City Inches toward updated 30-year plan

In this article last week, it was mentioned that at the upcoming Dec. 3rd RB City Council meeting, the council will be considering the General Plan update. One part of the council's review is setting the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) on all public zones. To clarify, the FAR in public zones is not just about BCHD. It's about determining details of the entire General Plan, which includes setting a new state-mandated requirement to set the FAR for all public zones in the city. 

The article writer said that CEO Tom Bakaly had previously stated he wants as great a FAR as possible in order to put up the standalone allcove youth mental health center. The strategy had been to appeal to the very real need for helping youth with mental health issues by suggesting without an increased FAR, that help won't occur. The problem with that logic is the proposed area for the youth center was to be on Flagler and Beryl, an area zoned commercial, not public. So that point is irrelevant to this conversation. It's also irrelevant now given that Measure BC was voted down, so the funds aren't there to build that facility. The reality is they want the bloated FAR allowance to build a massive private residential care facility.

Beyond rejecting BCHD's special request, the council should recognize the importance of adhering to a consistent and reasonable FAR on all public zones. The one exception should be leaving as is the only currently existing FAR of 1.25 for City Hall and the Police Dept. Annex. In all other public zones, adhering to the suggested FAR of .5 or at most .75 is critical and directly affects the look and feel of our city forever. Our city is built out. Redondo residents should impress this fact on the City Council on Dec. 3.

Lara Duke

Redondo Beach

Popular vote doesn’t count

Dear ER:

From 9 a.m. to noon on Friday, December 6, the Beach Cities Health District hosted a strategic planning workshop. Remarkably, BCHD interpreted the $30 million bond Measure BC failure in the November 5 election by nearly 20 points (it required two-thirds to pass and received 47%) as an endorsement of building an allcove building and also demolishing the former South Bay Hospital building and preparing the campus for private development. BCHD spent $580,567 of resident-taxpayer funds on Measure BCs rejection, yet somehow BCHD interpreted the loss as an endorsement of the projects that BCHD sought to fund in Measure BC? How can that be?

BCHD asked for $9 million to cover the allcove building. The allcove service and building require 30 years of unfunded operation for a 91% non-resident service area based on the contract that BCHD signed with the State. BCHD also asked for $21 million to tear down the former hospital and prepare the campus for developer PMB’s gargantuan, private senior living facility, which will service 80% non-resident tenants. BCHDs board and executives are disinterested in what the majority of the electorate had to say, and that’s been the same experience that surrounding neighborhoods have had from BCHD for years now.

Mark Nelson

Redondo Beach

Mission shrink

Dear ER:

Five bond measures were on Beach Cities ballots during the recent election. All but one won. School bonds in the three Beach Cities, which required 55 percent approval, won handily. A bond to support the building of new police and fire facilities in Redondo Beach, which required a two-thirds vote, surpassed that mark easily.

The only bond that lost was the smallest one. It was for the Beach Cities Health District’s. It also required a two-thirds vote, but did not even achieve a majority vote. On the most recent voter update, it had only a 47 percent approval.

Why would the voters say yes to much larger bonds and reject just one? As H. L. Mencken is quoted, “every complex problem has an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

For most of its existence, BCHD has toiled in obscurity. Established in the middle of the last century, and provided a constantly increasing stream of taxpayer dollars which don’t appear itemized on our property tax bills, no one should be surprised if much of the populace of the three beach cities didn’t even know it existed.

Scrutiny arrived when a grandiose scheme to expand the District’s services into residential care for the elderly came into existence. This irked the people who live near the District’s property, some of whom live in Torrance just down the hill, because of the impact that development would have on their quality of life.

That scrutiny expanded past the project itself to the unsettling management of the District, including its squandering of a nest egg left to them by the last tenant of the old hospital that was its genesis. Those millions of dollars have disappeared, through a variety of means, to leave BCHD in financial jeopardy should no new source of revenue arrive.

For years, some have warned the District of its tendency to “mission creep,” the expanding of services provided beyond not only its financial means, but also to areas that are only peripherally associated with serving the residents of our three cities. Those warnings provided the core resonance to the defeat of the bond issue.

It is time for dramatic introspection by the elected BCHD Board. This loss was not just about providing a relatively small amount of money to the District. It was a referendum on the District itself. The public is telling them to get their act together before they have the audacity to attempt to expand their services beyond their core mission. It is also a warning to never again ask for additional revenue until that retrenchment is done. 

Bob Pinzler

Redondo Beach

https://easyreadernews.com/letters-to-the-editor-11-14-24/