How Long Can Coast Inn Coast?
My brother-in-law lives in Kansas. We usually don’t have a lot in common. It’s like he’s a Klingon and I’m a Ferenghi. But through the years we have established some areas of shared interests. One of our strongest shared interests is in our communities and our desire to serve them. He is currently a Planning Commissioner and I once served on the Design Review Board. What is uncommon is how differently the roles of those two positions play out in our respective villages.
His role as a planning commissioner is to bring economic vitality to his village. He is concerned with improving infrastructure and development so that business and residents will want to move there. This is a way to provide for growth and the demands of the future. He is a facilitator of the transition from the way it is now to how it will be. His biggest foe is stagnation and blight.
My role as a design review board member was to make doing anything in my village so impossible that no one in their right mind would want to invest here and destroy the paradise we presently enjoy. Someone once said at a design review hearing that they weren’t happy with the process. My response was that the role of design review isn’t to make anybody happy. It is to make everybody equally unhappy.
We have done well in keeping things unchanged in our commercial districts. You can see the signs of our success in the increasing level of stagnant business development and a growing number of blighted buildings. Hulks that sit around for decades.
Some folks would say we are a town of NIMBYS, (not in my backyard people). It would be more accurate to see us as a BANANA republic, (build absolutely nothing anywhere people). Lately we’ve been raking those poor fools who want to renovate the Coast Inn over our regulatory coals. After the latest City Council meeting on their project they must have arrived at that equally unhappy place. Why they would want to continue is hard to fathom.
There is a valid concern about trying to stuff 10 pounds of charm into a five-pound village, but just saying no isn’t a realistic option. My brother in law’s biggest dream for his village would be a Costco or a big car dealer to move in, providing much needed tax income.
Laguna used to have several new car dealerships, which provided much needed cash flow. They’re no longer practical here. We’ve replaced that cash flow with restaurants and hotels. They are our Costco and car dealers. We use the income from them to float our civic boat. It is an important way we raise the money to pay for all the impacts visitors have on our village.
When somebody steps forward and wants to renovate the blighted hulk of a hotel like the Coast Inn we should try to facilitate that transition in a reasonable way. We shouldn’t expect that they will restore this pile of blight into a jewel box of a hotel without providing a way them to pay for it. The neighbors of this proposed project would want us to view the impact of life being put back into this property as a cascade of bad things. Oh the noise, oh the traffic, oh the trash and oh my goodness the light trespass. Those neighbors would have us think a renovated 24-room hotel is out of character for the neighborhood. This neighborhood on a busy national highway just a couple of doors down from the high rise Surf and Sand Hotel. If we keep this up, we could end up with one pound of charm in a five-pound village. Maybe then we’ll all be equally unhappy.
JJ Gasparotti moved to Laguna Beach with his family when he was 11. He has loved it ever since. His column is the latest of his efforts to repay the home town that has given him so much.
