Resolving The Differences

   Now that voters have approved Santa Monica College’s $160 million bond measure, it is time for the college, its neighbors and City Hall to resolve their various differences.
   As we noted in an editorial supporting the bond measure, we expect the college to work with its neighbors on finding solutions to the parking and traffic problems caused by the college’s rapid growth which have plagued the neighborhoods adjacent to the campus. Specifically, SMC should invite the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA) to name a neighborhood liaison committee which would meet regularly with college officials.
   The group could work with the college on finding temporary measures to alleviate the traffic and parking problems while effective long-range solutions are developed. It could also review and comment on future college plans and projects, relay neighbors’ complaints to the college and college complaints to its neighbors, and discuss means of improving college-community relations.
   Residents of the area are also at odds with City Hall on several counts. PNA recently sued the City and the College, alleging that the City’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the college’s new parking structure was inadequate. PNA lost the suit, but the problems remain and it’s up to City Hall to solve them to the satisfaction of the affected residents.
   Other residents remain dissatisfied with City plans for the Virginia Park expansion, claiming they were either excluded from the review process or ignored. At the very least, the City should examine those claims to ensure that the process itself is not flawed, or rigged to limit participation.
   Which brings us to the City Hall- College schism.Though the City and the college have regularly collaborated, as on the aforesaid parking structure, and the new municipal pool on the SMC campus (not an ideal location for a pool which is, by definition, for everyone in the community), they are currently at odds.
   Some City Council members are miffed because the college has refused to submit its Madison theater proposal for the usual city review on the grounds that it doesn’t need City approval. Council members have also been unusually sensitive to plaints from Madison campus neighbors that the theater will generate unwelcome traffic and noise and in those ways disrupt the area.
   Two Council members – Richard Bloom and Ken Genser — have strenuously recommended that the proposed theater be located in the new Civic Center, apparently overlooking the fact that the proposed theater is not a new free-standing building, but an elaborate interior renovation of one wing of the sizable Madison School building.
   And, at the February 26 Council meeting, some members spoke against Prop U and were less persuasive or eloquent than they were petulant.
   This three-way tug-of-war damages everyone, but its principal victims are people who live near the college and have consistently been short-changed by both the City and the college.
   Living near a college should be a blessing. After all, there, just beyond your doorstep, is a mini-universe of delights — libraries, art galleries, athletic fields, classrooms, an endless roster of courses, lectures, concerts, recitals and plays – available at modest or no cost, and poets, scientists, students from every part of the world actively engaged in exploring the world and its workings.
   College officials have created a great college. Now it is time for them to work with their neighbors on the creation of a great community.