May 25, 2010 -- The City Council next month will begin holding hearings on the land use and traffic document establishing the vision for Santa Monica’s next two decades. And if recent comments, both written and oral, from business leaders and neighborhood activists are any indication, those hearings should be intense affairs.

For the past month, the Planning Commission has held hearings on the draft Land Use & Circulation Element (LUCE) update to the City’s General Plan. The Commission’s final two hearings are scheduled for tonight and Thursday, and its members will finalize recommendations for the City Council.

During the hearings, the Commission has heard from a variety of community stakeholders. Among them have been representatives from the Chamber of Commerce’s LUCE Subcommittee, who have made various recommendations. These recommendations have also appeared in a series of letters submitted by subcommittee co-Chair Chris Harding, who wrote them on paper containing letterhead from his law firm Harding Larmore Kutcher & Kozal LLP.

Among the recommendation have been calls for tweaks to the restrictions for building heights and floor amounts, increased design flexibility and allowing above-ground commercial development on the boulevards.

In response to these recommendations, a collection of neighborhood groups last week submitted a harsh letter to the Planning Commission and City Council. They asked for commissioners and Council members to reject the recommendations “in their entirety.”

“Harding Larmore is engaging in a blatant attempt to derail the core vision and policies of the LUCE that were shaped over six years by now, at the last moment, rewriting fundamental provisions to favor the firm's developer clients and to overdevelop our City,” the letter states.

The letter went on to state the Chamber’s proposed changes “would necessitate at least another year or more in workshops, followed by costly environmental and traffic studies.”

“It would be unconscionable to allow another year to go by before the City finalizes the LUCE,” the letter states. “To do so would allow the process to be hijacked by special interests and to betray the entire public process -- a process in which residents were asked to have faith over the last six years.”

Harding said in an interview on Thursday that the letter was “pure politics” with no real substance, and the few portions that contained substance were “rhetoric that is demonstrably false.”

He said none of the Chamber’s suggestions would delay the LUCE process. And if it were determined any of them would, he said the Chamber would withdraw those recommendations, and bring them back as amendment proposals to the LUCE at a later time.

Harding also rejected a claim in the letter that the Chamber was offering changes at the last minute, saying that the Chamber has been involved in the LUCE discussion since the process began in 2004. Harding said he was disappointed that the letter writers did not contact him before going to the City.

He specifically called out Diana Gordon, who heads the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City, a group that unsuccessfully tried to put strict limits on Santa Monica development in 2008 through a ballot measure.

“Diana has my phone number,” Harding said. “I’ve had lunch with her. We know each other. We’re not close friends, but we’re cordial. So I was disappointed that in effect there is this move made that was clearly designed to politicize the LUCE and to intimidate the decision-makers into not considering the Chamber’s recommendations.”

Also a matter of contention has been the Chamber’s seeking of advice from architects that sit on the Planning Commission, Hank Koning and Gwynne Pugh. In a recent e-mail from the Neighborhood Council, which represents the City’s neighborhood groups, City Attorney Marsha Moutrie was asked about this potential conflict of interest.

Moutrie responded in an e-mail, which has been posted on the City’s LUCE web site, that the commissioners do not have to recuse themselves from making decisions on the LUCE. But they should disclose what information they gave to the Chamber. Mary Marlow, head of the Ocean Park Association and the person who submitted the e-mail, wrote in an e-mail to The Lookout News that she was satisfied with Moutrie’s conclusion.

Harding said that the Chamber has sought advice on technical issues from a variety of sources, including Ted Winterer, a planning commissioner who is championed by many of the neighborhood activists. As for the architects, he said both Koning and Pugh along with some others were invited to a session to give technical advice. Koning did not attend, but Pugh and other architects did.

Pugh said in an interview on Thursday that what he and the other architects did was give recommendations “very technical in nature.” Rather than suggest a policy issue of how many floors should be allowed in a building, they specified what heights the floors would need to be to make the buildings “effective” if a certain number of floors were selected.

“What we’re saying is if you got four stories and it consists of one level of retail on the ground floor and three levels of residential above, then to get something that’s graceful and effective, you need these kinds of heights,” Pugh said.
He said Harding only served as a “scribe” during the session and did not give any input.