Opening a business in SM is not a cookie-cutter process
After a 20-month bureaucratic boondoggle that tested their finances and their resolve, the owners of a local mom-and-pop cookie shop opened for business here on Monday.
Jeff and Syrna Glasser, both 38, blame City Hall bureaucracy for much of the delay. When the couple first took out their $1,400-a-month lease on a tiny storefront in July of 2002, they thought they’d be open within a couple of months. They now estimate they’ve lost $200,000 while wriggling through a system that delayed their opening nearly two years.
“I tell people, ‘Don’t do business in Santa Monica,’” Syrna Glasser said. “They don’t make a small business feel welcome. The community does, but not the city.”
“I tell people, ‘Don’t do business in Santa Monica.’They don’t make a small business feel welcome.” — — SYRNA GLASSER Owner, Schmerty’s Gourmet Cookies
With similar complaints becoming more frequent from local merchants, City Hall recently decided to pay a consultant $75,000 to create efficiencies in the planning department. Critics say City Hall is overly bureaucratic and favors corporations that can afford a protracted process. City Hall workers agree there’s a problem, but counter they’re bound by a host of state and local laws which regulate the approval process.
Santa Monica City Councilman Herb Katz said the situation surrounding Schmerty’s Gourmet Cookies is a prime example of what’s wrong with the system. Katz, a local architect, stepped in on behalf of the Glassers to see if he could help expedite the process.
“They were just put into a bureaucracy they couldn’t get out of... and they carry it to such horrendous extremes that these poor people got had,” Katz said. “It’s just awful what we do to little people like that. Small people with small businesses.”
Syrna Glasser attributed part of the delays in opening her store to a penny-pinching landlord who fought every upgrade and a sometimes lackadaisical contractor who let work slide for weeks. But the real culprit, she added, was a non-responsive City Hall.
“We came in doing everything by the book, legally, because we didn’t want to get in trouble — and we got nailed for everything,” said Glasser, while packaging cookies in the back of her store on Monday afternoon. “One person would sign off it, and then you’d go back and it was like the left person didn’t know what the right person was doing...
“I feel like sitting down and writing a book — 101 on getting a business started in Santa Monica.”
After repeatedly receiving conflicting information from staffers on everything from minor aesthetic details to major structural concerns, the Glassers said they were stuck in City Hall for months over a handicapped-accessible ramp inside their shop. The Glassers wanted to install a short concrete ramp, like the ones used by other merchants on the street, but they said City Hall wouldn’t allow that.
It was a space issue for the shopkeepers. The store is only 700 square feet — and about 15 feet wide — and a handicapped ramp that meets code would have had to turn at least once inside the store. So the Glassers said they next considered selling their cookies straight onto the street, but officials said that wouldn’t work either, because handicapped workers also needed a proper way to enter.
In the end, the two sides compromised. The Glassers paid $5,000 to have a handicapped ramp installed that doesn’t comply to code, because it’s about twice as steep as allowed. The ramp still takes up more than half of the front of the store, where customers purchase cookies at a counter.
Tim McCormick, head of the building department, said the Glassers weren’t treated as badly as it may sound. He said the Glassers didn’t submit their plans until Jan. 28 of 2003, and that staff returned them with comments on March 13. The plans came back to City Hall on May 22 and were approved by planners on June 6, McCormick said. A permit was issued June 12 of 2003. Their issue with the handicapped ramp dragged out the matter for several more months.
McCormick said plans for the average business are reviewed and returned to developers within six weeks, and amended submissions usually are reviewed within three weeks. Plans for 93 percent of merchants are approved by the third time they are submitted, he said, adding small merchants like Schmerty’s usually only require two submissions.
5D7,“Let me just say that it was unusual for the process,” McCormick said. “The amount of time that was taken, it’s not typical of the system...
“I think there is a legitimate issue with staff being able to review plans in a shorter time period, based on the number of plans that staff has,” added McCormick, who said the outside study of the planning department is already halfway complete. “That study is well underway and is pointing to various important policy decisions about how to improve the process. They involve the regulations, efficiency improvement and staffing capacity.”
Meanwhile, some local merchants said time is running out. They worry City Hall has grown accustomed to the deep pockets and seemingly endless patience of corporations like those that have sought space on the Third Street Promenade.
“They don’t deal with people who own their own places,” said Margie Ghiz, owner of the Midnight Special Bookstore, an independent favorite that struggled last year to open at its new location on Second Street. “They deal with their architects, or even their architects’ assistants... Two or three weeks (of delays) is nothing to them.”
Syrna Glasser
Owner, Schmerty’s Gourmet Cookies
PULL II: “It’s just awful what we do to little people like that. Small people with small businesses.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 20, 2004. Read the original PDF.