By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer

April 4 --Shaping Santa Monica will not be easy. The city will inevitably grow some. And everybody is not going to get everything they want.

That's the hard-truth message City Planning Director Eileen Fogarty is delicately breaking across town in a series of neighborhood workshops that culminate Thursday night when she gathers with residents of Sunset Park and Ocean Park to prepare her department for perhaps its biggest task.

Photos by Olin Ericksen

Barely three months at her top-planning post and Fogarty has the difficult job of figuring out how most Santa Monicans want their city to look and feel for the next few decades -- part of the City’s update of its General Plan.

"You won't have complete consensus," Fogarty told the nearly 50 residents who live between Wilshire Boulevard and Montana Avenue at a Wilmont District meeting in the Lincoln Middle School Cafeteria March 28.

"The key is what is it that people would like to see happen in the corridors near them, as well as in their immediate neighborhoods," Fogarty said. "You have to have a direction that people buy into."

Most importantly, she said, "you can't have winners and losers.”

One of three neighborhood workshops leading up to a comprehensive May 7 public meeting to help update the City's Land-Use and Circulation Element (LUCE), the Wilmont gathering gave planners and City-hired consultants a chance to gather community input.

"This is quality of life, so it's very important to get the public involved in how we are going to evolve over time," she said. “These workshops are very critical to us.”

As at the Pico Neighborhood meeting two days earlier, scores of Santa Monicans sat with planners around tables, and with the aid of aerial maps and color-coded construction paper or markers visualized how they wanted their neighborhoods to look.

Transforming what seems like childhood arts and crafts projects into real buildings, open spaces and trafficked streets will not only change the physical face of the city, but how people live their everyday lives, said Fogarty, formerly a planning director for Alexandria, Virginia.

"What we've decided to do is take what we heard a year ago with regards to extreme frustration with traffic and affordability and, rather than come up with some grand solution, to start to build a plan, neighborhood by neighborhood," Fogarty said.

With the neighborhood as the building block, the community-driven process will be a two-way-street, she said.

Yet there are signs City-hired consultants are already unveiling at least some possible scenarios for the public to consider.

Perhaps the two most dramatic sketch proposals include fewer cars in the City and, perhaps, just maybe… taller height limits for some boulevard buildings.

Standing in front of a power-point presentation, consultant John Kaliski from the firm, Urban Studio, asked the audience what he said was a central question.

"What do you really expect and demand in the future?" he said.

Behind him flashed pictures of buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, with an imaginary height line going off into the corridor's horizon showing the possibility of increased heights, a hot-button topic in the seaside City.

While the buildings would have "step backs" that allow them to gain height as they gradually move away from the street in successive steps -- each step back would be taller than currently allowed by code.

According to Kaliski, there could be many benefits for allowing what he described as modest height changes.

"As this (height) envelope evolves, what are the types of things you want to get back?" he told Wilmont residents.

The list of perks developers may offer could include making buildings more environmentally sound and adding daycare, affordable housing and open space -- amenities City residents have asked for in the past.

While quick to point out the City is not endorsing the suggestion, Fogarty did acknowledge planners want the public to ask themselves key questions.

"I think the issue is right now we have different sizes, different scales and what we're trying to get people to look at is what is the impact on your neighborhood. What form do you want," Fogarty said.

Where you live and what surrounds you will be a big question, she said.

"If you are living in a neighborhood, you don't want the sun blocked, you want to have a transition to make it still feel residential," Fogarty said.

"And then on street, how do we get activity, and how do we get activity at places that are vital for people and still make it at a scale that we are hearing from everybody that they are comfortable with."

Another idea thrown out by consultants was possibly making Santa Monica more pedestrian, bike and mass-transit friendly by restricting overall car traffic in parts of the City, such as the Downtown.

"They are taking a look at car-free cities in Europe," said Kaliski. "They are literally taking cars off the street there."

In the two meetings last month, planners have been listening to what residents would like to see in their areas, City officials said

At a March 26 meeting in the Pico Neighborhood, Santa Monica’s poorest and most diverse area, a local public library was a reported hit.

In the Wilmont District, closer to the more congested Downtown, planners set up a separate table just for parking issues.

By the end of the Wilmont meeting, a poster full of residents’ suggestions hung in a corner. "Car-free zone," "trolleys", "preserving small businesses," "open space" and "affordable housing" were only a few of the suggestions endorsed by workgroups.

Such input is invaluable, Fogarty and other planners agreed. "People need to be invested in what's going to happen," she said.

The final “Neighborhood Placemaking” workshop will take place Thursday, April 5 from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Olympic High School Cafeteria, 721 Ocean Park Boulevard. A location for the May 7 comprehensive meeting on LUCE has not been announced.