I like Bob Holbrook, but I winced when the mayor inserted his foot and bit down hard, again. In an interview (SMDP, Jan. 2, 2006, page 1), Holbrook told Ryan Hyatt that he “feels that Santa Monica is in need of a major retailer that could serve a variety of basic consumer needs, such as a Target.”
When a proposal to build a Target on Fifth Street and Santa Monica Boulevard was before the City Council five years ago, Holbrook voted to kill the store along with Kevin McKeown, Michael Feinstein, Richard Bloom and Herb Katz. Ken Genser and Pam O’Connor voted for the project.
“Traffic” was the major reason for voting against Target. Still, traffic concerns still didn’t stop City Hall from installing parking meters on northbound Fourth Street, narrowing it to one lane. Then they OK’d a scheme — the Transit Mall — to reconfigure Santa Monica Boulevard, reducing four lanes to two lanes between Fifth Street and Ocean Avenue.
All that’s done is further gridlock downtown. We’ve got more congestion and have lost a store “that could serve a variety of basic consumer needs,” forever. The trade-off was a bad one: more traffic without a good place to shop.
There’s no shortage of dumb ideas in this city.
Now, transportation management staff wants to radically change residential permit parking by issuing “daytime only” permits to employees to park on restricted residential streets adjacent to Pico and Ocean Park boulevards and to allow residents on unrestricted blocks to park in restricted zones.
At one point, residential streets adjacent to Montana Avenue were also included, but staff now recognizes that Montana Avenue employees can park on the vast number of unrestricted residential blocks between Alta Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard, negating the need for employee permits right now.
It appears that the employee parking in residential neighborhoods is designed to provide on-street parking for retail store employees. From what I can tell, college, school district and other non-retail workers don’t seem to be included in this proposal.
This half-baked scheme doesn’t provide employee parking relief where it’s really needed — in the mid-city area between Wilshire and Olympic boulevards east of Lincoln Boulevard or adjacent to Lincoln south of Pico. The transportation management folks say these areas are already “too parked up to allow employee permits.”
The problem is that the proposal is constantly changing. In neighborhoods effected, conditions for issuing permits and other parameters are not set, which means anything can happen in any preferential parking zone in the city. And this “one-year test” will likely last many decades unless legally challenged.
Basically the proposal is unfair. For example, it allows employees in one area parking privileges that employees in other areas don’t have.
But, the worst is still to come. City staff wants permission to sell permits, on a per request basis, to residents who live adjacent to permitted zones so they can park indefinitely on nearby time-restricted blocks.
The staff report — available online as a council information item dated Dec. 20, 2005 — mentions that people living on the unregulated 900 blocks of numbered streets between Idaho and Washington Avenues want permits so they can park on three Idaho Avenue blocks where permits are required for unlimited parking.
It’s a bad idea. Why should residents share hard-fought preferential parking with neighbors whose blocks are unrestricted? Favoring some people because of a job or location of work — especially giving special privileges to someone who lives on a nearby non-restricted street — threatens the entire permit parking process.
I have a parking permit for my block, and I’m prohibited from parking in another permit zone. Yet, staff is suggesting that neighbors on unrestricted blocks should be able to park unrestricted in my “two hour without permit” zone? Ridiculous. It’s another unfair double standard.
Even after this goes before the City Council on Feb. 28 and they put their own two cents in, we’ll see how much of an unmitigated disaster this plan could be.
City Hall is soliciting your input. Community meetings are scheduled for Jan. 18 at the Thelma Terry Center in Virginia Park and Jan. 19 at the Montana Avenue Library — both at 6:30 p.m. You also can e-mail comments to (Bill Bauer is a longtime Santa Monica resident and a freelance writer.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 16, 2006. Read the original PDF.