Why RIFT is good for Santa Monica Businesses

Below is a copy of an email letter that was sent to local businesses

March 2008

Dear Santa Monica business owner,

We want to introduce ourselves and tell you about a ballot initiative we are sponsoring that will positively impact Santa Monica and may help your business.

We're the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (“SMCLC”), a grassroots group of residents who are now collecting signatures to qualify an initiative for this November's ballot, which would place reasonable limits on the amount of new commercial development approved in Santa Monica each year.

The “Residents' Initiative to Fight Traffic” (“RIFT”) will cut the city's projected commercial growth rate roughly in half over the next 15 years. By capping new commercial growth citywide at 75,000 square feet a year, RIFT encourages reasonable commercial growth while requiring that the public benefits and trade-offs of large-scale projects --- which create the worst traffic impacts --- be approved by ballot.

Traffic congestion is bad for residents and bad for business. RIFT will slow development, allowing Santa Monica's public transportation system and infrastructure time to catch up with local growth.

RIFT was written with Santa Monica businesses in mind --- with the intent to keep existing businesses profitable, in business, and serving residents' needs.

Our city has starkly identified the challenge to existing businesses posed by future commercial development in its “Opportunities and Challenges” report. The consolidation of parcels, demolition, and intensified uses of commercial properties throughout downtown, the industrial lands and major boulevards, will force neighborhood-serving businesses to relocate or close. This alarming trend would also drive up rents and result in chain stores and regional commercial developments pushing out our local businesses.

The report's authors also concluded that absent a significant rise in resident population, Santa Monica does not need more retail uses nor does it need to become more of a regional office center. Nevertheless, our city projects (and is on target) to approve over 3,000,000 square feet of new commercial uses over the next 20 years.

The inevitable traffic congestion this much growth would bring is of serious concern. Commercial development typically generate 3 to 4 times the traffic as residential, so our traffic congestion and parking problems will significantly worsen while our resident population will remain relatively stable. As it is now, residents have a hard time frequenting local stores due to heavy traffic and limited parking. Imagine if it worsened!

This is not the vision of Santa Monica that those of us who live and work here want to see. This is not the vision of a healthy city or a vibrant downtown core. Studies by transportation experts show that when residents become too frustrated with traffic, it directly, quickly and negatively impacts how frequently residents patronize their local stores and restaurants.

Instead, RIFT will require our city to pace new commercial growth and to approve commercial projects that are in the best interests of our community.

Here are some additional ways in which RIFT favors local businesses:

• RIFT exempts parking lots and parking structures from the cap;
  
  
• It exempts remodels and additions that presently do not require a public approval process;
  
  
• It exempts projects with a vested right of development;
  
  
• Projects that replace or remodel existing buildings are given a credit for some or all of the floor area of the existing building that reflects the amount of traffic the site already generates;
  
  
• Only the commercial square footage in mixed-use projects is counted towards the cap;
  
  
• Ground floor, neighborhood-serving retail for 100% affordable housing projects is excluded from the cap in order to stimulate production of such housing and to promote a greater job/housing balance;
  
  
• It exempts residential, schools. child and senior day care facilities, hospitals, nursing homes, places of worship and government facilities.

Some people have asked why we don't wait until the Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) process ends and the City adopts a new General Plan? The answer is that once a new general plan is adopted, it can be changed at any time by the City, allowing too much development while at the same time ignoring the irreversible environmental impacts of overdevelopment.

That is what happened to our 1984 General Plan and what could be the fate of any future plan. We can't let that happen again.

This month we will sit down with the Land Use Committee of the Santa Monica Chamber to make the case for RIFT and why it is in the interests of most Chamber members to support this measure.

We would also like to meet with you in groups of business owners to answer your questions and enlist your support. Please contact us at 310.395.8044 (email at info@smclc.net) if you are interested in meeting. Also please visit our website at: www.smrift.com for more information about RIFT.

Thank you,

Diana Gordon,
Co-Chair
Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC)