This summer Laguna has felt like one protracted frat house initiation, with a bunch of hooligans and miscreants drinking, puking and defiling our precious campus. On Tuesday night at council, a small group of residents tried to pin the blame squarely on Visit Laguna, our tourist bureau. And sought to defund them. Emotions ran high as residents were at wit’s end over the onslaught of heathens. It’s gotten so bad that some Instagrammers who post valentines to Laguna claim they are getting harassed and bullied by residents. And there are reports that some locals are acting belligerently towards visitors. It’s a sad spectacle, but one thing’s for sure: we could calm all of these frayed nerves if we just opened a cannabis dispensary. And generate significant tax revenue to help defray the costs of those visitors while we’re at it. But I digress.
Let’s go easy on the Visitors Bureau, folks. They’re an easy scapegoat, but only part of the problem. Plus, they’re not spending your money. Its money generated by the hotels from their overnight visitors. And guess what? They just pledged to give half a million a year back to the city. That’s money that could be spent on needed local services like subsidized artist housing.
But clearly, some things need to change. Because while their avowed goal is to target overnight visitors, there’s no denying that their widely viewed social media posts have the unintended consequence of appealing to day trippers as well, as they depict our beaches as being solitary and peaceful. So, a little vigilance towards their marketing strategy and messaging needs to be implemented.
But are they to blame for the alleged 6 million annual visitors to our town? Of course not. We’re all to blame. Who hasn’t posted a beautiful sunset on social media? The world is just too bloated because, 1. we have no predators, 2. procreating is highly enjoyable, and 3. the planet is incinerating everywhere else but here. Where are all those charred inland residents supposed to go? Huntington? They’re too discerning – and we’re too charming – for that. We are bearing the brunt of the weekend exodus from Hades.
So instead of doing the sensible thing and figuring out how to get them out of their cars before they cycle into town, (and educating them on how a civilized society functions with signage, trash cans, and enforcement) the anti-visitor forces want to penalize them – and us – for coming here. Here are some of the dopey ideas offered up in last week’s edition of this paper:
-Place an additional tax of up to 5% on restaurants. Really? Make it harder to survive in a seasonal resort town (with exorbitant rents) than it already is? The writer stated that the restaurants could simply pass the cost on to visitors and not feel a thing. But 75% of their customers are locals, according to every restauranter in town. So we have to eat the price increase? No thanks. Aren’t our restaurants expensive enough already?!
-Increase the bed tax on overnight visitors by another 1%. Jesus, criminy, this is the gift that keeps on giving. Let’s not abuse it. It’s already a whopping 12% on top of the astronomical room rates they pay. These are the good visitors (well, there are fine people on both sides) who patronize our merchants, don’t clog our streets, and behave. Do we want to further repel them by becoming unaffordable and uncompetitive?
-Curtail the purchase of Laguna Canyon Road and Coast Highway, with wild, unsubstantiated claims that it would cost somewhere in the range of half a billion dollars to do so. Fact check: CalTrans will sell it to us for $1, just as they did with Dana Point and Corona del Mar. But let’s assume those are the annual maintenance estimates. First, Caltrans has historically provided money, and there are federal and state grants to help cover costs. And even if it’s expensive, it’s the only way we can take control of our streets and mitigate our traffic crisis. We have to reimagine circulation because our current infrastructure cannot support the volume of cars coming in.
Councilman George Weiss on Tuesday said that “over-tourism is an unsolvable problem.” This is why we vote you into these positions, George! Not to throw up your hands, but to do the heavy lifting and investigate what other cities are successfully doing. Or go back to our many studies like Complete Streets that offered up solutions decades ago. We have an urgent, metastasizing cancer that requires big thinking and brave action. As I’ve said before, we can’t stop the onslaught, but we can improve traffic flow dramatically by slowing them, diverting them, and keeping them from circulating downtown with periphery parking and alternative transport. There’s not a summer more to waste, Laguna!
Billy is the Chief Experience Officer at adventure sports company La Vida Laguna, and Executive Director of KXFM 104.7, Laguna’s Community Radio. He can be reached at billy@lavidalaguna.com.
If London can do it, why can’t we?
“The Congestion Charge is a £15 daily charge if you drive within the Congestion Charge zone 7:00-18:00 Monday-Friday and 12:00-18:00 Sat-Sun and bank holidays.”
You’re right, Billy – Visit Laguna is part of the problem. Apparently a big part. According to one local (no I can’t prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised), one of Visit Laguna’s social media blasts got reposted 1.3M times. In today’s New York Times, Laguna Beach was featured as one of the world’s six best fall travel locations. We don’t need any more promotion just to bring in more tourists and day-trippers. Visit Laguna is doing us more damage than good.
The claim that 75% of all restaurant business comes from locals is preposterous. Let’s see the stats. Of course restauranteurs are going to say that. For a very select few it may be close to true. But for the vast majority? Let’s see the documented credit card records for proof. Because according to previous City studies, 80% of all restaurant and bar revenue comes from out-of-towners. (We’re talking total for all such establishments, not just a few cherry-picked, randomly “surveyed” ones.)
By the way, you didn’t mention that three out of five Councilmembers approved of a 3% city tax on bar and restaurant tabs – a customer-paid tax that would cost proprietors nothing. Only pro-business, pro-tourism Councilmembers Kempf and Rounaghi refused to follow suit in the voting. So residents are still getting stuck and stiffed paying the full $20M per year tab for visitor services – in essence, residents are subsidizing businesses, and businesses and visitors get a free ride.
At a City town hall meeting, Tom Perez indicated the estimated cost to purchase Laguna Canyon Road would be $150M. And that doesn’t include any ongoing maintenance and liability costs. (Imagine the costs for additional staff and equipment!) The number I’ve seen floated to buy Coast Highway is $336M. That’s a lot of cash that can be better spent elsewhere.
Can we totally turn off all day visitors? Hardly. But dialing down tourist/day-tripper promotion is a decided start. And indeed, cranking up the cost for visitors to visit Laguna can be a deterrent, as well as a cash generator for the city – as is being the case in Venice, Barcelona and other worldwide overtouristed destinations.
Consider these options:
Increase parking meter fees; add more paid parking locations to existing spaces (but allow for free local parking and locals-only spaces); put a slim 3% customer-paid tax on food and beverage bills (this alone could generate more than $6M a year); increase ticketing for expired parking meters, parking in illegal zones, speeding, loud vehicles, unleashed dogs, smoking, beach drinking and littering; continue to limit the amount of parking instead of putting in more parking structures which would only induce more visitations; and charge $1 for trolley rides.
We must take steps to help limit the number of visitors – as we’ve seen, locals can’t enjoy their own town and are becoming held prisoners in their homes – unwilling to venture out and brave the glut of downtown traffic, crazy drivers, dearth of parking and teeming crowds.
Ceasing promotions and making visitors pay their own way should help moderate at least some of the overtourism.
Residents shouldn’t have to continue to pay the ticket for everyone else’s free Disneyland-By-The-Sea.
And God only knows, we pay so much to live here, it seems we should at least be able to enjoy the town enough to call it our home.
As a resident of Laguna Beach I have learned and ungenerously accepted that there is nothing that We as Residents can do in the Summer months when the “Day Trippers” surge into our “Disneyland-By-The Sea”. My Wife who moved to Laguna in 1958 tells me that it has not always been this way. At the very least, it was not as dreadful as it has now become.
We live in South Laguna and should You need a “lime” or an “avocado” on a weekend during the “bombardment” it could take an hour to an hour and a half to get to Ralph’s, or Whole Foods in the Village or, an equal amount of time to get to Gelson’s in Dana Point to purchase a $ 5.00 avocado. This is just a reality that We have been forced to tolerate. Yet our City Council “Majority” continues to put forth plans and strategies that will invigorate additional congestion, traffic, and gridlock in our communities. Seeing first hand the line of vehicles attempting to vainly secure a Parking Space in the underground Lot at the Montage is not only a traffic hazard but a community danger as well. I have witnessed full on fisticuffs over one precious parking stall. If You live in one of the neighborhoods above the Montage, the coveted space in the front of Your own home often serves as a Public Toilet as well as a parking place.
We as Residents are becoming disenfranchised in our own home town. It is not a hopeless situation. We the Residents can and should recover our town. Please look at Jerome P’s letter, above, then, please vote to remove the current CC Majority who for some unknown reason wish to go down this path of Parking Structures for the Masses. Let’s take back our little town, it could not happen too soon.
Jerome,
Let’s see your research and methodology that says 80% of restaurant customers are visitors? I’d rather hear from the restaurants themselves.
Also, show us the cost figures you state on acquiring Coast Highway, and how it squares with the zero costs Dana Point and Newport Beach paid?
From the LA Times: “Since the city (of Dana Point) has made a number of improvements to those streets and had to acquire a Caltrans permit to do so, the department offered to give Dana Point jurisdiction over those roads to make future improvements easier.”
And from the Daily Pilot: “Caltrans’ preference is to relinquish [Pacific Coast Highway] from the easterly limit to Newport Boulevard, or the westerly City limit,” Ken Nelson, the agency’s interim director for District 12 — which includes Newport Beach — wrote to city officials.”
Just taxing visitors is like putting a bandaid on a cancer. You have to address the cause and stop them before they get here. And the only way to do that is take control of our streets and implement multi-modal, complete streets methodologies.