LUCE

By Michael Davis
City Politics
If you were searching for a good way to torture yourself sometime in the past couple months, you might have found it by watching the recent series of Planning Commission hearings on the draft version of the Land Use & Circulation Element, more commonly known as the LUCE. The LUCE is a part of the City’s General Plan and will set the vision for traffic and land use planning for the next two decades or so in Santa Monica. The commission finally concluded those hearings last week.
The commission was tasked to make recommended changes to the document, which was created by City staff over a six-year period of public hearings. Some allowable heights to buildings were increased. But for the most part they did not make many changes to a document that limits development in residential neighborhoods and puts a halt to increased traffic.
The LUCE has not been updated since 1984. The current updating process has been ongoing since 2004. The 1984 document is blamed by many for creating significant commercial development and near-gridlock traffic in Santa Monica.
The City Council will hold its first LUCE hearing on Thursday. A second meeting is scheduled for June 15, at that same time council will vote on the 2010-11 budget. The City is facing an eight-figure deficit, but no significant reductions are proposed. LUCE hearings will continue into July. This is significant because July also marks the month when the City Council race gets started, although slowly, and then speeds up in August. City staff had hoped the LUCE could avoid becoming a political document.
Now that the Planning Commission is done talking LUCE, it can return to some regular Planning Commission items. The most interesting one is the upcoming presentation scheduled for next week on Wednesday on the proposed AMC movie theater on Fourth Street off Arizona Avenue. This item is being shown to the Planning Commission as a float up, which is the name the City gives to initial presentations seeking commission input. The float up for this theater was supposed to take place a couple months ago, but the item was mysteriously removed from the commission’s agenda.
The plan is for an AMC theater to be built on the site currently home to Parking Structure No. 3. The City owns the property, so AMC and Santa Monica will need to go into a development agreement and AMC must lease the property. Details of those contracts are currently under negotiation.
The theater will have 12 screens, one of them IMAX. The complete structure will be 83,000 square feet and also contain 2,100 square feet of retail. A restaurant that will be open to the public whether you go see a movie or not will also be included.
Santa Monica is only allowed to have a certain number of theater seats in the downtown. It is not clear what that official number is, or if it even exists. AMC plans to reduce the number of seats at its Santa Monica 7-plex and close the Broadway 4. AMC submitted a letter to the City in November saying it could close the Broadway 4. But recently, some people have questioned whether this is possible.
Since this is a development agreement, public benefits must be offered. What those will be are still under negotiation. An additional float up will go before the City Council. Then it should be about a year or so before the project will go again before both bodie