Court Upholds Preferential Parking Zone

By Elizabeth Schneider

August 29 -- The California Court of Appeal on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling that the City had the right to establish a 28-block preferential parking zone east of Downtown without conducting an environmental study.

The lawsuit, filed by land use attorney Chris Harding on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce's Santa Monica Automobile Dealers Association, claimed that under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), public projects are subject to the same level of scrutiny as private projects. It also claimed that an EIR is legally required whenever a fair argument can be made that a project may have a significant effect on the environment.

The City countered that preferential parking zones are categorically exempt under CEQA regulations and cited a statutory exemption for "existing facilities," including "highways and streets."

"Preferential parking zones involve only the issuance of permits for the use of an existing public street and include negligible or no expansion of this existing use," said a City staff report recommending the zone. "The proposed project will not result in an increase in the number of cars in the designated streets."

Appellate Court Judge Walter Croskey agreed with the City. Echoing a June 2001 lower court ruling, he struck down the chamber's argument that while the CEQA exemption might apply to individual permits, it did not cover a broad permitting scheme such as a preferential zone, which has significant "cumulative impacts."

The exemption, he said, "specifically states that it is applicable to activities involving the operation of existing public facilities, and that is exactly what the legislation here involves."

Harding said he was disappointed with Thursday's ruling. "It's unfortunate the case went the way it did," he said.

The City Attorneys office could not be reached for comment, but Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown called the Court of Appeals decision "a victory for our neighborhoods."

"When people who live in Santa Monica can't park close to home to carry in their groceries, because expanding businesses have filled their streets with employee parking, it's the residents who come first," McKeown said. "The Chamber was wrong to sue the City for protecting residents."

According to Harding, the decision to file the suit came only after the City refused to compromise with local businesses impacted by the new zone, which would be enforced from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week.

"The city's unwillingness to sit down and dialogue" with those who raised concerns over the preferential parking zone, Harding said, reaffirms the City's "continued hostility towards local businesses for the past number of years.

"We tried to persuade the City to work with us, but they were never willing to do so," Harding said. He added that his clients were not entirely opposed to the creation of the zone: "They only asked that it be structured in a way which would work for everybody."

For example, he said, the City could have chosen to expanded the supply of parking by creating diagonal parking spaces on one side of wider streets -- such as 9th, 10th or 12th streets, which would increase the number of parking spaces "by dozens."

The City also could have allowed limited parking during business hours, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. "when residents tend to be away at work or school," said Harding. "Or they could provide permits for local employees who work in the area and have difficulty finding a place to park. Those are two avenues they could have pursued."

The issue may be far from settled. The chamber can appeal the case to the state Supreme Court, Harding said, an option "they will be considering within the next week."