Shame at City Hall

City Hall has embraced massive commercial development. It has chosen to give free rein and to partner with commercial developers who seek to maximize profits at the expense and to the detriment of substantial residential interests. The results have been destination gridlock traffic on our major boulevards and residential streets, destruction of our city’s landscape and the substantial impairment of our quality of life.

If City Hall continues on its present perilous path, the “village city” we cherish will be no more, having been sadly transformed into just one more asphalt high-rise extension of the Wilshire corridor.

In our newsletters, we have tried to inform our friends and neighbors, residents all, of the reasons for our deeply felt concerns about the present conditions and future realities we face when confronted by a City Hall that is dismissive of residential interests and has sponsored excessive development. Together we struggle to maintain our quality of life for ourselves and our children.

City Hall by its adverse actions is impervious and insensitive to our pleas. We seek redress, City Hall turns a deaf ear. We petition, City Hall responds with dismissive disregard.

The stakes are too high for us to permit City Hall to continue to engage in business as usual. We care too much about our city and our way of life to permit an out-of-control City Hall to bargain away our quality of life to the highest bidder. There are times when the formal acts of City Hall become so odious that, after seeking redress, petition and redress over and over, we find it necessary to throw ourselves on the gears of the loathsome City Hall machine to grind it to a halt. Such a time is presently at hand. No longer will we sit idly by and accept City Hall’s faux promises and insincere politically motivated deceptions.

We will be deceived no more. We are prepared to act and to change the City Hall pro-development culture and councilmembers who time and again endorse it and who are arrogantly dismissive of residents concerns.

Comes now time to discuss important self-evident truths:

Respect The Liberty of Discussion

It has been a time-honored city tradition that at the initiation of City Council meetings, residents are invited to address councilmembers about matters of public concern. In the main, it is the expectation that councilmembers respond to resident issues. There has always been a give and take between the resident at the microphone expressing concern and a councilmember or members responding, with the resident given an opportunity to reply. There may be agreement or not, but there is a conversation. Such has been the respect given to the cherished concept of the “liberty of discussion.”

Not so any longer! Now, in a most egregious violation of the liberty of discussion, residents, who care enough about issues of public concern and take the time to attend a City Council meeting, are given two minutes to present their views with no up and back with any councilmember.

Such is the manner by which Mayor/councilmember Delshad runs the show. Under his rule, there is no colloquy between resident and City Hall, only soliloquy. There is no engagement by the councilmembers, only dismissiveness. There is no City Hall compassionate concern, only arrogant disregard.

Instead of listening to concerned residents, responding and giving residents opportunities to reply, City Hall has perverted the time honored “open microphone” period to nothing more than a perfunctory cattle-call designed to cover up City Hall hubris and know-it-all mentality by giving the appearance of an open fair-minded due process public meeting. All the while, councilmembers’ minds are irreconcilably in lockstep, eager to go forward with massive commercial development regardless of public input.

Speak Truthfully, City Hall

We hold true to the concept that service on our City Council is a privilege and an honor. Residents have every right to expect that each councilmember will speak the truth. Unfortunately, that has not been the case, particularly as it relates to matters of substantial public concern.

Widening of Santa Monica Boulevard

Presently, there is a plan at City Hall to widen the north side of Santa Monica Blvd. west of Roxbury Drive encroaching into Beverly Gardens Park. Yet, we have been told countless times, assured by City Hall, that there would be no widening of Santa Monica Blvd.

This latest City Hall deception is symptomatic of the faux promises that so disreputably characterize our city’s politicos and cries out for us to remove them.

The facts and circumstances surrounding this issue explain why change at City Hall is so necessary and immediate.

Early last year, we first learned and immediately notified you that City Hall had entered into a contractual relationship with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the purpose of widening the north side of Santa Monica Blvd, encroaching into Beverly Gardens Park.

In fact, in the September 29, 2006 issue of the Beverly Hills Courier, councilmember Delshad was quoted as saying that if he, Delshad, was re-elected, his priorities would include the widening of Santa Monica Blvd., westbound.

Yet, after we alerted the community to City Hall’s plan to widen Santa Monica Blvd., City Hall denied that any such plan existed, and further denied that there was a contractual relationship with L.A. County Metro.

We produced the contract! City Hall then acknowledged its existence, but still steadfastly assured the residents that there was absolutely no plan to widen Santa Monica Blvd. and encroach into Beverly Gardens Park.

Now, today, there is on the table at City Hall a plan to widen Santa Monica Blvd. and encroach into Beverly Gardens Park.

We possess documentary proof in this regard.

City Hall still misleads our community with its latest glossy alleged 'information' mailer.

With respect to the Montage Hotel project, it states that the city will receive $5 million in revenue. Nowhere does it mention that the $5 million is, at best, a guesstimate.

Moreover, there is no mention indicating that whatever revenue the city may receive from the Montage must be discounted by the $2.5 million debt service owed and payable by our city for the next 25 years!

Why? Because City Hall handed the developer a check in the amount of $32,270,000 for a four level subterranean parking structure, featuring at least 86% tandem parking spaces — cars parked and stacked in back of each other requiring valets to secure and obtain your car.

Last month, City Hall approved for this parking area an additional $1 million to install “smart parking” (pay at a machine before obtaining your car prior to exiting the parking structure).

But why do we need a smart parking system with so many tandem spaces? The idea behind smart parking is to cut down on the number of employees required thereby limiting labor costs. However, with tandem parking, valets are required if we are to ever get our car in a timely fashion.

Moreover, why wasn’t “smart parking” and no tandem spaces provided for in the original agreement entered into between City Hall and the Montage developer?

Any wonder why developers are lined up in tandem, desiring to do business with City Hall?

Roxbury Park

Notwithstanding the residents’ constructive concerns, City Hall engages in a practice best described as “residential avoidance” and proceeds with its designs ignoring the people’s voice. This official “dismissive disregard” of residents has become all too commonplace:

City Hall has proposed a $37.9 million dollar massive re-development expansion in Roxbury Park. City Hall has conducted several meetings, during which residents have strenuously objected to the massive size of the proposed project. To be sure, residents favor a renovation of the parks existing structures and an overall refurbishing at Roxbury.

During the public meetings, the residents informed the City Hall spokesman that they wished to see a plan that would reflect the desirable renovation at substantial cost savings contrasted to the City Hall plan.

The City Hall spokesman stated, in substance, that City Hall specifically directed “not” to provide the residents with such a state-of-the-art upgrade of the existing structures.

In spite of the overwhelming residential opposition to the City’s massive $37.9 million dollar mega-redevelopment expansion and denying the residents an opportunity to see a scaled down, more cost effective renovation/design, City Hall in all its hubris plans to proceed willy nilly.

Two-Hour Free Parking

Councilmember/Mayor Delshad and his City Hall colleagues, during the Montage Hotel/Measure A debate, promised that Two Hour Free Parking citywide would remain in place if the Montage Hotel project were approved.

City Hall even went so far as to state that “anyone who says that two hour free parking will be removed is a liar.”

A few months after the election, Mr. Delshad and his City Hall colleagues voted to abolish two hour free parking.

For two years we petitioned City Hall to return two hour Free parking. City Hall maintained its position and misinformed the residents that even the city’s merchants, business community, were opposed to two hour free parking. We then spoke with the city’s merchants and received over 200 signatures from them which we presented to City Hall.

Finally, City Hall yielded and re-instated two hour free parking. So it took us two years petitioning City Hall to revert back to the status quo, which City Hall had promised would not be altered!

General Plan

The General Plan of our city sets forth the nature and scope of development for our city. It is truly a blue print of the kind of city in which we choose to reside. Presently, our General Plan provides for height and density limitations. The General Plan and the Municipal Code categorically state that commercial development must be limited to 3 story/45 feet with a floor area ratio of 2:1. Unfortunately, City Hall honors these limitations in the beach.

City Hall now seeks to alter substantially our General Plan by seriously increasing the development limitations presently in place. Why? Because City Hall is wedded to massive commercial development.

It is a self-evident truth that we residents do not want to expand or in any way enlarge the present height and density limitations. Moreover, we earnestly desire a City Hall that will obey the Municipal Code and General Plan by honoring the 3 story/45 foot height limitations for commercial properties, and so inform the development community of its intentions.

To be sure, before the General Plan is altered in any fashion, we, the people, demand that we vote citywide on this issue. We did not elect councilmembers or, for that matter a majority of these councilmembers, to irrevocably define the future scope, nature and landscape of our city without a vote of the people.

The only councilmember who believes as we do that a vote of the people is advisable and righteous is Nancy Krasne. We commend her for respecting residents on this crucial matter.

Industrial Area*

On two prior occasions, the residents of our City voted in special elections to preserve the Industrial Area for municipal purposes, e.g., water treatment facility and other similar citywide beneficial uses.

Again, without consulting the public and disregarding the will of the people, City Hall has devised a commercial development plan for private enterprise purposes for the area:

1. At 331 Foothill Road, a four story building with a 300 car garage at a cost estimated at $30.4 million;

2. In addition, the City proposes a private development consisting of offices and a hotel.

It is our belief that before any commercial development takes place in the Industrial Area, the residents should have a chance, consistent with past practices, to vote on whether or not the residents still wish to maintain these last city owned public parcels for municipal purposes only.

*The area is bound by Santa Monica Boulevard to the north, North Maple Drive to the east, The Civic Center to the west, Third Street to the south.

Copyright © 2009 Beverly Hills Citizen™