Palisades Charter High School (PCHS) may temporarily relocate to the currently vacant Sears Building in Downtown Santa Monica while the school works to rebuild sections of its campus destroyed by the Palisades Fire.
School officials have been searching for a temporary location since the fire last month and at the Feb. 25 school board meeting, Director of Operations Rafael Negroe named the Sears building as the likely location.
“Currently, we are working with the City of Santa Monica to gain all regulatory permits and processes to construct so that construction can begin on a temporary location,” he said. “We are in final section, negotiating the lease with the Sears building owners.”
Later in the meeting, PCHS Executive Director and Principal Dr. Pamela Magee said a formal announcement would be made when the deal was signed.
“I won't say a lot about the temporary relocation, because we have more to talk about later, but I do want to assure everyone we were working on that,” she said.
Dr. Magee said there had been some delays associated with executing the contract but things are being resolved quickly.
“We definitely plan to have more communication out,” she said. “I know sometimes people feel like, why hasn't there been more information? But again, just trying to make sure we have our i’s dotted and T's crossed.”
She said in addition to a press release, there would likely be an online forum for people to ask questions and get more information about the plan.
The store at 302 Colorado Blvd. closed in April of 2017 following the sale of the location to a real estate investment company. In July of 2015, Sears created a new independent, publicly traded real estate investment trust named Seritage. The new company took control of 235 Sears/Kmart stores and joint ventures with several mall operators including Simon Property Group, General Growth Properties and the Santa Monica based Macerich Company. Under the terms of the $2.7 billion deal, 224 stores were leased back to Sears but Seritage had the right to end some of those leases and find new uses for the property. Seritage exercised that right for the Santa Monica location.
An initial plan was to rehabilitate the building, under the new name Mark 302, and convert the 94,186 sq. ft. historic main building into a mixed-use commercial development. The basement and first floor were to be converted into a food/retail area of about 11,720 sq. ft. The second and third floors would become office space.
While initial work on that project began, it was never finished and later abandoned. Last year efforts to open a Science Fiction museum in the space came to a disastrous conclusion with the facility holding an anemic “opening” before closing without taking in a single visitor.
The school’s occupancy would be temporary as officials hope to replace buildings lost to the fire with temporary structures and return students to the main campus as quickly as possible.
Negroe said there are regular meetings with LAUSD to discuss the return of Pali with bungalows set on campus to replace lost buildings, offices and restrooms included.
“It is a moving target,” he said. “... it's what we're going to call the village will be laid down on the baseball field. However, it appears that there are other factors that may influence that decision or not, factors such as water pressure and fire hydrants surrounding this area may not be allowable for us to put the modulars there. So engineers are working hard to try to figure out where and how we will ensure that Pali will be accessible from an environmentally sound perspective, we know that there are concerns regarding the state of the city and immediate surroundings around Pali, and we're working with the city to prioritize cleanup within a quarter mile within Pali, a comprehensive informational meeting will be held in March regarding the two step process.”
