Santa Monica Votes Curbs on Commercial Building

In an effort to slow a recent barrage of commercial development, Santa Monica has slapped an emergency moratorium on many kinds of non-residential construction.

With several notable exceptions, the city is banning new office buildings, stores and hotels for the next 10 months and 15 days. Projects that were in the works as of May 2, however, are exempted.

The moratorium--approved unanimously by the Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday night--similarly exempts building on city- or state-owned land and along the downtown Third Street Mall, as well as projects that measure less than 22,000 square feet.

Officials said the moratorium will be used to conduct nine public workshops and four studies on topics ranging from traffic to building heights. In addition to outside consultants, three full- and part-time staff members will be assigned to the task, which City Manager John Jalili estimated will cost $200,000.

Going into the council’s meeting Tuesday, the moratorium clearly had the votes to pass unchallenged.

The only outstanding issue was whether the new law should include exemptions for so-called hardship cases, in which a property owner has invested considerable time, energy and money in a project but missed the cutoff date for submitting permit applications.

After extensive debate, council members agreed to ask the city attorney’s office to draft a separate ordinance to set up a procedure for entertaining hardship cases. That measure will return to the council next week.

“It would be a serious mistake not to recognize hardships,” land-use attorney Christopher M. Harding, who represents several developers, argued before the council.

“If you have any doubt that there may be a (hardship) case out there somewhere . . . you have to leave some flexibility in the ordinance.”

Council members heard from representatives of the Latigo Realty Corp., a Houston-based firm that late last year bought a lot on Wilshire Boulevard for $4.2 million and planned to build a three-story office building.

Latigo Western Division Manager Gerald Chong said his company sought to “follow the spirit of development in Santa Monica” and spent several months meeting with neighbors to hear their complaints about the project and find solutions to potential problems.

In so doing, Chong said, the firm was caught by surprise when the moratorium was approved and had not filed its application. The case appeared to draw some sympathy from officials because the developer had been working with neighborhood groups.

But others cautioned that including a hardship provision would invite a deluge of last-minute claims of pending projects.

“You’re walking into a snake pit,” Councilman David Finkel said. “This is a very big mistake.”

Finkel and Councilwoman Judy Abdo, who originally proposed the moratorium, voted against considering a hardship provision but were outnumbered by four votes in favor of it. A move to extend the May 2 cutoff date to the end of the month also failed.

The moratorium was prompted by growing complaints from residents that an unprecedented boom in commercial development is leading to unmanageable traffic and pollution.

The city said that in 1987, a building permit was issued for a single commercial project totaling just over 1 million square feet. The next year, the amount of planned commercial construction nearly tripled, with the city issuing permits for 23 projects totaling 2.84 million square feet.

And as of May 10 this year, approvals had been granted for 12 projects totaling 436,304 square feet, with applications pending for 31 projects totaling 3.5 million square feet. All are exempt from the moratorium.

The surge is especially dramatic because Santa Monica is emerging from a period of relatively limited commercial development.

“(Recent development) was too much, too fast,” Abdo said. “A community can’t go through that kind of change in two years. Everybody knows that’s wrong.”

The moratorium has been criticized, however, for its numerous exemptions. Some slow-growth activists contend that the measure is an empty gesture because so many large projects in the works will be allowed to go ahead.

Among the most controversial exemptions are a 1.4-million-square-foot office and studio complex planned for city-owned land at Santa Monica Airport and a luxury hotel planned for the current site of the private Sand and Sea Club on Santa Monica’s state-owned beach.