Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, consider the applicant’s appeal, and find the proposed vacation of 117.62 feet of an east/west alley located east of Daisy Avenue and south of Willow Street, behind 520 West Willow Street, not in conformance with the adopted goals and policies of the City’s General Plan and uphold the Planning Commission’s determination of nonconformance; or Receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, consider the applicant’s appeal, and find the proposed vacation of 117.62 feet of an east/west alley located east of Daisy Avenue and south of Willow Street, behind 520 West Willow Street, in conformance with the adopted goals and policies of the City’s General Plan and overturn the Planning Commission’s determination of nonconformance, and approve Categorical Exemption No. 14-007. (District 7)
So all five motions have been adopted, right? City clerk. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations, everyone. Thank you. So we're going to go ahead and move on to hearing number two. And Madam Clerk, would you please go ahead and deliver the oath for number two? Item to require that all those who wish to speak on this item, please raise your right hand. Please stand up and raise your right hand, please. Mm. You and each of you do solemnly state that the testimony you may give in that cause now and pending before this body shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God. Thank you. Thank you. Item number two, please. Item two is a report from Development Services. Recommendation two received supporting documentation into the record, concluded the public hearing. Consider the applicant's appeal and find the proposed vacations of 11 7.62 feet of an east west alley located east of Daisy Avenue and south of Willow Street, behind Fy20 West Willow Street. Not in conformance with the adopted goals and policies of the city's general plan and uphold the Planning Commission's determinations of non conformance or overturn the Planning Commission's determination of non conformance and approve categorical exemption. Number of 14 Dash 007, District seven. Thank you, Mr. West. Deputy City manager Nita Dempsey will introduce the item. Thank you, vice mayor. Members of the Council Planning Bureau. Manager Linda Taylor will provide the staff report. Good evening once again, vice mayor, members of the Council. I'd like to give a brief overview of this presentation because it is an early abandonment. We do have a graphic presentation that I think will aid in in presenting the the specifics of this project. This this item is an appeal of an alley general plan. Conformity. Determination. And just for purposes of orientation, this is a vicinity map that shows the location of the alley, which is highlighted in red. It is located at five, the property at 520 West Willow. So Willow Street is there to the north and Magnolia Avenue is the property to the west of the property. Again, the the alley that's being requested for a general plan, conformity determination is highlighted in red. That adjacent parking lot to the south serves the building at 520 west Willow. All of these properties are under one ownership of the appellant. The request is to vacate a 117 feet segment of the alley and the zoning of the property of the alley itself and the adjacent park. The parking lot is p. However, the property on the frontage of Willow is actually zoned community oriented, commercial or automobile oriented community commercial. The reason that we are here for this council action is that state law requires that before the city disposes of any property or abandons any public right of way it has to, the Planning Commission is required to make a determination that the the abandonment conforms to the city's general plan, specifically to the land use element and to the mobility element. And that determination goes before a public hearing of the planning commission. And in this case, that determination was heard by the Planning Commission. And what we're here tonight is to have the planning, the city council consider that finding of a determination of conformity or non-conformity. I would just point out that this is just the first step of the process. If the council makes a decision regarding the conformity of this, this particular item, it would need to come back to the city council for an actual abandonment through a formal public hearing. So this is just one step. Once the conformity determination is made, it would then come back to the Council for an action on the actual abandonment. So I'd like to just give you the history of the project. The Planning Commission heard this item and on December 1st, 2016, and at that time, staff recommended that the Planning Commission make a finding of conformity after having reviewed the circulation element and the land use element. Staff found the the requested determination to be in conformance with the general plan. However, after the public testimony and the Planning Commission's deliberation, they found the abandonment not to be in conformance, and they directed staff to come back to the Planning Commission with a determination of non conformance at the January 5th Planning Commission hearing. The staff brought back the finding of of nonconforming determination and the Planning Commission adopted that finding on a vote of 5 to 1. Again, just to give you a little bit of context here, if you can see there south of Willow, you can see that if you look west of the property, the subject abandonment on the left , traveling west. You can see that the alley goes immediately south of Willow. And on this segment, you can see the proposed abandonment. The abandonment would only have been in one segment on the westerly side of that property. The alley would continue to be an open and public alley on the eastern portion. And that eastern portion does travel south. So that portion of the alley would remain open and available for public use. The reason I wanted to show this slide is that you can see that the alley is not continuous throughout that neighborhood. You can see on the block immediately east of the site, there is no alley. There is an alley on the block adjacent to that. And then again, just west of Cedar. There is no alley. So it's a very disjointed configuration for some properties. Have an alley and some do not. Next slide. So on. After the Planning Commission action on this item within the ten day appeal period, the property owner did file an appeal requesting that this item be heard by the City Council to reconsider and to make a determination of conformance performance inconsistent with the general plan. The applicants contended that the Planning Commission improperly characterized the subject properties having the same condition as the surrounding properties, and they felt that the the subject alley did not have the same characteristics of the surrounding property. And they also felt that the Planning Commission didn't recognize the safety issue of having to cross the alley to access the parking lot for that for their building. Next slide. So we've talked about the the alley and the vicinity. I think you can get a good picture of that. I'd like to just conclude the presentation by summarizing the recommendation. The recommendation of the Planning Commission is that the City Council find that the proposed vacation of the alley is not in conformance with the adopted goals and policies of the general plan. However, because staff felt that the City Council should have an alternative recommendation, considering staff's initial recommendation that the alley is in conformance, we are presenting the City Council with two alternatives. One is to uphold the Planning Commission's determination that the alley abandonment is not in conformance, but also to consider that the alley is in conformance so staff is available. This concludes our presentation where available to answer any questions you might have, and we also have public works staff available as needed, if any questions come up regarding the abandonment specifically. And Vice Mayor Richardson, if I. Might add, before we conclude, there are findings that accompany each for and against this particular project. So regardless of how council votes, they would also be voting to adopt appropriate findings either for or against this alley vacation. And they are in your packet. Thank you. So we will hear from the applicant and then we'll have public comment. Hello. Good evening. I thank you for hearing me tonight, Linda. Wonderful job, as always. Thank you. Pablo, do you have my presentation? There we go. How do I have a clicker? Just say next. Just say next. Year. Yeah. It'd be fun. Next. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Which which button is it? All right, great. So real quick, just to talk about Westlund and who we are and what we do. Western real estate group is a Long Beach based family real estate company. We've been in Long Beach for 40 plus years. We have we are a company that has about 10,000, what we call 10,000 doors. That includes about 8000 or 7000, give or take, apartment units in Southern California and Nevada. And we've also got about a million square feet of commercial shopping centers and strip centers. We do development as well. As you can see, we've developed this nice building. We've developed some other buildings around Southern California, and and we continue to seek development projects. When we moved out of North Long Beach in 2014, we had 60 employees. We redeveloped this 1940s building here on the corner of Daisy and Willow. Improved it to its original and restored it to its original beauty, I guess you can say. And we moved in with 60 employees. Today, we have about 90 employees working out of that office. We're also in the same building. We're housing the Long Beach Beer Lab, which is coming in as a brewery next door to us. And so this is a pretty well used the building. Next. Got it. So as Linda spoke, the Planning Department originally found positive findings for this allocation. Went before the Planning Commission a few weeks ago, a few months ago at this point. And it's important to kind of note what they said in their positive findings, and I'll read them really quickly, even though they're in front of you. All elements of the general plan were considered and staff finds this vacation to be in conformance with all applicable elements. The land use elements, land use element, which is a key element as the existing parcels develop with a parking lot associated with an existing commercial building, vacation of the alley would conform to the land use element and they spoke about the mobility element as the second element that's necessary to get the abandonment. It is the alley abandonment would therefore not prove detrimental to the movement of people and goods through the area. When the Planning Commission seemed to get stuck on some issues that were not addressed at the Planning Commission hearing. But it's important to note that when the Planning Department went back and found those negative findings, the Planning Commission ordered them to. They didn't actually change their findings, really what they did or they they what they did was found that the Planning Commission determined that it wasn't in conformance but didn't actually change the results of their findings , which is interesting, I think. But the planning commission seemed to get. Caught up on three main issues, it seemed to us anyways, from what they from kind of where it went. Trash pickup, fairness and cyclists. And I'll get into all three of those issues and kind of address what the Planning Commission had a problem with. And and maybe that helps you guys look at what we're doing here. And this time I brought a laser pointer. So as you can see, this is our this is our office building is right here. The alley that we're trying to abandon is right behind our building. And this is our parking lot. This is an old aerial view, obviously now. And many of you are aware we have a very large solar project that covers our parking lot. The trash enclosure here on the corner is actually designed to open up to the north south alleyway. And in fact, right now, when the trash comes and picks up, it does come from the south or north. I guess that is. I'm confused. It goes north and then east and it picks up. That can pick up the trash right here on this corner. So abandon this alley won't affect trash at all. The trash enclosure was designed that way. The fairness issue. They talked a lot about why would it be that we'd be able to vacate this alley and not the other alleys and not some of the other alleys like our neighboring properties? And they said, hey, this building looks like all the other buildings out there. What would be the what would be the value of abandoning this particular piece? It's really important to note, and we highlighted in yellow, as you can see, all around every there's a bunch of alleys on this corridor and every one of the buildings on the corridor has what you're seeing is a yellow highlight. That yellow highlight is the buffer zone between the door and the parking lot of the or the door and the alley, basically. So, for example, the Bank of America, you come out, they're exit door that you walk into a parking lot, not an alley, and then pass the parking lot into an alley, save a lot of time to react to fast moving vehicles. Our neighbor next door has about 20 feet between his door and the alleyway. And across here, you can kind of see all of those. They've got these parking lots right by their back doors. Ours doesn't have that condition, as you'll see on the next slide. This is a picture of the back of our building, which is actually our main entrance. That's the main entrance to our office where we have 90 employees. We have obviously tenants, customers coming in, paying rent, etc., all the time. This is there's constantly people traversing back and forth along this alleyway or from the alley to the parking lot. And this picture down here is actually a picture. The picture of down here is taken from the door itself. So you can see there's a very small sidewalk between the door and the alleyway. And cars speed through this alley to go from daisy to Magnolia or magnolia to Daisy, and it creates a significant hazard in our view. You can read more of the slides that I mean, you guys have access to this. I just want to summarize. I know it's late and nobody wants to get to their Valentine's dates. Before it's too late. Cyclists, as I'm getting I'm getting there. Apologize the cyclist issue, which was an odd one to us because in our view, they mentioned that they've noticed that cyclists use this alley to get from Magnolia to Daisy. But as you are all aware, the general plan, the city of Long Beach has been a you guys have adopted a general plan that tries to maximize cycling. And in fact, you've created or are creating the Daisy Lane bike corridor here, which is meant to be the connecting piece between downtown or part of the connecting piece between the downtown and North Long Beach through Daisy. So the idea here, there are going to be some dedicated bike lanes on this, in fact. And you're also adding, interestingly enough, just to accommodate this bike traffic, a new traffic signal right here. And that's going to be happening, as I understand it, within the next 12 months. It's already been approved. That Signalized intersection right there. We'll do a couple of things. One is it'll actually completely moot the point of having to go back from one magnolia to daisy and vice versa. And it will also slow down traffic on Willow Lane. The reason why this is so important is because as bikes are coming back and forth on Daisy Avenue and cars are speeding along this alleyway where our building kind of ends, this is big pictures, a bit deceiving, but the building actually ends literally at the corner of the alley and the street. So cars flying by here really quickly are not paying attention because they have to now come out of the alley, turn right and turn left. To go through the alleyway are actually increasing the hazard to cyclists that are going to be traveling on this Daisy Avenue. And then in conclusion, this was an interesting one, and I'm going to read it for you as well, because I think it's important. We did have one vote on the planning commission that went our way, and this is what he said. I've also walked past this alley. The truth is that the traffic enters that alley pretty fast sometimes and it does have somewhat of a blind spot and it can be dangerous to people walking along the alley. I've experienced it firsthand myself. From my own personal experience, I can see the potential for someone being struck by a vehicle while walking on that side of the alley. I think that anybody who's been in this building and many of you have, as we've we've chaired the North Long Beach Boys Improvement District meetings there and we've done other community events, etc.. It's obvious that there is a hazard here. And I think that closing down this alley is going to hopefully save some lives. That concludes my presentation. Thank you, sir. So is there any public comment on this hearing? Hello. Council people. Vice Mayor. My name is Levi Freed. I'm the founder and owner of the Long Beach Beer Lab, and we're one of the tenants at Westland. We are. From what I understand, the first ABM license in Long Beach, and we're very proud of that. We want to establish ourselves as a community brewery and a community structure. And I think that abandoning the alleyways is going to help our business in many different ways. One is my employees and myself. We park in the alley and we use this alley all the time. And I've seen firsthand how unsafe people drive through this alley trying to cut the traffic on Willow and there. So they're using the alleys as a thruway. So I've I've witnessed firsthand people driving past very fast. Second of all is I get a lot of deliveries being a manufacturing facility. When my trucks park back there, you could see traffic build up with people trying to cut through that alley while I'm trying to unload goods from what I'm told is they we they will be able to use the parking lot to do a full U-turn and drop the delivery goods off without having to cause any disturbances to the to Westland and the business and to people just trying to use it as a shortcut to get from Magnolia to Daisy. And lastly, when I'm thinking about the future, when we want to hold community functions that are beer related, to have people walking from the brewery to the alley to the parking lot where I would hold such festivities would become a tactical nightmare, if you will. If there are cars speeding past that alleyway where my patrons would come and and try to have a good time. So I am in support of this effort. And if you have any questions, I'm available as well. Thank you, sir. Thank you. No further public comment. This hearing is closed and we will take it back behind the rail. Councilmember Ringa. Thank you, Mayor. I want to, first of all, thank Mr. Greenspan for being here and presenting his appeal. I also want to thank staff for the for the great work they've done on this. They've had to do it twice, apparently at once, finding a positive result, and then secondly, going back and doing it again. But I want to can you put up a slide? I think with four four of the staff presentation with the map, actually, that shows Willow and Magnolia and Daisy in the building with only the red stripe that has the. There's the vacation that's there. And the reason I want that put up is because you could see it more on an invisible perspective that the only vacation basically is is a safety issue, maybe. Yeah. That right there is a is a an issue of safety. One of the major issues there is that that alley is used as a traffic right away when Willow is congested between the corner right there of Magnolia and Willow, when people are see that there's traffic backed up and Magnolia, they figure they make a left, make a quick turn through the through the alley right there and go to Daisy and then make a right and then continue on through the alley all the way up to Golden, which is a fairly long distance and creates traffic issues further on down for other businesses down that line because traffic traffic seems to race down there. I've seen it myself. The quote there that was presented by a planning commissioner of go is absolutely correct. I mean, the the exit to that building is right onto to the alley. And if you have cars coming presently real fast through there, there is an issue of public safety there. Also, the other aspect of it is that there is going to be a back path going through Daisy and there's going to be a traffic light put right there on Daisy and Willow, which is going to mitigate many of the traffic issues that are presented that are there now with people coming through the alley. That will be hopefully mitigated because of the fact that there is a vacation there and people will be now used to going down to Willow and the traffic battling bike lane will be unimpeded with any traffic coming across that portion of the alley to go continue on to the bike path through through Daisy all the way up to North Long Beach. So there were some the neighborhood concerns about that. And I want to thank Mr. Greenspan again for doing his diligence. He went to there's two associations in that area. Wrigley, the Wrigley Association and the Wrigley Area Neighborhood Alliance. One, he went to both of those meetings. So those neighborhood associations and nobody actually complained anything about it. But there was one that might have been concerned about the safety to the bicyclists, but with the understanding that there's going to be a traffic stop there, that concern went away because now people can just continue on into Daisy and not worry about any traffic coming out of that, that alleyway. So having said all that, I think that what I will have to do is now make a make a motion. And that motion would be to receive the supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, consider the applicant's appeal and find a proposed vacation of 117.62 feet of an east west alley allocated east of. Located east of Daisy Avenue and south of Willow Street, behind 520 west Willow Street. In conformance with the adopted goals and policies of the city's general plan, and overturn the Planning Commission's determination of nonperformance and approved categorical exemption number 14 007. And I ask for my colleagues support of that motion. So that has been moved and seconded. Councilman Austin in comments. Any City Council deliberation, seeing none. Members, please cast your vote. Hi. Hi. Oh, hi. And he opposed saying none. This motion is approved. Thank you. Moving right along. Congratulations. Moving right along. All right. Was. Okay. We're going to do item. There's a request to do item 18 that will go to 1618.