by Mark McDermott
A permanent plan for outdoor dining was presented to the City Council last week that would extend sidewalks in the downtown and North Manhattan Beach business districts. But the plan arrived without a price tag, and the Council deferred making a decision until City staff can provide a cost estimate.
“I want to know what this is going to cost and how we are going to pay for it,” said Councilperson Steve Napolitano. “Because the rest is just an academic exercise. We can draw pretty pictures and maps and do all of these things, but the bottom line is what it costs and how we are going to pay for it. Because nothing happens without funding.”
The plan was proposed by the Outdoor Dining Task Force, a 15-member group that includes residents, business owners, and representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, the North Manhattan Business Improvement District, and the Downtown Business and Professional Association. The group met nine times since last May. Additionally, city staff conducted public input, including a community workshop at the Hometown Fair in October, and extensive outreach to walk street residents who would be most impacted by increased outdoor dining.
The implementation of an outdoor dining program grew out of emergency measures taken during the pandemic. A temporary outdoor dining program was launched in June 2020 in an effort to help restaurants whose indoor dining had been shuttered due to Covid-19. The City of Manhattan Beach at the time was at the forefront of allowing outdoor dining in areas it had not previously existed. The Council at that time defied LA County Health Department regulations by declaring the City-owned outdoor spaces adjacent to restaurants to be “parklets” in an effort to help local restaurants survive.
“I had what some may call the honor of being the mayor during Covid, when it started, the first ten months,” said Councilperson Richard Montgomery. “And if there was a silver lining to Covid at all — a big if — it was watching the city react to ‘How do we save our restaurants?’….We were shooting on the fly, I’ll admit it. We didn’t know how to do it. There was no book out there to follow, no city we could look at and say, ‘What are they doing?’”
The state and the county eventually enacted emergency outdoor dining programs, and Manhattan Beach at one point closed downtown streets to allow even more outdoor dining. Temporary decks were erected near restaurants both downtown in North Manhattan Beach. Diners flocked to the new outdoor dining areas, a rare instance of conviviality during the darkest days of the pandemic, and a rallying point for the community. And it worked: the city lost very few restaurants during the pandemic.
The decks came down last February when the state of emergency was officially declared over. But the council, recognizing the popularity of the “al fresco” dining areas that many compared to that of European cities, made a priority of exploring a more permanent but less invasive way of allowing outdoor dining. Many downtown residents had complained of the impacts of the expanded dining areas, including noise, traffic, public nuisance issues, and the cluttered aesthetics of the decks. Residents and some other downtown businesses also complained about parking impacts.
The Outdoor Dining Task Force attempted to address these concerns in two ways. By expanding sidewalks by four to eight feet and implementing angled parking, building cumbersome decks would not be necessary, and parking would be less impacted. And after taking input from walk street residents, the notion of dining areas on the commercial corners of walk streets was scuttled — except, potentially, on 10th Street and Manhattan Avenue, which is not residential-adjacent.
Mayor Joe Franklin said the avoidance of building decks was one of the most attractive aspects of the plan.
“It looks terrific,” he said. “Not using decks, that’s a huge thing.”
The task force’s recommendations included a range of options, from maintaining the status quo to only adding public-serving “flex spaces” in some areas that would not include public dining, or, finally, to expand sidewalks in order to allow more outdoor dining.
The issue of 10th street drew some public ire, as well as support. The conceptual plan included the option of making the area — which is unusual not only in not having residences but also because it has more public space than any other walk street — either public serving “flex space” with amenities such as benches and bike racks, or allowing the Uncorked wine shop to use that area for tasting tables.
Planning director Talyn Mirzakhanian told the council the plan in general was embraced by the California Coastal Commission, the state agency that maintains oversight of development in coastal areas. The flex space in particular, she said, aligned with the commission’s “preferred use of public spaces that benefit the public in terms of coastal access and recreational opportunities.”
George Kaufman, who lives across Manhattan Avenue on the 100 block of 10th Street, called the inclusion of the area “a stab in the back” after the task force had indicated it would not include walk streets in its recommendations.
“This is not a proper use of our block,” he said. “We’ve lived for 35 years in this location. We’ve relied on the sanctity of the walk streets, the quietness and the non-use. We don’t want end runs around the no commercial use with the flex areas.”
Another 10th Street resident, Jeff Le Sage, expressed support for Uncorked specifically and outdoor dining generally. He said most residents, both on walk streets and throughout the broader community, embraced the increased vitality downtown that occurred during the pandemic.
“What outdoor dining does is increase community,” he said.
The Council essentially tabled discussion of 10th Street and focused on the larger issue of expanded sidewalks and their cost. Mirzakhanian said that the reason cost estimates were not included was that staff wanted to first see if the council approved of the idea sidewalk expansion before expanding further resources to find out how much it would cost. Also missing from this step would be the cost to restaurants. Early in the pandemic, that cost was largely subsidized by the City at $1 per square foot, which eventually increased to $3. The handful of restaurants with pre-existing approval for outdoor dining spaces on public land are paying $4 per sq. ft.
One of the recommendations under consideration was an expansion of the scope of work for the IMG consultant group, which would cost $92,000 and include civil engineering plans of sidewalk expansion and its cost, including any utility reconfigurations that may be necessary.
“We were trying to be a little bit budget friendly in that sense, which is why we didn’t do all of that work and expend all of those resources in advance,” Mirzakhanian said. “That is the next step.”
The council’s institutional knowledge came into play. Napolitano recalled the City’s “Dream it, plan it, build it” motto of the early aughts, in which a lot of resources were spent envisioning projects, most of which never came to fruition.
“[It] was a complete failure because by the time the price tag came, nobody said we’re going to do anything,” he said. “And that’s happened several times over for different projects. So I’d like to know what that scheme is before going any further with this, because I don’t see the point of spending another $90,000 on consultants to come up with it. We should be able to ballpark which sidewalks will cost through Public Works.”
Public Works director Erick Lee said that though he has not been involved with the issue as much as the planning department, his department could come up with a rough estimate.
“We are not envisioning hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Lee said. “What I would envision is in the order of millions of dollars. I just want to make sure that perspective is in the council’s mind.”
Napolitano, independent of this issue, said he had long advocated expanding sidewalks downtown. He believed an earlier estimate was $1 million per block.
“I would like more details on that before we say, yes, let’s just do this. Plan away,” he said. “And then we come back with a $100 million price tag.”
Montgomery, who was also on the council at the time of “Dream It, plan it, build it,” said that actually the new public library came out of that process.
“But this is different,” he said. “This all happened because of Covid. We saw what happened. We didn’t realize at the time, how well [outdoor dining] would take off, how well it would be accepted. So the question became, to this council, do you want to push the idea forward?”
The council voted unanimously to direct staff to perform a cost estimate before revisiting the issue. ER
