In December 2021 Laguna residents were invited to read the California Coastal Commission (CCC) review of the latest Laguna Beach Downtown Specific Plan (DSP). The commission review consists of 325 pages of edits, redactions and recommendations to modify the original 179-page DSP. The CCC redacted some topics dear to Laguna residents and city planners, other topics were modified or added to the DSP.
Since these lengthy planning documents are unlikely to be read by LB residents and fewer still will comprehend how the planning changes would affect them, it would be helpful to reduce their content to basic topics readers could grasp at a glance. The charts below are an attempt to do this. In this way a quick view of the chart gives the reader a grasp of the topic and the trend shown by the graph.
Topics of interest dear to Laguna residents are associated with abbreviated keywords, for a topic of Affordable Housing the keywords may be "InDeed" or "shared parking" or "single-family". The keywords for Mobility would include "employee incentives" or "parking structure" or "remote parking" and so on.
In this way each DSP topic is described by a short library of distinguishing keywords. The topics covered best contain more descriptive keywords, those covered least contain fewer keywords. For example "aesthetics, attractiveness, art community, preservation" are keywords for topic Goals in the DSP.
The charts show keywords mined for a given topic, like Affordable Housing. Notice how seldom the keywords appear in the original DSP.
The Laguna Beach DSP document was organized into Goals, Issues, and Implementation Measures. The next charts show charts for DSP Goals and the Implementation Measures proposed to achieve those Goals. Notice the measures proposed often do not address the goals. For example, the most frequently mined Implementation Measures of "new development", "affordable housing" and "funding" do not address the popular Goals of "enhance", "activities" and "preserve".
It is disappointing to learn the Laguna Beach Planning Commission inserted a single occurrence of "Complete Streets" to support the DSP Mobility topic supported by LB residents, then the Coastal Commission redacted it and other references about mobility.
This chart shows the recommendations for a resilient prosperous town by Strong Towns dot org are largely ignored, the frequency of relevant keywords are low.
These results from the Laguna Beach DSP planning document are disappointing, the actions taken by the California Coastal Commission are further limiting and prevent Laguna Beach from planning implementation measures to achieve future goals. Hopefully these charts give more LB residents a better understanding of the planning documents defining Laguna's future urban plan. Time for a do-over, let's improve our planning deliverable documents.
-LS