Santa Monica College Leases School Site : Traffic: Hundreds of students will attend classes there. Neighbors fear parking shortage will get worse.

On Tuesday, 300 Santa Monica College students are expected to show up for the first day of classes at the college’s Center for Humanities, housed in a former elementary school. When they arrive, neighbors fear, the students will add to the already clogged traffic in the area and the race for parking spaces.

Under an agreement that the college Board of Trustees approved last week, the college is leasing the old Madison School on Arizona Avenue from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. The district board is expected to consent to the lease at its meeting Monday night.

The college plans to locate classes and a child-care center for students at Madison. It will rent the four-acre lot for $8,333 a month for up to two years. Meanwhile, it will prepare an environmental impact report and seek other approvals needed to restore and remodel the school, which was built in the 1930s, for long-term use.

During the two years, the college will paint the school, add phone lines and upgrade the electrical system and landscaping, said Tom Donner, the college’s business manager. Once it gets the official go-aheads, the college can opt to lease the school for another 64 years. Eventually, Donner said, about 600 students at a time will attend classes there.

The school district closed Madison in the mid-1980s because of declining enrollment. It then used the site for its continuation high school and rented rooms to a preschool, Pepperdine University and other groups.

Under the lease agreement, the district will keep half, or about 100, of the continuation students at Madison for several years but later turn over all the classrooms to Santa Monica College, said Art Cohen, the district’s assistant superintendent for business.

Neighbors had no complaints about the district’s use of the site but have launched an 11th-hour protest of the college’s plans.

David Shniad, a longtime resident and a member of the board of MidCity Neighbors, said “it’s almost impossible to get a parking space” in the area already because of residents’ cars and those of people who work on Lincoln Boulevard but park in the neighborhood.

Donner acknowledged that “there’s no parking in the neighborhood there,” but he said a combination of shuttle buses and development of on-site parking “will all but eliminate (students) trying to enter the neighborhood (to hunt for parking).”

Classes will be held at Madison only during the day, Donner said. He added that the college is paying a couple of thousand dollars a week to the Santa Monica Blue Bus to carry students between the school and a parking lot at Cloverfield Boulevard and Colorado Avenue. The shuttle will run every 15 minutes in the morning, starting at 7:30 a.m., and every half hour until the early evening, he said.

Letters have been sent to students urging them to take the shuttle, Donner said.

“We have a good experience of students using (shuttles to the main campus on Pico Boulevard),” he said, “so we think they’ll use the shuttle for Madison, too.”

The college is also preparing three acres of the Madison site where the school district used to park buses to hold about 270 cars, Donner said.

If the college is granted the long-term lease, it will turn some of the campus lawn into another 100 or so parking spots, Donner said.

But neighbors aren’t convinced. “They’re staggering from pillar to post with ideas,” Shniad said. “They’re going to make any claims that will justify them and get them through.”

Shniad argued that the college should prepare an environmental impact study before moving into the building. College and school district officials disagreed. Cohen said the college lease is “not changing the nature of the (land) use--it’s still an educational use.”

Still, residents feel that they are being steamrollered, Shniad said, adding that the college is “going pell-mell into classes. . . . (It is) just pushing through with no real plan.”

The lease negotiations began nearly a year ago, though the college started hosting public meetings on its plans only last month. Donner said the college has taken up many suggestions made by neighbors.

To discuss the issue any earlier would have been inappropriate, Donner said. “It was not ours to talk about.”

But Shniad said the honorable thing would have been to put off classes at Madison until the spring semester while “getting the cooperation of the neighbors.”

“The college has sort of acted as a preemptory bully,” Shniad said.

Another resident, Linda Ross, said the students to be taught at Madison will also burden two parking structures to be built on the college’s main campus. Those structures were approved by the city last year.

Ross, who founded Parents and Children against Traffic and Parking Structures, plans to argue to the City Council on Tuesday that a new environmental study for the structures should be prepared to consider the growth represented by the Madison lease.

Since the 1970s, the college and residents have argued over the college’s growing enrollment and the shortage of parking near the main campus.

Enrollment this year is expected to be about 25,000, including part-time students.