The new leader of Culver City may have been one of its few residents who held neutral feelings about the crackling flap over presumed gaudy signage that allegedly would have accompanied the economic sprucing up of a mixed neighborhood at the south end of the community.
Mayor Mehaul O’Leary said that fellow City Councilman Jeff Cooper’s suggestion at the outset of what figured to be a stormy debate last week – delete all mention of signage while plans for the neighborhood go forward – “was an interesting way to open up. It obviously calmed down the people who were going to speak very passionately about signage.
“So we actually got a productive dialogue going,” Mr. O’Leary said of his first meeting as His Honor. “We are moving in the right direction, even if it has no sign component.”
Did the mayor feel strongly pro or con about the signage protests that rang out for months about the Fox Hills area neighborhood also called Hotel Circle?
“I had really no opinion on it,” Mr. O’Leary said. “I was enjoying the fact we were going to be looking at an area I have pondered about in the past.”
The mayor applauded the turn of events because “it gives me sort of a guideline on how to go about things like this, a template.”
Mr. O’Leary described the template as “breaking the component area into sub-component areas. Not one thing will suit all areas.
“There is the hotel component, there is the residential area with smaller streets, and there is Fox Hills with the big, expansive parking lots, the old way of thinking about building high- rises that seems to be of not much value anymore to the tenant community for office space.”
And that brought the mayor to several unanswered questions:
- “Where do you imagine the main street in this area would be?
- “Where do you imagine the walkable corridors would be?
- “Whose property is going to be taken?
- “How will those matters affect the deal.”
Mr. O’Leary acknowledged “there will be a cost to this,” although he is unsure what form the cost will take.
“Look, we put in parking structures in Downtown when there were no cars. Yes, it was Redevelopment Agency money. But even if it had not been, and the money had been taken out of the General Fund, it would have paid itself back already.”
By taking the signage component out of this development project, council members may have “saved” themselves from having to listen to the same concerted group of citizens’ repeat performance passionately expressing their already well known views on signage. But, in doing so, this council also sent a message to any potential developers that they should not expect future projects in Culver City to be as profitable as it would have been under the now defunct CCRDA.
Listening to the council meeting webcast, it seemed some on the members wanted to put the cart before the horse, by having the public propose what to build in the area and then have the council find a developer willing to build it. Will that really work at this major level of development?
By saying no to limited signage, the council also said no to the $500,000 it would have brought into our city coffers annually; the very type of sustained stream of income that our city should be aggressively searching for since the demise of the CCRDA.
Hopefully, the next council will have the gumption not to cave-in so easily to this small, well-organized group of sign-haters and will have a far better fiscal sense of the benefits that limited signage could generate and how much good this type of annual funding could bring to our city.