Helpful City Staffer Suggests Double Deck Parking Lifts On Beachfront, Instead Of Hotel Crossing PCH
Written by 991KBU on August 21, 2018
The Malibu Beach Inn project … to move its parking lot across P C H … is dead.
But the hotel was not turned down in its quest … to put in a swimming pool in its parking lot.
Not yet.
In a three hour discussion last night … the Planning Commissioners said they were dead set against plans to put the parking lot for the beachfront hotel across the street … and down a bit … further choking traffic in the most-congested part of Malibu.
Even commissioner Jeff Jennings … normally a pro-building vote … said he had real problems with the proposed variances needed for this proposal.
All five commissioners made it clear that the idea of parking valets … shuttling cars across Pacific Coast Highway just east of the pier … would not fly.
And they saids … come back to the Commission with a plan that we can possibly … maybe .. just might approve.
Planner Richard Mollica summed up the big issue.
NEWSCUT 77677 MOLLICA :39
“What I fear here, is that the applicant is locked on an idea of moving cars across the street.
“Would something that be more palatable to the planning commission is that if the applicant took their swimming pool, rotated it 90 degrees, out that as an infinity-edge pool, on the edge of their deck, cut the edge deck size down about, say, half to two thirds, and install on site (double decker parking ) lifts on site?
“That way you’re not moving any cars across, and you would make for the say 6 or 8 cars that are lost, by having to pool in the area of the parking?
“And you would make up for that with lifts.”
That is lifts – double deck parking – cars on top of cars – just like downtown San Francisco.
On Malibu’s oceanfront commercial strip.
That would be a first for Malibu … remember … the city’s general plan says even hotels are specifically supposed to be rural in nature.
Double deck parking is not even used in downtown Los Angeles.
Planning commissioners told the city staff and applicant … -you- come up with the plan… not us.
Commission chair Richard Marx.
NEWSCUT 77678 MARKS :08 QQQ: TRYING TO GET TO HERE.
“I don’t think we are going to try get at how to lay it out.
“As long as get the number, the guidance on the numbers, that is what we are trying to get here.”
As you heard … putting in double-decker parking lifts in at the hotel came up last night in a suggestion from the city staff.
Another city bureaucrat … the acting public works director Rob Du Boux … said at the last minute that he might drop his objections to the traffic jam issue …
If the hotel painted Do Not Block zones on P C H … he says he would consider that to be a solution to the traffic jam issue.
Double-stacked cars may yet join the list of rural attributes … along with vertical landscaping … in the Malibu planning department definition of “rural character.”
