Hermosa’s endless summer construction

Illustration by Keith Robinson

In mid-January, workers broke ground on one of Hermosa Beach’s most ambitious construction projects, the redesign of Pier Avenue – the city’s main drag. The plans call for wider sidewalks, new landscaping, generous green areas at the corners of large intersections, a revamped storm drain system, and a median.

City officials are looking forward to a pedestrian-friendly downtown destination, as are the owners of the avenue’s many shops, restaurants and salons.

But meanwhile, construction is driving away customers, causing sales to fall as much as 30 percent at some businesses, owners said.

As the work threatens to continue through the summer, when tourists and beachgoers are counted on to fill the storefronts, some of the businesspeople believe the brief peak of their money-making year will get drowned in the rumble of heavy machinery and the ding-ding of backup bells. This is why they’re looking for heavy equipment transportation that can transfer equipment earlier as to not disturb the community.

City officials this week estimated that the project would be completed Aug. 18, a month later than the initial target date and nine days before Labor Day Weekend brings an end to summer.

 Frowns and smiles

In interviews Friday, 17 business owners along Pier Avenue offered various reactions to the construction.

Many reported sagging sales, but some said their businesses had not suffered much, or even at all, as construction equipment stood in the center of the roadway and some precious parking spaces were temporarily lost.

Business owners on the westernmost stretch of the avenue complained that the first section of the project dragged on too long outside their doors. Construction was slowed when the contractor found underground utility structures that forced workers to trench down six feet deeper than planned to lay a new storm drain.

Although the contractor’s phased work schedule was designed to concentrate the inconvenience on small areas of the avenue at a time, many businesspeople saw the hurt applying the full length of the avenue.

They said customers saw the construction equipment and simply decided to stay away from the entire avenue.

Some promotion-minded business owners reacted to the construction by launching a “First Thursdays” event at which they’ll stay open late and offer enticements such as food samples, discounts, gift bags, art exhibits and live music (see About Town column, page 14).

 Best of times, worst of times

The variety of the business owners’ viewpoints was highlighted by two neighboring salons in a beauty-row section on the north side of the street.

Michelle Hart, who has owned the Maximus Salon with her husband Ed for 25 years, said prospective customers have stopped strolling the avenue.

“There is no foot traffic. Walk-ins are down 75 percent – just gone, disappeared. They are just putting people out of business and this is not what they were promising,” she said.

“There was the economy first, and now people are just staying away from Hermosa Beach.”

Hart was among those who called for some parking relief.

“They don’t even give away parking for the customers. They are going around giving everyone tickets,” she said.

“They promised this would be phased in, and they’re phasing out the businesses.”

Hart doubted the project would end Aug. 18.

“That date has been postponed once,” she said. “It will probably take until the end of the year. This is a big project.”

Asked if Maximus would still be in business, she said, “I hope so.”

At the neighboring Mimosa salon, manager Rose Daneshmand described a completely different experience.

She said her business was “not at all” down.

“We have a loyal client base, and I haven’t noticed a change in walk-ins,” she said.

Daneshmand said her patrons complain about a lack of parking, but that’s not new.

“They say ‘There’s no parking, I got a ticket.’ That’s normal,” she said.

She also described herself as “really excited” about the anticipated outcome of the project.

“I’m gung ho about the changes,” she said.

 ‘Land mines’

At Java Man coffeehouse, owner Rick Hankus said his sales have dipped in the area of 30 percent. “No matter how good the coffee is, if I was a customer I don’t think I would want to take my life into my hands by parking on the other side and then zigzagging through all the land mines to get here,” he said.

“It’s so loud. It’s like being in a war zone,” he said.

“If you can avoid Pier Avenue, do it – I think that is what people are thinking,” he said.

“And I’m worried about summertime, because that’s when the tourists come, and people come down to go to the beach,” he said.

Hankus was critical of early delays in the project that have contributed to keeping the thrust of the construction near his business since January. But he said he is “totally behind the project,” just the same.

“It’s going to be great when it’s finished, that’s what I keep telling everybody,” he said.

“I’ve been here 17 years, I’m going to be here when it’s done,” Hankus said.

But he worries that some of the small businesses and recent start-ups might not make it through the construction.

 ‘The mindset’

Christina Carano of Planet Earth Eco Café said business was down since the heavy machinery came to roost in her part of the street.

“For the last two weeks I noticed it,” she said. “Our numbers have been way down, and I think it’s the construction.”

Carano turned to a computer screen, looked at her receipts, and found they had dropped about 30 percent over the two weeks.

She said customers might believe that the avenue is too inconvenient to drive, but the perception might be worse than the reality.

“It’s the mindset – ‘I just don’t want to chance it,’” she said.

Carano said customers’ main complaint was the noise, but she also looked ahead to a period of lost parking directly out front, when the construction spearhead moves her way.

“So far it hasn’t been that hard,” she said.

Carano already had taken steps to save money because of the recession, bringing in a vegan raw food chef who shares rent while he cooks inside the building.

 Blame game

Mohammad Seraj, owner of The Bike Shop, said, “It’s a little slower, but we accept that.”

He also said the economy and “tax time” for his customers might have dampened sales.

“It’s not fair to blame everything just on the street,” he said.

Seraj also said it would cause him some concern to see the construction continue through the summer, and said “we’ll see” if it will affect his bottom line when he takes his turn losing parking out front.

He said he believes the project will “pay off” upon completion.

 ‘Tough year’

John Leininger, 30-year manager of the 4,200 square-foot Becker’s Surfboards, shook his head at reduced sales, traffic backups and temporary detours on the avenue.

“I haven’t run the numbers, but business is definitely off. It’s definitely affecting us,” he said.

“From the top of the street it looks like you can’t get down here half the time,” he said. “It would be nice if the city gave the customers free parking. Maybe it wouldn’t do a lot, but it might do something.”

He also looked ahead to his turn for lost parking spots.

“It’s going to be worse when they start doing the sidewalks here,” he said.

He crossed his fingers for what is normally his busiest season.

“It’s been a tough year, and this is the time we really have to do business,” he said, referring to spring and summer.

 ‘Master plan’

At the 650 square-foot Bottle Worx, where the stock comes from boutique wineries and micro-breweries, owners Lara Sowinki and Cynthia McCann painted a rosier picture: no significant slump in sales, plenty of continued business from locals who walk to the store.

“They see it the way we do, it’s a temporary inconvenience,” Sowinksi said.

“When it’s done I think people will want to come and take a look at the beautiful downtown Hermosa Beach,” she said.

“It’s a master plan to attract people down to Pier Avenue,” she said, envisioning people having dinner, window shopping, stopping for coffee.

“It would be nice if this would become a destination,” she said. “We need more than just bars.”

 Thinking globally

Lori and Will Ford of the 16-month-old Gum Tree café and gift shop said the café business was down about 25 percent. The cluttered sight and loud sounds of the avenue dissuade patrons from using their front patio.

A banner out front advised, “We’re open during pier construction! Think globally, shop and eat locally.”

Lori Ford, spearhead of First Thursdays, said customers believe they can’t drive and park on the avenue, but she believes the drivers’ perception is worse than the reality.

Still, she looked down from her windows upon an inconvenient route to her business.

There was no westbound left turn onto Monterey, just below her. She said some customers “just turned right and went to Manhattan Beach” instead.

And she looked across the street to Java Man coffeehouse, where the parking was gone.

“Pretty soon that will happen to us. There will be no parking on our side of the street,” she said.

Ford remained supportive of the construction project itself, however.

“It’s going to be amazing when they’re done,” she said. “We will make it through this no matter what we have to do…We believe in Hermosa and we think this project will be amazing.”

 Philosophical look

A co-owner of Re:Style, who goes by just Rodge, was keeping a stuff upper lip.

He did not know how much of his own slump he could blame on the construction.

“It certainly hasn’t helped, but with the economy as sh***y as it is you can’t tell,” he said.

He said you could look at the double whammy of the economy and the construction as adding “insult to injury.” On the other hand, he said, with business down anyway, why not get the construction over with when it’s not disrupting brisk sales.

“If it has to be done it might as well be done now,” he said.

He said the noise and dirt and vibration of the work had created a nuisance for a time at the funky building that used to house Either/Or bookstore.

“When they first dug up the middle of the road, it was harsh,” he said. “In this bloody old building stuff literally vibrated off the shelves. But you can’t expect them to do it another way. If you have to dig a hole, you have to dig a hole.”

Rodge looked forward to the completion of the project, saying the newness of the rebuilt avenue would help attract the public.

“It’s going to look better than it did. Maybe it will draw people along the whole length of Pier,” he said.

Asked about summer construction, Rodge refused to stress out.

“We’d like it to be done tomorrow, but you’ve got to be realistic,” he said.

 Summer feeling

Ani Lane, manager of Splashin Boutique located in the same funky building as Re:Style, said business is off.

“It’s been very slow,” she said.

“Customers will say ‘I couldn’t find parking so I just left.’ Every day I hear that twice or three times,” she said.

She added that cold April weather might have played a part in slow sales as well.

Adam Braun, manager of The Coastal Connection, which opened in November to sell clothing, skate boards and art supplies, said business was slow.

“We saw sales going up monthly, then it dropped off when the construction started,” he said.

He estimated the sales decline at 25 percent.

Braun did not like the prospect of summer construction.

“It would be pretty bad, because we rely on summer sales,” he said.

Outside, his parking was temporarily gone while work was being done on the sidewalk.

Alex Capo, a manager at Los Muchachos restaurant said people were dodging parking tickets outside her business.

“People are getting more food to go because there’s no parking. They just park illegally and grab food to go,” she said.

“It’s annoying, mostly,” she said of the construction. “It feels like they’re taking their time. I feel like they’re going to drag this through the summer, and that’s bad for all of us.”

 ‘It was time’

At Hibachi Teriyaki Grill, where street parking had disappeared as workers remade the sidewalk, curb and gutter, business was down about 10 percent said co-owner Bob Ellings.

But he remained sanguine.

“We’ve been here eight years and the locals really know about us and patronize us. We don’t rely on tourists and people from out of the area. A lot of people walk here.”

His business stands near the westernmost edge of the avenue, where construction was slowed by the deeper trenching. His parking had been gone for more than a month.

“The biggest thing that’s needed is parking,” he said.

But the hurt is not limited to the areas of concentrated construction, Ellings said.

“I think this does affect the whole street,” he said. “I think people stay away until the project is finished.”

Still, he supports the project, and not just because he will no longer have to throw sandbags in front of his door when rainwater overwhelms the storm drains and floods his stretch of sidewalk.

“I’ve been a Hermosa resident over 35 years, and as a resident, this street needed to be fixed. It was time,” he said.

“Coming off a recession, the timing is tough,” he said. “It’s a necessary evil. I think once it is completed it is going to represent our city well. Just getting through it is the pain.”

He said his customers continue to debate whether the project was a good idea in the first place.

“Most are optimistic about it,” he said. “Some want Hermosa to stay like it always has been. I’m not of that mind. I want to see the city progress, and become even better than it was.”

 I will survive

Across the street, owner Gina Rothwell of Sol-Baby said nearby locals are patronizing the shop as much as usual, but people are reluctant to drive there.

Her year-to-date comparison is limited to the month of April for now. She opened in April 2009, and saw business drop 10 percent in April 2010.

And she did not look forward to work crews taking away her immediate parking.

“I don’t think I’ve seen the worst of it,” she said.

Still, she saw her business poised to reap the benefits of the new and improved upper Pier Avenue, as long as they remain in business.

“I hope we’re all still here,” she said. “People don’t come to a town just to see new sidewalks and trees.”

For her part, “I will stay afloat no matter what it takes,” she said.

 Forewarned

Looking back, it should have been clear the big makeover project would probably last through all, or almost all, of the summer.

Construction projects notoriously fail to hit their target dates, and large projects “never” do, the city’s public works director said. Work gets rained out some days, even in Southern California. What’s more, unexpected hurdles are all but certain to pop up.

Previously in Hermosa, a refurbishing of the city pier and construction of the Pier Plaza stretched on long past their initial completion dates.

On upper Pier Avenue, the project’s initial completion date, July 15, would have seen it continuing through half of the summer, if no rain fell and no unexpected hurdles appeared. But delays were foretold on Dec. 8, 2009, when the City Council awarded the construction contract to get the ball rolling.

City Manager Steve Burrell presaged the inevitable in remarks to the council shortly before the contract was awarded.

“Quite often we’ll find that when they start digging, say for the trench to put the storm drain in, they’ll find additional pipes or concrete structures or other things that we have not identified on the original plans, and they have to be removed,” Burrell advised.

Public Works Director Rick Morgan told the council the plan to phase the work up and down the avenue had already added two months to the initial completion schedule.

“There’s a cost to it, if not in money in time,” he said.

Morgan told the council, “The goal is to have this project wrapped up by the summer, when the public comes out in hoards.”

But he also said the project could “take much longer.”

By mid-April the project had fallen 16 days behind the completion schedule, partly because of rain, but mostly because workers had to trench so much deeper, in shifting sand, to lay a section of the storm drain, just as Burrell had foretold.

Following the rain and trenching delays, the contractor, Pima Construction, had crews working on Saturday to try to make up lost time and get back on schedule. And while city officials believe the hoariest part of the project – on the avenue’s tricky westernmost slope – is over, history indicates further obstacles will arise.

A large construction project is a fluid work in progress. For instance, Morgan said the contractor is seeking a deadline extension to install extra decorative elements, which were requested mid-project by the council.

“The council doesn’t want an extension, and I’m trying to get my contractor to accept that. Who knows how that will go.”

Under the contract with Pima, the city can charge the contractor $2,500 a day for unjustified delays once the project is over. But aside from that, Morgan has little clout as he works to hold the contractor to his schedule. Even the selection of the contractor is dictated to city officials by laws requiring competitive bidding, with the lowest qualified bidder getting the job.

Contractors say they have a built-in incentive to work as quickly as possible: they don’t get paid extra to work past a project’s completion date, but they do have to continue paying their workers.

City officials secured $4.2 million in federal and state grants to fund the project. To get it they had to award a construction contract by the end of 2009. In the construction world, where the prices of materials can rise and fall substantially, the bids by competing companies are only valid for a three-month period.

So officials hustled to launch the project as soon as they could, and tried to beat the odds and finish by mid-summer.

 Crossing fingers

This week they were crossing their fingers for an Aug. 18 finish, which Morgan described as tentative.

Councilman Kit Bobko, the original spearhead of the Pier Avenue makeover plan, said Pima Construction is “known in the industry as being very good at making up time.”

“At this stage I don’t think I would lay odds on July, but I am hoping it gets done by August. We want it to end as quickly as possible,” he said.

Mayor Michael DiVirgilio said he is “cautiously optimistic” about an Aug. 18 completion.

He said he watched 20 or 30 workers on the job last Saturday, a workday added to the schedule to make up lost time.

“When I see that at 4 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, that leaves me thinking they’re doing everything they can,” he said.

DiVirgilio said he believes the project will conclude “some time in August,” but not before.

“I’m confident that the extra effort is going to keep us from more delays, but it’s not going to pull the schedule in,” he said.

“As I’m learning, things come up [in construction]. It is complex, tough work,” he said.

Councilman Jeff Duclos was not happy with delays in the project, but he also said it is important not to sacrifice quality to speed the project.

“My biggest concern is that when projects are tightly funded and scheduled, and ambitious like this one is, that corners are cut,” he said. “We have one bite of the apple to do this, and the quality, the finishing, the details of the work are absolutely critical to get that right, and not take any shortcuts.”

 Facing forward

Bobko, who attends regular meetings with avenue business owners, said they have asked for a better way to get information on the projects’ progress, upcoming traffic detours, and which portions of the avenue are next to lose parking spots.

“The main thing I hear is that business owners feel they don’t have somewhere go keep up to date with what is going on,” Bobko said.

He said the city website is not doing the job.

“It won’t shock you when I say the city is not cutting-edge with its I.T.,” Bobko said. “We try really hard, but sometimes I feel we’re using the best East German technology available.”

Creating an updated web presence is among the council’s goals, “we just are not there yet,” he said.

He turned to local business consultant Josh Ochs, owner of Media Leaders, who said he would pitch in to help city officials communicate through Facebook, Twitter and emails. He said about 75 percent of Hermosa families use Facebook, and most local businesses do to.

Ochs said he envisions fresh updates on a Facebook page every 24 hours, for the businesses and the residents. People would also be able to leave comments.

Turning to parking, Bobko said he wants some sort of “grace period” before people are given tickets for staying too long at the metered spots along the avenue.

“Maybe there can be a gentle warning that people have parked over the limit on the meter,” he said. “If I’m a customer and the thing I went in to buy costs $20, and I come out and there’s a ticket for $40, I might not come down as much.”

In warm weather people from inland use Pier Avenue to get to the beach, and to big events such as pro beach volleyball tournaments and the Fiesta Hermosa street fair. Bobko said city officials will have to do what they can, including using police to direct traffic.

He pointed out that the Fiesta will have a bicycle valet service as an inducement to pedal to the event.

The Fiesta also is donating vendor-booth space to businesses on the western stretches of upper Pier, where a wing of the fair will be moved. Previously those businesses could benefit from Fiesta foot traffic past their doors, but not this time around, said Carla Merriman, executive director of the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau, which sponsors the Fiestas.

 Epilogue

Like the rest of City Hall, Bobko is eager to see the end of the Pier Avenue project.

“This is a big project, it’s a legacy project for the city. It’s probably the last big improvement we’re going to do in Hermosa for years, and it will be fantastic when it’s done, but we’ve got to do some work to get there,” he said. “I think when it’s done, people are going to wonder why we didn’t do this sooner.”

DiVirgilio echoed the sentiments.

“I have a feeling that a year from now, the anxiety of the construction will be long gone, and we’re going to love this thing,” he said. ER

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