Hermosa Beach council, district address North School traffic woes
The proposed North School loading zone at 25th Street. Only about nine cars could que up at a time, prompting worries about backup in the neighborhood. Photo
The city of Hermosa Beach and the Hermosa Beach City School District agreed to collaborate to address expected traffic impacts that would result from the reopening of North School, including possibly allowing the school district to use city property for alternative drop off zones.
The City Council and School Board directed their respective staffs to collaborate on a Memorandum of Understanding and Neighborhood Traffic Management Plan at a joint meeting Monday night. The meeting was intended to help settle issues associated with the district’s plans to reconstruct North, a currently shuttered district property west of Valley Park, that is set to reopen to address overcrowding in the district.
The agreement follows a letter issued by the City at the beginning of the year as a comment to the Draft Environmental Impact Report for North. The letter raised serious concerns about potential impacts from reopening North, most of them dealing with traffic and congestion.
At Tuesday’s meeting, several council members sought assurance that the memorandum would result in concrete solutions to the city’s concerns.
“There were a number of really significant, substantive concerns: I’m trying to get a sense of, will all of those things be addressed in the EIR?” said Mayor Jeff Duclos.
Specifically, the city’s comments called attention the way in which the district’s EIR assessed traffic impacts. Relying on a “level of service” measurement, the document concluded that congestion impacts from reopening the school would not reach a level of significance, a conclusion greeted with scoffs and headslaps by residents when it was first announced.
Terry Tao, an attorney for the district, pointed out the level of service method was the one called for in the city’s own General Plan but said that the district recognized that it was inadequate for showing the concentrated morning-and-afternoon rush of trips a school generates, and was willing to work with the city.
There was some uncertainty over how the memorandum and traffic plan would cohere with environmental report. City staff said that it would be difficult to know precisely what the traffic impact would be until the school was operational and that the most effective mitigation would have to be an ongoing process. But many residents and some on the council said that some of the possible changes called for in the city’s letter included site design changes that would have to be made before the campus opened, let alone before the EIR was approved.
Resident Scott Davey addressed the two bodies with a lengthy list of possible mitigation measures that he assembled after collecting traffic data by watching students come and go from Hermosa Valley School for a week.
His comments were cited with encouragement by others in the meeting and embodied a moderate tone that had been overshadowed by the intense debate surrounding Measure S, a bond measure passed by voters in 2016 that will provide funds to reconstruct North and modernize Valley and View School. And although many at the meeting continued to raise some of the same arguments that were brought up leading up to the vote, Davey said that surveys of residents in his neighborhood convinced him that most people supported the school reopening, but saw it as essential for the district to work with the city to mitigate potential impacts.
“I do think that before EIR gets finalized, it’s important to have that neighborhood traffic management plan. I don’t see how they can approve a final EIR without having that in place,” Davey said in an interview after the meeting.