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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2011
Volume 10 Issue 69
Santa Monica Daily Press HONORING JACK SEE PAGE 7
We have you covered
THE WHO ISN’T SICK? ISSUE
Downtown area braces for spate of projects BY NICK TABOREK Daily Press Staff Writer
CITY HALL Bulldozers could soon be the new Priuses in Downtown Santa Monica. A slate of projects in the city’s commercial core and adjacent Civic Center planned for the next five years promises to transform the most iconic parts of the city — and to pose some serious challenges for businesses, their customers and City Hall planners during construction. No matter how you spin it, the list of projects expected to break ground before 2015 is impressive. It includes the renovation of the California Incline, the re-building of a Downtown parking structure on Second Street, a new Civic Center park, the Expo Light Rail station on Colorado Avenue and a multi-screen movie theater slated for Fourth Street. There’s also the Civic Auditorium renovation, an expansion at Santa Monica High School, a new bridge leading up to the pier and The Village housing development across from City Hall. Tonight, Santa Monica officials overseeing the projects will present their plan to deal with the impacts to the City Council, and residents and business people will get an opportunity to raise concerns. Mayor Richard Bloom said everyone who will be affected by road closures and other inconveniences needs to recognize that there will be some unavoidable disturbances. In the end, he argued, the benefits of the projects will be well worth their costs. “The staff is looking at this as a time when there will be some level of disruption, and the objective is to minimize that,” he said. “We simply cannot have progress on these issues without experiencing some level of disruption, but the dividend at the end of the day is that our downtown area is going to be even more spectacular than it is now.”
Parking Structure No. 6
Morgan Genser news@smdp.com
ONE FOR NORM: Santa Monica head girls’ basketball coach Marty Verdugo presents Patty Lacy with a jersey on Saturday.
HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS ROUNDUP Civic Center
Expo Light Rail
Samohi girls’ team remembers Lacy BY DANIEL ARCHULETA Managing Editor
SAMOHI The late Norm Lacy, Santa Monica High School’s longtime athletic director who passed away last year, was honored before a girls’ basketball game on Saturday. Head Coach Marty Verdugo presented Lacy’s widow, Patty Lacy, with a ring celebrating last season’s California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section Division 1A title and a jersey bearing the number he wore during his days playing football at USC. Verdugo said that he decided that the girls’ basketball program’s annual Westside Challenge was the appropriate time. “Norm really meant so much to all of us at the school,” Verdugo said.
SEE PROJECTS PAGE 6
SEE ROUNDUP PAGE 7
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