The Hermosa Beach Planning Commission has completed its revisions to the draft of PLAN Hermosa, its General Plan and Local Coastal Program, and recommended Monday that the City Council adopt the plan and associated environmental impact documents.
The decision caps years of work by nearly every department of the city government, and a lengthy resident involvement process. But it also exposed deep resistance in the community to some of the more progressive goals the plan initially embodied. And while that resistance significantly influenced the version of the plan that the council will encounter, the ultimate fate and shape of the plan are still to be determined.
Monday’s unanimous Planning Commission vote advances the city’s revised plan and coastal program to the council further discussion and eventually a vote. The timeline for approval is not yet determined, but the public will have a chance to weigh in at a City Council study session on April 20.
If recent gatherings are any indication, the session will be a lively one. The vast majority of the plan has gone uncommented upon, and many residents have praised its aspirational features. But others have been so upset as to question why the project is being done in the first place.
The project’s urgency, officials say, comes from the fact that many parts of the city code governing land use are long out of date. Some of these anachronisms are merely humorous. In an interview, Mayor pro tem Jeff Duclos said that, when he recently consulted the code to research statutes governing parking by the beach, he found a provision that mentioned the tethering of horses.
Others have more tangible impacts. The city’s decision last year to prohibit short-term rentals in residential areas — itself a product of the general plan process — hit a legal snag when two lawsuits disputed the city’s position that existing code already prohibited the practice. (One of the lawsuits has been dismissed, and the other is pending.) The city has acknowledged that home-sharing websites like Airbnb and VRBO made the existing ordinance difficult to enforce.
The other primary benefit to the process will be in securing approval of a Local Coastal Program or LCP. Hermosa, like nearly three dozen other coastal cities in California, does not have any approved LCP, so coastal development permits still come from the state body.
According to City Environmental Analyst Leanne Singleton, the process creates added cost, delays, and confusion for people hoping to do projects in Hermosa.
“Right now, developers interact with local staff and get conceptual approval. Then they have to go to the Coastal Commission down in Long Beach,” she said. “Then the commission staff comes back to us with questions about things written in the ‘80s.”
Shaping PLAN Hermosa began as far back as 2013, with a community meeting attended by hundreds of people. Other periodic outreach efforts, including walking tours of the city, helped elected officials cobble together priorities that would guide city staff in producing the document.
A draft of the plan was released in December 2015, but the project did not begin to garner significant public attention until this February. Various residents and businesses called attention to provisions of the plan and aspects of associated environmental documents that they said posed fundamental threats to quality of life in Hermosa. The plan’s approach to two issues in particular — greenhouse gas emissions and historic preservation — have been most significantly altered by this reaction.
The initial draft of PLAN Hermosa called for achieving city-wide carbon neutrality by 2040. Worries about the sacrifices required to get there, many of them based on city projections for an alternative goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030, motivated many residents. But alongside practical concerns, many residents expressed hostility to the very idea of Hermosa as a bastion of progressive environmentalism.
“I have zero interest in Hermosa Beach becoming carbon neutral and even less interest in Hermosa Beach becoming Santa Monica South,” said resident Marvin Collins during one of the six Planning Commission meetings
These concerns ultimately swayed commissioners to jettison the carbon neutrality goal in favor of one of “low carbon,” meeting California’s state guidelines for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Duclos said he closely followed the planning commission process and noted that, for many people, speaking out at the plan marked their first time ever appearing at a city meeting. While he appreciated the input the community had provided, he said the project’s complexity made it a challenging introduction to the work of local government. Nonetheless, he argued, the changes were also an indication that the system was working.
“Our job is to let the process run its course: hear what people have to say, then deliberate. That’s the way its supposed to work,” Duclos said.
The passive approach produced even more anxiety, however, in the area of historic preservation. State law requires cities to evaluate the impact of major projects, such as a general plan update, on historic resources. So in 2014, the city conducted a “windshield survey” of properties, finding 218 parcels, most of them residential, with potential historic significance.
The list was hardly a secret; an Easy Reader reader article from October 2015 discussed the windshield survey and Existing Conditions report. But as the Planning Commission prepared to discuss PLAN Hermosa in February, local realtors and developers contacted the owners of the parcels, warning them that their property values could be endangered. Property owners turned out in droves.
“For those 218 people who for a period of time were uncertain what was going to happen with their property values: I watched what was happening as people came to the podium and it was hard to watch. I want you to know, all of you property owners, that I am so sorry that you had to go through that,” said Councilmember Carolyn Petty said at a Feb. 28 council meeting.
Adrian Scott Fine, director of advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy, said windshield surveys are common practice for cities attempting to catalog potentially significant locations. As with Hermosa’s survey, they typically have no legal impact.
“A survey is kind of the first step. It’s assessing what it has in terms of historic resources. It is a basic and good planning practice to test the waters and see what it has,” Fine said. He added that studies in regions throughout the country indicate that property values of designated parcels or historic districts tend to match or exceed those that go undesignated.
Commissioners again bowed to public feeling, pouring over the plan and associated documents with a jeweler’s loupe to remove any reference to the list. The plan also modifies existing code provisions that allow the city to designate properties as historic over an owner’s objection.
When asked why he thought the plan produced such strong reactions despite the extensive outreach involved in crafting it, Duclos became reflective. He said that the city “could have done a better job along the way” in explaining the process, but also tied the reaction to broader political phenomena. In the city’s ongoing search for a city manager, council members have had discussions with officials throughout the country, who have experienced similarly surprising blowback.
Using terms that political commentators have employed to analyze the unexpected victory of President Donald Trump, Duclos said he has detected both a rising lack of civility and a “general lack of trust of any institution, especially government.”
“The atmosphere has completely changed,” he said.
