Courthouse Plans Turn Into a Trial for Torrance : Building: After quietly negotiating to scale down plans for the new Municipal Court building, Torrance officials have publicly criticized court officials for not heeding the city’s concerns.

When South Bay Municipal Court personnel moved into the new Superior Court building in Torrance in 1968, they intended to stay only a few years until their own courthouse could be completed.

Built to handle decades of Superior Court expansion as the South Bay’s population swelled, the building had some extra space. No one saw any harm in letting the Municipal Court use it awhile.

Unfortunately, a lengthy planning process and the tax-limiting provisions of Proposition 13 turned “awhile” into 21 years.

Now, with the Torrance courthouse bursting at the seams with personnel and caseloads, state legislation has finally made $60 million available to build a new courthouse. Municipal Court officials have spent the last few months eagerly making plans, hoping to move to their new home in 1995.

Torrance City Council members, however, are not pleased by what court officials envision.

Last year, city officials were stunned by initial estimates that the new building would soar eight stories above the Torrance Civic Center. The city has little legal control over what is built on county-owned land and has been quietly negotiating to scale down the project before final plans are drawn.

Negotiations went public last week when irritated council members, debating how best to talk to the county, accused court administrators of paying scant attention to their concerns.

Although a report on the court’s space needs submitted recently to county administrators now calls for only a five-story building with an adjacent five-level parking structure, council members say the proposed 200,000-square-foot courthouse would be too bulky for the Civic Center area, even though it would be only 65 feet tall. The existing courthouse is 80 feet tall.

“It’s too damned big,” City Councilman Dan Walker said when asked to summarize the council’s concerns. “Everything we’ve seen so far is too big, too dense and not enough parking.”

Council members also criticize plans to lease private office space for temporary courtrooms, saying the proposed sites provide far too little parking.

South Bay Municipal Court Administrator Christopher Crawford said the council’s discontent comes as a surprise to him.

“We have been going out of our way to make sure that we are meeting with the city, sharing documents, sharing plans,” he said. His report on the court’s space needs “could have been submitted months ago, but it was only submitted Aug. 31 because of a months-long process of meeting and conferring with city staff.”

Meeting time has not been the problem, City Council members say. They believe the problem is that court planners have not been listening.

“Part of the problem is the attitude of the court people. It does not seem real open or real flexible,” Councilman Mark Wirth said. “I haven’t heard, ‘What do you think of this?’ We’ve heard, ‘This is what we want to do.’ ”

City Council members worry that allowing a massive new courthouse will gridlock traffic and overwhelm parking in and around the Civic Center.

The council, which generally opposes parking structures for aesthetic and safety reasons, also is disgruntled over the size of the structure proposed for the courthouse.

Crawford said the building plan reflects existing and future needs of the Municipal Court.

Existing courthouse crowding is “intolerable,” he said. Crawford noted that 10 judges work out of eight courtrooms; clerical staff are assigned half the space they need, and jurors for the Municipal and Superior courts are packed into a basement assembly room with woefully inadequate restrooms and too few emergency exits.

“It is horrendous,” he said. “It’s oppressive not only for the work force but for the public, too. It really is at the crisis point.”

The new courthouse cannot be scaled back, he said, “not unless we can prevail on the good nature of the citizens and transient residents of this district to commit fewer crimes and file fewer civil actions.”

Plans to turn leased office space into temporary courtrooms and clerical offices also have been discussed with the city, Crawford said. He said court administrators are looking for sites that meet both their space requirements and the city’s parking requirements.

Crawford said he is continuing to look at several locations, but a city memo said the search has been narrowed to two: an empty warehouse east of the Civic Center on California Street near Maple Avenue, and an office complex called the “Park Beyond the Park” on Crenshaw Boulevard south of Carson Street.

Neither site has sufficient parking for what court officials have in mind, City Council members said.

A recent letter from the Crenshaw Boulevard site’s owner requesting permission to lease 500 city parking spaces at Wilson Park infuriated the council.

“I voted against that development in the first place. I thought it was too much for that area,” Wirth said. “My attitude is, ‘Forget them.’ ”

Council members have asked city planners to draw up amendments to commercial and industrial zoning codes that will set a minimum number of parking spaces for courthouse uses on private property.

“We don’t have the control now, but give us a couple weeks,” Walker said. “This is just one of those little cracks in our land use regulations that is being shored up as we speak.”

Last week, Councilman George Nakano asked Mayor Katy Geissert to assign a council committee to oversee negotiations with the county.

Nakano wants the committee to meet with county Supervisor Deane Dana and court administrators to hammer out a compromise.

One solution might involve a swap of vacant city land next to the county courthouse complex for a 15,000-square-foot brick court annex building behind the existing courthouse.

Adding additional land to the court development would help reduce its lot coverage ratio, city officials said, while the city would get an existing building within its present Civic Center complex.

City Manager LeRoy Jackson said no formal negotiations have begun about that possible exchange.

Crawford insists that the county wants to do as much as possible to incorporate the city’s concerns into the final courthouse construction plan.

“We’re talking, and we’ll continue to talk. This plan isn’t set in stone,” he said. “At this point, erasers and pencils are cheap.”