Planners Say They Favor Beach Hotel : Santa Monica: A proposed 160-room luxury hotel and community center on Pacific Coast Highway wins an important vote.

A proposed beachfront luxury hotel and community center on the site of the private Sand and Sea Club on Pacific Coast Highway cleared another major hurdle last week when the Santa Monica Planning Commission voted 5 to 2 to recommend that the City Council approve the project.

The commission, which discussed the proposal for nearly seven hours before casting its vote about 2:30 a.m. Thursday, also voted 6 to 1 to recommend certification of the environmental impact report for the project. Commission Chairman Donald Nelson voted against both actions, and Commissioner Mehrdad Farivar voted against the project.

The City Council is scheduled to review restaurateur Michael McCarty’s proposal for the 160-room hotel and three-story community center at its June 19 meeting. If approved by the council, the project would still need approval by the state Coastal Commission, which will probably review the project in late summer.

McCarty’s proposal was selected by the city from among 11 received in 1987 in response to a call for proposals to develop the 4.9-acre parcel, which is owned by the state and managed by the city. The state has told the city that it wants the private Sand and Sea Club removed and any new development on the site to generate at least $500,000 annually in rent and to increase public access to the beach.

The Sand and Sea Club has leased the site at 415 Pacific Coast Highway since the early 1960s, and had been paying the city about $125,000 a year until recently, when the amount was doubled.

Opponents of the hotel, including many club members, argue that a luxury hotel with $300-a-night rooms is not an appropriate use for public beach land. They also say the project would worsen traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

But city officials are pushing the project because of the revenues it would provide, particularly since they were unable to get public approval of a commercial office development at Santa Monica Municipal Airport that would have furnished $28 million during its first 10 years.

McCarty’s project would guarantee the city a minimum of $1 million a year in rent, which would go into the city’s fund to maintain and improve the beaches. An additional $1.9 million in taxes would be generated for the city’s general fund beginning in 1993.

The hotel would contain 160 rooms, each with a fireplace and a private balcony or patio, a 200-seat restaurant, a conference center with six meeting rooms, a banquet room and a 2,151-square-foot multipurpose room.

One of the public benefits of the project would be a community center complex that would include public changing rooms and showers, a children’s park, an arts and environment center and a price-controlled 200-seat cafe.

The three-story center would include the two-story house known as the Marion Davies North House, which has been designated a local historical landmark. It would be the only structure on the site that would be saved. The house would be relocated to the northern edge of the site, and sit atop a new first floor.

Two levels of subterranean parking would provide 527 spaces for the hotel, the community center and the public beach.

The project would generate an estimated 2,495 daily trips weekdays and 2,240 daily trips Saturdays and Sundays, thus significantly increasing peak traffic on Pacific Coast Highway and the California Incline leading up the Palisades Park bluffs.

McCarty had proposed closing the hotel restaurant from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. weeknights and reducing the number of seats in the cafe from 200 to 160 to lessen the traffic.

The Planning Commission agreed to closing the restaurant during the peak evening hours, but reinstated the full number of seats to the cafe because it is designed to serve beach-goers and offer lower prices.

McCarty also wants to install a traffic signal on Pacific Coast Highway at the entrance to the project, to allow for left-hand turns into and out of the hotel. As part of the installation, signal lights along Pacific Coast Highway at the California Incline and Chautauqua Boulevard would be synchronized with the new signal light at the hotel entrance to allow better traffic flow.

A debatable point is whether a 1973 ordinance designed to “preserve the natural beauty and environment of Santa Monica Bay” and which bans the construction of any “building” west of the mean high-tide line without voter approval applies to the hotel parking structure.

A building is defined in the ordinance as “a structure having a roof supported by columns or walls; building includes structure.”

A portion of the underground parking structure as designed would extend about 100 feet west of the mean high tide line.

City Atty. Robert M. Myers wrote in a memo to the Planning Commission that there is a reasonable possibility that the courts would interpret the ordinance to include underground parking structures. However, Myers said that because of substantial disagreement among other attorneys in the city attorney’s office, he could not give an unqualified opinion.

McCarty has redesigned the parking structure so that all of it is east of the mean high tide line, but said he will seek a court decision to determine whether the ordinance applies to an underground parking structure. He said he prefers the original layout of the structure because it is more efficient and because the reconfiguration would add between $1.5 and $3 million to the construction costs.

There is also a question whether an initiative on the November municipal ballot to ban all new beachfront hotels would affect McCarty’s project. Generally, an approved project is not protected from any changes in the law until construction starts.

McCarty said he believes his project would be exempted from the initiative if the city approves a development agreement with him even if he hasn’t broken ground. However, the city attorney has not issued an opinion on that.

McCarty has co-sponsored a competing initiative that would also ban beachfront hotels, but exempt his and one already under construction by Maguire Thomas Partners on Ocean Avenue.

McCarty is also proposing that 75% of the hotel bed tax generated from the project be set aside for the first 10 years for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, for city parks and for groups dedicated to restoration of Santa Monica Bay.