(The city will unveil the three draft scenarios for the future site this Saturday at the airport. Get the details here.)
The airport planning process was always going to get contentious…it just didn’t have to get to that point this early in the process. I’ve seen people who agree on 95% of state and local policy questions now fighting over largely inconsequential milestones in the airport planning process.
Recently, groups representing various viewpoints about the future of the Airport pressured their followers, email subscribers, and anyone within shouting distance to stuff online ballot boxes with their preferred scenario for the airport. Since the launch of the outreach process last year, the outreach team has done a series of surveys, and each time it’s served as a call to action by various groups to get in as many similar comments as possible.
That’s not representative nor democratic. It’s exactly the type of campaigning that the direct democracy lottery process proposed in 2023 was designed to avoid.
It also seems to be based on short-sighted logic, assuming that the city will take a winner-takes-all approach to the airport plan and whoever wins won’t have to compromise with those who received fewer votes. In the end, the airport site plan should be a compromise between many interests and even greater constraints..this is a planning process, not a pickleball game.
The direct democracy option
Throughout 2023, city staff conducted outreach on the planning process for the future of the airport site. Santa Monica has had many contentious planning processes over the years. Most of these, like the Downtown Community Plan update and the Land Use and Circulation Element, require a certain amount of community outreach and chances for the community to weigh in. The airport conversation is a big enough project to meet that requirement as well.
Santa Monica is a nice town, and the stakes of these planning processes are low relative to other places, where planning is more existential for people and businesses. So people get invested in their minor differences rather than what they have in common. And, because people are relatively comfortable and the stakes are low, stakeholders dig in and refuse to compromise. This is the Santa Monica way. I’ve seen it before. In 2023, the way to address this problem was through a new process.
The result of this city’s process to plan the airport planning process concluded that a democratic lottery process would be the most representative way to consider various options and reach common ground. The city’s thinking was:
“Panelists are everyday people who live in Santa Monica and reflect the demographics of Santa Monica. Given that most lottery-selected panelists do not have prior experience with the policy topic, the idea is that they have a unique capacity for identifying common ground solutions in the public’s best interest. This approach has been shown to result in an efficient, engaged public process with outcomes that enjoy broader community buy-in.”
This conclusion seemed smart because I had participated in some of the previous contentious planning processes. The impetus to start Santa Monica Forward, which I co-founded with a dozen others, came after a particularly uncivil Downtown planning meeting.
However, Mayor Lana Negrete and former council members Phil Brock, Oscar de la Torre, and Christine Parra voted against staff’s recommendation in favor of a more traditional process.
CEQA will be contentious
American legal processes are adversarial. That’s the nature of the common law system, where two sides provide evidence for a judge or jury to decide what’s true or not. Don’t like it? Move to a place that practices civil law, where the judge adjudicates facts in addition to the interpretation of laws (Louisiana is the closest place, 1,639 miles down I-10). The California Environmental Quality Act is an environmental review law embedded into many California planning processes. It is enforced by people suing, either on procedural grounds or on substance. Planning processes are fact-finding political negotiations that work best when they bring diverse stakeholders together to consider information and make concessions. But CEQA has no room for negotiations.
Lead Agencies (those looking to make a change through a building or non-building “project”) have mitigated the risk of procedural violations by making CEQA a check-the-box exercise that has little room for true negotiations. In addition, every major Environmental Impact Report (CEQA’s primary product) is adversarial, because commenters who may wish to have future legal leverage to delay or stop a project will try to find the right mix of vaguery in a substantive comment so that a judge determines they have legal standing and enjoins (or delays) the project to allow for some hearings. CEQA has evolved from something that primarily aimed to inform public decision-making with evidence-based assessments of impacts.
CEQA is not required for a visioning process or feasibility study, but it will be required for airport closure, removal of aviation facilities, including the runway, and conversion.
Those interested in reopening the airport will try to use the CEQA process to keep the airport infrastructure intact.
Budgeting will be contentious
If a local subsidy is required – and plans for 100% park or 100% affordable housing will require the largest subsidies – then this subsidy will come at the expense of public dollars that could have been spent on restoring library hours, improving community programs, keeping public spaces clean, and even improving other parks throughout the city. Because budgeting processes are fiscally-constrained (a dollar can only be spent once), they require active and purposeful negotiation of trade-offs and priorities.
If a local subsidy is required, at least some must come from a ballot measure that increases property taxes to raise additional funds for the city to use on various projects, including the airport conversion. To pass, this measure will need to support various expenditures besides the airport: safe streets, renovated community facilities, and new parks in the park-poor areas of town (Airport Park and Clover Park are two of the city’s largest parks). And it will also need the support of groups participating in the process: Airport2Park, Great Park Coalition, Cloverfield Commons, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, Community for Excellent Public Schools, Santa Monica Forward, and others.
(To hear Juan talk about the city budget and tradeoffs that might be required for an Airport Park, listen in on the last episode of the Mayor’s Roundtable podcast with myself, Juan and Mayor Gleam Davis, retired, here. – DN)
Environmental and budget constraints will be significant
When people ask me about the future of the airport, I tell them I’m most curious about soil samples from the site. Lead has been used in aviation gasoline for as long as Cloverfield/Santa Monica airport has been around. The reaction of some in the community to air quality and the potential for toxics on the beach and in parks demonstrated some in the community’s level of interest in environmental impacts and remediation.
There’s already a soil vapor extractor to remove chemicals on the last portion of the airport site to be redeveloped – the former site of the Douglass Aircraft Corporation that was redeveloped into the Santa Monica Business Park and Clover Park.
Moving Forward
Working our way as a community through the consequential decisions of toxics remediation and budgeting will require that community members believe that the process was fair and led to an outcome that represents the public interests, rather than special interests. This won’t happen if one side thinks that another rigged the process.
Those planning for the future of the airport should consider what’s needed to regain trust in the process – but a representative poll of Santa Monicans, who skew much younger than those participating in the airport process, may be a way to identify what the direct democracy group may have – a considered middle ground.
