The Planning Commission will discuss alcohol licenses and granny flats at their Feb. 1 meeting.
Two alcohol licenses are up for discussion Wednesday including one for a restaurant inside the Shore Hotel and a set of licenses for a new Whole Foods store on Pico. The night will finish with proposed revisions to rules for building additional housing units on an existing property.
The first alcohol application is for a new restaurant on Second Street located inside the Shore Hotel.
Full of Flavor LLC filed an application in January to open an eatery inside the hotel. During the initial hearing, Commissioner Richard McKinnon questioned the city’s willingness to issue a permit to a hotel that he considers to be illegally operating and said existing permits prohibit the Shore Hotel from operating a hotel within the property.
The Shore Hotel is in the midst of a legal dispute with the Coastal Commission over operations at the hotel. The Commission has maintained required information was not provided during the permitting process and that the hotel was built without appropriate permits. Hotel ownership contend all the paperwork was filed and that construction was completed in compliance with local regulations.
The Feb. 2 discussion is a continuation of the January meeting and includes revised documents that would prohibit the hotel from taking over operations of a restaurant if the entitlements were granted.
The second alcohol issue involves a new grocery store in the Pico neighborhood.
Whole Foods has applied to open a new store at the corner of Cloverfield & Pico Blvds., across from Virginia Ave. park.
The store has asked for three permits, one to allow the sale of alcohol within the store, one for an in-house restaurant and a third to allow for instructional tasting.
Whole Foods has converted the office space into a grocery store for its “365” brand. The stores, known as 365 by Whole Foods, have a smaller selection of products and are designed to be faster, more efficient and less expensive than the full-service stores.
The 30,000 square foot Santa Monica store would be the fourth Whole Foods in the City but the first with the 365 designation. Its proposed hours are 6 a.m. – 12 a.m. daily. The restaurant will open at 7 a.m. and close at midnight. Any tasting room operations would occur between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. The location was previously a two-story office park.
Staff are recommending approval of all three permits.
Following the alcohol discussions, the commission will revisit rules for ancillary dwelling units, sometimes known as “granny units.”
The small, second units are on the property of a main home and Santa Monica altered its rules to bring them in compliance with state regulations last year. At that time, the commission asked for additional discussion about parking exemptions, allowable size of ADUs, integrating existing accessory building/structure standards into the ADU standards, having separate ADU standards that are not tied to accessory building/structure standards, timing of garage conversions to ADUs, conversion of other non-garage accessory structures to ADUs and enforcement process for owner occupancy requirement.
The discussion Wednesday will include, but is not limited to, those topics.
Planning Commission will meet on Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m. in City Hall, 1685 Main St.
Visit http://www.smgov.net/Departments/PCD/Boards-Commissions/Planning-Commission for more information.
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