Hermosa Beach Coastal Commission okays permit for North School
A rendering of the North School campus. Image courtesy Hermosa Beach City School District
The California Coastal Commission approved a permit for Hermosa’s North School earlier this month, clearing the way for the Hermosa Beach City School District to begin construction on the campus.
The commission’s vote was unanimous, but the final tally concealed deeper divisions that mirrored local disagreements that have troubled efforts to reopen the school for the last five years. Just before the vote to approve the school’s Coastal Development Permit, a motion to delay the decision for further study until the commission’s September meeting in Newport Beach, failed 6-5.
As in Hermosa Beach, the issue that nearly derailed the project was traffic. Several commissioners expressed concern that the proposed layout of the school would burden and congest the narrow streets that surround the North campus. But these doubts were ultimately not significant enough, or not sufficiently related to the commission’s mission of enforcing the Coastal Act, to stop the body from providing a permit for the school.
In California, projects within the “coastal zone” — roughly all land 1000 yards landward of the mean high-tide line, an area which includes North — must obtain a Coastal Development Permit. Hermosa does not have an approved Local Coastal Program, a planning document that gives cities the ability to interpret the act and award coastal permits, so the district’s application came before the commission. Commissioners are supposed to review developments for consistency with the act, which protects beach access, coastal views, water quality, and related issues.
Several of the commissioners said that temporary parking prohibitions in spaces surrounding the completed campus — between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., and between 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. on school days, the hours when parents are expected to drop off and pick-up children who do not walk or bike to campus — could impair beachgoers from getting to the ocean. But the majority were ultimately persuaded by the commission’s staff, who said that the traffic impacts the project could create were not sufficient to create a coastal access issue, pointing out that the parking impacts fell outside of summer and the weekends times, when demand among visitors to Hermosa’s beaches is greatest.
“I don’t really see a Coastal Act impact. Is there a traffic impact? Yes. But I feel like the school district has set up a mechanism to resolve traffic impacts with neighbors,” said Commissioner Donne Brownsey, just before voting against the motion to delay awarding the permit.
The mechanism Brownsey referred to was an agreement reached in late February between the city and the district. The agreement, reached after tense debate earlier this year when the city of Hermosa was considering challenging the Hermosa school board’s approval of the Environmental Impact Report, calls for splitting the cost of a traffic consultant, creating a traffic management plan, and holding meetings with residents living in the neighborhood.
But several commissioners and Hermosa residents, some of whom traveled nearly 200 miles to appear at the commission’s meeting in San Luis Obispo, were concerned that the agreement lacked the “teeth” needed to ensure that parking and traffic issues were satisfactorily resolved. Like all other school districts throughout the state, Hermosa has final permitting authority for projects on its campus; the city of Hermosa only has permitting control issues related to public rights of way and city streets.
The similarity of concerns raised by the commission minority and those previously brought up by Hermosa residents was not a coincidence. Before beginning deliberations, commissioners announced whether they had participated in any ex parte discussions on the issue. Commissioners Roberto Uranga and Erik Howell said that they had spoken with members of Safe School Solutions, a group formed by residents concerned about the neighborhood impacts, including Scott Davey, Ira Ellman and Marie Rice. According to a disclosure form filed by Commissioner Steve Padilla, he and a staff member had a 20 minute phone call with Davey and Rice at the beginning of the month.
In recent years, coastal advocates have criticized ex parte communications with commissioners out of concern that developers could use them to unfairly sway a decision; in one case, the Los Angeles Times reported that a commissioner went backstage at a U2 concert while The Edge, the band’s guitarist, had an application pending for a massive complex of private homes proposed for a hillside overlooking the Malibu Pier. The controversy prompted the state to impose new disclosure requirements, and only about half of the commissioners currently accept ex parte communications at all; all three who did on the North issue voted for the initial motion to delay the project.
Davey also spoke during the commission’s public comment period, warning about the impacts the loss of parking could create. Having spent decades working for the Los Angeles County Lifeguards, Davey noted that the beach just west of North had become popular enough in recent years for lifeguards to add a new tower, and said that dropoff hours at the school coincided with those of surfers trying to catch good morning conditions. Davey presented engineering schematics for two possible alternative campus layouts that would include onsite pickup and dropoff, an option long sought by residents living nearby that could alleviate parking issues.
Nathan Herrero, an architect with SVA, the firm handling North’s rebuild, said, as he had during local discussions over the approval of North’s EIR, that onsite dropoff options had been considered, but were deemed incompatible with student safety and district priorities. Commission staff deferred to the district’s assessment, but not all commissioners agreed
“Well, I think it could be worked out,” Uranga said at one point, flinging his hands into the air.
Weighing on the commission’s decision was the impact that a delay would have. Superintendent Pat Escalante said that construction costs were forecasted to increase rapidly, and that the coastal development permit was the last thing that the district needed to begin work at North. (Michael Liang, assistant deputy director with the office of public affairs for the state’s Department of General Services, confirmed that the campus had secured all needed permits from the Division of the State Architect.)
The commission sometimes imposes costly delays on projects from private developers, and some were ready to do the same with North, to provide time to address concerns from the neighborhood. But in a moment of candor, Terry Tao, an attorney representing the district, told commissioners that, “I’m not convinced that you’re going to get consensus.”
“This district is very unusual. I represent school districts, primarily on issues of facilities, up and down the coast of Southern California. This district seems to get sued on just about every project,” he said.