By Gary Gordon Executive Director Main Street Merchants Association Council needs to start thinking Editor:
Tonight the City Council will open discussion on sidewalk dining, sandwich signs and display of merchandise, all three of which are typical activities on Main Street.
The Main Street Merchants Association, in response to customer and merchant concerns, a wave of costly citations issued to several businesses, the tangle of current regulations, and an initiative to open discussion by Councilmembers Michael Feinstein and Pam O’Connor, put together a proposal we hope the Council will support and implement before summer.
The MSMA proposal, which is also part of a Main Street Revitalization Plan presented recently to Council that would improve parking and traffic and continue the improved police presence since last November, would include allowing sidewalk dining, sandwich signs, and display of merchandise on the public portion of the sidewalk as long as 48” clearance for public passage is maintained. The use of this would not be free; it would be rented from the city by the merchant, paid for as part of a check-off option on the annual business license.
The size of the signs would be regulated (3’-4’ tall; 2 and 1/2’ wide) but would not require Planning Department or Architecture Review Board review.
Merchants would be allowed to display merchandise either on 6’x2’ tables (as they do during sidewalk sales) or on clothing racks. The number of tables and racks would be regulated per store. And within certain limits, furniture could be displayed. Benches would also be allowed; again, size would be regulated.
None of this would require planning permits or review which would save the city money in the allocation of staff resources. All of this would create income for the city in the form of the additional rental fees and the additional sales tax generated by the additional business.
While some of the above activity is allowed, application fees for permits (which do not guarantee the permit) are expensive, the process consumes a lot of staff time, and the result has been uneven, frustrating, and especially costly for merchants and for the city. And some of the activity above is just flat-out not allowed so that in the case of some sandwich signs and merchandise displays, what you see, enjoy and use is illegal.
This is not a proposal that would allow anything and everything; it is a proposal that would legalize quite a bit of business activity already popular and characteristic of the eclectic nature of Main Street.
MSMA believes that the Main Street Business Improvement District is part of the solution to the city’s money problems and that changes in policy, including adopting this proposal before summer, will help the city, help the merchants, respond to customers’expressed desires and values, and increase customers and business as well as expand and enhance the pedestrian orientation and village-like atmosphere on Main Street.
If you support these goals, if you support making these aspects of life on Main legal under a well-regulated but less tangled and less expensive system, please consider communicating this to your Council members before or at the meeting tonight.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 28, 2003. Read the original PDF.