Manhattan Beach Petition to Seek Limits on Growth

A group of Manhattan Beach residents, dissatisfied with recent City Council actions that they contend threaten residential neighborhoods, plans to circulate petitions to put an initiative on the June ballot that they say would keep residential areas intact and restrict commercial development.

Bruce Ponder, spokesman for the Neighborhood Protection Committee, said many people in the community are frustrated by a “lack of leadership” on the City Council and do not like the General Plan that the council is expected to approve next month. Ponder called the plan “a full-fledged growth document.”

Ponder said the initiative, if approved, would preserve residential neighborhoods that are designated as such in the General Plan. The provisions of the initiative could only be changed by a vote of the people. The initiative would redesignate the east side of Oak Avenue between 14th Street and Marine Avenue as low-density residential.

Mixed-Use Area

That portion of Oak Avenue is currently designated as commercial, and the proposed General Plan tentatively approved by the council would designate the area as mixed use. The council, however, has indicated it would not allow residential uses there, said City Planning Administrator Steven Lefever.

“People are being forced to go to the ballot box to insist that quality of life issues are resolved in a rapid and fair manner,” said Ponder, who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in 1986.

He said he will not run again in the April 12 council election, but the committee will demand that all council members and candidates take a stand on the initiative and the group “will heavily publicize their positions.”

Mayor Bob Holmes, whose term expires in April, said he is “150% against” the initiative. “I think most people will recognize it as pockets of dissidents who didn’t get what they wanted,” he said, adding that he has not decided whether he will seek reelection.

The committee published Thursday the required legal notice of intention to circulate petitions. It will file the proposed initiative with the city clerk’s office within a few days and plans to begin collecting signatures Jan. 5 to qualify the initiative for the June 7 ballot, Ponder said.

Needs 2,240 Signatures

The committee needs about 2,240 signatures--10% of the city’s 22,381 registered voters--by Jan. 29 to qualify the initiative for the June ballot. If the committee does not collect the needed signatures by then, it has until mid-June to qualify the measure for a future election.

“We anticipate we’ll do it in 30 days or less,” Ponder said. “I’m very confident that we’re going to be able to do this.”

Ponder said the directives in the initiative “are not new issues. They have been argued by literally hundreds of people before the Planning Commission and the City Council. That’s what the residents want, and we’ve taken the prerogative to see that that’s what the residents get.”

He said he hopes to bypass the need for an election by persuading the City Council to adopt the measure as an ordinance after he presents the initiative petition with about 4,000 signatures. “I think the handwriting’s going to be on the wall, and I hope the City Council would save the city some money and adopt the initiative as is,” Ponder said.

But, he said, the council is “behind the learning curve in what the residents are demanding . . . they are just not listening to our concerns about overdevelopment and property values.”

The terms of council members Jan Dennis and Gil Archuletta also will expire in April. Archuletta said he is “leaning towards” running for reelection, and Dennis said she will announce her decision Jan. 14.

Dennis would not comment on the initiative, saying she does not know enough about it. Archuletta said: “From what I know, it sounds like a good document that I can support.”

The Neighborhood Protection Committee has about 200 members, although a core of about eight people have been working on the initiative for the past year, he said.

The committee’s initiative would prohibit parking lots or structures from being developed in residential zones. The council recently approved two parking facilities where houses previously were--one on 8th Street near Sepulveda Boulevard in conjunction with the Pollo Loco restaurant and one on Elm Avenue near Manhattan Beach Boulevard.

“We feel this is a great threat to residential property values,” Ponder said.

Lefever said those were the only two cases he recalls in the past six years in which the city allowed parking facilities to replace residential areas.

Parking lots and structures can be built in residential zones with a City Council-approved conditional use permit. Developers did not need a permit to put parking in residential areas before 1979, Lefever said.

Another recent City Council decision sparked a dispute and initiated an additional provision in the committee’s initiative. Upset over a recent City Council decision, which will allow a 23,000-square-foot shopping center at 18th Street and Sepulveda Boulevard and an adjacent 72,000-square-foot parking garage on 35,840 square feet of land, the committee is proposing that commercial developments, including any parking structures, be limited to 1 1/2 square feet of building space to each square foot of land. The restriction does not apply to parking lots. (For example, if the project was built on 10,000 square feet of land, the building could not be more than 15,000 square feet.)

City officials did not include the parking structure when calculating the building-to-land area ratio for the development at 18th and Sepulveda. The building-to-land ratio is 2.7 to 1 when the parking structure is included.

The Manhattan Village Mall area, which is bordered by Sepulveda and Aviation boulevards and Rosecrans and Marine avenues, would be exempt from the initiative’s building-to-land area ratio. Restrictions on that project are outlined in an agreement between the developers and the city.

The City Council, as part the new General Plan, has tentatively decided to limit floor ratios to 1.5 to 1 for general, downtown and north-end commercial developments and 1 to 1 for local and mixed-use commercial developments, Lefever said. The council’s ratios do not include parking structures in the calculations, however. Because of the development agreement, the Manhattan Village Mall is exempt from these standards as well.

Mixed-use commercial areas usually allow both commercial and residential development. Local commercial areas would allow “local servicing” developments, such as small office buildings and shopping centers, Lefever said.

The initiative also would limit commercial buildings, including offices, to 26 feet in height, except for the Manhattan Village Mall.

Under the development agreement, the mall’s anchor stores can be 50 feet high and the others can be 30 feet high. Downtown commercial structures are limited to 26 feet and the rest of the city to 30 feet, except office buildings east of the mall, which are limited by council policy to 99 feet.

The initiative would limit residential development heights to 26 feet, except in the Manhattan Village Mall and beach areas, which is defined by the committee as the area east of the Strand; west of Highland Avenue, north to Marine Avenue; west of Alma Avenue, north to Rosecrans Avenue, and west of Crest Drive to 45th Street.

The city defines the beach area more broadly--anything west of the Manhattan Beach Parkway north to 15th Street and west of Grandview Avenue. Residences can be built to 30 feet in that area and in high-density residential areas and 26 feet in the rest of the city.