Civic Center Plans Upset Growth Foes : Development: Government agencies and RAND say they need room to expand. Opponents want open space and say citizens’ opinions went unheeded.

SANTA MONICA —  For four years, ardent slow-growther Merritt Coleman has attended committee meetings and saved his money.

As a member of a task force, Coleman argued and voted for what some would say is a Utopian view of a Santa Monica Civic Center: inviting expanses of pedestrian-friendly open space, with minimal development.

The money he saved was for a more cynical purpose: legal fees. While arguing passionately for Utopia, Coleman was socking away money for a court battle if his vision didn’t prevail. It didn’t.

Now he is one of a growing group of residents opposing a draft Civic Center plan wrought after a four-year public process in which he participated, but rejects as a sham because he says community members’ wishes were not heeded.

Opponents of the plan say the task force has squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to redesign the heart of the city. Too little vision. Too much traffic. Too many offices.

“This is the biggest development issue of the century in Santa Monica,’ said Ocean Park resident Frank Gruber. “This is the most significant piece of real estate left in (the city).”

The opponents picked up a formidable ally in State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who recently weighed in with a blast against the process and its product.

“Some seem bent on burying the coastline under an artificial urban environment, making Santa Monica a mere consumption magnet for ever-increasing traffic, density, air pollution and crime,’ Hayden said in a letter to Santa Monica Mayor Judy Abdo. He also convened his own hearing on the issue.

Responding to the uproar and hoping to avoid a major development war, the Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday voted to hire a design consultant for $75,000 to come up with something more palatable.

The designer will have four months to work with a committee of three planning commissioners, two council members and the public.

At stake is the future of 42.8 acres bounded by Pico Boulevard to the south, 4th Street on the east, the Santa Monica Freeway on the north, and Ocean Avenue.

It’s the current home of City Hall, the Santa Monica Courthouse, the Civic Auditorium, the Pacific Shores Hotel and RAND Corp., the international think tank and one of the city’s biggest employers. In addition to its offices, RAND has bought up nearly all of the buildings along the east side of Ocean Avenue, most of which are now vacant and boarded up.

Maguire Thomas Partners has development rights for an office building on Ocean, but otherwise the area has been in zoning limbo for the four years that the city has been working on what in government parlance is called a Specific Plan.

The plan sets desired limits on building height, density and other variables. Actual projects and their design are still subject to a complete city review.

Nearly all of the public and private landowners in the Civic Center area say they have pressing needs to expand.

The city, for example, needs a new police building: Its current facility at the back of City Hall is antiquated and cramped. Some small offices, shared by four officers, literally have wall-to-wall desks with a narrow aisle more suitable to an airplane than a work space.

Even after major cuts in the Santa Monica city work force in the past few years, some departments are using rented offices because of lack of space in City Hall.

The courthouse is also bursting at the seams: Presiding Santa Monica Municipal Judge David Finkel said he and another judge have to work out a schedule to share a jury deliberation room. The file rooms are stuffed. And lack of proper security facilities for defendants has long posed a public safety threat.

For more than a decade, RAND has sought to double the size of its facility, not to add employees, but to expand research space and conference facilities.

To pay for its expansion, RAND wants to develop an office building that it would lease out. The company also proposes to build 350 units of housing, with ground-floor retail space designed to serve neighborhood needs.

The total new development, including RAND, the courthouse and the police facility, would triple the existing square footage of building space in the Civic Center. It is now 690,000 square feet, to which 1.350 million square feet would be added for total of 2.04 million, Santa Monica planner Suzanne Frick said.

Frick said the development would add about 28,000 daily car trips, a major sore point with project opponents.

Under the current proposals, RAND has agreed to leave 70% of its property as open space, with a maximum building height of eight stories. Its consultant, Santa Monica developer Bill Janss, said RAND is hoping to achieve a consensus on the project and is keeping an open mind.

For example, Janss said he met with Hayden and the president of Santa Monica College, Richard Moore, to discuss Hayden’s idea of a land swap that would have brought the college to the shore and moved RAND inland.

This idea has been abandoned, and Janss said RAND wants to stay on the land overlooking the Pacific it has owned since 1951, arguably one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the state.

Project opponents are pushing for a regional park and open vistas to the sea. If they are not satisfied by the final product, they say they will try to force a citywide referendum.

Janss said RAND, though still intent on cooperating with residents, would fight hard to prevent a public vote on a complicated land-use issue involving several property owners.

Recent history suggests that RAND has good reason for wanting to avoid a public vote. A divisive referendum campaign in 1990 ended up blocking a proposed beach hotel project, and just the threat of one a year earlier derailed a plan for a large commercial development at Santa Monica Municipal Airport.

Already, three neighborhood associations favor putting the Civic Center plan to a vote unless it is substantially altered to their liking.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Coleman noted that on important votes taken by the task force concerning height limits and density, six out of seven neighborhood representatives wanted more stringent standards than did property owners and business representatives on the task force. They were consistently outvoted.

Supporters of the task force plan, apparently including most members of the City Council at this point, are hoping the new design process will allay concerns that the wishes of community members were ignored.

Task force member Bob Gabriel disputes that anyone was left out of the process or that the plan shortchanged the public on open space. “We have a regional park--the beach, three miles of it,” Gabriel said.

But whether residents were left out or merely outvoted has become beside the point, because their outcry is now impossible to ignore.

“This is the heart of the city,” Planning Commissioner Jennifer Polhemus said. “We have all these possibilities, and all we did is go down the conventional road and do it the conventional way, and that disappoints me.”

Coleman, meanwhile, has his stash of money in the bank and says he is interviewing lawyers.