Why all this talk about public participation in the Downtown Specific Plan process?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that whenever the the public discourse of the DSP gets going, there’s mention of just how much public participation there’s been. Immediately people in the audience start looking at each other, a little stunned. Ever wonder why?

Perhaps you were part of the meetings called Downtown 101. Although billed as a charette, they were in fact nothing of the kind.

A charette occurs when a group of design experts meets with the community in an intensive series of meetings of stakeholders which becomes the basis for a realistic development vision for future design.[1]

To say that Downtown 101 was a legitimate charette is like saying that the DSP was a grass-roots effort. That’s not true and we all know it.

If you doubt it, go to the Planning Counter some morning and see if you can see the planning staff wearing their green polo shirts embroidered with “Sierra Madre DSP.” Seeing such a thing might make you think that they were promoting a product. They are. This is why the DSP process is not based on a charette, but is an attempt to sell a product—a specific plan that will streamline development of a character never seen before in Sierra Madre, and not really all that welcome by its residents.

In California, the urban planning process is described as the constitution for future development. It is more than just a garden-variety ordinance, it is intended to guide and limit future development and is therefore supposed to be reflective of the community will. In order to reflect the community will, the public participation provisions of the general plan process require maximum public participation.

Here for example is a statement of the public policy of the State of California for purposes of planning:

The Legislature recognizes the importance of public participation at every level of the planning process. It is therefore the policy of the state and the intent of the Legislature that each state, regional, and local agency concerned in the planning process involve the public through public hearings, informativemeetings, publicity and other means available to them, and that at such hearings and other public forums, the public be afforded the opportunity to respond to clearly defined alternative objectives, policies, and actions. [Government Code, section 65033.]

This certainly does not describe what happened here in Sierra Madre. But, there’s more. If a proposed plan would affect the intensity or permitted uses of a specific area, notice must be given, not only by publication, but also by mailing to all owners within 300 feet of the affected area.[2] This is basically the same notification required of a specific planning commission decision, not the same notice required for the adoption of a general ordinance. Here the “charette” process was really a sales pitch in disguise. Meant to make it appear that the public had been involved in the determination of DSP provisions, it was in fact to the contrary. Many who participated in this process were allowed the “opportunity to comment” but their comments were never reflected in the proposal.[3]

Instead of coming together to develop a publicly-supported vision of a vibrant, alive downtown area, the City simply sponsored a sell-job that was intended to convince the participants that what they had in mind was an important and necessary part of the City’s vision for the future. Too bad it doesn’t represent the residents’ vision for their future.

The importance of this charette process is that it can be trotted out when people object to the plan as being something from the City’s back pocket, by “demonstrating” that this was a result of consultation with the public; that it was a distillation of public comment. In this way, the public participation has been used as the City’s shield against claims of unilateralism, and as a sword against criticism of the process.

When I hear about the purported public participation, I just remember the planning staff in their green DSP polo shirts at the public counter.

[1] A full discussion of the planning process and the role of the charette is found at CharetteCenter.net.
[2] Government Code, sections 65353 and 65091 (general plan) and section 65453 (specific plan)
[3] Of course, the City continues to try to claim that there is no proposal yet. In this way, the City hopes to avoid the appearance that there is a specific specific plan. The CEQA process puts the lie to this effort: How can you perform environmental review on a project and alternatives without articulating what it is?

Avoiding Political Suicide -

Watch your council members when the petitions are submitted.

With the activity of people circulating the 2-30-13 petitions, it may seem inevitable that it will be on the municipal ballot in the next general election. Because they wish to avoid the expense of a special election, the proponents of the initiative have declined to seek a special election. In any event, the initiative will go before the City Council when the signatures have been certified.

Meanwhile, there is a great deal of concern about what happens in the meantime.

In reality, there shouldn’t be a long wait before this initiative ordinance is adopted by the City. This may seem counterintuitive, but the initiative process for cities provides for a quick, easy solution—the legislative body (the City Council) may respond to the certified petition by adopting it themselves.

Here’s how the initiative petition process works in general. The details of this procedure are found at Elections Code, sections 9200, et seq. The process begins when a Notice of Intent to Circulate an Initiative Petition is filed with the City’s elections official, in this case the City Clerk. This filing includes a statement of reasons for the initiative. A request that a ballot title and summary be prepared is also filed with the elections official. In response to this request, the City Attorney is required to prepare a ballot title and neutral summary of the initiative’s provisions, which becomes part of the petition. The ballot title, ballot summary, and initiative language are published. After publication has been established by affidavit, the circulation of the petition begins. It must be completed within 180 days after receipt of the title and summary.

After submittal of the signed petitions, the elections official has to verify that the signatures are valid signatures of registered voters. Usually, despite the efforts of the petition’s circulators, there are some that are not valid, or are duplicates, etc. After discarding those signatures, if there are 10% of the registered voters who have signed the petition, it is eligible to go on the ballot.[1]

This is where the City Council can intervene and prevent delay and extended controversy. Under section 9215 of the Elections Code, the City Council can respond to submission of the certified petitions by adopting the ordinance then and there or within 10 days. If the City Council adopts the ordinance in response to the petition, it will have the same effect as if it had been adopted by the vote of the people--it cannot be amended or repealed except by a vote of the people. [Elections Code, section 9217]

So, it’s back to the City Council. A statesman-like Council member who might otherwise be disinclined to support this measure, could certainly do this community a big favor by putting this discussion to a swift and merciful end and vote in to adopt the ordinance upon presentation of the certification by the elections official.

Based on the public statements by the Council, we can anticipate that Councilmembers Watts and Zimmerman will vote to adopt the ordinance upon presentation. That leaves the other three Councilmembers—Joffe, Buchanan and Mosca. Will any of these members realize the impact of their vote if they refuse to adopt the ordinance and force it to a vote of the people? It is entirely possible that there will be more signatures submitted in favor of the ordinance than voted for at least two of these council members. In a town energized by activism and frustrated by the officials’ response to their efforts, who can say what the result would be?

A council member, however, wishing to avoid political suicide, should carefully consider how to vote on the issue when it comes before the Council when the petition is certified.

[1] If the petition had a request for a special election and is signed by 15% of the voters, a special election must be held. That doesn’t really matter here, because there is no request for a special election in the petition itself. However, it may be interesting to note that 2-30-13 could be subject to a special election if it’s proponents had requested one.

Why sponsor an initiative?

The 2-30-13 initiative is being brought as an initiative because of the failure of the City Council to act to put the Downtown Specific Plan before the people for a vote.

The Downtown Specific Plan was an issue in the April municipal campaign. Three Council Members were elected, each one stating an intention to have the DSP put before the voters. So, what happened? you might ask. Many people are still wondering what happened. When the matter came before the City Council only two council members were prepared to vote to place the DSP on the ballot.

To a less determined citizenry, that might have been the end of it. In this case, however, a group of people committed to preserving the independence of our community and with a strong desire to maintain the downtown village atmosphere that has brought so many of us to Sierra Madre has banded together with other like-minded people to promote the 2-30-13 initiative.

The California Constitution reserves to the people the right of initiative. It is a method whereby voters can propose legislation and bring it before the voters. Once passed by the voters, it cannot be repealed or substantively altered except by the voters.

If the 2-30-13 initiative is passed by the voters at a municipal election, it will be the law of the City unless and until repealed by the voters. In this way, the citizens will have implemented the general plan in a way that every single City Council since the general plan was amended in 1996.

It does not take much imagination to see that millions of dollars are at stake. The proponents of this initiative can expect a dirty fight--some tactics have already been brought out. Be prepared for a tough fight. Be prepared to go the distance for your village community.

Why shouldn’t we just let the City Council make these development decisions?

• I recently attended a meeting at Café 322 where there was a presentation made about the initiative sponsored by Sierra Madre Residents for Responsible Development. George Maurer got up and asked this question: Why don’t we just let the City Council do the job it was elected to do—make these land use decisions? This is another form of this question: Why do people feel that they should be voting directly on land use decisions?
  
  This is a hard question to answer. It is not intellectually difficult, but it is hard because it entails telling the City Council some facts that may seem harsh. They are.
  
  The main fact is that after several years of watching City Council make land use decisions, many – maybe even most—people do not trust the City Council to act in the City’s best interest. There are some notable exceptions to this, but there is also recent conduct that tells us that this view is still justified.
  
  Projects have been approved, ordinances passed, and subdivisions granted that inexorably have chewed away at the village quality Sierra Madre has enjoyed over the years.
  
  Supervision of approved development has been poor. Other than an outstanding building official, city conditions have been largely unfulfilled. [Jamison Estate tree plan]
  
  The general plan, though adopted, has never been implemented. There has never been a systematic adoption of zoning throughout the City to match the designation of the general plan. [Residential, Residential Entrepreneurial, Park, Canyon zone, etc.]
  
  The City Council in 2004 adopted the very downtown development standards that are now being held up as the basis for needing a downtown plan. We are now being called upon to adopt a plan to protect ourselves from what our 2004 City Council did!!
  
  The City Council in 2005 approved the One Carter housing development over public objections, based on the excuse that it was settling a lawsuit of disputed merit.
  
  The last council had a member that was elected as a preservationist candidate with an expressed preference for protecting the environment. Before long, this council member was voting against every preservation issue that came before the City Council. The member was resoundingly defeated. The replacement, also elected on a platform of public involvement in decision-making, and restrained and government, has already betrayed his campaign promises.
  
  George, no need to take this personally, but many voters feel that the City Council has failed its duty to act on behalf of the people. Instead, the people are demanding to take back their power and vote on these projects themselves.
  
  Once the development has been approved and built, there’s no going back.
  

Why I oppose a downtown specific plan

Before I launch into the monologue about the merits and demerits of a specific plan, I want to draw attention to the title of this article. Please note, this is not, Why I oppose the downtown specific plan, or, Why I oppose this downtown specific plan. I am about to describe why I oppose a downtown specific plan.

My opposition is not based on the content of the plan type that is now being discussed. My opposition is not based on the number of stories or density bonuses or parking garages or number of units, or mixed use or any of those things. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty to say on each of those subjects, and I’m sure I will get to those another time.

My opposition to a downtown specific plan is based on the fact that a specific plan confers certain rights and obligations and I oppose a mechanism or process that confers those rights and obligations for development in Sierra Madre.

First of all, there is no requirement that a city have a specific plan. A city is required to have a general plan with certain elements, but a specific plan is permissible but not required. A specific plan has a level of detail unknown to a general plan. It lays out specific development plans for a small area contained within a general plan. Often a specific plan will be brought in to handle a particular area within a general plan—especially an area that has yet to be developed. One example of this is the civic center area of Malibu. Much of that area consists of raw land that has not been subdivided yet. It has some adjacent development and rather than leave this are in flux, during the Coastal Planning process, it was determined that a specific plan would be developed to address the exact details of how this property was to be developed. This could result in a shopping complex, including civic buildings, hotels, etc. It is easy to see that an area like the Malibu civic center area is very different from the downtown of Sierra Madre.

Perhaps an obvious difference is the stage of development of the two locales. Malibu’s civic center area has many acres of property that are owned by several owners. It is adjacent to a environmentally protected area (Malibu Lagoon) and there is a shopping area already existing on part of the land. It is not necessarily the devil’s work to lay out some kind of a plan that will allow continuity and compatibility of development there while considering and protecting the Lagoon area. Whether and how this will happen remains to be seen. The concept is apparent, however.

Sierra Madre, however, is another story. The entire downtown area can fit on one of the parcels of the Malibu civic center area. More importantly, it has been developed for nearly a century. It has been a downtown business area, with existing streets and buildings for many years now. Businesses have come and gone and occasionally a building has to be rebuilt after a fire. It is, however, an area with a developed past—unlike the Malibu property.

This raises the first questions: Why is further development a foregone conclusion? Why are we talking about development at all? We have buildings that exist and are quite serviceable. Some of them are or should be historically protected. There is no presumption that attends acres of wide open space in the center of a new city that it should be developed.

We are talking about development because somebody wants to talk about development. So far, the only people I can see who want to talk about development are City government and developers. Until the whole downtown specific plan issue was raised, I have never heard anyone talk about how much more development we need in the downtown business district. It was certainly not generated by popular demand.

In fact, I have heard about how bad some of the most recent buildings were—too tall, no style, too much mass, etc. Yet, at the same time, the proposal is to allow more new buildings in town, rather than protect our existing buildings and their footprints.

The reason I am opposed to a downtown specific plan, however, goes way beyond the fact that we don’t need and shouldn’t encourage additional development of our downtown area. The reason I am opposed to a downtown specific plan is because it will streamline development and make it easy for development to obtain permits over the counter with virtually no additional review or public comment. This is why developers want a downtown specific plan. One of the recent issues of Downtown Dirt spelled this reason out precisely, when it claimed that developers want to develop in a specific plan area because they know that their project will be approved if it meets specific plan criteria.[1]

The specific plan is developed by preparing and circulating an EIR to cover the impacts of the plan. That is it. No more EIRs -- or any other level of environmental review-- for projects proposed within the plan. No more public hearings or comments. Over the counter approval and then here comes 55 condominium units at the former Skilled Nursing Facility. Didn’t know? Hate it? Want to object? Too bad. No public participation, no need for any—it was all handled during the specific plan process.

Proponents of the specific plan will point to how much money and time this is saving the city. They’re right. When you dispense with things like public process and open decision-making, it is expensive and time-consuming. That pesky public can be a real problem when it comes to doing what you want to do in the development world. That is why the specific plan is a blessing to development. That is why I’m opposed to it—any specific plan. In a small town like Sierra Madre with an existing stock of buildings, there is no basis for a foregone conclusion that the downtown will be developed. And there is no basis for accepting that a plan ought to be laid out so the downtown can be handed to development interests on a silver platter.


[1] Downtown Dirt, Save Sierra Madre from Bankruptcy, [Really!!] http://www.downtowndirt.org/archive/lead/lead_007.htm