8/26/24Below is our letter to the City and the City Council strongly opposing an agenda item tomorrow night to declare the publicly owned lands at 4th/5th and Arizona and the Bergamot Arts Center as “surplus” land.
This would mean that those sites would be taken out of public use for all of us and privatized for huge private developments.
Bergamot would be wiped out as a renowned cultural center, and we would forever lose the potential for public land at 4th/5th and Arizona to be used as open space, something that’s increasingly vital as the downtown rapidly densifies.
If you agree with our letter, please email your respectful opinions to the Council at council.mailbox@santamonica.gov by noon tomorrow, specifying Council item 11-A and cc:ing the clerk at councilmtgitems@santamonica.gov
Thank you for your support.
TO: City Council
FROM: Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC)
RE: City Council 8/27 item 11-A: Privatizing our Public Land at 4th/5th and Arizona and Bergamot Arts Center
Residents have told the City repeatedly that they do not want to see their public land sacrificed for private developments. That was the case at 4th/5th and Arizona when the City was negotiating the Plaza project, and more recently when residents came together to save the Civic Auditorium after the Council declared it “surplus land,” paving the way for its sale for non-cultural uses.
The sole purpose of item 11-A, before you this Tuesday, is to privatize the public land at Bergamot Arts Center and 4th/5th and Arizona by claiming an impossible goal of building 1100 units of 100% affordable housing on those sites. Even the staff report concedes that projects of this magnitude are highly unlikely to ever secure the amount of funding required.
But Council is being told by staff that it can claim an exemption and bypass the Surplus Land Act (SLA) if it requests bids for 100% affordable housing on those sites.
When, inevitably, that 100% affordable housing goal is deemed unfeasible, Council will then be able to entertain other proposals, such as requiring only 25% affordable housing, together with market rate housing and commercial revenue-generating uses, like hotels. That’s possible under another exemption of the Surplus Land Act, not specifically cited in the staff report just as the specific 100% affordable housing exemption wasn’t specified either.
And these mega projects, which would gut Bergamot as a world-renowned cultural center and eliminate irreplaceable open space at 4th/5th and Arizona, could be processed administratively with no public hearings!
Our publicly owned land could be given away without ANY public input.
Proceeding down this path would be a fundamental failure of local government.
Pitting open space and cultural arts against housing or mixed-use developments is poor public policy. Preserving public land for open space in a rapidly densifying downtown is extremely important. Even more so now as thousands of new housing units are being built throughout Santa Monica in an attempt to reach state housing goals. Good planning recognizes that open spaces complement dense housing by fostering community and civic engagement.
We urge the Council to refuse to declare either site “surplus” or exempt from the SLA, and to instead instruct staff to report on the current status of housing projects citywide, and inventory other sites that legitimately are of a suitable size to actually enable 100% affordable housing projects to be built.
