Election: Civic Center Fallout Continues

In recent letters, two ardent foes of the new Santa Monica Civic Center plan, Laurel Roennau and Merritt Coleman, have sought to rationalize their landslide loss in the June election (60% to 40%). Along with smog, we must now contend with the pungent bouquet of sour grapes.

Coleman expressed the usual lamentations of one who has lost an election: “the winners bought it” and “if we’d only had a bigger turnout.” As if more money hasn’t been spent both on losing in Santa Monica (ask Michael McCarty) or winning (ask Tom Hayden). As if this shouldn’t have been the perfect election for the foes of the plan, since their champion, Hayden, was running for governor and presumably attracting his supporters to the polls.

No, Coleman was more truthful when he was collecting signatures to put the measure on the ballot. His line then was that the Santa Monica voter was sophisticated enough to judge complex development issues. He was right. (Not that it’s a good idea: We elect a City Council to do that.)

Roennau’s letter was a calculated “late hit” on Kelly Olsen and the members of the City Council who worked on the plan. She claimed that the “RAND-council-Planning Commission-city staff pro-development team” tricked Olsen by agreeing publicly to his request to lower the maximum height of the RAND buildings by 14 feet, but then raising the height 14 feet in secret. A serious charge. But patently false.

Roennau is, as she states, a retired urban planner and transportation analyst, experienced in reading planning documents. She read the Errata Report, containing the change, “with some care.” I submit that she cannot believe in good faith that the council did anything other than lower the height limit by 14 feet.

The old formulation, prior to the Errata Report, provided that the “predominant” height of the Rand parcel would be 56 feet (four floors), but allowed 40% of the eastern half of the site to be built to 70 feet, and 40% of the western half to be built to 84 feet (six floors). So although the predominant height was to be 56 feet, the maximum height was 84 feet. This is what Olsen objected to.

Under the new formulation, the concept of “predominant height” was discarded, and instead, on the bottom of Page 3 of the Errata Report, the sentence was changed to read: “The maximum building height . . . shall be five floors or 70 feet . . .” Believing that the council had raised the height limit 14 feet, Roennau must have stopped her careful reading at this point, or perhaps she was missing Page 4 of the report, because on that very next page the clause that allowed development of part of the site to 84 feet was deleted. So that, in fact, just as Olsen had requested, the maximum height was now 70 feet. These changes were reflected in the plan sent to the voters, and anyone who still has the voter information pamphlet can look at the cross-section drawing on Page 35.

Lest anyone be alarmed even at a 70-foot maximum, the maximum height along Ocean Avenue is only 31 feet, and anything above 56 feet must be on the average at least 45 feet from the Ocean Avenue building face.

Roennau was an active member of Citizens for a Better Civic Center, an organization that during the campaign showed no reticence in making the most extravagant claims not only about the substance of the plan but also about the general depravity of the council. If she believed her charge to be true, why did she hold it back until after the vote? Why nurse a grudge when you can put it to work?

The answer is simple politics. Her letter appeared only five days before a SMRR convention at which Olsen and three other candidates who supported the Civic Center plan would be competing for SMRR endorsements against two of Roennau’s cohorts (including Coleman) from the anti-Civic Center group. Although all three candidates that SMRR endorsed were supporters of the plan, Olsen lost his endorsement. Ironically, he has been one of the two strongest anti-development votes on the council.

I guess that’s hardball.

FRANK J. GRUBER, Santa Monica