Recommendation to direct City Manager to initiate a visioning effort for the Downtown Shoreline Planned Development (PD-6) zoning district as the framework for a Downtown Shoreline Specific Plan that updates current development regulations and facilitates repositioning of existing uses and resources in the Downtown Shoreline area; and Increase appropriation in the Tidelands Operations Fund Group in the Development Services Department by $250,000, offset funds available. (District 2)
Some have folks are in the audience and I'm going to try to get to these at the start of the agenda as much as possible. We're going to go ahead and here, item 19, please be quick. Item 19 is a report from the Development Services recommendation to initiate a visioning effort for the downtown Shoreline Planet Development Zoning District, District two. Thank you, Mr. Modica. Can we get to just a short staff presentation? I think the. The staff reporters. Who have been taught staff report. By Linda Tatum and Christopher Coons. Good evening, Mayor, and members of the council. This is a presentation regarding a proposed visioning process for the downtown shoreline area. And. Excuse me. The downtown plan is the success of the downtown plan owes a lot of its success to the effort that the city took to actually conduct a visioning process before enacting the plan. So we'd like to do something similar with the downtown, with the PD six area. The PD six is that area one of the most scenic areas in the city on the waterfront? It is. Let's see. Thank you, Tom. There we go. Pediatrics area was last updated by the city back in the 1980s, and it is the area south of Ocean between the Los Angeles River and Alameda Street there. And it contains some of the most visited sites in the city. And since the city's announcement or the city's selection for the 2028 Olympics, there has been an intense level of interest in development activity in the PD six area. So the city is going to take advantage of that interest and conduct a visioning exercise for this. This property and that process will be very similar to what we did for the the downtown plant. It was a very community oriented, a lot of community engagement. So I'll walk you through very briefly what that process will look like. The objectives of this process is to establish a stakeholder, a very strong community outreach effort. We would identify stakeholders to essentially establish a consensus about the future development within the PD six area. The other objective is to strengthen the connections between this area and the downtown. Right now there is. We could do a much better job of getting those that visit the shoreline area to come into the downtown and vice versa. So that will be one of the objectives of the visioning exercise. Fundamentally, the other purpose of this process would be to establish a framework so that we can subsequently prepare a specific plan. And it is the specific plan that will be very similar to what we did in the downtown in terms of establish some key goals and developing consensus around how we can best enhance that area and enhance provide the kinds of activities and spur investment in that area. And that process would essentially be led by a consultant and driven by a consultant and staff guided process. The idea would we would have a series of committees or working groups that would represent various stakeholder groups in the community and develop consensus around some of the topics and some of the objectives of the plan or of the process. We would also conduct economic trends analysis with the idea being to identify the opportunities in the area as well as some of the strengths that we can build on in the shoreline area. In terms of a timeline. Very briefly, we envision this to be about an 18 month process and that would start up early 2020. And the very next steps in this process is staff will be working with the city manager's office and with the mayor's office in the next couple of months. And we will be bringing back to council in December a very detailed work program and a schedule for this effort. We would work to start selecting a consultant to to guide this process, working with staff sometime in early 2020 and then initiate the working groups in the second quarter of 2020. So that's essentially an overview of that process. We look forward to engaging the community, resident groups, business groups, property owners, waterfront interests to make sure that as we establish some kind of a consensus about how we can best invest in that area and capitalize and have a specific plan in place by the time 2028 rolls around. And we host the 2028 Olympics here in Long Beach. That concludes the staff presentation, and I'm available for any questions. Thank you very much. A great presentation. The only thing I will add is that obviously updating our are different plans across the city has been a priority. I really want to thank the staff for presenting this and bringing this forward. Anything councilmember pearce will agree, pd six is a critical piece of of our of our infrastructure and our economy and the area. And so I just want to thank you for the work, Councilman Pearce. I too, want to thank you guys for the work. I know that we've done visioning just at the Rainbow Lagoon area and understand the process before us. Just like in downtown, when we did the downtown plan, we saw that it invited so much new developments. We see that we had, I think, up to eight cranes in our downtown over the last several years. And so we welcome this process again with this area. I'd like to just highlight that one of the things that has been important to my district is the fact that a lot of it is shared with tourists and making sure that when we develop these areas that we're really inviting the rest of Long Beach to come to our waterfront. And we're saying that this is your waterfront and everything that we can do to try to make sure that transportation is accessible, that when we're updating our plans, we're looking at community benefit agreements and things like that , ways that we can ensure that the development will be inclusive and diverse. So really looking forward to the process. Thanks for everything that you guys have done so far. Appreciate it. Thank you. Councilman Richardson. I support the study. Thank you, Councilmember Gringo. I know you guys are ready to dot the I's and cross the t's. However, this is within the coastal zone. Is that correct? So we exist within our local coastal plan, the LCP. Yes. This would require an action and approval by the the Coastal Commission. I'm guessing that you're going to have a timeframe timeline to bring it to the Coastal Commission in the near future. Date in the future. Yes, we will include that in the the memo that comes the council that outlines the process in some detail. We will kind of outline the steps of the visioning process and the subsequent specific plan process, because it's the specific planning process that will be subject to the coastal action, not the visioning process itself. I just want to make sure that we are timely on this. Obviously the Coastal Commission has its own schedule and I want to make sure that we have the time to have an opportunity to where to count to the commission when we are here locally, whether Long Beach or somewhere in the in the southern region. Thank you. Councilmember. Mr.. Good to hear any public comment. No. Members, please cast your votes. Councilwoman Price. Councilwoman Mongo. Ocean cares.