The Manhattan Beach City Council approved the Downtown Specific Plan Tuesday night, capping years of work to protect the neighborhood’s charm, while changing some aspects of the plan’s final draft in deference to overwhelming concerns from residents that the it could encourage intensification in the area.
The resulting document modifies various sections of the city’s municipal code in an effort to bring coherence and vision to land-use decisions in the downtown area for the next 20 years. It preserves most of the provisions cobbled together over dozens of meetings of the council and Planning Commission, and removes the most controversial items, including those governing second-floor outdoor dining.
Development of the specific plan began more than two years ago in response to the appearance of banks and offices in ground-floor spaces traditionally occupied by retailers and restaurants, and concerns that their proliferation would have a deadening effect on foot traffic in the area. To that end, the city in 2014 imposed a moratorium on such conversions and, when the moratorium expired, an interim-zoning ordinance doing much the same; the interim ordinance will continue to govern land-use in the area until the Specific Plan receives approval from state officials.
Tuesday night’s action by the council addresses the threat of more banks and offices by, among other things, requiring them to obtain a conditional use permit to open on ground-floor street fronts, and requiring the planning commission to make findings about the effect that granting the permit would have on the broader downtown
But discussion of measures addressing the original impetus for the plan was drowned out by quality-of-life concerns. From a document that ran hundreds of pages, the majority of comments were directed, negatively, at a one-page map of downtown with areas where second-floor outdoor dining would be potentially permitted. One after another, residents made clear that they had no desire to see it anywhere in the city, let alone in the area deemed eligible for it in the plan’s final draft.
“It’s not simply dining. It’s intensification of use, which brings trash, traffic and parking issues,” said resident Martha Andreani.
Existing code places no limits on second-floor outdoor dining, other than the requirement to obtain a use permit. In addition to this requirement, the draft version before the council would have limited it to certain areas of the downtown, required patios to face main thoroughfares rather than homes, and mandated a decibel-level study for properties serving alcohol and open after 10 p.m. Residents successfully pushed the council to ban second-floor outdoor dining entirely in part by arguing that the draft plan’s approach sacrificed the needs of residents for those of non-residents. (Upper-level indoor dining will still be possible with a use permit.)
“[Visitors] may very much like it, and it may help their needs to get outdoor dining,” said Carol Perrin, head of the Downtown Resident’s Group.
The concern about the appropriate consideration to be given to non-residents echoed through the evening. In the document’s final draft, the plan’s “vision statement” had sought a mix of uses “primarily oriented toward the local Manhattan Beach community, while acknowledging the role that visitors play in supporting the downtown.” Bowing to near-unanimous opposition from residents, the council voted to excise the portion acknowledging visitors.
While clearly supported, it is not clear that the excision will survive. Marisa Lundstedt, the city’s director of community development, said it was possible that the California Coastal Commission could reinsert the provision. Because much of downtown sits in the Coastal Zone, typically defined as the area within 1,000 yards of the mean high-tide line, the code revisions that the plan effects would need to be incorporated into the city’s Local Coastal Program, which requires the approval of the Coastal Commission. The California Coastal Act, which the Coastal Commission is entrusted with enforcing, mandates equitable access to coastal resources, including for those who do not live along the coast.
Lundstedt’s point about the requirements of the Coastal Act and a potential reversal produced no discussion.
Residents denied that they were motivated by insularity or nativism, saying that their position was rooted in a sense that the city’s downtown was slipping away from them. Bob Valentine, a former planning commissioner in the city, extolled downtown’s charm as the powerful force that brought many to the city in the first place, while lamenting how fragile the area was in the face of change.
“It’s not that any of us don’t like non-locals. But Manhattan Beach as it is right now has a beat to it, it has a throb,” Valentine said.
The precarious balance, residents reasoned, prompted a need for clear rules like the ban on second-floor outdoor dining. Administrative attempts to deal with these changes simply could not be trusted.
“All of these things have gotten through with laws in place. Exceptions, variances use permit processes and all these other things don’t control all of the mysterious ways businesses have to wrangle out of these rules,” said resident Kenneth Thompson.
Mayor pro tem David Lesser rooted the outpouring in residents’ reaction to a report from the Urban Land Institute, a consultant hired by the city at the early stages of the project. The ULI report advocated several changes, such as allowing third-story development, that were condemned by residents at community outreach sessions early on in the development of the plan, and ultimately abandoned.
Though Lesser was more frequent in voicing concern that the some of the enacted provisions, such as maximum frontage limitations, could sap the area’s economic vitality, he said that residents had made clear that they wanted the Specific Plan to “claw back” the ULI recommendations.
“Are these measures going to protect our downtown?” Lesser said. “Or are they going to bring some other consequence?”
