QUICK RESPONSE Photo courtesy Glenn Roland Santa Monica Fire Department personnel respond to the corner of Sixth Street and Pacific Avenue on Thursday morning. There was no further information as of press time. Coalition notifies city of intentions
CITY HALL A group of residents concerned about the growing density and accompanying traffic in the city have filed a notice with the City Clerk’s Office that it intends to submit an initiative that would limit commercial development in Santa Monica.
The Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC) filed the notice on Monday, preparing for a petitioning campaign in which the organization will have to collect more than 5,500 signatures of registered voters within the next six months to qualify for the November ballot.
The coalition seeks to limit all new commercial development in the city to less than 75,000 total square feet a year, about the size of two supermarkets. The initiative would allow new development approvals to exceed the maximum during any given year as long as the average annual square footage calculated over the following four years would fall below the 75,000 threshold, according to the initiative.
The initiative is meant to improve traffic on the Westside, which Diana Gordon, the co-chairman of SMCLC, called “unbearable.”
“This is an historic moment,”Gordon said on Thursday. “Residents will have the power to decide how to limit traffic in the future.
“Traffic is only going to get much worse and residents now have the opportunity to take the city back,” she added.
City officials have raised concerns that the initiative would curb the formulation of the Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE), the update of the general plan which will guide development in the city for the next 20 years. City planners have held numerous community workshops over the past few years, which have been attended by several hundred residents and business owners. A draft of the LUCE is expected this summer.
“Thinking of an arbitrary 75,000 square foot a year doesn’t really solve (traffic),” Katz said on Thursday. “It just doesn’t make sense and it really is, I believe, something to screw us up and stop us from doing what we should do.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 18, 2008. Read the original PDF.