Manhattan Beach City Council considers charging for outdoor dining decks
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by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council spent much of the last 14 months grappling with how to handle the pandemic locally. Now, as the pandemic wanes but its impacts linger, the Council is faced with a new set of challenges.
On Tuesday night, at its first meeting conducted in-person since March of last year, the Council considered charging local restaurants $4 per square foot for public right of way “parkettes,” used for the construction of outdoor dining decks during the pandemic.
The concern that compelled the discussion wasn’t just financial, although a staff report indicated that the City is losing $734,597 annually due to the 78 parking spaces taken from public use by the dining decks a figure that includes parking fees, citations, and ongoing maintenance expenses.
by Mark McDermott Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard was in Manhattan Beach last Tuesday, visiting Bruce’s Beach, the property owned by his family nearly a…
by Mark McDermott
The return of Bruce’s Beach to the Bruce family came one step closer to fruition Tuesday when Senate Bill 796, introduced by Senator Steven Bradford and intended to resolve deed restrictions, quickly passed out of the Senate’s Water and Natural Resources Committee with unanimous bipartisan support.
Bradford, a Democrat from Gardena, is a member of the state’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The Task Force was created last year in wake of Black Lives Matter protests and intended to develop proposals by 2023. But Bradford said that Bruce’s Beach is exactly what the Task Force, the first of its kind in the nation, was intended to address.
Manhattan Beach City Council rejects apology regarding Bruce’s Beach
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by Mark McDermott
Nearly three hours of public testimony had already occurred at Tuesday night’s Manhattan Beach City Council meeting before councilmembers took up the question of whether or not to issue an apology to the Bruce family and other Black families displaced by the City from their beachfront homes a century ago.
Several more hours of testimony had been taken at the March 23 council meeting. For months, the issue had embroiled the community and captured national attention. In-depth stories on Bruce’s Beach were published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times regarding the council’s attempts to address the racially-motivated misdeed that the city perpetrated in 1924, when the city utilized the eminent domain to wrest away land from the burgeoning Black community at Bruce’s Beach resort. An anonymous group called Concerned Residents of MB had run full-page advertisements a