Many callers into the Jan. 25, 2022, City Council Zoom meeting warned the City Council about intensification of use and parking. One resident said “The changes in the parking element of the Downtown Specific Plan will enable developers to intensify use without properly mitigating the impacts it creates.” Apparently, the residents are better informed than Councilman Peter Blake.
Councilman Peter Blake exposed his ignorance about intensification of use at about 1:57 into the meeting. After being corrected, he still voted to approve the revised Downtown Specific Plan. Revisions that are destined to aggravate parking, congestion, traffic, and the livelihood of surrounding businesses.
Councilman Peter Blake:
“Marc, I’d like to clarify something. It keeps being said that a retail place could turn into a restaurant without modifying the parking. Everything I know says that that’s false. If you’re a retail location and you decide that you want to open a restaurant at that retail location, you’re going to have to come up with parking, right?”
Community Development Director Marc Wiener:
“So, under—with the updated downtowns specific plan, it’s going to require three spaces per 1,000 square feet of commercial floor area, regardless of the use, for most uses.”
Yours truly,
Gene Felder, Laguna Beach
Gene, did you mean many Village Laguna and Laguna Resident First activists called into the Council meeting to lie and engage in fearmongering? 20 of the same old gadflies that show up to every meeting?
Yes, I was corrected on an integral portion of the Downtown Specific Plan. There was a misunderstanding in relation to grandfathered parking and having no parking and transferring to a restaurant. Are you surprised that I voted to approve the revised DSP? I was overjoyed to and frankly owe myself a pat on the back. Who would have known that a mere three years after getting elected we would be this close to decoupling parking from use? This probably explains why you and your fellow activists are beside yourselves trying to regain the stranglehold that you, your wife Johanna, and your fellow authoritarians have held for 50 years. What’s to become of your nanny state if you can’t lie your way through a BS initiative that raised signatures by lying to residents. In the end, you had to hire a signature-gathering service to complete the job. And what percentage of the signatures was fake? Yikes!
Gene, a liar like you should not close off your political emails with Yours Trully. Who do you think you’re kidding?