From the Mirror Files

RAND and The City: Part One 

Here and Now

Peggy Clifford

Editor

    Hard by the high sheen of the Pacific, the buildings at 1800 Main Street, Santa Monica, are angular, silent, neutral in color and mien, apparently immune to the ocean's roll and dazzle.
   Framed by parking lots and a row of bearded-up motels and apartment buildings, the complex looks like one of those quasi-public entities - an auto club, an HMO that boasts it doesn't spend any money on fancy offices. In fact, it's the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation, Washington's favorite think tank. For half-a-century, it was the war room for Armageddon. Until recently, it was ground zero for the largest commercial development in Santa Monica's history. 
   Today, it's the site of the City's most ambitious public development or the flash point for another pitched battle between residents and City Hall, depending on what City officials have in mind for what is arguably the choicest piece of open land in Santa Monica. 
   In 1994, after an extended city-wide debate, voters approved the massive Civic Center Specific Plan, a radical redesign of the 40+ acres that span Main Street between Pico and Colorado and comprise the Civic Center. The Plan called for RAND to more than triple the size of its 300,000 square foot complex to include an additional 200,000 square feet for itself, and 650,000 square feet of offices, apartments and retail space, while the City would add a new public safety facility, parking structures, an artificial lake, parks, a plaza in front of City Hall, new streets and a viewing tower to its existing buildings.
   In order to secure City approval of its own plans, RAND agreed to invest $15 million in the public improvements and include affordable housing in its commercial development. But, after a fruitless effort to find a developer partner, RAND proposed an alternative plan: it would build a new 300,000 square-foot complex on about four acres at the southern end of the property and sell the rest of the acreage to the City. 
   After several months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, RAND and the City have agreed that the City's Redevelopment Agency will buy 11.3 acres of RAND's land for $53 million.
   According to a City Staff Report, a portion of the acreage will be used for low and moderate income housing and, in the words of the Report, "a new planning process for the Civic Center area will be initiated...(to) formulate new guidelines for development in the area which will reflect the diversity of opportunities associated with public ownership of a majority of the subject properties..."
   Given the City's history of overdeveloping public lands and resources, such as Santa Monica Pier and the Third Street Promenade, and the visceral dislike many people have for the Civic Center Specific Plan, concerned Santa Monicans are already bracing themselves for a struggle.

Deep Background 
   Unencumbered by ideology, the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation has advised every American president from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. It devised strategies for the Cold War, wrote the book on thermonuclear war and was the chief tactician for both the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It developed domestic policy for Jimmy Carter, made the case for the Reagan administration's massive arms build-up and had a hand in planning both George Bush's Desert Storm and Hilary Rodham Clinton's health care initiative.
   America lost the Vietnam war and the war on poverty. The Cold War ended not with a thermonuclear big bang, but with a whimper, as the U.S.S.R. imploded. Desert Storm was a great show, but Iraq is still a global menace, and federal health care policy remains a dream. Nonetheless, RAND has secured a permanent, publicly financed niche for itself and all the other so-called experts who have dominated U.S. policy since World War II. Its most enduring achievement is not its legendary systems analysis or nuclear weapons and war games, but itself, and its first priority is its own continuing well being.
   So it was that when the Cold War ended in 1989, RAND, the ultimate Cold Warrior, fearing a slowdown in the doomsday business, decided to become a bigtime commercial real estate developer.

Civic Center Always More Theory Than Fact 
   A wide arroyo effectively separated downtown Santa Monica from Ocean Park until the construction of the Main Street Bridge in the 1920s. Once the bridge was in place, the open land to its south was seen as an ideal location for a new civic center. In 1936, the Santa Monica Outlook and the Santa Monica Realty Board sponsored a civic center design competition and, over time. a kind of civic center took shape. In 1938, Santa Monica City Hall was built by the federal government's Public Works Administration. In 1951, the city added its Civic Auditorium and L.A. County built a courthouse. That same year, the City of Santa Monica, unaccountably, sold much of the remaining open land to the new RAND Corporation.
   It was a sweet deal, a prime chunk of land, 8.5 acres, directly across from City Hall, overlooking the ocean, for g50,000, or 18% of its actual value. RAND immediately used its bargain acreage as collateral for a $1.4 million loan from a San Francisco bank.
   In the early 1960s, the western end of the Santa Monica Freeway rolled through the arroyo and, in the 70s, Santa Monica Place and its vast parking structures filled two city blocks at the north end of Main Street, isolating the civic center from downtown Santa Monica as effectively as the arroyo once had.

Rand Stockpiles Ocean Ave. Land 
   Between 1974 and 1977, RAND bought up adjacent Ocean Avenue motels, businesses, apartments and a popular Santa Monica bistro, Chez Jay's. In the 1980s, RAND evicted most of its tenants, shut down most of the businesses and boarded up the buildings. The empty buildings quickly became a kind of ghost slum occupied by drug dealers and vagrants in the heart of the City's much-bruited tourist district.
   The 40+ acre civic center site is more or less equally divided into two long, rather narrow rectangles by Main Street, which runs south into Ocean Park. RAND's office buildings range across the center of the west rectangle, between Main and Ocean Avenue. 
   The eastern rectangle contains the only architecturally distinguished building in the civic center, the Classical Modern City Hall (not Art Deco as claimed by City Staff and its consultants), along with the Courthouse and the Civic Auditorium, both elaborate, insubstantial and thoroughly '50s architectural icons. 
   There are three large parking lots on the RAND property and a City employees' parking lot, a small public lot between City Hall and the Courthouse and a large lot adjacent to the Civic on the public parcel.
Though the civic center is in the middle of the city, adjacent to the freeway, framed by Santa Monica High School to its east and the hotels, motels and restaurants of Ocean Avenue to its west, it is curiously aloof, and wide open.

Rand and City Collaborate On Plan 
   In 1989, RAND set out to change all that. It requested zoning changes to permit a major commercial development on its property. About the same time, L.A. county announced plans to enlarge its courthouse. Eager to play master builder, City planners conjured a major revamp of the city complex and wrapped it and RAND's proposed development into a new Civic Center District.
   Employing its usual procedure, the City Council created a citizens' advisory committee to work with City and RAND planners on a Civic Center Specific Plan and named eight business people to serve on it.    Neighborhood organizations chose seven people to represent residents' interests on the committee. Early on, the residents' representatives opposed the proposed increase in density - which would permit RAND to more than triple the size of its development from 300,000 square feet to over one million square feet. At the time, RAND's partner in the development was the Janss Corporation, a subsidiary of a longtime Southern California developer which had recently constructed a $26 million residential/commercial complex on the Third Street Promenade and had other projects in downtown Santa Monica on its drawing boards.

Some Residents Oppose Rand/City Plan 
   The Civic Center Specific Plan, with the controversial density increase intact, went to the Santa Monica Planning Commission in April, 1993. Residents continued to oppose the size of RAND's project. In an effort to silence the critics, the Planning Commission recommended that "an urban design concept be prepared which would more clearly describe the implications of the proposed policies, development standards and guidelines and create an overall vision for the Civic Center area."
   The City Council created a "Working Group," comprised of two Council members, three Planning Commissioners, City staff and the ROMA Design Group from San Francisco. In hiring ROMA,which played a key role in the redevelopment of the Third Street Promenade, the Council bypassed all of Santa Monica's acclaimed architects and planners.
   The Working Group held several meetings with residents, but changes in the original plan were largely cosmetic, as the Group refused to give an inch on the density question. 

Council Approves Specific Plan 
   The final Civic Center Specific Plan, which was remarkably faithful to the original plan, was unanimously approved by the Council on November 23, 1993.
   When dissident residents asked the Council to put the Plan to a vote of the people, the Council refused on the grounds that residents had participated in the making of the Plan. Councilman Ken Genser added that the Plan was too complicated for voters to evaluate intelligently, while Counciman Paul Rosenstein reiterated his view that Santa Monica was a representative democracy not a town hall democracy and the residents' representatives had spoken.
   Led by disaffected members of the original citizens' advisory committee, Plan opponents were on the streets quickly with petitions calling for a popular vote. RAND spent $40,000 to short-circuit the petition drive, but 8,500 people signed, compelling the Council to schedule a vote.

Hayden Marshals Opponents 
   Though his longtime political allies, the SMRR chiefs, were RAND's staunchest supporters, State Senator Tom Hayden was an early and active opponent of RAND's plan. One rainy night during the signature drive, an Ocean Park supermarket's customers were surprised to find their State Senator collecting petition signatures in the parking lot.
   John Bodin, another leader of the opposition said, "Santa Monica's peace dividend is a major for-profit development for a non-profit RAND. Moscow gets MTV and McDonalds. Santa Monica gets gridlocked streets and polluted air."
   Despite RAND's central role in making federal policy, RAND had always avoided the spotlight as assiduously as Garbo herself, working the national corridors of power quietly and maintaining a discreetly low profile in Santa Monica. Indeed, though RAND's brand was on everything from the neutron bomb to urban renewal, RAND itself hit the front pages only once in its 49 years, and then as a mere sidebar to the 1971 story of disillusioned RAND researcher Daniel Ellsberg's release of the "Pentagon Papers" to the New York Times.
   Now, a seemingly insignificant real estate deal in an old beach town forced the hitherto invisible think tank out into the light. As RAND set out to win the approval of Santa Monica residents for its proposed development, the world finally got to see the inventors of modern warfare in action, and what it saw was a standard issue elaborate 1990s marketing campaign that was long on spin and short on facts.
   Voters were wooed by mail, phone and door-to-door solicitations. After several such visitations, one resident said, "They were invisible for 50 years and now you can't get away from them."

to be continued...