Hermosa Beach Puts Muffler on Car Dealership Noise

Blaring car alarms, roaring engines, loudspeakers, honking horns--for years, Vasek Polak’s neighbors say, they have had plenty to complain about.

But this week, after countless irate calls to City Hall and a marathon meeting that lasted until 2:35 a.m., the Hermosa Beach neighbors of Polak’s five automobile dealerships won a measure of satisfaction. The City Council voted to get tough with its largest generator of sales tax revenue.

A month after citing Polak for flouting the city zoning laws--the city’s first enforcement action against Polak--the council approved a master conditional-use permit that tightened restrictions on all of Polak’s dealerships in the cramped beach city.

The new permit, among other things, prohibits Polak’s dealerships from testing car alarms outdoors, from summoning employees on loudspeakers, from using a fire lane for new car deliveries and from test-driving Polak’s Porsches, BMWs, Volkswagens and Subarus on the narrow streets that crisscross the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Moreover, if any further noise violations are documented around the dealerships, Polak will have to erect a soundproof wall between his businesses and their various neighborhoods, the permit says.

The restrictions generally consolidate the terms of the operating permits that separately covered Polak’s dealerships. They address years of complaints and were approved 4 to 0 by the five-member council.

Absent from the vote was Councilman Chuck Sheldon, who stalked from the meeting room about 20 minutes before the meeting ended. A cadre of about a dozen irate Polak neighbors said after the meeting that Sheldon left because he feared offending Polak.

However, Sheldon said Wednesday he went home because “it was 2:15 in the morning, and I had a 7:30 a.m. business meeting to go to.”

Polak’s representative, local businessman Jerry Compton, warned it may take time for Polak’s employees to break their noisy habits.

“There’s no way for a business to be in the proximity it is to that residential neighborhood and there not be problems,” Compton told the council. “The only way in the long run for the problem to go away will be if Vasek Polak goes away.” That’s a fate the council for years has gingerly tried to avoid, since Polak’s dealerships generate millions of dollars of sales-tax revenue for the tiny city.

But Mayor Roger Creighton assured the residents that if Polak fails to comply, he’ll be cited, as he was last month, for misdemeanor violations of the Municipal Code. The citation, which carries a maximum penalty of $500 and six months in jail, stemmed from Polak’s decision to move his Subaru dealership to another piece of his property without authorization.

Polak operates five new and used dealerships along Pacific Coast Highway.