Sale of City Lots May Provide Parking in Venice : Politics: Councilwoman Ruth Galanter wants to use the proceeds from a land auction to benefit the Venice beachfront; two other councilwomen would like their districts to get some of the profits.

Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter hopes to solve Venice’s chronic parking shortage by selling more than a dozen residential lots that the city has collected over the past 40 years and using the money to build parking lots in the popular beachfront community.

The City Council agreed this week to sell five of the parcels at auction next month. City officials said about a dozen others are expected to come up for sale soon.

Proceeds from the sales will go into a special account set up by Galanter’s predecessor, former Councilwoman Pat Russell, that is paying for a new parking lot on a railroad right of way near the intersection of Electric Avenue and Venice Boulevard.

Jim Bickhart, Galanter’s legislative deputy, said the councilwoman hopes to use money from the December auction to buy several lots along the Venice Boulevard median between Pacific and Dell avenues to enlarge a beach parking lot there. Some of the money may also be used for other projects, such as sidewalk improvements along the Venice canals, he said.

The five tiny, irregularly shaped lots--the largest is 3,088 square feet--are worth about $300,000 each because of the scarcity of vacant land in the neighborhood south of the Venice Pier and west of Marina del Rey, city officials said. Most of the lots were purchased from the county in the 1940s and 1950s, when the city hoped to collect enough of them to create parks, parking lots and other city facilities.

“This is stuff that people considered junk and wouldn’t pay their taxes on,” said Donald Molony, senior real estate officer with the city’s Bureau of Engineering. “But they were scattered for the most part. Now they essentially are being converted in such a way that they will still be used for public purposes in Venice.”

Galanter spokesman Rick Ruiz said the city has determined that the parcels are too small for other uses--such as low-income housing--and that there is no other way to pay for new parking lots in Venice.

“Because the budget situation is the way it is, there is not enough money to go around,” said Ruiz. “So we can use this money to fund projects that wouldn’t get funded from other means.”

Although the council Tuesday unanimously approved Galanter’s request to sell the first five properties, the vote had been postponed from late September because of objections raised by two council members.

Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who heads the council’s housing committee, was concerned that the city did not try hard enough to find ways to use the land for affordable housing. Molina later dropped her opposition after she held a committee hearing on the issue and questioned representatives from various city departments.

At a council meeting in late September, Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores complained about the special Venice account, which contains about $1 million and is the only one of its kind in the city. Flores said money from the December auction should go into the city’s general fund for citywide uses since the parcels are owned by the city, not the community of Venice. Galanter has argued that Venice’s parking problems are citywide problems because beach visitors come from throughout Los Angeles.

“I don’t see any special circumstances in one district that aren’t prevalent in others as well,” Flores said in an interview. “I don’t want to be vindictive against her district, but I have so many needs in the Watts area that I can’t afford to fulfill through the normal channels that I could use this kind of arrangement, too.”

Flores voted for the December auction Tuesday, but only after introducing a motion of her own that would establish a similar account for Watts. Flores said that if the council refuses to create the Watts account, “it will be time to discuss whether we should be doing this at all.”

The auction will be held Dec. 16 at 1 p.m. in Room 350 at City Hall. The following properties will be for sale: 3319 Grand Canal (2,700 square feet, minimum bid of $298,000); 3413 Grand Canal (2,160 square feet, $265,000); 3515 Grand Canal (3,088 square feet, $305,000); 119 Eastwind St. (2,629 square feet, $280,000); and 28 Driftwood Street (2,888 square feet, $295,000).

City officials said state coastal building requirements and temporary city restrictions in Venice limit development on the properties to single-family homes or duplexes.