The city of Hermosa Beach is inadequately staffed to deal with ongoing public safety challenges posed by late-night activity in the city’s downtown area, according to statements from city officials at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting.
The testimony was provided as part of a council review of the city’s “Late Night Action Plan.” The plan was originally developed over 2012 and 2013 in response to concerns from residents about negative impacts of the concentration of alcohol establishments in the city’s downtown. Public safety was one of several areas where council members expressed frustration or disappointment with progress in achieving the plan’s goals.
According to Community Development Director Ken Robertson, the city has made a number of changes in how it is approaching downtown, including the creation of a Downtown Nighttime Enforcement Team, or “DNET,” in which various departments of the city that were once “siloed” now cooperate. The changes, staff said, have yielded measurable improvements, including increased presence of code enforcement officers to monitor compliance with conditional use permits and greater collaboration with bars and restaurants
But although appreciative of staff effort on the topic, council members were skeptical about how much progress had actually been made. Councilmember Stacey Armato balked at staff claims of improved daytime business traffic as an example of a declining focus on late-night activity. The concentration of activity during late-night hours, council members have said, creates an atmosphere that does not conform with the city’s long-term strategic vision for the area.
“We get a number of complaints that we are dead in the middle of the day,” Armato said.
The renewed focus on late-night activity comes following a cost-benefit analysis for the downtown area, which found that the neighborhood had a net-neutral to positive economic impact on the city. While Councilmember Carolyn Petty pointed out that the focus on late-night alcohol service is almost certainly a result of the skyrocketing rents in the area, others on the council focused on the impact on public safety.
The total capacity of all downtown restaurants is more than 2,000 people, according to Chief Sharon Papa of the Hermosa Beach Police Department. Though hesitant to disclose precise deployment figures, Papa said number of officers assigned to handle this number of people is often disturbingly small.
“We are not feeling good about the level of police presence” in the downtown area, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, said interim City Manager John Jalili.
This is due in part to the fact that medical issues and retirements have left the department short-handed, Papa said. And she said that recruiting new police officers is becoming more difficult, mirroring a trend at the national level.
Among the coming improvements are the addition of a downtown police substation slated for the area of the parking lot behind the Hermosa Avenue Starbucks, and further changes to lighting in the area to discourage congregating after last call.
But part of the difficulty is that there are simply more enforcement challenges since the late-night action plan was developed. Tthe city has implemented a complete ban on smoking in public areas, which remains challenging and time consuming to enforce. And ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft continue to grow in popularity, creating an increased threat of accidents from drivers unfamiliar with the area, looking at cell phones for navigation.
“We cannot continue to enact new initiatives without also implementing enforcement mechanisms at the same time,” Jalili said.
