For all of the smoke that was blown and the thunder that was pounded over the technical status of so-called Community Organizations at last night’s City Council meeting, hardly anything seems likely to change for the groups in the coming months.
As the opening act before the Council finally approved a slenderized revision of the city’s mixed-use development policy was more dramatic than it was defining.
Starting Point
Councilman Steve Rose was the main force behind coaxing his colleagues into updating and streamlining the previous policy that was said to be vague, little known and seemingly routinely ignored.
“The City Council gave guidelines to the city staff for helping to organize the usage and the fee structures of Culver City non-profit organizations,” Mr. Rose said.
The ongoing challenge is for City Hall to devise a coherent system for bringing 20 to 30 wildly varying civic groups under a single umbrella.
“For the first time in city history,” said Mr. Rose, “a policy will be established on the relationship between the city and non-profit organizations. One idea is to get rid of patronage. We will adopt a clear policy of who gets what instead of having one group being over another just because.”
But the complicated presentation in Council Chambers confused many listeners in the audience. They feared mysterious amounts of potential harm to their clubs.
Emphasis on Paper Effects
Mostly, though, the City Council’s attempt to tidily categorize and label the indecorous mélange of civic organizations that use city facilities is a bookkeeping matter.
The paperwork will not affect members of organizations, the way leaders are chosen or the way the groups are run.
However, since none of the Council members helpfully pointed out this salient fact, the agenda item was badly misread by the target groups.
Gripped by the fear that they would have to pay rent for the first time or that their rental fees would be raised, a number of groups descended on Council Chambers.
Veterans Have Their Way
The Disabled American Veterans, not a marketing-conscious group, turned out a dozen or more of its very best members and supporters to plead its case.
Outrageous, said one speaker after another, that disabled veterans — noble men and women who had defended the country — should be forced to pay a rental fee for their monthly 3-hour meetings in a facility that goes by the name of Veterans Memorial Auditorium.
Whether by heat or by logic, the Disabled Vets’ protest prevailed. If they don’t continue their Saturday afternoon meetings at the Vets, Mayor Alan Corlin said they could move to the nearby National Guard Armory or AmVets building, still at no charge.
Because of the disparate, esoteric nature of the subject, Council members said they lacked vast amounts of crucial information. Therefore they returned the matter to staff for considerable research and refinement.
A New Mixed-Use Policy
For the third time in recent weeks, the Council converted a rhetoric-intense meeting into a two-day affair.
The clock struck 1 this morning before the they voted 4 to 1 to adopt a sharply tightened policy toward mixed-use projects. The decision appeared to be a clear-cut victory for residents who have been barraging City Hall the past year with bitter complaints that proposed buildings are too tall and too dense.
Ms. Gross strongly objected to the final numbers as too restrictive, and she argued that the downsizing would discourage prospective developers. “We may as well put up a sign that says ‘Culver City Is Closed for Business,’” she said.
In one significant change, 30 percent of a mixed-use building must be reserved for retail. For developers who build adjacent to a residential neighborhood, the corresponding numbers are smaller than for a project in a commercial area.
The 56-foot height limit essentially did not change, but the number of dwelling units per acre definitely did.
It was shrunk by 54 percent, from 65 units to 35, as Mr. Malsin pridefully pointed out.
Celebratory Moment
Without question, this was a night of triumph for Mr. Malsin, who conceived and and carried to successful completion a passel of nuances and concepts.
He went swimming in a sea of competing numbers. He calculated incentive-driven schemes that he sold to his colleagues. Mr. Malsin has been working since last July to accomplish a fragile balance between the ambitious wishes of builders and the conservative desires of residents.
Mr. Malsin’s showcase accomplishment is a Community Benefits Incentive program, a tradeoff formula whereby builders would be allowed to exceed certain limits if, in exchange, they would agree to develop, say, a pocket-sized park, or an extra parking area.
Community benefit programs, he said, will lead to “a number of facilities that we, as a city, could not have provided. The effect will be to make our neighborhoods more livable.”
Sympathy?
When builders later complained that the rate of 65 units per acre had been policy when they started their Culver City projects, Mayor Corlin said, “These projects did not come with guarantees. I feel a little empathy but not a lot for them. I am sure if we had gone up instead of down, from 65 units to 200, the developers would not have complained. So it wasn’t change they were criticizing but that we were reducing the number.”
