Santa Monica Airport took its first small step to being transformed into a park of some description on Tuesday night when Council voted 6-0 to enter into an agreement with urban design specialist Sasaki Associates, Inc. for community outreach, visioning services and concept design for the Airport conversion project.
City Councilmembers rejected a public lottery form of public outreach to determine the future use of the land currently at Santa Monica Airport back in October. In a 4-3 vote, Council instead opted to ask Sasaki, the Boston-based company originally selected by staff to undertake the technical design work for the airport land, to include a standard public outreach element when they presented their proposal to Council in the meeting on Tuesday evening.
The rejected system would have involved a panel chosen through a randomized lottery-based system that’s designed to draw in a broader range of potential participants and to help remove many of the barriers from participation present in the traditional land-use planning community outreach processes.
To put this space into perspective, the principal area of land that would be transformed is 227 acres in area. Central Park in Manhattan is 843 acres and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is 1,017 acres in size. So, while the project isn’t going to break any records, it will without a doubt transform this little corner of Southern California.
Amber Richane, from the Public Works Department with the City of Santa Monica gave an impressive presentation that was well thought out and thorough. It consisted of past examples of transformative projects that Sasaki has worked on all around the world, together with conceptual comparison, hierarchy details, information on outreach and recommended actions.
For most of this presentation and subsequent discussion, the expression “great park” was used as an all-encompassing term, but it was Councilmember Gleam Davis that raised the issue concerning the ambiguity of this definition.
“We’re starting out with the idea of a ‘great park,’ but if you were to go around and ask a bunch of people in Santa Monica ‘what does that mean?’ You’d get a lot of different answers. Some people might say ‘yeah, the great park should be the centerpiece, but there should be other stuff’ and others might think there should be park, just park and nothing but park,” Davis said.
“So when you say we’re starting out with the idea of a ‘great park,’ what are you talking about since you’re going to be the ones guiding the process?” Davis asked.
“The intent was that it is consistent with Measure LLC and there are a lot of questions or different opinions. I’ve seen people say it’s 187 acres [the open space, including runways, parking etc], the whole 227 [including existing buildings], there’s a lot of things out there,” Richane replied.
“And so the way the process is designed is to listen to the community, give people space to talk after we’ve done some very deep dives on the technical and then come to an agreement or conclusion on what should be in or out, what’s included or not. It gives Council the ability to, at two different points before we have ever put pen to paper, to say we want more of this or less of that.
“If someone says we want to keep the airport open forever, we can say thank you for that opinion, but that is not what the goals of this project have been, the community’s been resolute in wanting to close it. And so the way the process is designed right now is to allow discussion and community input. But there’s always the guardrails of the guidelines that we talked about at the very beginning,” Richane said.
Davis highlighted the long political road ahead of this issue and City Attorney Douglas Sloan confirmed that a vote by City Council will still have to be taken to actually proceed with the closure with the airport. And since that isn’t slated until December 31, 2028, frankly anything could happen between now and then.
“If you want it to close as of January 1, 2029, obviously before that, if you took that vote, say next year then a later council could change that again before 2029. There’s that possibility,” Sloan said.
Councilmember Caroline Torosis raised the prospect of considering an outdoor entertainment space since the airport is on raised land and offers unprecedented views of the coast and Pacific Ocean, especially from the south-western edge. Barker Hanger, already on the airport site, is an entertainment venue that positively drips with history.
Torosis also raised the issue that since the airport site actually straddles both the City of Santa Monica and the City of Los Angeles and approximately 20 acres of the northeastern-most corner of the site rests in Mar Vista, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a contribution from the City of Los Angeles. But perhaps more importantly, residents in that particular part of Los Angeles should also be consulted.
The issue of semantics continued to perplex most councilmembers and in fact this already contentious issue was made even more controversial as before the discussion had even started, Mayor Pro Tempore Lana Negrete wanted to move the item to a January 2024 meeting as Councilmember Oscar de la Torre was unexpectedly absent. Council was equally divided on that issue, with Councilmembers Christine Parra, Mayor Phil Brock and Negrete voting to postpone the item and Davis, Torosis and Councilmember Jesse Zwick voting to proceed. In that event of a tied outcome, the item remained on the agenda.
In guaranteeing that no opinion would be ignored, Davis made a friendly amendment to the original motion — specifically, the third item — that as a result of Council direction, at least one of the proposals made to Council by Sasaki would come under Measure LC.
“I don’t want to create unfair expectations,” Davis said, “Because I don’t want to go out in the community and find out what the community wants, and then have to tell them that’s nice, but that’s not even being considered.”
This amendment was at first met with stern resistance by both Parra and Negrete. A vote was taken on whether or not to vote on the items individually, before Council circled back to Item 3. Ultimately, after some laborious explanation, the motion was made to pass the amended item by Davis and seconded by Torosis and all six were unanimously approved by 6-0.