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Health & Fitness

What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

Santa Monica may reduce parking spaces & increase parking prices as part of its Traffic Demand Management plan. In stark contrast, Rancho Mirage provides residents with free valet parking. Why?

If you believe that your autonomy is related to your automobile and that having to pay for parking restricts your personal freedom, you might want to travel to Palm Springs where all parking is free or, better yet, move to Rancho Mirage, where all residents get free valet parking paid for by local merchants because it’s good for their business.  Despite complaints from Santa Monica residents, workers, and businesses that gridlock and lack of adequate parking threaten our quality of life, many predict that the Santa Monica Planning Commission and the City Council will vote to excuse Yahoo! Center and St. John’s Health Center for increasing their profits by violating their Development Agreements with our city—even though this would reduce parking and increase its cost. For those readers old enough to remember Paul Newman as the rebellious Cool Hand Luke, cutting off the heads of parking meters and ending up on a chain gang, this situation may best be described by that film’s famous line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate!”

Bad decisions by decent people are usually made according to high-minded principles.  Here the principle is Traffic Demand Management (TDM)—the standard of city planning that says traffic must be reduced to increase air quality, lower green house gases, and aid the circulation of people and products around the city.  One advantage of gaining TDM points is that it can lead to a city offered grants, like the $652,000 grant Santa Monica just won to develop its Bergamot Station industrial area.  You can see why our city’s Planning Division is hot to advance our TDM rep.  But they are easy pickin’ for lawyers who are adept at building arguments on the foundation provided by their opponents.

Residents were concerned with Traffic Demand Management when Yahoo! Center was first built; only neither had that name back then.  Gridlock was the villain when “Colorado Place” was first proposed.  The first of many giant business complexes to invade the Mid-City neighborhood, it started converting our quiet boulevard into the ever-expanding “Colorado Corridor” that crowds our community with cars.  Equity Office, in purchasing the Yahoo! Center, agreed to follow the rules of the Development Agreement for “Colorado Place,” which required that free parking be provided to all workers.  Owners might charge $2.50 for each 10 minutes to anyone foolish enough to pay it.   But, the D.A. protected residents by guaranteeing 3-hour validated parking for business visitors, customers, and members, along with free event parking for up to 500 people, and visitor parking on weekends.  Equity Office’s agreement to set-aside parking spaces was labeled: “Current Measures Implemented to Reduce Neighborhood Spillover.”  But that agreement was violated when owners started leasing out space to off-site parties.

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This violation, which Yahoo! Center’s lawyers have renamed “a long-standing practice” (in that it had started even before they bought the place) has increased over the years.  With one-third of Yahoo! Center’s office space being unoccupied, one-third of its parking space has been leased to off-site parties—in particular, to store cars for auto dealerships and to allow nurses to park until Saint John’s Health Center builds its promised parking garage.  Though Standard Parking, which keeps records of earnings, has not distinguished what Equity Office has earned in breach of its agreement from what it was allowed to collect, of the recorded $30 million received over the last five years, perhaps as much as $10 million was ill-gotten gain.  Though Barry Rosenbaum, Senior Land Use Attorney for our city, told Yahoo! Center’s lawyer at the Planning Commission meeting on May 25th that his client was indeed in violation of its Development Agreement, the City Council is expected to approve an amendment that would allow Equity Office to keep all of that money and gain other benefits as well.  Neighbors throw up their hands in disbelief as they realize that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

It is important to understand how this failure happens.  Communication breaks down when we can’t relate words and numbers we use to the reality they are supposed to represent.  Consider:  Though this agreement calls for setting aside spaces for parking, there are no actual spaces are set aside except reserved usually by non-tenants. Employees and health club members are given plastic cards to gain access to the garage.  Others have their parking slips validated.  That is why with 3,086 spaces available, there is not a problem when “approximately 3,010 have been leased out to existing tenants” and “approximately 1,053 unassigned parking spaces were leased out to non-tenants.”   Even though Equity Office is paid for nearly 1,000 more spaces than it has, when demand for parking was measured in December one-fourth of the spaces were available even at peak hours.  Of course, that was when one-third of its office space was vacant.  Though one-fourth of the spaces were not being occupied when one-third of the office space was unoccupied, Equity Office does not hesitate to ask the city to legalize leasing out one-third of its presently assigned spaces to off-site parties.  While the numbers mentioned may not justify this, with so many numbers, for most people these figures cease to make sense:  But the numbers over the last five years that show Equity Office has given the City of Santa Monica parking tax payments at amount to $3,074,184.23 make both dollars and sense.  That’s how Equity Office makes a silk purse out of the sow’s ear.  It puts money in it.

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Besides, Equity Office’s promises advance the city’s Traffic Demand Management (TDM) plan by releasing its tenants from their requirement to give free parking to their employees.  Making employees share some of the parking expense (which Standard Parking spaces can go for $183 a month) should make some think twice before driving their cars to Santa Monica.  In fact, most workers I spoke to said they couldn’t afford to work here at all at those prices. 

This same TDM logic is being used to justify relieving Saint John’s of its obligation to build the parking garage for all the new cars expected to come to their expanded Health Center.  This gives our city another "first"—the first city in L.A. County to have a hospital without on-site parking for its staff, patients, and those visiting loved ones.  By the standards of TDM logic, that’s something to be proud of. The irony is that St. John’s asked to be relieved of its obligation to build a parking lot because it would cost too much money.  Now the city planners, who would released St. John’s from that responsibility of taking on the cost of parking are pleased to place it on people who use cars to drop someone off at the hospital or visit a sick friend.  These folks must pay a $13 charge for valet or nearby garage parking providing St. John’s with even more money while the lots that receive their cars are obliged to pay the parking tax that Saint John’s would pay if it used the garage it promised to build.  St. John’s gets a double benefit thanks to TDM logic! 

By the way, I like to think of “TDM” as standing for the Totalitarian Deterministic Mantra: “Anything is good if it reduces the emission of green house gases in our city as much as possible, as soon as possible.”  At least then, the letters explain the decisions many of our planners are making.  This explains why they are such patsies for lawyers for developments. When lawyers construct arguments out of the ideals that are the planks of our own platforms, they can create from them a box that keeps us from seeing the real world.

That’s why I called the Randal Bynder, the Director of Community Development for Rancho Mirage:  He lives outside the Santa Monica box.  After talking over our differences—he’s from a touristy desert destination city in the middle of nowhere and I am from a touristy destination city on the crowded coastline of California—we talked about what we had in common—developers who could get planning staff get sucked into thinking their way.  I asked him why that happened.  Randy explained, “The problem is that staff tends to develop relationships with developers before they meet with the community.”  That sounded a lot like Santa Monica.  But, when I asked him how Rancho Mirage avoids this problem, he described a process that didn’t remind me at all of Santa Monica, “We have developers bring their projects to the home owner associations before our planning department ever gets involved.  Only when the developers come to some agreement with those who live in the community do we help them with their plans.”  That’s what keeps communication straight.

That’s how Rancho Mirage realizes its vision for community benefits:  It requires that the community be involved in the decision-making process.  Unfortunately, in Santa Monica, the vision of involving the community in its decisions seems only a mirage.

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