A physician specializing in infectious diseases is stepping up his focus upon what he sees as the hazards of tattoo parlors, which are lining up to move into Hermosa following a court ruling. In addition, city officials are mulling further restrictions on the parlors, and a citizens group is pressing a lawsuit aimed at fighting the parlors’ advance.
Last week the city’s Planning Commission took a first step toward tighter restrictions on the parlors, including 9 p.m. closing times, banning them near parks and schools, and forbidding them to perform body piercing.
The commission tentatively agreed to ask the City Council to add the restrictions to the tattoo parlor ordinance it passed after a federal appeals court struck down a citywide ban on tattoo parlors.
The council had taken the unusual step of asking for a commission review of its own ordinance, after parlor opponents begged the council for further restrictions on the businesses.
The commission’s recommendations, if adopted by the council, could not take effect for about three months, officials said.
Some opponents had asked the commission for still broader restrictions, including capping the number of allowed tattoo parlors at four.
One parlor has opened and three have received permits to open, and city official say a total of seven could exist in the city under the council’s ordinance. The ordinance restricts the parlors from standing within 1,500 feet of each other in the Pier Plaza-Hermosa Avenue commercial area, and more than 1,000 feet of each other along the Aviation Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway commercial corridors.
One resident asked the commission if Hermosa wants to be known as “tattoo central,” and presaged a decline in property values and the spectacle of “needles littering our streets.”
Greg Maffei, a real estate broker and 22-year resident, said he emailed members of South Bay and Palos Verdes real estate associations and quickly got 28 responses. All of the respondents said it would be more difficult to market a home next to a tattoo parlor, 92 percent saying the sale price would be lower and 77 percent saying the home would take longer to sell.
Maffei joined other tattoo parlor critics in urging the commission to act boldly in the face of the federal appeals court ruling.
“Please, let’s not be afraid of getting sued, let’s set some boundaries,” he said.
Gene Smith, a partner with Shane McColgan in the Hermosa Avenue parlor soon to open, told the commission that many of the objections to his business were prompted by “misunderstanding and misinformation.”
Smith said he lives within four blocks of the Hermosa Avenue location and has daughters in the town’s two public schools. He said the partners signed a long-term lease with their landlord, with a “commitment to have the nicest, most upscale tattoo parlor in the state, if not in North America.”
Commissioner Peter Hoffman said he had been “against tattoo parlors from day one.” But he reminded the parlor opponents of the expensive and failed court fight to uphold the ban, and told staunch opponents “you’re the guys that cost the city $250,000.”
Hermosa physician James McKinnell, of Torrance Memorial Medical Center and the prestigious LA-BioMed research center, wrote to the City Council asking for public health inspections of tattoo parlors by a private contractor and contending that existing inspections by county officials are under-funded and inadequate.
“I am dismayed by the failure of the Planning Commission to recommend any changes to the health regulations for tattoo parlors in Hermosa Beach,” McKinnell wrote.
The physician previously told the council that he found inadequate health protection measures when he visited a handful of tattoo parlors in the Los Angeles area. ER
