Bird Rock has embarked on a mission to determine what it wants for the commercial district, as opposed to what it doesn’t, including three-story buildings. The Bird Rock Community Council (BRCC) held its first meeting with the city-retained Stepner Design Group to discuss how it would like to shape the boulevard.
Instead of pursuing a standard Planned District Ordinance (PDO), which typically entails rules that permit and prohibit certain features within a commercial center, BRCC is creating a form-based code.
The form-based code asks community members what they want their boulevard to look like and focuses more on public services and “place space,” as opposed to what’s occurring in the private building, explained consultant Howard Blackson.
“It’s not a text-based code where attorneys read one and one reads the other and they haggle over the language,” Blackson said. “It’s a visual, graphic tool that everyone can use. It gives predictability. You see it. You know what you’re going to get if you’re a developer coming into the area, if you’re a neighbor living next to a new development, if you’re a decision maker ” what’s expected.”
The community first has to decide how it interprets the boulevard. Is it a thoroughfare between La Jolla and Pacific Beach, a main street for shopping, dining and other services that draws outsiders or a neighborhood center?
At the meeting, Stepner distributed a survey asking the community to answer this question, and to stroll the boulevard and identify the exceptional, acceptable and unattractive places.
The survey is part of an extensive public process that the consultants are using to gather the thoughts and desires of the community in order to fashion the code. At the next meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 4, the consultants will present the results of the survey, indicating any preferential trends, and will then show pictures of similar commercial districts to see what interests the locals.
On Oct. 18, the Planning Department will discuss regulations to establish what it will and will not accept. A four-day workshop, from Nov. 3 to 6, will conclude the entire process, during which a group of architects, planners, engineers and retail specialists will use the suggestions to form a plan. Called a “charrette,” community members will be able to interject their thoughts and comments throughout the workshop. At the end of each day, the consultants’ work will be displayed to the public.
“The job of the professional consultants is to listen and to translate, not to impart the things they like or don’t like ” to try to really extract from the community what they like or don’t like and to translate that into a plan,” said Joe LaCava, a member of the BRCC.
The final report will then be sent to City Council by mid-December and work will begin on translating the ideas and desires into a zoning document.
The first meeting stirred a sense of opportunity, according to Blackson. Participants identified the types of streets they enjoy, such as Orange Avenue in Coronado or State Street in Santa Barbara. The community also concluded that the boulevard is really a neighborhood center that also happens to be a major thoroughfare.
“That balance is very tricky “¦ The reason that it’s great is because they’ve already started that with the traffic calming and roundabouts,” Blackson said. “It will be low speed, high volume, which is great for retail. We have to work with that.”
Blackson said that the traffic-calming process began the dialogue about the boulevard in 2002 and that building the code is the next step.
Some locals wondered how the code could entice a variety of businesses that would better serve the entire community, such as a hardware store and ice cream shop, rather than simply yoga studios and clothing boutiques, LaCava said. Others raised concerns about the interaction between the homes that border the alleys and the businesses.
As for revisiting the proposal to allow three-story buildings along the boulevard, it’s one idea among many that will be considered, LaCava said.
La Jolla has already forwarded 30 PDO recommendations to the Development Services Department, which does not plan to assess them this calendar year, according to George Biagi, spokesman for the mayor’s office. Only two other areas in San Diego are updating their PDOs, including a two-block street in Uptown and the 13 blocks of Cass Street in Pacific Beach.
“It shows you that the La Jolla PDO is an enormous project; the other PDO updates are very small,” Biagi said.
People who wish to fill out a survey about Bird Rock can pick one up at La Jolla Mailbox, 5666 La Jolla Blvd., or at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, 5627 La Jolla Blvd.
All meetings will be held at 6 p.m. at the Masonic Lodge, 5565 La Jolla Blvd. Workshop times have yet to be announced, but the consultants’ work will be displayed at 6 p.m. For more information call Mike Stepner, (619) 234-2112 or e-mail [email protected].