Imagine driving home to Manhattan Beach in your electric car and plugging it into a solar-powered outlet — heck, imagine driving home to Manhattan Beach in anything and finding a parking spot.
Clean, renewable energy and a place to park are just two of the far-reaching proposals Manhattan Beach Community Group (MBCG) President Ira Zalcman hopes to realize in the coming year.
“We need a renewable, clean source of energy,” Zalcman told neighbors gathered at P.S. 195 on Irwin Street last week. “Thirty-three percent of Manhattan Beach could get its energy from solar power as early as next year.”
In an alternative energy plan even more ambitious in relative scope to even the one President-Elect Barack Obama is proposing for the nation as a whole — the MBCG president persisting in his dream of transforming the mostly derelict Manhattan Beach Bathhouse into a solar power station.
To help motorists — whether electric-powered or not — Zalcman is also suggesting that it might be time to bring residential parking permits to Manhattan Beach.
According to Zalcman, the current traffic situation for residents has become “impossible” with the bulk of complaints about blocked driveways and the like coming from residents living between Pembroke and Irwin streets.
To remedy the situation, Zalcman envisions issuing Monday through Friday parking permits exclusively to residents.
The MBCG president also wants to expand Bay Academy — formerly the James J. Reynolds school on Emmons Avenue — to accommodate neighborhood students.
“Kids have a right to go to school in their own neighborhood,” Zalcman said. “There is no reason why Reynolds can’t go from 6 to 12. Children have a right to stay in their community.”
In addition, Zalcman also renewed the MBCG’s opposition to revising current zoning regulations citing a 58-0 vote in 2005 to keep things as they are.
“Nothing has changed,” he said. “We will not be intimidated or harassed into doing anything we don’t want to do.”
In his own comments to the MBCG, Congressman Anthony Weiner talked about “opening the map” and making smart decisions about land use.
“Do we want places that used to be green turn concrete,” he said.
Lest the DOT think that after winning approval for a new traffic light at Irwin Street and Oriental Boulevard, the city won’t be hearing from Manhattan Beach in 2009, Zalcman said the MBCG will continue its efforts to “normalize” the flashing traffic signal on Ocean Avenue, relocate the planters along Oriental Boulevard and remove the zebra stripes.
