The year just ending saw a civic makeover of sorts in Hermosa Beach. The iconic main drag underwent a complete and sometimes agonizing overhaul, private businesspeople stepped in to run and expand popular community events that City Hall would no longer fund, and a punk fashion landmark closed its doors amid tearful farewells.
The decade was one of resolution for the downtown areas of the three beach cities. In Hermosa Beach the village main drag was remade, in Redondo Beach the harbor area – a de facto downtown – saw its future determined by voters, and in Manhattan Beach a boutique hotel anchored a development that filled a big empty space.
At the beginning of the year, the city found itself without a manager and at the start of an exhaustive, year-long search for a replacement, leaving an interim manager to navigate the city through an investigation into an alleged police hit-and-run cover-up, the reopening of the city’s controversial sand dune, a crackdown on the Six-Man Volleyball Tournament and a last-minute save of the Manhattan Beach Open Volleyball Tournament. [Read More]
The financial picture at the three city halls was colored by the recession that hammered the latter part of the decade. Hermosa Beach watched 15 percent of its workforce disappear in attrition, Redondo Beach laid off workers and persuaded the rest to take pay cuts, and Manhattan Beach lost workers to attrition, but continued to be buoyed by property tax revenues that refused to erode.
