City to Consider Making Downtown Pacific Avenue Mostly Two-Way

Although downtown merchants wanted the Santa Cruz city council to make Pacific Avenue two-way right away Tuesday afternoon, several council members put the brakes on the fast-moving plan and asked for more study and more public hearings.

The business community, spearheaded by Larry Pearson, of the Pacific Cookie Company, and the mono-named Downtown Association director, Chip, asked for the removal of the one-way limitation between Church and Cathcart streets by Dec. 2.

They said that a $75,000 study by retail expert Robert Gibbs, who claimed that business could pick up by as much as 30 percent if the streets were more easily navigable.

Doug Ley, whose Redtree Properties owns the vacant 20,000 square-foot building that formerly housed Borders, called the current streetscape "convoluted" and said clients looking to rent the building were distressed by all of the confusing "Do Not Enter" signs on the one-way streets.

"The sooner we can make this change and make it a more welcoming environment, the better," he said. "We want to get them here, not Los Gatos, which has a two-way street, or Palo Alto or Valley Fair."

Retail broker Jon Stansbury said he was talking to a promising national tenant for the E.C. Rittenhouse building that has been vacant for four years and thought two-way streets would be more appealing.

However, another resident and member of People Power, argued that the Kinko's building on Laurel Street is still vacant despite a two-way street and a substantial parking lot.

At this first public hearing on the issue, held in a 3 p.m. session, other people said they favored closing the street and making it a pedestrian mall, like one in Boulder, Colorado. Some said they liked it the way it is and still others demanded more study and more input from people who could attend a meeting at night, not during a working day.

Mayor Ryan Coonerty stressed that it was only three blocks of one-way street they were talking about. The area north of Locust would stay one-way and the area south of Church Street is already two-way.

However, they estimated that changing the street would be a $20,000 project.

Before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the street was serpentine and laced with cobblestone, wooden planters and benches. It got straightened out and concretified in the rebuilding of downtown. It also lost a lot of benches.

The council asked the city staff to return with more details about costs, about possible economic values, to get a second expert opinion and to schedule nighttime public hearings.