In 2014 the people of Santa Monica voted overwhelmingly for Measure LC so that, when Santa Monica Airport closes in 2028, it will become a great park.
During the city’s recent outreach program to find out what sort of park, the same overwhelming majority made it clear they still want LC-compliant green space.
But when the staff report on the outreach emerged, two of the three options offered involved paving over much of the park for roads and housing. Now the council has to decide what to do.
For decades the City of Santa Monica has prioritized building new housing downtown, in former industrial areas, or along public-transport corridors. Putting new housing at Santa Monica Airport would contradict all of that.
Little of Santa Monica Airport is near transit centers or shops, so people living there would be dependent on cars in an area where traffic is already often at a standstill. It would mean new road building, new water and sewer lines, and countless other utilities—all of which the people of Santa Monica would have to pay for.
If the city backed a non-LC-compliant option, it would give the aviation industry the chance they’ve been waiting for: a ballot initiative where big money could pour in to stop the park from happening at all, keep the airport open, the corporate jets flying in, and thousands of air taxis buzzing day in and day out over Santa Monica.
The aviation industry knows they can’t defeat a pure park, but any future for the airport that involves housing or commercial development will split voters and allow them to stop the airport closing altogether.
To make sure this doesn’t happen, the council needs to back a plan for the LC-compliant park everyone has been asking for. Open land on this scale will never again be available in Santa Monica. Once it’s been paved over, it will be gone forever.
In the words of a former mayor of the city, for the council to back anything other than an LC-compliant great park now would be to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But if they do get it right, the children of Santa Monica today—and generations of children and adults to come—will thank them for their wisdom.
