From: Holly Osborne <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2022 9:06 AM
To: Eleanor Manzano <[email protected]>
Cc: Sean Scully <[email protected]>
Subject: Fw: Remarks for council meeting on June 12: ADUs and zoning CAUTION: Email is from an external source; Stop, Look, and Think before opening attachments or links.
Eleanor and City Council people:
The remarks below are the remarks I made at the city council meeting last night under non-agenda items. This is for the record, and so you can get the minutes right, I hope you include them where-ever it is you include them in the record.
(I am not going to submit a copy of my remarks under the N4, because they came out so disjointed and confused, and I departed from my prepared remarks, and no one was listening anyway. ( In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to try and continue with my theme, because N4 was so far after non-agenda items; even though I thought they were highly relevant, people had forgotten what I said at the beginning.) HOWEVER: All is not lost; I will revamp them slightly and try again this coming Tuesday! Thank you.
Holly
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Holly Osborne <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2022 at 04:13:26 PM PDT
Subject: Fw: Remarks for council meeting on June 12: ADUs and zoning Good evening Mr. Mayor pro-tem, council members and staff:
My name is Dr. Osborne, district 5.
For those of you who do not know me, I am a retired aerospace engineer, and a registered professional engineer in the state of California. I spent my 40+ years at a local aerospace company as a systems engineer, examining specs for inconsistencies, examining test data for possible anomalous behavior, and so forth; all to ensure that the systems that these companies develop work correctly and for the good of the country. I was very good at what I did. I now apply that same zealousness for accuracy to civic affairs, in my city of Redondo Beach.
Most of you are aware that I worked very hard to get signatures for the zoning initiative, which would have returned all zoning matters to the cities. Most people think of the "zoning initiative" as an anti SB 9 (the lot splitting bill) measure that would destroy single family neighborhoods; and it was the preservation of single family neighborhoods that is what motivated me initially. However, there are some other recent troubling zoning laws on the books, the initiative ALSO covers those. . I will get to one in a minute.
First let me say that we had to temporarily stop the signature gathering when it became evident that due to a host of reasons, we would not get enough signatures by the deadline. One of the issues we fought was ignorance. Most people were just absolutely CLUELESS about zoning bills. The organizer of the initiative campaign, [John Heath, who is from South LA] said, the best education is going to be when a really BAD project turns up in your neighborhood. THEN people will be galvanized.
I now have such a BAD project, which I just discovered over the weekend, and it actually has to do with ADUs. Most of you might think that ADUs are flats that you build for your granny in your back yard of your single family neighborhood. If that is what you think, you are woefully, blissfully, ignorant.
According to the latest zoning laws, ADUs can be added on multifamily (i.e. apartment) complexes. At first glance, the ADU law allows the number of ADUs to be equal to 25% of the number of apartments.
So, if you have an 8 unit apartment complex, you can add two ADUs. Where do you add them? You convert the attached garages or other non residential space within the main complex. What happens to the people's cars who live in the units? TOO BAD. Their car is on the street, and joins the homeless.
It gets worse. If you have a free -standing structure (for example, a garage building at the back of the property) you can convert that to TWO adus, regardless of the number of units in your apartment building. In the above example of an 8 unit apartment complex there thus be total of 4 adus for an an apartment complex with this configuration. THAT IS A 50% increase in the number of dwellings! In North Redondo, we have a particularly unfortunate situation. There are a number of very dense complexes of 6, 8 or 10 units dating from the "dark ages" that actually have more apartments on the lot that would be allowed today. These lots, since the late 70's, are now zoned for 3 units, so they are non-conforming.
So, what is the case for these non-conforming overly dense apartments? Why, the owners are rewarded, of course. The more units there currently are, the higher the number you have to multiply by 25% and so convert common space to ADUs.
This is a particularly bad piece of legislation because it does NOT take into account situations unique to our city,
People who live in these apartments should be running, not walking, to sign the zoning initiative when we start up again.
My three minutes are up. I will get to the exact case when we get to the item on Artesia Blvd, later on in the agenda.
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Holly Osborne, PhD, PE