All's Well That Ends Well? City staff arrived at Tuesday's hearing with a last-minute revision. Robert's Liquor left with its 35-year-old permit intact and exactly the four conditions it was promised.
Robert's Liquor walked out of Tuesday night's Planning Commission hearing with exactly what its attorney said the city had agreed to in January: four targeted additions to its existing 1990 conditional use permit, and nothing more. But the path to that outcome was anything but smooth, and it raised pointed questions about how a negotiated agreement nearly became something much larger.
Robert's Liquor has operated on Pier Plaza since 1996 under a conditional use permit — a land use entitlement required because the store remains open until 2 a.m., past the 11 p.m. threshold that triggers CUP requirements for off-sale alcohol establishments in the C-2 zone. The business is the only alcohol retail store in the downtown area open past midnight and through bar closing hours, a fact that has made it a recurring focus of police attention in discussions about late-night conditions on Pier Plaza.
Between February 2024 and August 2025, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control conducted two undercover investigations at the store resulting in confirmed sales of alcohol to minors, and police documented a third incident involving juveniles leaving the store with open containers. The violations triggered a city-initiated review of the business's CUP under Hermosa Beach Municipal Code Section 17.70, which authorizes the Planning Commission to modify or revoke a permit when violations are documented.
The commission first heard the case in October 2025, where it declined to impose immediate restrictions — commissioners expressed skepticism about the evidentiary record and questioned whether the store was truly the source of Pier Plaza's broader late-night problems — and instead directed staff to meet with the owner to develop agreed-upon operational improvements. Owner Dung "Mike" Tran had already voluntarily installed electronic ID scanners and completed ABC training before that hearing. Following a November meeting between staff, police, and the owner, four specific new conditions were negotiated: mandatory electronic ID verification, warning signage, ABC LEAD training for all employees, and a video surveillance system with 60-day retention.
That, both sides believed, was the deal. What happened next is what brought the matter back to the commission Tuesday night.
The hearing opened with Assistant Planner Johnny Case presenting a revised resolution that staff had circulated only minutes before the 5 p.m. start time — a document that differed substantially from the version publicly noticed the previous Thursday. That earlier version, which had been available for public review all week, would have superseded and replaced the business's 35-year-old permit in its entirety with a new 21-condition document. The version presented Tuesday night stripped it back to the four conditions the parties say they agreed to in December.
Case explained the shift matter-of-factly, telling commissioners that staff was recommending "striking all conditions except for conditions of approval 5, 10A and 10B, 12, 16, 17 and 21" and that the amended resolution would be "in addition to" rather than superseding the 1990 City Council resolution. He framed it as a response to the owner's request to preserve the original permit.
What he did not explain — and what commissioners did not ask — is how the publicly noticed resolution came to contain 21 conditions replacing the entire 1990 permit when the negotiated agreement called for four additions, and what specifically prompted the reversal on the day of the hearing.
Commissioner Flaherty, the most pointed in his remarks, expressed frustration with the last-minute nature of the change. "I appreciate the last-minute changes from our staff report that we got on Thursday to today at nine o'clock letters and today late — five minutes to five seeing this for the first time," he said, adding that he would have preferred a cleaner document without extensive strikethroughs.
Commissioner Hoffman noted that the episode had revealed something important about the limits of CUP enforcement. "Part of the difficulty of this is that the staff report indicated at some point we were trying to mitigate the impacts of the violations," he said. "Well, that's not the function of a CUP." He characterized the four additions as a rare opportunity to modernize a decades-old document — ID scanners and video surveillance systems simply didn't exist in 1990 — while keeping the original permit structure intact.
Robert's attorney Patrick 'Kit' Bobko (a former Hermosa Beach councilmember), appearing before the commission, was gracious following the agreement. "We appreciate the chief and staff working with us on this. I think this is the right result," he told commissioners, noting that the four conditions accurately reflected what the parties had negotiated. He acknowledged ongoing factual objections to some of the language in the resolution's recitals — "I'll just leave that where it lies" — but said the outcome was acceptable.
Police Chief Landon Phillips echoed the sentiment. "We don't want that challenge to limit the ability for businesses to be successful, and that's something we worked through in this process," he said, praising the owners for installing ID scanners within a week of the August 2025 ABC violation, even before the October commission hearing.
The commission voted 5-0 to approve the amended resolution.
For Tran, who is in the process of selling the business, the resolution removes the cloud of uncertainty his attorney had argued was depressing the sale's value. The business's 1990 permit — and the property rights attached to it — remains intact.
Bobko is no stranger to taking on Hermosa Beach on behalf of clients who believe the city has overstepped its authority. A former two-term city councilmember and mayor, he represented the owners of CrossFit Horsepower, the Cypress Avenue gym that the city declared a public nuisance following neighbor complaints about noise and vibrations. That case ended badly for the city — a Los Angeles Superior Court judge invalidated the city's abatement effort and found that Councilmember Stacey Armato had been biased when she voted on the nuisance resolution. The gym owners subsequently filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging deprivation of due process and an unconstitutional taking of property without compensation. The pattern in both cases is similar: a local business facing city enforcement action that Bobko argues crosses constitutional lines, a record that he contends doesn't support the action taken, and a client whose property rights and business value are directly on the line.
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