The Road Not Taken

Parking has been much on the Claremont City Council's mind recently. As we wrote Wednesday, the council had to deal with an appeal a Planning Commission decision on Claremont McKenna College's planned 162,000 square-foot Kravis Center building.

It turned out that the law requiring developers to submit a parking management plan for the project contained a major flaw when it was approved earlier this year and failed to include a provision for review of the document. Consequently, no appeal of the decision could be allowed. Apparently, no one realized this until Tuesday night's council meeting, so the matter went onto the agenda, and a number of people showed up to speak on the subject.

The appellants were disappointed, however, after City Attorney Sonia Carvalho ended the discussion by informing the council of the loophole in the ordinance.

The council later had a different sort of parking discussion regarding the parking situation for Johnson's Pasture. The council ended up approving a plan implement an overnight permit program for residents of Via Santa Catarina, the cul-de-sac at the pasture trailhead. Residents had complained about an increase in crime, parking problems and general nuisances since the city took possession of the pasture open space and more people began visiting there.

The city and open space proponents, unlike CMC, did not have to provide a parking management plan when it bought Johnson's Pasture, and was largely blindsided when these problems arose, even though Via Santa Catarina residents had raise questions about parking long before the purchase became final.

The city, in a rush to buy the pasture, simply swept the parking and crime concerns under the carpet, and even if a parking management plan were required, the city would have been the proponent, the judge, and the jury in the proceedings, so the result would have been the same.

So, as often happens in Claremont, only when the deal was done did the city begin to acknowledge the problems imposed on the residents near Johnson's Pasture. In this instance, though, the city, residents, and open space proponents were able to craft a compromise that, while not completely satisfactory to all parties, at least attempted to address the issue in a fair way.

The Daily Bulletin reported on the decision:

The plan, approved Tuesday, calls for a permit parking program to be established allowing night parking for residents only on Via Santa Catarina, the northernmost road in Claraboya, where the entrance to the open-space area is located.

A red-curbed area on the north end of the road will be removed, allowing public parking. Parking will be prohibited on the south side of the road, where there are houses.

The plan was praised by conservationists who wanted to ensure public access to the open-space area, and by residents concerned with the impact of the park on their neighborhood.

"Nothing is perfect, but it's a good Band-Aid," said David Jacks, a resident of Via Santa Catarina who has frequently complained about the behavior of visitors to Johnson's Pasture.

Visitors to the park have increased significantly since the open-space area was purchased by the city from private owners last year.

One would like to believe there's a lesson here. As with the 2006 bond measure that provided the money to purchase the property, in the parking compromise all the interested parties sat down and tried to work something out together.

The fact that the 2006 bond passed with 72 percent of the vote ought to show Claremonters that working together we can accomplish much more than when those in power try to ignore or marginalize dissenting voices.

The affordable housing mess, for instance, could have been avoided if, rather than condemning people opposed to the Base Line Rd. site as NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and racists, the Claremont League of Women Voters, who had pushed the failed project, had been open to ideas other than their own and had tried to treat their opponents fairly and respectfully.

This lesson crops up again and again in Claremont, but those hold power never seem capable of accepting it. There is a model for cooperation and compromise that has worked on the few occasions we've used it. When we don't, we invariably go through long, drawn out legal and political fights that almost always end up right where we would have if we had worked together.

The decision is entirely in the hands of the people who run things. They hold all the power, and they can choose: work together quickly and efficiently, or start a long, nasty fight to get the same results.

The first way is the way to building a true community. The second, the road more often taken, is the way to division and contentiousness.

Choose.