MatthewTerry

Why this matters

I was at the water rate meetings giving presentation after presentation after presentation showing the city council the issue with their approach to calculating the new water rates needed to cover the cost of replacing our aging water infrastructure.

My presentations go into greater detail, but the gist of it is: normally, when a water line is installed down a street, the city uses the development on both sides of the water line to absorb the line’s capital costs. However, in Seal Beach we cannot develop along miles of our water line because of the Naval Weapons Station, and what the base pays doesn’t come close to covering its share of those costs.

The difference gets picked up by the rest of us.

How I’d fix it

Make the Navy pay its fair share. If elected, I will push my colleagues on the council to revisit our water rates and look at moving the Naval Weapons Station to a service-based agreement, because the current system treats the base like any other business instead of the unique customer it actually is.

Why this matters

Main Street is our heart and our identity. People pay a lot of money to go to Disneyland to experience Main Street U.S.A., while we get to experience the real thing every day. So, it’s important that we do everything we possibly can to ensure its success.

How I’d fix it

Make it easy to open a business on Main Street. Main Street is built out. No new parking is coming. So requiring a new shop to supply parking that Main Street has no room for, or to pay the city instead, is just an unnecessary burden on our shops. Both requirements should be removed.

Make it easier to hold street events. Install removable bollards on Main Street to reduce the hassle and cost of holding street events.

Turn the development across the river into Main Street customers. Love it or hate it, when all the development across the river is finished, we are going to have thousands of new neighbors. That’s thousands of potential Main Street customers, but we need them to get here without their cars. Long Beach currently has a bike share program that stops at the city line. If elected, I would explore a partnership with Long Beach to let the bikes in, with docking stations strategically placed adjacent to Main Street to ensure the bikes end up where they’re supposed to and not on the sidewalk. That’ll give our new neighbors a way to get to Main Street without adding to traffic or taking up parking.

Simplify sidewalk permits for shops. The process for a business to get a permit from the city to put out tables or merchandise racks on the sidewalk is immensely overcomplicated. As I mentioned at the Planning Commission meeting when this was first proposed, the process should be as simple as paying a fee, signing an agreement and following the rules.

Modernize the Main Street Specific Plan. It’s the plan that governs everything on Main Street, and it’s out of date. It was written in the 1990s and has only been patched piecemeal since. It’s time for a full review.

Give Main Street properties more ways to earn, so shops don’t carry it all. Rents are high on Main Street, and on many parcels a single shop is carrying the whole property by itself. I would work with both the property owners and the shops to see how the city could encourage building housing on parcels that have room for it in the back. Building housing gives a parcel a secondary source of income, with the added benefit of more customers for Main Street. When a parcel earns from housing too, the shop’s rent no longer has to cover the whole property.

Finish the Local Coastal Program. Seal Beach should be able to make its own decisions about Main Street, but right now the Coastal Commission has the final say. We need to finish our Local Coastal Program so the final say belongs to us.

Why this matters

Over the past decade we voted to raise our sales tax twice. Both times it was sold as a fix, but it was really just a stopgap measure. The permanent solution never came. Now we are at the state’s sales tax cap.

Budget cuts are always an option, but they won’t close a gap this size. Also, tourism is not the answer. The perpetual idea of building it into a larger revenue stream is a pipe dream because that is not how Seal works. The city is pulling the last easy revenue levers, and still the long range financial forecast is negative.

Making things worse, we lean heavily on our big box stores at a time when their popularity is declining, and our revenue streams are out of date with how society has changed, so those streams will only lag further behind. The city has said it has no ideas for a new large revenue stream. We need to solve this issue so we hand off a financially healthy Seal Beach to the next generation.

How I’d fix it

The most common response to a budget gap is to audit the spending. But that is only half the job. Nobody ever audits the revenue our land produces for the city.

In fact, our most valuable revenue generator is our land. So managing it well is one of the most important jobs the council has.

We have rightly put much of this town off limits to development to protect our small-town charm, but that leaves us dependent on a handful of commercial shopping centers to support the city. Our entire revenue system is built on growth. That is why, as counterintuitive as it sounds, to protect our neighborhoods we need to develop our underperforming shopping centers.

In a year the state will require us to update our housing plan, which means we will be rezoning again one way or another. The only question is whether we use this process to our benefit.

We need a systematic approach.

• Run a long range budget forecast, so we know what we need to be bringing in over the next decades.
• Audit our shopping centers (not Main Street) for what the city collects from each one today, and set the target it needs to hit for a stable future.
• Zone them accordingly, so whatever gets built next has a better chance of reaching those targets.
• Master plan everything out before anything gets built: traffic, utilities, services…

As an architect who has lived in Old Town my whole life, I am the right person to take this on. We do not need to be Huntington Beach or Santa Monica, but we cannot no-develop ourselves into bankruptcy either.

Why this matters

This one is personal for me. I have three kids, and I want our neighborhood to be the best it can be when it comes to making streets safer, for them and the whole community.

How I’d fix it

Pay closer attention to what we build. No street is perfect, and every street in the district has a way it could be better. But every time the city works on one, it just gets rebuilt exactly the way it was before. I would work with Public Works on a master plan for the district’s streets covering crosswalks, stop signs, sidewalks, bike routes and speeding. Then when a street’s turn comes up, we already know what better looks like, and we build that instead of repeating the past and inheriting its mistakes.

PCH. Caltrans does not care about pedestrians. It’s as simple as that. PCH, which is Caltrans controlled, is a pseudo freeway bisecting our community, but it’s also a street families cross on a daily basis to get to school, to swim lessons, to baseball practice. I’ve presented on it and written about it, and I’ve personally crossed that street on foot over ten thousand times, and the fact is every day our neighbors cross a street that is unnecessarily dangerous, and Caltrans does nothing about it. The latest work Caltrans did on PCH offered the city a rare opportunity to make the street better, and the only thing our city council pressured Caltrans about was the landscaping in the median. Senate Bill 960 directs Caltrans to design streets for everyone, not just cars. So, if elected, I will use it to make it very clear to Caltrans that we are not putting up with this anymore.

Close the OC Loop gap. The OC Loop is a 66 mile protected bike route that circles Orange County along the San Gabriel and Santa Ana rivers and the coast. 88% of it is already built, and the county is closing the few remaining gaps right now, but the stretch between Surfside and Old Town has stalled out. As proposed, it would be a separated path spanning the bay, for bikes and pedestrians and a much needed connection between Surfside and the rest of the city. This would be a win for Main Street too because families on bikes fill the beach path south of here every weekend, and they all turn around at the gap because nobody wants to ride PCH. Close the gap and that’s a lot of potential Main Street customers who don’t need a parking spot and don’t add to traffic. What makes it possible is projects like this get built with county, state and federal money, so this is something meaningful that can get built even under our current budget situation. If elected, I will do everything I can to go get that funding.

Why this matters

Anything the city wants to do near the coast has to get approved by the state first. That makes everything take longer and cost more than it should. The Local Coastal Program is the city’s own set of coastal rules. Ours is not finished yet.

How I’d fix it

Finish the plan. The plan is closer to done than most people realize, and there is state money to finish it. It just needs someone to push it across the line. If elected, I will make finishing our Local Coastal Program a priority.