Despite 15 years of fighting, Jim Light isn’t tired. He’s frustrated. For more than a decade, Light has clashed with the City of Redondo Beach and its leaders’ plans to redevelop the Redondo Beach waterfront area, including King Harbor, the International Boardwalk and the Redondo Pier. In that time, Light has charged the city not just with fomenting overdevelopment but with twisting and stretching local and state laws to reach their desired ends.
“I’ve been raised to give back to the community and this country,” Light said. “I’m driven by following processes diligently and respecting their intent; the City hasn’t done that.”
Bill Brand, current Redondo Beach council member and 2017 candidate for mayor, has stood alongside Light for much of that same time, rising to prominence on a platform that eschews “piecemeal development” in the waterfront.
“It’s the kind of classic overdevelopment that Redondo Beach has become famous for,” Brand said. “We need a comprehensive vision in rezoning that focuses on recreational and open space.”
Compared to Brand and Light, Martin Holmes is a civic engagement neophyte. But over the the past 12 months, Rescue Our Waterfront, an organization he helped found around his dining room table, has raised thousands of dollars and thousands of signatures from Redondo citizens standing against current development plans.
“Despite the best efforts of CenterCal, and some members of city staff and elected officials, they haven’t been able to shut us out and close us down,” Holmes said. “We’ve been able to make an impact.”
The activists’ focus is halting the Waterfront: Redondo Beach redevelopment plan proposed by CenterCal Properties and approved by a majority of the Redondo Beach City Council on October 20.
With Brand’s full-throated support, Light and Holmes’ organizations have filed appeals, lawsuits and initiatives with county and state authorities in an effort to take every possible step to stop the plan in its tracks.
CenterCal’s project would develop 523,939 square feet — a net 312,289 square feet of new development — of the Redondo Beach waterfront, adding 19 buildings over 36 acres. The project includes the construction of a market hall; a five-story, 45-foot tall parking garage; a boutique hotel; a movie theater; office space; and a connecting road between Torrance Boulevard and Harbor Drive. The city’s Seaside Lagoon saltwater swimming park would also remove existing fencing and open to the ocean, creating what CenterCal calls a “protected beach” in King Harbor.
The proposed changes to the Lagoon are in keeping with a desire to avoid thousands of dollars in fines levied by state regulatory agencies regarding the water treatment cycle.
But according to a lawsuit filed last Friday by Light against the City of Redondo Beach and CenterCal, the proposed renovation is but one of many issues with the entire project process. Light’s suit challenges the legal validity of the project’s Environmental Impact Report. The lawsuit alleges that the project runs counter to local zoning and the state’s Coastal Act and that Redondo Beach’s city-level California Environmental Quality Act appeal process is weighed against appellants while favoring developers.
“We’re for the enjoyment of what the harbor was built for using taxpayer money. We have plenty of malls and plenty of restaurants, but only one harbor between Marina del Rey and the Port of Los Angeles,” Light said. “We shouldn’t be negatively impacting longstanding existing uses of the harbor as a harbor.”
According to Light’s lawsuit, the CenterCal plan would erase existing low-cost coastal access for “expensive, exclusionary…facilities, neither affordable to working class people…nor dependent on a site within the harbor or adjacent to the ocean to be able to function at all.”
The loss of Seaside Lagoon in its current state, Light contends, is a chief example of the project’s desire to shunt public land in favor of commercial development.
“Why not just move a concessions building in Seaside Lagoon into one of those 100 leaseholds they’re going to let out? Why pave over the current public park for a road that basically serves the mall?” Light said. “It just shows the lack of compromise in the process.”
The lawsuit also refers to a planned boat launch facility at King Harbor’s Mole B, a man-made outcropping on the harbor’s north end that houses both the city’s Harbor Patrol building and two outrigger canoe clubs. It contends that the ramp is a danger to public safety, citing testimony from retired Harbor Patrol Captain Tim Dornberg. Quoted in Light’s brief, Dornberg calls the site “the least safe location of all the moles” and a location “dictated by prioritization of development.”
“Public safety professionals who are paid to be in the harbor every day say that this is a dangerous situation,” Light said. “It shows the bias of the city going into it.”
That bias, Light argues, ranges from the EIR itself to the process of appealing before the City Council. Light’s appeal of the project’s certifications was denied by the Council in a 3-1 vote, with Brand abstaining, in the early morning hours on Oct. 20.
The lawsuit is still in its early stages; the City Attorney’s office confirmed on Monday afternoon that the City had yet to be served.
But the initiative on the horizon for March 2017’s upcoming municipal election may make CenterCal’s plan moot.
The King Harbor Coastal Access, Revitalization and Enhancement Act, finalized by Holmes and Rescue Our Waterfront in July, received 4,511 resident signatures validated by the County Registrar’s office, clearing the bar for placement on next year’s ballot.
The measure, as described by ROW and Light — the act’s primary author — is a “tightening” of 2010’s Measure G, which set the building and zoning limits for the city’s coastal zone at 400,000 additional square feet of development to the harbor area.
The CARE Act seeks to protect Seaside Lagoon from renovation, deeming it necessary for the city to develop a replacement pool of equal water area should the Lagoon need to be removed. It also places a further cap on development, including any additional parking structures in its net 400,000 square foot limit.
The initiative would mandate the construction of a boat launch facility sited to both “avoid the net loss of any boat slips” and be at a safe distance from human-powered watercraft launch and swimming areas. It also prohibits the expansion of existing structures.
The CARE Act was brought before City Council on Nov. 1 to be placed on March’s ballot. But a motion by Councilwoman Laura Emdee, adopted in a 3-2 vote, asked staff to examine the CARE Act’s financial impact. That report will be brought before the Council on Nov. 29.
“I’m not surprised by it, and what we’ve seen for many months now is that there are clear signs of bias from a number of folks in decision-making positions,” said Holmes, “…in keeping with the bias that a lot of us in the community have identified since day one.”
Brand, who is planning to challenge incumbent Mayor Steve Aspel for the city’s top elected position in March, is the would-be champion for the many who have lined up in support of Holmes and Light. That race, he says, is Redondo’s “last chance to vote the right way.”
“The Redondo Beach electorate keeps electing the wrong people,” Brand said. “We’ve got the wrong people up there, a narrow majority pushing these things through, and you need to vote differently for real change.”
Brand’s vision is to combine both the Waterfront and AES power plant sites, reclaiming land that would be laid bare should the existing plant be decommissioned. AES has put the site on the market, and is working with City officials to develop a vision and find potential suitors for the site.
“I’ve been preaching that for many years. It’s amazing — here we are where both properties are available, the timing is uncanny,” Brand said. “The canvas is before us right now.”
What Brand wants is a cohesive idea for the area. “It’s not a comprehensive plan; it’s the kind of classic, piecemeal overdevelopment that Redondo Beach has become famous for.”
But according to City Treasurer and former Councilman Steve Diels, Brand and Light have no vision.
“For Jim Light and Bill Brand to be so callous as to assume that, after all of the work that’s gone into this, that it violates the Coastal Commission recommendations and Measure G is ridiculous…it’s tantamount to a tantrum,” Diels said.
What Brand is doing, Diels says, is proof that he’s “never fully transitioned from being an activist to a responsible elected official.”
Diels is troubled by Brand’s recusal from Light’s appeal hearing against the CenterCal project’s certification. Brand argued he could not fairly sit on the appeal hearing because he was already biased against the project.
“His recusal is an admission he’s unwilling to listen to the public,” Diels said. “The requirement is not that you don’t have an opinion, but that you suspend judgement until you listen to everyone’s opinion — now, he’s walked out of the room when it’s the public’s turn to have input on the Waterfront.”
It’s Diels’ belief that Light is searching for an issue, noting that, in a 2008 email to Redondo Beach officials, Light praised city officials for their “compromise” with Measure G, “which provides a stable environment with reasonable growth for developers.”
“They’re doing everything and anything they can to keep their issue alive at the risk of city resources and the risk of the pocketbooks of residents who will ultimately have to pay for the waterfront,” Diels said.
Mayor Steve Aspel noted that, indeed, it all goes back to 2001, when the Heart of the City plan sparked civil war within Redondo Beach.
“I believe it’s become more of a personal issue than a ‘save the city’ issue,” Aspel said.
The problem with Brand’s “cohesive” vision, Aspel argued, is that the AES and CenterCal sites are on different timelines.
“In a perfect world, if we backtrack 100 years, it might have been doable,” he said. “But right now, they’re two separate parcels that happen to be very close to each other…we can’t force AES to go into business with the City or any other developer to make it one common place.”
The pier, Aspel argues, has been aching for real revitalization since it was destroyed by fire in 1988. Redondo Beach’s sales tax revenues have fallen over the last year, a reflection of declining sales at the South Bay Galleria, and the City wants to compete with surrounding cities by creating revenue at the pier.
“We’ve been trying to get this done for 30 years,” Aspel said. “The City Council and citizens have been working on this since then and every time an idea comes up, it gets shot down by what I consider a vocal minority.”
Aspel does not plan to make the Waterfront a key platform in his reelection bid, believing that citizens want to hear about plans for the flagging Artesia Boulevard corridor.
“If the citizens want to vote down [the Waterfront] in March, that’s the way it is, though I would suggest it’d be another 10 years, at minimum, before anything got approved down there,” Aspel said. “We’ll let the voters decide again and go from there.”
