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# The city has a 25-year plan. It's past its Sell-By date.
- URL: https://www.hermosareview.com/the-city-has-a-25-year-plan-its-past-its-sell-by-date/
- Published: 2026-10-29T23:31:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-29T23:31:52.000Z
- Description: "Where there is no vision, the people perish," warns the bible verse on the wall of the Community Center. But is PLAN Hermosa really a vision, or just an expired document gathering dust in the cupboard ?
- Author: Hermosa Review
- Tags: Opinion

***Nine years after Hermosa Beach adopted PLAN Hermosa, its zoning code is still unfinished, its coastal program remains uncertified, and the forces now reshaping the city — deficits, state housing mandates, a collapsed short-term rental ban, and a consumer economy of delivery apps, empty storefronts and declining drinking — appear nowhere in its 240 pages.***

When the City Council voted to place a half-cent sales tax on this season's ballot — the city's third attempt at a revenue measure in four years — Councilmember Raymond Jackson called it "a hope rather than a plan."

He was talking about the budget, and it was a strange protest coming from the second-longest serving member of the city council. But the phrase could also serve as a review of a much larger document: *PLAN Hermosa*, the 240-page Integrated General Plan and Coastal Land Use Plan the city adopted on August 22, 2017, and which remains, on paper, the governing vision for everything Hermosa Beach does.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6e/b0/6eb0c461-60b1-49cd-b904-5f02d7b5a05e/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-06-at-9.00.02---AM.png)

PLAN Hermosa's introduction

Adopted after a four-year community process, *PLAN Hermosa* promised a 25-year trajectory toward a carbon-neutral, economically vibrant "best little beach city." Nine years in, a review of the document and the city's record since suggests something closer to the opposite of a strategic driver: a values statement whose implementation was deferred by design, whose central legal deliverable never materialized, and whose assumptions have been overtaken — by a pandemic, by Sacramento, and by the city's own balance sheet. Jackson himself has already served five years on City Council, but has shown no interest in championing an update of a plan that is seriously deficient in several key areas.

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WHY DOES PLAN HERMOSA MATTER?  
A general plan can seem like the most abstract artifact local government produces. It is closer to the opposite: California courts have called it the "constitution for all future development," and state law requires every city to have one — and requires nearly everything else the city does to be consistent with it.  
  
That consistency requirement is the mechanism by which a plan reaches into daily life. The zoning code that determines what can be built on the lot next door — its height, its use, its parking — must conform to the general plan. So must the capital improvement program that decides whether your street gets repaved, your sewer line replaced, or a crosswalk added near the school. When a developer proposes a project, when the Planning Commission conditions a permit, when a resident appeals one, the general plan is the standard everyone argues from. Pretty much every significant piece of city business (and quite a lot of insignificant ones) are referenced against PLAN Hermosa for compatibility.

### A plan built to defer

The most revealing pages of *PLAN Hermosa* are the ones near the end. In a 240-page document, implementation — the machinery that turns goals into budgets, deadlines and accountable departments — receives roughly two pages of substance.

Those pages describe an "implementation matrix" that would assign each action a lead department, a timeframe and a funding source. But the matrix itself is not in the plan. The document states it should be "adopted separate from the rest of this Plan so that it may be updated and kept current as council set priorities on an annual basis." Actions, it says, would be completed "as resources become available."

The effect is that the adopted General Plan commits the city to nothing schedulable. Priorities can be added or dropped each year without ever amending — or consulting — the plan.

The policy language points the same direction. Across roughly 300 policies, the dominant verbs are "encourage," "consider," "support" and "strive." One mobility policy commits the city to "consider exploring opportunities" for greater transit use. A public safety policy, titled "Minimize coastal hazards," reads in full: "Injuries and loss of life are prevented, and property loss and damage are minimized" — the goal, restated as its own policy.

There are exceptions, and they are instructive. Where the plan quantifies — capping beach special events at 70 summer days after data showed events consuming 93 percent of the summer calendar, or setting numeric noise standards — it has functioned as actual regulation. Where it exhorts, little has moved.

The clearest measure of the gap: the comprehensive zoning code rewrite that *PLAN Hermosa* called for in 2017 is still underway. The city's "In-the-Zone" update is now in its commercial-districts phase, with completion projected for 2026-27 — a decade after the plan it implements was adopted. At last, under the direction of new City Manager Steve Napolitano, some progress is being made on the zoning discussion, but questions remain over the city's ability to adapt to meet the commercial challenges of a vastly different consumer landscape than the one envisaged even ten years ago.

### The coastal promise that never came due

*PLAN Hermosa*'s signature ambition was in its subtitle: an *integrated* General Plan and Coastal Land Use Plan, meant to finally win California Coastal Commission certification of a Local Coastal Program and bring permitting authority over the coastal zone (roughly half the city) home to Hermosa. Indeed a substantial part of *PLAN Hermosa*'s funding came via a Coastal Commission grant.

It never happened. The city's only certified coastal land use plan still dates to 1982, and no implementation plan has been certified in 43 years. In 2021, the city quietly downshifted to a partial amendment covering only the Mobility Element; its own website concedes "a substantial amount of work remains."

This spring, the bill for that unfinished work arrived. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled the city's 2016 ban on short-term rentals in the coastal zone unenforceable because it was enacted without Coastal Commission approval — approval that a certified LCP would have localized. The city declined to appeal. Roughly 200 short-term rental operators are affected, and enforcement in the coastal zone is enjoined.

Any renewed certification effort now faces a further problem: the plan's coastal hazard analysis rests on 2012-era sea level rise science that state guidance has superseded twice, in 2018 and again in 2024\. The chapters written to satisfy the Coastal Commission would need to be redone to current standards before the Commission would act on them. 

Perhaps more importantly, the current direction of Coastal Commission politics is leading many local observers to feel that the price Hermosa may have to pay for an LCP will be simply too much to bear. One former mayor told us "The Coastal Commission today has strayed a million miles from its original purpose. They don't like the fact that Hermosa has existed without an LCP all these years. They will try to punish us for that with a bunch of mandates and conditions wrapped up in their access and equity politics." Recent actions by the Coastal Commission in respect of development applications in the coastal Zone would seem to support that view, with new and onerous conditions now being inserted by the Commission into what would once have been seen as routine rubber stamp exercises.

### Overtaken by Sacramento

*PLAN Hermosa*'s land use framework is built on an assumption that no longer holds: that Hermosa Beach controls its own residential densities. The plan caps density citywide at 33 units per acre, designates five neighborhoods for single-family preservation, and discourages converting commercial land to housing.

Four years after adoption, the state assigned Hermosa a Regional Housing Needs Allocation of 558 units for the 2021-2029 cycle. The city's Housing Element was rejected three times by state housing officials and was out of compliance for roughly two years — a window in which a builder's remedy application on Palm Drive pierced the city's voter-enshrined 30-foot height limit, the exact outcome the plan's preservation policies were meant to foreclose.

The element was finally certified in August 2024, but it rests on a residential overlay on commercial sites — the same structure a state appeals court invalidated in Redondo Beach last October, forcing that city to abandon its overlay in May. City staff have said they are reviewing whether changes are warranted. 

None of this regime — RHNA enforcement, SB 9, builder's remedy, ADU preemption — exists anywhere in *PLAN Hermosa*. The plan's answer to the housing question was, in effect, that there wasn't one.

### The customer changed, too

Sacramento is not the only force that moved. The consumer economy *PLAN Hermosa* was designed around (conceived in community workshops beginning in 2013) has been remade from underneath it, and the changes fall with particular weight on a city whose downtown runs on bars, restaurants and storefront retail.

Start with the storefronts themselves. The plan's land use element reserves ground floors across the city's commercial districts for "sales tax-generating" retail, and one policy flatly discourages converting commercial space to housing. That bet was placed just before the great contraction of American physical retail: store closures have outpaced openings for years, and retail-tracking firm Coresight projected more than 120 million square feet of U.S. retail space would close in 2025 alone — one and a half times what opened. The apparel and general-merchandise categories the plan's background studies identified as "leakage" to recapture are precisely the ones e-commerce has since removed from any small city's reach. A plan that mandates retail frontage in a post-retail economy is not guiding the market; it is arguing with it.

The restaurant economy shifted in a different direction. Uber Eats did not exist as a national service when *PLAN Hermosa*'s visioning began; DoorDash was a Palo Alto startup. Today third-party delivery is a structural share of restaurant revenue, and its effects — commission pressure on thin-margin independents, ghost-kitchen competition, and a constant curbside churn of pickup drivers — reshape both restaurant economics and street management. The plan's mobility element, which found room for autonomous-vehicle drop-off zones in 2017, says nothing about the delivery economy that actually arrived.

Then there is what people order when they sit down. Americans are drinking less — markedly so. Gallup's 2025 survey found the share of U.S. adults who drink at all had fallen to 54 percent, the lowest in nearly nine decades of polling, with the steepest declines among the young adults who fill Pier Plaza on a Saturday night, and a majority of Americans now telling pollsters that even moderate drinking is unhealthy. For a downtown whose identity, sales-tax receipts and late-night noise complaints are all built substantially on alcohol, a generational sobriety shift is not a lifestyle curiosity — it is a revenue and land-use question. It is nowhere in the plan.

The countervailing trend should be Hermosa's opportunity. The rise of personalized health and wellness — boutique fitness, recovery studios, wellness tourism, a global industry now measured in the trillions — maps almost perfectly onto the "active healthy lifestyle" identity the plan celebrates. But *PLAN Hermosa* treats health as urban design (walkability, parks) and exhortation (a policy "encouraging" businesses to offer healthy products), not as an economic development strategy. A city that branded itself on beach volleyball, surfing and the South Bay's Blue Zones project has never positioned that brand against the fastest-growing consumer category of the decade.

The cost side moved as well. When the plan was adopted, California's minimum wage was $10.50\. On January 1 it reached $16.90, and last week the governor announced it will rise again to $17.40 in January 2027 — the nation's highest statewide rate, and a 66 percent increase over the plan's first decade, with fast-food workers already at $20 or more. Layered on post-pandemic rents and insurance, that has rewritten the margins of exactly the small hospitality businesses the plan's economy depends on. Household spending has meanwhile migrated into subscriptions — streaming, delivery memberships, app services — dollars that flow to platforms rather than local merchants and generate no local sales tax. The plan's fiscal architecture assumes a transaction economy that is quietly becoming a subscription economy.

None of these shifts was fully foreseeable in 2013\. That is the point: a general plan built as a fixed 25-year portrait, with no true monitoring regime and no scheduled review, has no mechanism for noticing that its customer has changed. Community Development Director Alison Becker insists that *PLAN Hermosa* is 'a living document', and minor zoning changes are cited as evidence of that. But what if the fundamental assumptions on which the plan is based are now incorrect or disrupted by unforeseen societal and technological shifts? What then?

PLAN Hermosa makes a bold bid in striving to make the city 'a catalyst for innovation'. One prominent local commercial property owner (who asked not to be named) laughed when reminded of that this week. "Under Suja (Lowenthal), Massey and Jackson, City Hall became almost impossible to deal with. Restrictions, delays, uncertainty - yes. Innovation - no."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6e/b0/6eb0c461-60b1-49cd-b904-5f02d7b5a05e/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-06-at-9.13.49---AM.png)

An excerpt from PLAN Hermosa

### The green frame and the fiscal blind spot

*PLAN Hermosa* is often described — by admirers and critics alike — as an environmental document. The framing is real: the update was financed largely by a California Strategic Growth Council sustainability grant, and the plan brands itself a "Blueprint for Sustainability and a Low Carbon Future." Its municipal operations were to be carbon neutral by 2020\. The previous council pushed the city into the Clean Power Alliance, defaulting every resident into the most expensive '100% Green' energy pricing tier at a stroke. Many Hermosa households seem to be unaware of the switch, but a 2025 statewide survey by PPIC reveals a deep underlying consumer issue: 87% of Californians are concerned about rising electricity bills — 54% "very concerned," 33% "somewhat". PLAN Hermosa's infrastructure element calls for utilities that are "reliable, affordable, and renewable" but contains nothing on energy cost burden.

But read closely, the operative commitments are less environmental than preservationist — the verbs that govern the land use element are "preserve," "maintain," "retain" — with sustainability supplying the vocabulary. The plan pledges a low-carbon future for a city where 95 percent of employed residents commute out and transportation generates 54 percent of emissions, while ruling out the density that might change either number.

The plan's environmental center of gravity was not only a function of grant money. No elected official is more closely identified with PLAN Hermosa than former councilmember Justin Massey, an 'environmental attorney' elected in November 2015 — midway through the plan's drafting — and serving as mayor when the council adopted it in August 2017\. His signature is on the document in more ways than one: his own biography for a regional air-quality board seat states that he "led adoption of PLAN Hermosa," and his council tenure reads as an implementation program for its greenest chapters — the 100-kilowatt community solar installation the year the plan passed, more than 35 EV charging stations, a solar-ready fire station, much-mocked costly solar panels on park restrooms and the regional Integrated Planning Award he accepted on the city's behalf from SCAG in 2018.

What can be said from the record is this: the plan's most specific, most dated and most ambitious commitments cluster in the areas Massey championed, and the areas with no champion — municipal finance, retail economics, housing capacity — are where the document is thinnest.

What the plan conspicuously lacks is a fiscal strategy. It acknowledged, in 2017, an infrastructure backlog exceeding $100 million; the figure in current city documents is $160 million in unfunded capital projects. The five-year forecast shows structural deficits growing from $1.3 million to $4.2 million by FY 2030-31\. Measure HB, a 0.75 percent sales tax, failed decisively in November 2024, and will make another attempt at this coming November ballot. County fire and beach-services contracts are being renegotiated at sharply higher cost. "Doing nothing is no longer an option," City Manager Steve Napolitano told the council in May.

On all of it, the city's governing plan is silent. Its fiscal toolkit consists of a decision-screening rubric and an aspiration to "consider innovative funding strategies."

### A plan nobody is updating

Perhaps the most telling fact is what isn't happening: there is no comprehensive update of *PLAN Hermosa* underway, scheduled, or even whispered about. There's no obvious mechanism by which the city even reviews progress or suitability of the plan to meet future realities. The city continues to cite the 2017 document as its operative vision, while conducting its real planning in state-mandated lanes: the housing element, the ADU ordinance, the zoning code. The next forcing event is already visible — the 7th-cycle RHNA process is expected to begin within the next year or two, which will require further amendments whether the city initiates them or not.

The community that produced PLAN Hermosa prosaically answered the question of who Hermosa Beach wants to be. The questions now in front of the city — how to pay for itself, how to comply with a housing regime it didn't choose, how to secure authority over its own coastline — are among many that the plan was never built to answer.