City Preps Residents to Defend Beach Parking Zones

By Jorge Casuso

On the surface, it seemed just another meeting of city staff and their constituents.

But with seven Ocean Park preferential parking zones on the line - all of them more than 10 years old -, Saturday's meeting at the Ken Edwards Center was anything but routine.

Instead of just providing information and listening to concerns, planning department staff helped coach and organize some three dozen residents for a crucial Coastal Commission meeting Tuesday morning.

After a year's delay, the commission finally will decide the fate of 936 preferential parking spaces south of Pico Boulevard and east of Lincoln Boulevard that were created by the city without commission approval between 1983 and 1989. The commission discovered the spaces in 1998, while considering the Edgemar Development project on Main Street.

"Don't be exclusionary," Planning Director Suzanne Frick advised the residents. "What is important is to put a face on this issue. We don't want to alienate this commission."

Among the key points city staff encouraged residents to make are the dearth of street parking, the availability of parking in beach lots and the make up of the community (it is not just rich homeowners).

Residents who spoke at Saturday's meeting said they feared that if preferential parking is revoked they wouldn't be able to move their cars or entertain guests, especially on weekends, because there will often be nowhere to park near their homes.

"I can't leave during the day, but there are empty spaces on the beach," said one resident who lives in a zone near Main Street with no daytime restrictions. "As usual, the residents are going to be caught in the middle of this squabble."

While there are 2,400 spaces in Ocean Park's two beach lots, it costs $7 to park ($6 during the winter.) By comparison, unrestricted street parking is free.

Frick, however, warned against bringing up the underused lot, saying that lowering the rates - which already are cheaper than the rates at Venice Beach and Will Rogers State Park - is not on the table.

She did encourage residents who blamed the parking woes not on beach goers, but on employees and customers of Main Street businesses, to speak out on Tuesday.

"It's a major impact," said Roger Genser, a 22-year resident of Ocean Park who helped organize the first Ocean Park zone in 1983. "It was a reaction against Main Street. It had nothing to do with beach parking."

Tuesday's decision will center on whether Santa Monica's zones restrict access to the beach, which the Coastal Commission was created in 1976 to protect.

Commission staff has recommended that the seven zones be retained - with the caveat that the city must reapply for the permits in three years. The city opposes that condition, saying it would be too costly, inhibit long-range planning and leave residents in limbo. Instead city staff is proposing to conduct a parking monitoring program and file a report within five years.

Commission staff also is requiring the city to create 154 spaces to help replenish those taken up by preferential parking. Of these, 65 already have been created. The city also must keep the Tide and Pier beach shuttles running during the summer months.

While Coastal Commission staff seems sympathetic to the plight of beach area residents, it is impossible to predict what the commission will do, Frick said. One warning sign was a complaint by a commissioner who visited the beach to watch the sunset and found no place to park.

"We've been discussing this with the staff for a year and a half," Frick said. "I think this really boils down to philosophical issues with the commission."

Although the city has been negotiating with commission staff, it also has made it clear that it is prepared to file a lawsuit if the commission revokes the zones.

"We have a difference of legal opinion as to whether the Coastal Commission even has authority," Frick said. "We would prefer to go through the process and have a positive outcome."

Since the Coastal Act was passed in 1976, the Coastal Commission has required cities to apply for permits for the special parking zones.

Historically, the Coastal Commission has granted permission for preferential parking zones in coastal communities, often imposing strict conditions to ensure plenty of public parking and beach access.

Since 1982 the commission has approved three applications from Hermosa Beach, Santa Cruz and Capitola. The commission, however, has denied preferential parking permits for Santa Monica's closest neighbors - Venice to the south and Pacific Palisades to the north.

In 1998 approximately 7.5 million visitors flocked to Santa Monica beaches. Over the past 28 years beach attendance has grown by 20 percent.

City Manager Susan McCarthy, who did not attend the meeting, said it would be "unforgivable" if residents weren't prepared given what's at stake.

"The Coastal Commission has a relatively clear mission laid out in the law, and in this situation, it may not be a mission that is sympathetic," McCarthy said. "This would certainly be a profound change."

The Coastal Commission will meet Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the Four Points Sheraton, 530 Pico Blvd.

Staff writer Teresa Rochester contributed to this report.

By Teresa Rochester

After 21 months of heated negotiations - marked by impasses, a lawsuit and a "fact-finding" panel - the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees approved a 10 percent raise for teachers on Monday, much to the faculty's chagrin. The raise is retroactive to the beginning of this year.

Calling it their last, best and final offer after a long battle that even a state mediator couldn't resolve, the board unanimously approved a plan that also grants a second raise in 2001 based on the state's cost-of-living allowance (COLA).

The offer had been rejected by the Faculty Association and the teachers union on Jan. 26.

"These negotiations have gone on far too long and there is no indication that the [Faculty] Association is prepared to offer any real compromise proposals," said Board Chair Dorothy Ehrhart Merrison, in a statement to the board. "It is not fair to ask the faculty to continue to forego a salary increase and improvements to other financial matters."

Trustee Nancy Cattell, who spent 31-years on SMC's faculty and was the Faculty Association's original organizer, said the college had come a long way from its days of financial uncertainty due in part to withholding a faculty raise for a year, which helped bolster the college's budget reserve.

"This raise of 10 percent, I believe is an extraordinary one for a community college today because of the paucity of state funding," Cattell said. "And in a matter of a few months from now there is another raise of COLA of better than two percent that will be given for the next year."

Faculty Association President Fran Chandler said the union considers the board's decision unfair.

"The faculty members are upset about the unilateral implementation of any terms," Chandler said. "Our attorney told us as well as the board that this is an unfair labor practice."

Chandler said the 10 percent increase isn't as much as it seems since the faculty has gone for more than a year and a half without a raise. The faculty contract expired in August of 1998.

"The 10 percent offer they're touting starts in January and it's totally misleading," Chandler said. "To characterize it that way is misleading."

Another sticking point was office hours. Faculty representatives wanted part-time teachers to get paid for their office hours, but SMC officials offered limited pay to a small number of part-timers, who teach certain ESL and English classes.

"I don't know of anyone in the state that pays part-time faculty for office hours at community colleges," SMC spokesman Bruce Smith said.

Chandler countered that Los Angeles pays its part-time faculty for office hours. She argued that 60 percent of the college's faculty are part-time and, because of their status, only a handful qualify for the district's benefits, which is a disservice to students.

"They all need to be able to meet with their teachers outside of class and not just with their full-timers," Chandler said. "We'd like to see them get paid for that."

Negotiations for a new contract started in March of 1998 and quickly became a battle between college officials and the faculty. In October 1998 the two parties reached an impasse, and two months later a state appointed mediator was brought in to work out a compromise, to no avail. The mediator called in a fact-finding panel consisting of representatives from both side and a neutral fact finding chair in June 1999.

The panel met with the Association and college district officials in September, 1999, when 70 issues were presented to the panel for consideration. On January, 17, 2000 the panel presented its findings and recommendations, which were advisory.

The district's offer, however, does not include any of the recommendations made by the panel. Faculty representatives said that when they balked at the district's offer, they expected a counteroffer that never materialized.

Monday's vote does not mean an end to the battle between district administration and faculty. The Faculty Association is expecting word on a lawsuit it filed against the district over unfair labor practices. In January union leaders declared a victory when Administrative Law Judge Gary Gallery ruled against the college on three charges of unfair labor practices.

Gallery ruled that the district threatened union heads with retaliation after they filed a lawsuit against the administration when it eliminated pay for professors who run non-instructional campus activities. He also held that the district bargained in bad faith by reclassifying some faculty members as management, which removed them from the union and its bargaining unit. The judge also found that the district had withheld relevant financial information from the union, including expense accounts for SMC President Piedad Robertson.