Chamber will hear final report at January luncheon
Local officials could learn a few lessons from the planning departments in Burbank, Culver City and Pasadena, according to a presentation given Monday by a team of graduate business students.
After interviewing the head planners and several entrepreneurs from each city, five students from the University of Southern California presented their preliminary findings to a group of City Hall officials and local business leaders.
The students confirmed complaints that it takes significantly longer to open a business in Santa Monica, and that the process is difficult, costly and confusing to navigate.
Chamber of Commerce officials have long lambasted the department for being overly bureaucratic, which negatively effects local businesses. The chamber called upon the MBA students to flush out the department’s weaknesses and offer suggestions on how to fix the perceived problem.
The group recommended that City Hall remove some of the department’s bureaucracy and make the process easier for business owners to understand.
5BF,“Something that we discovered was, heck, many of these cases were just wrong expectations. And if someone were there to manage those, maybe it would have taken just as long, but it wouldn’t have been as frustrating,” said Audney DePaulo, one of the graduate students working on the project under Dr. William Crookston, a professor at USC and former chairman of the chamber.
The group conducted four in-depth studies of businesses, but also interviewed an additional half dozen merchants and gathered information on another handful. All four of the in-depth case studies were of businesses opening in buildings that had already once been permitted for the same type of use.
Of those four, one, a bakery called the “Good Urth,” on Main Street, was still waiting to open after signing the lease 18 months earlier. Another restaurant had been open one year but was still waiting to have its signage approved. A crepe restaurant successfully completed the process after one year. The last business has been in the planning process for two years with “no real end in sight,” the students said.
Nearly a dozen local officials, including city manager Susan McCarthy, assistant city manager Gordon Anderson, planning department head Suzanne Frick, City Councilwoman Pam O’Connor, and former chamber chairs Ann Greenspun and Nat Trives, attended Monday’s presentation at the chamber’s offices downtown. The students will give a final presentation at a chamber luncheon in January.
Meanwhile, a recommendation by the planning commission earlier this year that the planning department be audited is expected to go before the City Council this month.
Crookston said the USC project was initiated by repeated war stories from business owners that the process in Santa Monica was too burdensome and time consuming.
So the students set to work interviewing various business owners. They talked to restaurateurs and to retailers. They interviewed merchants moving into in new building and ones moving into aged structures. They made sure to include businesses that were a new type of use for a location and those that were still the same as whatever business had preceded them.
What they found was that, it takes significantly longer to set up shop in Santa Monica than it does elsewhere. While the goal for approving projects in Culver City is two weeks, the goal in Burbank is a little over a month and Pasadena approvals seemed to average about two to four months, Santa Monica lacked a clearly communicated goal. As a result, many businesses end up trapped in the process for years.
The students highlighted good qualities in the other three cities, such as online tools, flow charts and information booklets that spell out the intricacies of the process. They pointed to the “one stop shop” for information and help that’s available to prospective business owners in Pasadena, as well as the consistency in Culver City and the business-friendly attitude of Burbank.
But the students didn’t find any of those qualities in Santa Monica.
“There are a lot of paths a business could lead down that could take a long time,” said USC student Shana Rosengart. “I think Santa Monica is balancing a lot of needs in the planning department. There seem to be a lot of conflicting messages.”
Chamber president and CEO Kathy Dodson said the 12-week study, which Crookston valued at about $30,000 if done privately, is a starting place for future research and analysis.
“We’re using it for a very broad overview of these four cities,” she said. “I don’t think it’ll ever replace paying a consultant, but I think it gives us particularly a great starting place.”
The students said problems appeared to stem from the lack of a clear understanding of the process, a clear time frame for different types of projects and the lack of a defined culture promoting or limiting business growth.
They reported difficulty in meeting with business owners because they were apparently shy to criticize the planning department, which may be indicative of the lack of communication between City Hall and local merchants. Students said they didn’t encounter the same resistance in other cities studied.
To remedy the situation, the group suggested that hearings and other subjective elements be removed from the planning process and citizens be educated on the benefits of business growth. What’s more, the students suggested that City Hall do a better job of managing its image in the press and business owners be encouraged to give more input to the city’s policies.
But streamlining the process may be difficult. Though planning heads Suzanne Frick and Andy Agle have said in the past they are open to suggestions and criticisms from outside sources, how much change they can effect in City Hall may ultimately be controlled by other local ruling boards, like the City Council and the Planning Commission, which draft ordinances and hold hearings related to the issues the businesses are dealing with.
Several members of the City Council have said the amount of ordinances currently controlling developments in Santa Monica may have become too burdensome said the entire situation needs to be re-examined.
In the end, the students acknowledged that the other three cities all want to develop a business climate like the one that exists on the thriving Third Street Promenade in the center of downtown. They suggested City Hall conduct surveys with residents and businesses to determine exactly how much business growth locals want, and then develop cash or recognition incentive programs to get planning department staffers to work more diligently towards that end.
“We have to think about customer service,” Crookston said after the presentation, as others asked questions of the students. “I think we should become a bellwether for adding more of it in our city.”
“We have to think about customer service. I think we should become a bellwether for adding more of it in our city.” — — DR. WILLIAM CROOKSTON Professor, USC
Dr. William Crookston
Professor, USC
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The breakdown
Planners Business cases/yr* Budget
Culver City 13 40 $1.1M
Burbank 13 126 $1.7M
Pasadena 34 100 $3.2M
Santa Monica 27 190 $2.6M
* The number of cases figure reflects cases related to new businesses opening that are handled by the department each year. Students said in the other three cities the majority of cases are handled “over-the-counter,” whereas more cases are heard administratively in Santa Monica.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 2, 2003. Read the original PDF.