Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, and adopt Negative Declaration ND 01-20; Adopt resolution amending the PlaceType map of the Land Use Element of the General Plan (GPA20-002) to change the PlaceTypes of the subject parks from their existing PlaceTypes to the Open Space (OS) PlaceType;
Thank you. We are now going back to our hearings. So we have our first our first hearing up, which will be item 21. Item 21. It requires four votes. It's a report from Development Services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record. Conclude the public hearing and adopt negative declaration. Adobe resolutions amending the place type map of the land use element of the general plan. Declare ordinance setting aside and dedicating certain lands owned by the City of Long Beach for public park purposes and uses declare ordinance amending table 30 5-22 at 11 subject parks and declare ordinance amending the use district map to change the zoning districts of the subject parks and remove foreign and 56 square foot remnant parks located at the southwest corner of East 14th Street and North or Zaba Avenue from the area dedicated as or as a Park City y. Thank you. I'm going to go into this over first, over to our city team. Mr. Mayor, Mayor and members of the council. I'd like to introduce Alison Spindler, our acting planning manager. She'll give a presentation on this item. Good evening, Mayor, and members of the Council. The item before you this evening is a request to approve a variety of land use and zoning actions associated with 11 existing parks to ensure appropriate protections for those parks in perpetuity. The Department of Development Services and the Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine have been working collaboratively for more than five years to ensure land records, zoning dedications and the general plan designations of the parks within the city are accurate, up to date and consistent across multiple regulatory instruments and documents. This has involved researching land records and identifying the legal boundaries of city owned parks for the purposes of ensuring that they have the appropriate land designation and zoning and are formally dedicated as park land to ensure proper protection and preservation of public open space in perpetuity. On June 20th, 2019 and November 18, 2021, the Parks Recreation Commission recommended the designation or dedication of 29 existing owned parks, including any other land use actions needed, such as central plan amendments, zoning code amendments and zoning changes. This current batch of cleanups associated with 11 existing parks represents ongoing efforts and progress towards updating and modernizing those appropriate designations. The remaining 18 parks recommended by the Parks, Recreation and Marine Commission will be brought forward for dedication and necessary land. These actions at a future date. Most of the remaining parks have been identified to have more complex boundary and land use issues that required additional resources and land surveys before action can be taken. Dedication is the process that applies to city owned parkland. To protect a park in perpetuity for public open space use. The City Charter specifies that the Council shall adopt zoning and other regulations for the purpose of protecting parkland. Both the Charter and the general plan, open space and Recreation Element provide that if a dedicated park is sold or used for an on park use and it must be replaced at a ratio of at least 2 to 1. Protections provided through dedication help implement the goals and policies of the general plan, including the land development and open space element, to ensure that all residents have access to open space and recreational facilities. Therefore, typically, city owned parks are designated with an open space general plan, place type, are zoned park and dedicated in perpetuity. The last park designation was in 2006, though other minor land, minor parkland designation cleanups have occurred. Citywide Park inventory was completed in 2019 by Planning and Parks, Recreation and Marine. Many of the properties being proposed for dedication and land use designations this evening are properties that were owned by the city's former redevelopment agency. Again, this represents a first batch of proposed dedications and cleanups. Additional parks with additional issues to be addressed will be brought forward at a future date, as provided in the City Charter. The powers and duties of the Parks and Recreation Commission include recommending to the City Manager and council the dedication of public land for public parks. Again, as a history, in 2019, the Commission recommended the Council dedicate 29 existing city owned parks, and in July 2021, the Planning Commission recommended to the City Council dedication and associated land use actions for 12 parks. In September of 2021, the Council moved to continue this item due to needed additional research on Willow Springs and Tanaka Parks research, which is still underway. Therefore, 11 of the 12 parks that were contemplated at that time are moving forward today. You can see on the map here the 11 parks that are being proposed for dedication, that designation, including a list on the left hand side and a map on the right. But Slide summarizes which parks require general plan amendments to change the general plan from whatever existing place type may exist on the park to the open space place type as appropriate. Similarly, zone changes are proposed for ten parks listed on the slide. For each of the ten parks, the proposed zone change is to change the zoning from a variety of existing zoning districts to the park zoning district, which will provide for consistency with the open space place type and with the existing park uses . Again, it's a clean up. The zone changes are reflective of what's on the ground. All are being read zone to park except for one 450 square foot noncontiguous remnant parcel at the southeast corner of or is of a park which is proposed to be zoned from P to AL. It was dedicated in 2003. Many years back, a community organization was to improve and maintain the remnant parcel. However, over time, this responsibility fell to the Parks Department, which presented some challenges. Meanwhile, economic development staff has been exploring the possible sale of the parcel to the abutting industrial property owner. As a result, this area is proposed to be zoned from park to light industrial consistent with the abutting private property. The proposed zone change and removing that small area will allow the parcel to have appropriate oversight and be better maintained. This action does remove that small square footage. However, the other dedications proposed as part of the project more than fulfill the 2 to 1 requirement. This project proposes a zoning code amendment, a text amendment to add the 11 parks to the dedicated parklets in the municipal code again that supports formal dedication of the parks. Finally, Willow Springs Park was included in the original submittal. However, it was removed due to additional investigation needed, including preparing a legal description and clarifying boundary information. It's anticipated to come forward towards the end of the year and to Minorca Park was purchased by the city after the first batch of parks was considered by the Planning Commission . It's anticipated to be heard by the Planning Commission in July and with the Council in August. The remainder of the parks with more complex boundary and land use issues will be brought forward for dedication and necessary actions at a future date when that work can be completed. Public hearing notices were published as required and shown on the side. With that staff recommends approval of the dedication and associated land use actions to designate these existing parks with the proper zoning and land use designations and to protect these 11 parks in perpetuity. With that, staff is happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you. Can I get a motion in a second, please? I also believe there's going to be four votes required on this. Yeah. For whatever reason, it's not appearing on my vote counter. But it needs. Yeah, it's not appearing on mine. So the. For some reason, Madam Clerk, the. Those that are coming in are not appearing on the main screen or going to the. Top of the screen. So it's a little tech I should be going to fix. Thank you. So there's a motion and a second. Let's go ahead and first go to public comment. Is your public comment on this? Yes, we have five Dave Shukla, David Sonata, Anna Christiansen, Lynnette Firenze and Mike Le Quatre. No, I know, but. Dave Sugar. David Sonata. Please approach to the podium. And Christianson. Annette Firenze and my love. David Sonata. Please approach to podium. Good evening, Mayor Garcia, Council City Manager Tom Modica. I came tonight to really sincerely thank you for the support that you give to Parks, and particularly to create open space in our park, poorer areas of Long Beach and communities of color. Tonight's actions are very important and I support them completely. As the last major park dedication took place in 2006. I do want to bring your attention, though, to the comments about Willow Springs. It is my favorite park in our city. And as we move forward to the December date that we discussed as they look into Willow Springs, I am hoping that council will keep attention to keeping these parks in total in whole. Because I have been told that there is a tension to plan and remove park acreage from Willow Springs Park to make it available for sale or swap. That would be a tragedy, especially on the West Side where we need open space and park accessibility. It also is not consistent with the park. Park's Commission and Planning Commission recommendations, nor with the city councils adopted in the global master specific plan. Again, our parks need to be in perpetuity. All of them taking any more properties from our parks will only cause us to lose access for our citizens. But with all that said, I think you already saw the quality of the Parks Department with Brant and his team. Durbin do an excellent job and I'm sure you'll keep attention to keeping our parks whole across our city. But most important, Willow Springs, because it is one of our different parks. Thank you very much for your attention. Anna Kristensen loads through this Wetlands Task Force. I came because I was at the Parks and Rec meeting and the former speaker did not introduce himself as the former chair of the Parks and Rec Commission, which he has been for many, many years. And he was highly honored at that meeting last week. And and there was a concern about Willow Springs Park. And and I think Willow Springs Park is a particularly special place because it it once had a spring. It was the original source of water for the city. And that spring and that source of water, it could could maybe the spring can't be active. But they are trying to rebuild the wetlands there. And in the middle of an urban area to have a space, we have soccer fields. You know, we have not maybe not enough, maybe we don't have enough basketball courts. But other than the nature center, we don't have a place like this. And that's the way it's being developed. It's being developed with native plants and and in honor, really, of tribal people and and the way they could teach us how to live and sustain the land. So I agree that to chip away at it, we've we've seen this too often, in fact, in front of the Coastal Commission meeting when we were trying to get better protection for our coastal birds, we were told, well, well, urban birds are just they just adjust. But if they adjusted, where the hell are they then? Because because we're losing, you know, we're losing this. And our parks are for people like like that, the Parks Department says, but they're also for wildlife, which I think we've we've taken so much for granted. And the way we we the way we treat those residents and the way we allow spaces for them. Yeah, we know we can't we can't have it. We need, we need those playing fields and we need the picnic benches and stuff. But Willow Springs is different, you know, and and money isn't everything. I mean, taking that little piece of land away and putting a little mall on it, there's a spot I'm probably going to go over. Oh, not quite. Oh, there's a there's a city park. It has the city of Los Angeles City Art Museum there, Barnsdall Park. I don't know if any of you've ever been there, but Elaine Barnsdall had a home there surrounded by farmland. She was a great radical and she left that land to the city on the condition that children have a museum there and children's art classes would be there. Her home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's quite an elegant place, but somebody decided at some point to take the city, took a chunk out of that to build a strip mall, and it's really ugly. And so that's what we see. We see it sometimes on our public schools, in our universities. Even so, we have to be careful because our our public open space is priceless. It really is. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Okay. Um, good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is going out, and I'm also here concerning that Willow Springs Park is again excluded from this with when the park dedication was last heard at City Council on September 14th, 2021, the dedication was for. 11 parks. Instead of 12 has approved by the Planning Commission since Willow Springs has been removed from the list. The motion was to continue to an unspecified date. City manager Tom Monaco spoke on this item and said that there were letters of concern regarding Willow Springs Park. It has been removed from the list of parks shortly before the item went to City Council, although it had previously been approved by both the Planning Commission in 2021 and Parks Recreation Commission in 2019, and it was included on the same list of the 12 other parks. He said the city was fully intending to bring Willow Springs back to be dedicated as a park. But there were very technical issues regarding lot lines and you have to be very specific on boundaries as well. Once it is dedicated, it cannot be undone. He went on to say that the city intends to bring Willow Springs back and have it dedicated as a park. Once that work is done, he did state that the city will look at that in all parks and will bring them back all at once to see that they would be dedicated in perpetuity. However, once again, this is not happening. This process has been going on for at least three years. The map for Willow Springs Park dedication from the Parks Commission was approved on May 21st, 2019. I checked with the Planning Department today and was told there have not. Been any applications to alter. The boundaries in the last ten years. The boundaries have already been approved by two city commissions. The community feels that these actions are a stall tactic and are very concerned that the park size may be reduced. This is an area of the city that has an extreme lack of open space. The city's new Long Beach Strategic Park plan has one of its goals a commitment to end parking equity and systematic racial inequality. Without the dedication approved by city council, the park is unprotected from sale or reduction in size. Unfortunately, the community is in the exact same situation we were nine months ago, with 11 parks being proposed for dedication in Willow Springs left off. I hope the city manager will simply honor his own words from last September and continue this item until Willow Springs as part of the 12 Park dedication has promised to the community. Thank you. Thank you. Next picture, please. My name is Mike Quatre, and I'm also here to speak concerning Willow Springs. I'll keep this brief since many of my points have already been covered, but I am pleased whenever we gain a dedicated park space. But I am concerned about whether Park Springs Park not being on the list again for a year or more. We've been told they would all be dedicated together. Yet Willow Springs remains the odd person out, so to speak. Repeated calls and emails to various council districts. Parks and Rec, city manager's office and other involved entities have failed to yield a concrete answer for this. Instead, we can continue to get vague responses, citing questions about long lines and boundaries. Central and West Long Beach are underserved in regards to parks. And since Pacific Place and soon, Baker Street properties are going to be marked for development. Willow Springs appears to be our last chance to gain open space, since there seems to be no definitive reason as to why this park is being treated differently. I fear that in the face of a looming budget deficit due to the recent court ruling overturning Measure M, the city might be considering selling part of the land currently included in Willow Springs Park prior to the final dedication. I hope that I'll be proven wrong, but the continued failure to dedicate this park space leads me to this conclusion. Therefore, I am asking that you follow through on the city manager's previous promise to dedicate all 12 of these proposed parks as a group. Thank you. Dave Chappelle, third district. I'm not here to speak in support of Willow Springs, except to say that I grew up skateboarding down that road, and it would be great for there to be a park there. I haven't heard any good reasons yet why it shouldn't be included for perpetuity scale, but specifically on the removing of the 456 square foot noncontiguous remnant parcel located at the southwest corner of East 14th Street, North or Rizal Avenue. That was, uh, originally part of the dedication of words of a park. I think that's kind of a harbinger of what's to come. More generally, throughout the city, which is kind of carving off and selling off parcels where one can, uh, to generate revenue, uh, when we should be doing the opposite. We should be trying to take over the properties where we can and just use the city authority to make it, uh, something better than it is now. And specifically with that, uh, noncontiguous remnant parcel that was part of the Pacific Electric wide right of way, as well as with all the other parts. I'd like to ask on the record. Um, has, when you, when you do things like a equity analysis, do we do it? Do you ever think about like grid reliability, like where these parts are located in the city is important. Where we have parks, resource rich areas also happen to be certain areas where electricity needs water needs, different needs are either met or not. And parks are interesting because they kind of have everything that like an institution or city hall building a school, for instance, would have in the way of services, utilities, buildout, etc.. So I'd like to know specifically just how deep is the equity analysis. Thank you. That concludes the public comment. Fantastic. Thank you. Is there I don't see any any individuals queued up because anyone want to speak on this? Councilman Austin. Thank you so much. I appreciate the public comment and I certainly am supportive of this land use general plan change to declare these parks in perpetuity. I always assumed that they were. That was the case anyway. I know it's also I do have a couple of questions just to clarify. So when we outlined our 169 parks, that was actually part of the presentation earlier. Are these parks included in that that scheme? In terms of actual parks and in acreage parking acreage in the city, are we accounting that already these parks? Councilmember I believe all of them are included in the 169. They're on the park's website. They're considered part of our park system. It's really more of like a a cleaned up set of actions to ensure that they have all the proper designations that should go with parks to ensure they're dedicated in perpetuity and that nothing in the future would be a problem for that. Great. And also, I'd like to just just piggyback on many much of the public comment that we've already heard. I think it's completely in the city's interest to have as many parks in green greenspace in our city as possible. I think it's all I think we all endeavor to have more parks, space and acreage in terms of the details. But since we last went through this exercise as a city council, I believe it was 2006, we're going to have to wait another six years to make that happen. Or. You know, no one at this table, council member, can perfectly predict the future. We'd probably be working somewhere else, but our commitment to this council is to keep our general plan, our zoning, all of those documents in in better order than than has maybe always transpired in the past. And part of that commitment is not waiting until you need to do a major update, but just keeping things up to date constantly and sort of looking at everything at a minimum every five years, if not more frequently. So this is a down payment. This is most of the parks and most of the fixes that need to be done. But there are ten more that need to be done. So there's a lot of public testimony about one of those, but there's more work to be done. But we don't want the perfect to get in the way of the good. So we're getting done today in front of this council what was ready to go. And the other parks have to be surveyed by the city's land surveyor. At one point that position was vacant. For about a year or so. We've had some slowdowns on the other parks. What we wanted to bring you was what's ready to go today and then to keep things up to date better going forward and into the future. And then my final question, what if we don't do this with what were the consequences or impacts of not actually declaring this park space parks in perpetuity? Perpetuity. So Don can build on my answer here. But it when a park is not a park in perpetuity. A future council could consider a transaction regarding that piece of real property. It doesn't mean that will happen. It doesn't mean it would happen automatically. But it it allows for that possibility in the incredibly unlikely event of some kind of dispute between the city and a creditor. It's an asset that could be considered by a court or other judicial officer. But once the park is recorded as park in perpetuity, cannot be sold, at least not without a two for one replacement. And it generally can't be seized by a creditor. And this is John. I'll just add that this is really a cleanup measure. So this isn't changing anything that is currently in existence with the parks. It's just making sure the land use designations are consistent and are all in keeping with the general plan. And operationally, nothing changes. All of our parks or that are parks today are all going to continue parks until they're, you know, parks in perpetuity. So from a realistic perspective of the use of those, they all stay exactly the same. Well, I appreciate the clarification for myself and the public as well. I certainly hope that we all can support this. Thank you. Thank you. So with no further comment, members, please cast your vote. We have a number of votes on this. That correct. How many? There's four. Votes. Right. Let's have skip the first vote. The motion is carry. Thank you. In another motion. And second. As their second vote is to declare ordinance setting aside and dedicating certain lands owned by the City of Long Beach for public park purposes and uses. Thank you. Members, please cast your vote. The motion is carry. Thank you. Next. Next photos for declare ordinance amending table 35 does to to add 11 subject parks. Thank you, members. Please cast your vote. The motion is. Carried. Thank you. That's the final motion, correct? Correct. Declared ordinance amending the use district map to change the zoning districts of the subject parks and remove the 1456 square foot road in park. So located at the southwest corner of East 14th Street and North or Zeba Avenue from the area dedicated as or Zaba Park City Way. All right, members, please cast your vote. The motion is carried. Thank you. All right. So that satisfies that item. Let's now move on to item number 22, please. Item 22 is a report from financial management and it does require an old recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record. Conclude the public hearing and grant an entertainment permit with conditions for entertainment with a dancing to house, a painting debate the board at 1253 East Fourth Street, District two. Please stand for those that are here to testify on this item. Raise your hand. You and each of you do solemnly state that that that the testimony you may give in the court now and pending before this body shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. I do. They do. Great. Let's go ahead and start with the staff presentation. I'd like to introduce. Tara martinson, our business operations manager, and she'll give a brief presentation on this item. Thank you and good evening, honorable mayor and members of city council. Before you tonight is an application for entertainment with Dancing for House of Pain Inc DBA, The Bird, which is located at 1253 East Fourth Street in the second Council District. This establish operates as a bar tavern lounge. The business has a valid ABC license. It's a type 48 for on sale general public premises. This license authorizes the sale of beer, wine and distilled spirits for consumption on the licensed premises. The business met the Long Beach Municipal Code requirements to be eligible for a temporary entertainment permit and was issued one in November of 2021. All of the appropriate departments, including the Health and Human Services Department, Development Services Department, Police Department and the Financial Management Department have reviewed the application and have provided their recommended conditions as contained in