Letter to CIPOA Membership, Jan. 26, 2001



All,

Unrelated to the California power problems, the CIPOA.COM server was off-line for a few hours. It's back now.

Susan and I just got back from a two-day work/get away to attend the Property Owners meeting, which Jim and Merrilee Reid so kindly hosted, the joint Avalon City Council/Planning Comm. meeting, as well as some minor house repairs. What a great little get away that was.

Susan will put up notes from the CIPOA meeting as soon as she has a few moments, but I wanted to get a couple of important facts out to the membership.

Here are my thoughts from both meetings:

In general our CIPOA meeting was very good, we had about thirty-five people attend. A suggestion was made to form our own committee to help the City keep track of "problem vacation renters." A committee was formed and will report back at the next meeting.

The joint City Council/Planning Commission meeting was a lot of talk and not much action. The Planning Commission asked for direction from the Council; but none was given. Instead, the Council asked the Commission for its recommendations.

There was much discussion on CUPs (Conditional Use Permits) and the City Council will probably propose and pass a moratorium on CUP's at their next meeting on January 31. The CUP applications that are already on the agenda will be considered under the usual guidelines. However, due to a new California Law, any commission member who lives within 500 feet (it was 300 feet) of a property that is being considered may have to abstain from the vote.

Given the size of Avalon, that should make the Planning Commission meetings very interesting. The distance from Sumner to Claressa is just over 600 feet!

I would urge anyone who is thinking of getting a CUP, that they make their application as soon as possible. I don't believe they will be able to refuse to take applications until the moratorium is passed. Once accepted, they must act on the application within 30 days.

In my opinion, and most people agree, there is no relationship between the number of year-round rentals and issuance of CUP's. CUP's have not yet significantly had an effect on the prices of homes, nor the availability of year-round housing. Home prices have been going steadily up in the past few years, while the number of CUP's has been nearly flat. Plus, the tally of CUP's issued needs to identify the flats vs. Hamilton Cove. My informal accounting shows 278 CUP's, about 90 of which are in Hamilton Cove. This does not take into account Fairiew Terrace, Sol Vista Canyon Terrace and Bahia Vista.

I don't have a breakdown for the distribution of CUP's for the past few years, but I will try to get that from the Planning Department. These numbers will give us the trends (if there are any) in approved CUP's. However, I'm not sure what the number of CUPs will tell us. We all agree that the housing shortage is not directly caused by CUP's.

It appeared that there is great confusion on the number of permanent residents in the city of Avalon. Many publications state that there are 3,000 +, but, many speculate that the number has now doubled to over 6,000. Certainly, the school in Avalon can attest to a large increase in population because of the huge increase in the size of the number of children now in each grade. The census results may come in soon and that should be most interesting to all. Clearly the shortage of housing is aggravated by an increase in year-round population.

One other issue that has come up is water. This is a serious matter. Without proper planning and execution the lack of water will stop the whole City in its tracks. So far the planning and execution has been dismal. With the de-sal plan not operating, and not much short term hope for getting it going, it could be a dry summer. A well appears to be contaminated and SCE is planning on digging new wells, but that will all take time and money.

One common notion is that a summer-rental (occupied for 3 months) uses more water than a year-round rental (occupied 12 months). I doubt that this is true. The Mayor has raised the water issue and wants So.Cal.Edison to study the water usage. I don't think we need their help. If we collect 30 water bills and compare the water usage for summer-rentals to year-round rentals to full-time residents we can easily determine who is using the water.

In Los Angeles, it's the businesses that use the water and the people that work at the businesses. I think we need to address the water problem, simply by having the people that use the water pay for it. The more they use, the more they pay. UCLA and USC are the two biggest users of water in Los Angeles. Who is the biggest user of water in Avalon? Who is #2?

I've heard that some of the properties in Avalon are still not using salt water to flush their toilets. If that is true, then I think that should be the first step in reducing water usage - no matter what their excuse is! Is this a City Law? Are we REQUIRED to use salt water for flushing? If that is true, then what responsible resident would still be using fresh water in such a wasteful manner? As the Mayor of Avalon, states, "Water is a very precious commodity."

Another item we noted was that some employers in Avalon are pressuring the City to find housing for their employees. Is this the City's problem? Is this the property owner's problem? We think this is the employers' problem. The employers in Avalon, we feel, should buy single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, etc., or build structures (like Jerry Dunn has done on Marilla, and Al Solomon did) to house their employees. Why should the property owners make their property available to them at a much reduced rental rate to help the employers house their employees?

So it seems that the summer-rentals are being blamed for the water problem, the housing problem, the traffic problem, and what next the population problem? One thing for sure, the summer rental crowd is not filling the classrooms that Rudy Piltch noted in his speech before the City Council. The summer rental crowd was not buzzing around town this last week in their golf carts and adding to the traffic problems. The summer rental crowd is home, working hard, and saving their money to come back and enjoy a week or two on the Island, the Island that some of us call home, some of us call it "get away", some of us call it "a business"; but an island that we all LOVE and want to make available to our children, grand children and great grand children.

Thank you to all the folks that came to the CIPOA meeting and the Joint Council/Commission meeting.

We can agree to disagree; but let's keep talking. The more CORRECT information we have the better. It seems like there are a lot of "war stories" floating around, but we need to have the real story to make decisions.

Please feel free to write to Susan or me with any questions or comments.

Bill Scheding wls@CIPOA.COM
Note: The opinios expressed here are those of Mr. Scheding, not necessarily those of CIPOA