This Saturday, the Santa Monica Airport Conversion Project kicked off “Phase 2b” of its multi-year outreach process to guide a consulting team in creating a design for a future “great park” on the land where the Santa Monica Airport now stands.
The meeting was held in the community room at Memorial Park and at points the line to get in was so long it snaked into the parking lot. Estimates on attendance at the event range from 500 people to over 1,000. If you weren’t able to attend, or participate in the outreach portion of the event, you can take a survey at the project’s official website. I attended Saturday’s events and observed enough to be able to say with confidence that the outreach at the event and survey are very similar in what questions they ask and how they ask them.
When the city council chose the planning firm Sasaki to do community engagement over a competitor who specialized in involving people who usually don’t participate, some advocates worried that this would mean the outreach process would be dominated by the “usual suspects.” In other words, the concern was that community outreach meeting attendees would just be a handful of park advocates, well-worn political advocates, and pilots – making up the majority of a small audience. Saturday’s event proved that enthusiasm for the possibilities of bringing a major park to the westside runs through pretty much every demographic.
Parents, students and even coaches from local schools were present, filling out post-it notes asking for more sports fields. A handful of teenagers wearing helmets and carrying skateboards looked for a place to advocate for a new skate park. Bike racks were overflowing. People who drove had to park blocks away because parking in the Memorial Park parking lot and along the street was overflowing.
Which is not to say that the “usual suspects” weren’t present as well. The “Great Park Coalition,” a group of advocates pushing for nearly all of the airport land to be used as park and open space, had a tent set up outside the entrance to sign up new supporters and talk to people before they saw the presentation by Sasaki and city staff and to make one last effort to persuade folks that any future use for Santa Monica Airport should be about building a great park, not about providing more housing opportunities. The aforementioned attendance spurred on by schools wasn’t a coincidence, as the academic community sees an opportunity to expand their sports, science, and cultural programming. And even a short walk through the room saw more than a handful of shirts and hats for various neighborhood and political organizations.
After signing in at the official sign-in table, participants were greeted by informative poster boards that showed the results of the first two rounds of outreach. When asked about preferred uses for a future airport park, 13 of the 15 top choices were a type of recreation. Trails, open space, sports fields, community gardens all topped the list, with only a cafe (#7) and an outdoor amphitheater (#15) cracking the top 15 for non-recreation uses.
Most (83%) of the most popular uses that were supported would not require a ballot measure to enact. In 2014, the voters of Santa Monica passed Measure LC that restricts uses of the airport land to park space or educational uses if the airport is closed without a future ballot measure.
Next, participants were led through a series of slides that presented five draft guiding principles that Sasaki culled from the first two rounds of outreach. Participants were encouraged to leave their thoughts at the end of each area on a final board.
For example, Principle #4 is “Amplify Versatility — prioritize amenities for daily use, support active recreation, balance active and passive spaces, provide space for performing arts and big events.“ Posters offered photos and further explanations, and at the end people were encouraged to provide feedback. This is where the skateboarders left their encouragement for a skate park.
Since I was planning to take the online survey, I didn’t spend much time in the “games” area where people could get into the details of park planning with interactive maps, worksheets to discuss various uses, and a discussion of how the park could be funded and maintained. But for the hour and a half I was there, the games tables were crowded with people of all ages sharing their vision for a future great park.
The last of these tables talked about the elephant in the room: how will all of this be paid for? There weren’t a lot of details, but participants were asked if they believe the land should be rented out to private interests, whether the city should seek and raise only public dollars, or whether it should be seeking something in the middle (public funds plus selling naming rights for fields and other attractions, for example.) This table is presented in the survey almost to the exact detail, so if you didn’t get a chance to participate Saturday, you can get the same feeling online.
