An attempt to make minor updates to the city’s regulations governing construction generated controversy at Tuesday night’s Manhattan Beach City Council meeting over concerns that the city was poised to enact rules that would stifle development in one of the nation’s most lucrative real estate markets.
The controversy abated as it became clear that the council had no plans to act on a so-called “Neighborhood Bill of Rights,” which contained provisions that would curb development in the city, including a limit on the number of simultaneous construction projects permitted in a one-block area. The council’s action on the item consisted in creating a new administrative penalty scheme to deal with builders flouting rules, and a recodification of existing construction rules to make enforcement easier to carry out.
But while none of the Bill of Rights provisions were implemented or voted on, council members agreed several of the issues raised by the document were worthy of further study. The provisions address interconnected aspects of construction, setting up a potential showdown over issues like mansionization.
The depth of developer opposition to the rights provisions became clear during the public comment period of the meeting. Local architects, builders and real estate agents assailed the document and its potential effects.
Blake Overend, a Manhattan Beach resident and a managing partner at TriWest Development, said that he has 10 to 12 projects going in the city but that most of his work is elsewhere in Southern California. The proposed rules, he said, could make Manhattan a less desirable place to develop.
“If you make this too painful, there are other places to go, and home values will go down,” Overend said. “If you make this too difficult, there aren’t going to be four people like me making an offer on every property.”
Overend suggested that some issues the bill raised could be addressed with more narrowly tailored regulations, like those targeting maximum grading quantity on a lot.
The issue came to the council last fall, after an increase in resident complaints about problems associated with neighborhood construction sites. Construction-related concerns ranged from the relatively simple, such as excessive noise or beginning too early, to the more complex, including subsidence and shoring issues caused by subterranean construction on neighboring properties.
In response, the City Attorney’s Office and Community Development Department worked to develop an administrative penalty scheme that would give the city’s code enforcement officers the ability to issue fines to builders in violation of construction rules. Existing rules provided no middle ground between issuing a warning, and dragging the violator into court for a potential misdemeanor prosecution.
Officials said the new penalty scheme should be welcomed by residents and city staff, because it will enhance enforcement. But they also said that it should be embraced by the development community, who would face less uncertainty over the possibility of criminal prosecution.
“For our code enforcement officers, this is an invaluable tool,” said Councilmember Mark Burton. “They go out and warn and warn and warn, and they don’t want to send someone into court.”
The other actionable aspect of the agenda item came as the council approved a recodification of construction rules. Over the last three to four years, the city has added several additional rules for builders to follow to limit the impacts to surrounding neighborhoods. But these regulations have been scattered, with some buried in the “Noise” section of the municipal code, and others in the city’s Construction Rules Handout.
According to City Attorney Quinn Barrow and Community Development Director Marisa Lundstedt, the codification contained only rules with which developers were already required to comply, and merely made rules easier to cite. Nonetheless, the issue provided a segue into the more controversial Bill of Rights Item, with staff later saying that although no new rules were emerging, members of the development community had been specifically noticed about everything on the agenda item, including the Bill of Rights.
Mayor Tony D’Errico said that the city should have done a better job in making it clearer to residents that the provisions of the bill would not be enacted that night, but that the bill nonetheless raised important issues.
“This belongs on our agenda. Maybe we should have been clearer, but there are four or five items on here that we have said have merit,” D’Errico said.
Chief among those were potential subterranean development rules. Although existing code limits projects to three stories in height, there are no limits for basement depth. Skyrocketing property values have prompted homeowners seeking to maximize home values to dig deeper underground, with some new homes sinking as many as three stories below the surface.
But regulations on subterranean building are connected to many other issues, Lundstedt said, particularly “mansionization,” or limits on the built square footage of a single lot. (The council previously formed a mansionization subcommittee, but had tabled the issue.)
In debating authorizing a study of the potential impacts of some of the rules, mayor pro tem David Lesser questioned its value, pointed out that all such projects already have to be certified by an engineer and comply with existing shoring regulations.
But other council members said more sensible regulations were possible, citing Overend’s suggestion about maximum grading quantities during public comment.
“Clearly, we have existing rules that are not working,” Burton said. “Tonight, we have heard from people in the industry that there are rules that could address these problems.”
