Tie Beach Hotel to Ballot Issue, Developer Asks : Santa Monica: Save Our Beaches opposes the hotel and community center.

Restaurateur Michael McCarty, faced with mounting opposition to his proposed luxury beachfront hotel and community center, has decided to ask the Santa Monica City Council to place the fate of the project in the hands of the voters this November.

McCarty said he is willing to leave the project up to a public vote in order to end debate with a group of opponents that he characterized as small but vocal, and in an effort to avoid legal challenges that might tie up his plans for years. Rather than a separate ballot measure, he said the council could tie the fate of the project to one of the two beachfront development initiatives already scheduled for the November ballot.

“They’ll have no argument after the people have supported this--none,” McCarty said of his opponents. “I want this party over.”

Announcing his decision on Thursday in a private upstairs room of Michael’s, his gourmet Santa Monica restaurant, McCarty said he was confident of success. “I have nothing to fear or hide.”

The shift in strategy is in response to increasing criticism of McCarty’s plan from a group of residents who early this year brought about the defeat of a large commercial project on city-owned land at Santa Monica Municipal Airport by tapping strong anti-development sentiment in the city.

A leader of the group Save Our Beaches, Sharon Gilpin, has threatened to organize a referendum campaign if McCarty’s project wins city approval. Gilpin said Thursday that she did not share McCarty’s belief that the public would favor a luxury hotel on the beach.

By going directly to the public, McCarty is taking a calculated risk that he may lose a project into which he has invested millions. At his press conference, McCarty reluctantly agreed that if “the people of Santa Monica don’t want this project, we probably won’t build this project.”

As it stands now, his 160-room hotel is on the council agenda for final approval later this month. City officials have embraced the project so far, in part because it would generate an estimated $1 million a year for the city, and also because of the community center McCarty plans to build on part of the property. The center would include public changing rooms and showers, a children’s park, an arts and environment center and a 200-seat cafe.

The site of the project, at 415 Pacific Coast Highway, has been leased to a membership-only club, the Sand and Sea Club, since the early 1960s, at a rent of $250,000 a year.

The city has been under pressure for years from the state to use the publicly owned land for public beach access.

Opponents of the plan, including Sand and Sea Club members, question whether $300-a-night luxury hotel rooms are an appropriate use of public land.

Gilpin’s group is seeking public access to the entire parcel, rather than just the community center, and accuses city officials of underestimating community opposition to commercial development. “I think in this city we’re finding the leadership is not in step with the public on development issues.”

McCarty said he would ask the council to tie his project to two competing beach development initiatives on the November ballot. By doing so, he would relieve the council of a potentially unpopular pro-development vote in an election year.

Gilpin said her group has been lobbying council members over the past few weeks, asking them to give voters a chance to approve or reject the beach hotel, rather than deciding the “hot potato” themselves.

Her group’s initiative, Save Our Beaches, seeks to ban all commercial development on the beach. The competing initiative on the ballot--sponsored by a group called Santa Monicans for a Livable Environment and known by the acronym SMiLE--also opposes commercial development on the beach, but exempts McCarty’s project because it is already in the pipeline. Under McCarty’s proposal, passage of that initiative then could lead to construction of the hotel.

If the City Council were to keep to its schedule and approve the hotel this month, then the proposal would not be subject to either initiative, and the only recourse of the anti-hotel forces would be another referendum next year.

Santa Monica City Manager John Jalili said he is unaware of any obstacle to McCarty’s suggestion that the project’s approval be tied to the initiatives, if it meets with council approval.