Consultant Gives Sneak Peek of Planning Audit

By Olin Ericksen

April 22 – A consulting firm auditing the City’s beleaguered planning department suggested Wednesday that it would recommend changing the zoning code and streamlining the development process, rather than adding staff.

The third in a series of focus groups mandated under the terms of the audit, the meeting with the Matrix Consulting Group hosted by the Chamber of Commerce provided details of the ongoing audit launched to curb inefficiency in the planning department.

Matrix’s vice president, Gary Goelitz, took copious notes and chaired the meeting. But it was when Goelitz spoke that all the pens in the room began to move in unison, jotting down his consulting group’s assessment of Santa Monica’s planning department woes, and providing insight on how the experts feel those shortcomings should be fixed.

“Council has already indicated a desire to rewrite the zoning codes,” said Goelitz. “The problem this City’s going to face is that the staff… are by and large spending between 96 and 97 percent of their time processing permits.”

Goelitz said after the meeting that those percentages were based on staff’s assessments of how they reported their time.

So much time devoted to minor permit issues means that many of the larger planning issues get ignored, Goelitz said.

“The choices we are going to be presenting to Council is one of a streamlined process, to give the staff more time to focus on long-term priorities, or adding a boatload of staff, which will cost between four and five hundred thousand dollars more a year,” Goelitz said.

Matrix intends to advocate streamlining rather than adding staff, Goelitz said. “We want to get the (planning) engineers off the counter and back to planning.”

Tipping his hat to a debate that has raged on in recent weeks and divided City government into two factions, Goelitz said the City will be challenged to find a way to insert public input early into the development process while also shortening the amount of time it takes for projects to be approved.

Currently, approval can take months or even years. Getting an item on City Council’s agenda, Goelitz said, currently takes an average of nearly two months.

The Architectural Review Board, the Planning Commission and several City Council members have opoosed transferring review on projects from elected officials to staff.

Meanwhile, planning staff, the chamber of commerce and several members of the City Council favor streamlining the development process by giving more oversight on certain downtown and multifamily designs to planning staff.

The entire issue will come before the City Council again on May 11, one day after Matrix Consulting Group’s first draft of the audit is due.

Goelitz was murky on which approach they would suggest to streamline the development process, but said his group will inform the Council of different approaches used in both Pasadena and San Mateo.

Pasadena’s approach of raising review thresholds to allow more administrative review of projects is similar to a contentious proposal planning staff introduced in early March.

San Mateo’s approach emphasizes that developers should meet with neighbors before a project comes before the City, a proposal that approximates one put forth by the Planning Commission in April.

Both sides appear to be at loggerheads.

Goelitz said the audit will not focus on individuals in the planning department, but, rather, on how the development process unfolds as a whole. His firm, he said, will recommend additional training for planning staff to raise each individual’s responsiveness.

The department appears to be broken into four different divisions, which is “highly unusual,” Goelitz said.

Matrix will team up with a “zoning and land use” firm in San Luis Obispo, which could serve as a consultant if the City chooses to rewrite the zoning codes.

A dozen contractors, architects and entrepreneurs shared their stories of frustration navigating the often lengthy and costly planning process and added their perspective to Matrix’s review.

One architect, who asked to remain anonymous, said he has worked for 25 years in Santa Monica, and identified several recurring problems that he’s encountered.

Calling it a “cascading corrections” problem, he said many rounds of corrections must be endured before a project passes. The architect also complained about a lack of clarity in the design codes and escalating fees, which have doubled and quadrupled in recent years.

Others indicated a strong desire to add clarity and predictability to the design standards, an issue currently before the City Council.

Many others complained that the subjective input from planners resulted in continuously resubmitting plan after plan for inspection, costing a good deal of money and time.

While some added their suggestions, others lamented the general atmosphere surrounding planning and developing in Santa Monica.

Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Katherine Dodson questioned whether there was indeed a “public outcry” against losing public input to staff if projects meet a set of standards, or if the opposition came from a handful of community activists who attend most meetings.

“It’s the same group of people over and over again at these meetings,” Dodson said. “They are creating a huge problem.”

Proponents of streamlining the process by eliminating much of the public review did not testify at Wednesday’s meeting because they were leery of criticizing the planning department, which is currently reviewing their projects, Dodson said.