One of Santa Monica’s first development agreements may be up for debate in the near future as one of the City’s most historic organizations is looking to modernize its office footprint.
The RAND corporation is asking officials to void the development agreement that governs its Santa Monica office and work with the organization on a new deal that would account for the declining number of workers physically coming into the space every day. RAND said they are not necessarily looking to sell or redevelop the site, but they can’t do anything other than leave offices vacant under their current rules.
The organization has called the city home for more than 70 years but its current office has only been home for about two decades.
Prompted by the need for technology research during WWII, RAND was established in 1945, at a total cost of $640, as an offshoot of the Douglas Aircraft Company. Taking its name from a contraction of “research and development,” Project RAND completed its first report (Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship) in 1946 and was soon spun off into a standalone nonprofit in 1948 under the approval of the Air Force.
The organization quickly grew to more than 200 staff with wide ranging expertise in areas like mathematics, engineering, aerodynamics, physics, chemistry, economics, and psychology.
At one point, RAND owned about 15 acres along Main Street but its original office space began to deteriorate, both from age and damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. True to their nature, RAND produced a wealth of studies on potential futures over several years and finally struck a deal with the City to create the Civic Center Plan. Included in that deal was approval for their current building, the adjacent housing units and the creation of what would become Tongva Park.
The building’s elliptical design is supposed to increase chance-encounters between staffers as they travel along the floors and almost all offices are the same size (about 10×14) as part of the group’s equality ethos.
The eventual deal was the city’s first development agreement, a document that governs the rules and uses of a particular property. The agreement was modified in 2012 to allow RAND to convert part of the parking structure into additional office spaces but has remained otherwise unchanged leaving the organization with little ability to adapt to modern work requirements.
The agreement is binding through 2055 and RAND is asking the City for revisions that would let them be more flexible with uses inside the space.
“The way the agreement is written doesn’t give us a whole lot of leeway to adjust,” said RAND spokesman Jeffrey Hiday.
RAND said they have not made a decision to sell the property or lease part of it, but they can’t do anything other than leave offices vacant under their current rules and need to evaluate their options. RAND’s proposal is limited to facilitating a broader range of occupants in the building and does not propose redevelopment of the site.
Hiday said the building is now underutilized due to both the pandemic prompting a push to remote work and trends in RAND’s hiring and space needs. The first step to addressing the underutilized capacity is to address the rules of the development agreement.
“Given the pandemic, like many employers we’re looking at a different environment in the way that our workplace will be set up,” he said. “As it stands right now, we wouldn’t have any flexibility to make any meaningful changes.”
According to the City, RAND has applied to “terminate the Development Agreement No. 00-001, amend the Civic Center Specific Plan to clarify allowable uses if the Development Agreement is terminated, and amend the Zoning Ordinance to elaborate on allowable uses within the Existing Building. No new development is proposed.”
The proposal will eventually go to the Planning Commission although no date has been set for that hearing.