$14-Million Suit Filed Over Torrance’s Parking Policy

The owner of a Torrance office building has filed a $14-million lawsuit against the city, charging that the sudden passage last October of strict new parking requirements for buildings used as courthouses killed his pending deal with Los Angeles County.

Jerry Conrow, owner of a building on Crenshaw Boulevard called The Park Beyond The Park, charges in a lawsuit filed Monday that the city’s Oct. 31 urgency ordinance requiring one parking spot for every 150 square feet of courtroom space prevents his 125,000-square-foot building from ever being used as a courthouse.

The law requires building owners to seek a conditional-use permit to convert space to courtroom use.

The Park Beyond The Park, which in December won a community beautification award, only has tenants in about 15,000 square feet of its space, Conrow said. He said he has used three different brokers in an attempt to lease out space in the year-old building, but office tenants in Torrance “have simply dried up.”

“The people in the South Bay are entitled to have a better court system than they’ve got,” Conrow said. “I think the city is behaving in a discriminatory fashion when they run over people this way.”

Conrow said he was on the verge of a $14-million, seven-year deal with the county to convert offices in his building to courtroom use until work could be completed on a new Municipal Court building at the Torrance Civic Center.

The suit charges that it was illegal for the city to pass the measure as an urgency ordinance.

Conrow said in an interview that the city’s ulterior motive is to force the court system out of Torrance, “so that this can be the All-American city of Torrance--all white.”

City Atty. Kenneth Nelson said he had not yet reviewed the suit in depth but that what he has seen so far “doesn’t have a lot of base.”

“He has not applied for a conditional-use permit . . . so he cannot know whether the city would have granted one,” Nelson said.

Nelson called the racial allegations “sheer, utter nonsense.”

Conrow characterized his building as the only one in the city suited to the court’s needs. The Park Beyond The Park has 404 parking spaces of its own and leases daytime use of 180 additional spaces from a church next door. Conrow had asked the city to lease him daytime use of 600 more spaces at neighboring Wilson Park.

He said the city has never responded to that request.

Court administrator Christopher Crawford, who oversees operation of the cramped South Bay Municipal Court facilities, said he has been trying to find room to grow for several months. Court officials already had established an informal rule for themselves that there should be one parking spot for every 150 square feet of building space--the same requirement later passed by the city.

Crawford disputed Conrow’s claim that the county was on the verge of a deal at The Park Beyond The Park.

“They were under serious consideration, as were several other properties, but it’s a stretch to indicate that we were at the point where the county was sitting down and negotiating a lease,” Crawford said.

The court since has narrowed its search to three other locations, two of which would need to build new parking to meet the city’s requirements, he said.