By Jonathan Friedman
Lookout Staff

April 9, 2010 --Approximately 100 City officials, activists and development interests attended a Planning Commission workshop on Wednesday at Lincoln Middle School to discuss the draft update to the General Plan’s Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE).

A second workshop will take place later this month or possibly early next month, and then the document goes to the Planning Commission later in May for hearings. The LUCE must eventually get approval by the City Council, which will have the ability to tweak it. City officials are hoping to get the document finalized by mid-summer.

The LUCE, which the City has been working on since 2004, is being updated for the first time since 1984. It establishes the land use and traffic vision for the next two decades in Santa Monica.

Many people have praised the document for its call for neighborhood preservation and its goal for “no net new evening peak period vehicle trips.” But the LUCE has its critics who consider it commercial development friendly and question its actual ability to curb traffic increases.

Planning Commissioner Ted Winterer, a leader of Santa Monica’s slow growth advocates who is planning for a second City Council run this fall, called the LUCE a “terrific document” overall.

“I am very excited we’re finally going to get this thing done and start moving on with this,” Winterer said. “Because I know a lot of people have some issues with this document. I have some problems myself. But there is so much in here that is better than the existing General Plan we have that we should really get behind this thing.”

Planning Commissioner Gwynne Pugh, who is an architect, praised the document for being “holistic.” “Do we like all the bits? No,” he said.

“But the moment we start pulling at the threads, it’s going to start unraveling on us. So we can’t just say ‘hey fix this’ without looking at the consequences of everything else.”

Several members of the public commented on the document, most of them providing criticism. Gary Gordon, head of the Main Street Business Improvement Association, rejected the LUCE’s description of Main Street as “primarily a local-serving shopping district serving the Ocean Park neighborhood.”

“This isn’t true,” said Gordon, who said the number of visitors is divided evenly among locals, those from the region and tourists.

“If a person not familiar with Main Street were to read the document and begin to make land use decisions without going to investigate that it is actually a regional shopping area, then they might look and see all the traffic and go, ‘gee if this area just serves Ocean Park, why is there so much traffic? We’ve got to get people on bicycles. We’ve got to get people walking,’” Gordon said.

He continued, “We could get everybody in Ocean Park to bike and walk and it wouldn’t solve the problem because you’ve left out two-thirds of the people. There has to be an integration that puts economic development within the forefront of these discussions for the LUCE planning. I’ve been asking for this for a couple years, and it just really hasn’t happened.”

Zina Josephs, president of Friends of Sunset Park, criticized the traffic analysis in the LUCE’s draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) as “questionable.”

The draft EIR was released earlier this year and received numerous comments during the 45-day public review period. Responses to those questions will be included in the final EIR, which is expected to be released in “a couple weeks,” Planning and Community Development Director Eileen Fogarty told the meeting attendees.

"There has to be an integration that puts economic development within the forefront of these discussions for the LUCE planning."
         GaryGordon   

“I am very excited we’re finally going to get this thing done and start moving on with this,”
        Ted Winterer