 acres right there. We’ve got another 17 acres of parking lots. We’ve got a strip along Catalina that looks like it could be in any blighted area in any community in the US. Mixed uses, hodgepodges, blight, and then we’ve got a corridor with big 220 voltage power lines going through it, and it all sits on the Pacific Ocean. Doesn’t that doesn’t cry out for somebody to change it? This plan is the important step forward to say, well, we don’t want that, and here is what we’d like." ER