Last summer, the City Council unanimously voted to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) with a development team led by Revitalization Partners Group (RPG) for the redevelopment and operations of the Santa Monica Civic Center. At last week’s meeting, the city council voted (in closed session) to put a deadline to complete those negotiations. City staff and RPG now have until the end of this month to reach an agreement or the ENA will expire and other groups can submit proposals for their own ENA.
“Negotiations on the potential to revitalize the shuttered Civic Auditorium are not progressing,” read a statement released by the city yesterday.
RPG’s group was selected for the ENA after competing proposals for the Civic that included not just revitalizing the Civic, but also affordable housing (put forward by Santa Monica Community Corporation) and athletic and education uses (put forward by the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District) were rejected.
The RPG bid was forcefully supported by Save the Civic, a coalition of community groups with the stated goal of seeing the Civic reopened as a venue for the performing and visual arts only, as it was before closure. Save the Civic urged members to attend last week’s council meeting to urge the city to continue the ENA with RPG without a deadline for agreement.
“While the previous City Council voted unanimously to enter negotiations with the team that came forward, RPG (Revitalizing Partners Group), we now have a new Council. And honestly, we don’t know if their commitment to revitalizing Civic is as strong as we’d like it to be,” the letter read.
A handful of activists attended the meeting to urge the Council to reject placing the new deadline on the ENA negotiations. They argued that because many RPG senior executives were impacted by the recent wildfires as residents of the Pacific Palisades and will need more time to finish negotiations.
The city and RPG have until February 28 to reach agreement before the ENA expires after last week’s vote.
