Residents Air Concerns About New College Campus

By Blair Clarkson
Staff Writer

May 7 – More than 150 wary Mar Vista residents Wednesday filled the unfinished lobby of one of two airport buildings Santa Monica College plans to turn into a satellite campus and demanded that the school address concerns that their neighborhood would be overrun with students.

After listening to presentations from college officials about the development and use of the 10.4-acre Bundy Campus slated to open by Summer 2005, members of the standing-room only crowd openly worried about traffic and parking, residential access, property values, noise and future construction plans.

They also criticized the college for failing to keep the greater Mar Vista community informed of its intentions for the $14-million Bundy Campus renovation.

"We started dealing with the immediate neighbors," said Thomas Donner, executive vice president of business and administration at SMC. "Now we're realizing that this community is very tightly knit and reaches far more than just the immediate blocks around the new facility."

"We want to be more inclusive" of the wider community, he said. "I'm sorry we didn't do things the right way the first time, but we're trying to correct that."

Previous meetings with residents on adjacent streets resulted in almost $1 million of improvements to the site, including a 10-foot sound wall along the south side of the property, the planting of hundreds of new trees and extensive landscaping, and the burial of unsightly utility lines.

Chief among the residents’ fears are that students will pour out of a back entrance of the property onto Stewart Street to avoid stop lights on Centinela Avenue and flood the neighborhood with cars. Donner allayed those fears.

"We do not intend to have that gate as an access way," responded Donner. "That will be for emergency vehicle use only. It will not even be available for pedestrian traffic."

The school plans to use the main Bundy entrance and a second driveway opening onto Airport Avenue as the campus' only access ways, Donner said.

School officials, however, said they would not agree to residents’ requests for deed restrictions on the use of the entrances, eliciting groans from the crowd.

"There will not be a deed restriction because (SMC) is a government agency and can't predict the future," said Donner, noting that such decisions fall under the purview of the SMC Board of Trustees.

"Just because I haven't agreed to a deed restriction," he said, "doesn't mean I'm not sensitive to these concerns."

"A deed restriction is a permanent type of thing," said Greg Brown, SMC's director of facilities planning, adding that the board would probably not agree to such a written guarantee. "It restricts the flexibility on the future should the Board need to sell the property."

In response, numerous residents insisted that SMC work out an agreement with the neighborhood to allay fears that the entrance will eventually reopen.

"The college should be willing to sit down with us and work out some legal arrangement, which assures the entire neighborhood that the Stewart entrance and the exit onto Airport is a definite, inerasable situation which we could live with,” said resident Carl Beierle.

"If not, we would not feel comfortable with the school opening," he said. "The Stewart gate should be as if it's a blocked wall."

SMC officials also attempted to dispel worries that students would park on surrounding residential streets -- a problem which plagued the neighborhood around the main campus and led to the use of preferential parking.

"I do not want to see or create an opportunity for our students to park in the neighborhood," said Donner. "Parking in the neighborhood leads to preferential parking, which I'm strongly opposed to."

Consequently, the college will have free parking on site to keep students from trying to save money by parking off-campus, he said.

Free parking "keeps the students out of the residential area, and it also keeps them out of the airport commercial areas," Donner said.

While community members could find little to fault with SMC's current free parking plan, several residents pondered the college's future plans for the site.

"If I were the board of trustees," said Mar Vista board member George Chung, "I can't see the economics of paying ($30 million) for just these two buildings and operating it as such."

"They're out of land," added resident Vincent Corry. "The only obvious thing to do is get this land and build a parking structure. These 10.4 acres will be developed. Every single building they can put on here to make money from students will be used."

Other residents echoed similar fears that to alleviate the parking pressures on the main campus, SMC would eventually construct a multi-story parking garage and shuttle service on the site.

"I'm not saying that you're going to," said Chung, "but we're not hearing the assurances from you that you're not going to do that."

Donner admitted that although current plans did not include any such developments, he would not say they were out of the question. The school has only made plans for the site up to 2006, he said. "That's the part we will work on together."

Some residents weren’t satisfied.

"I don't buy it," said Ron Passaro. "I think people do know somewhere what's going to happen to the facility and we're not being told."

Despite the occasionally rancorous tone of the meeting, SMC officials agreed to work together with the community to address mutual concerns about the property and relay the needs and desires of the neighborhood to the Board.

The college also agreed to expand its traffic impact study to include a wider array of intersections, adapt the schedule of general education classes slated for the campus in order to minimize rush-hour traffic increases, and proposed subsequent community meetings to update residents on progress.

"I think it went very well," said Brown. "We were expecting that people would have a lot of concerns. They didn't have all the correct information, so this gave us chance to get out to the community what we're doing. Also, we really did want to hear everyone's concerns.