Hansen: The artistic designer turned city planner

With his horn-rimmed glasses and East Coast sensibility, Roger McErlane looks like an art professor who could hold his own in a Brooklyn bar fight.

But the Harvard educated, 74-year-old landscape architect hasn’t been in any brawls lately, except maybe verbal disputes over design standards and view ordinances. For the last three years, he’s been serving on the Laguna Beach Design Review Board.

Now, however, he’s been promoted to planning commissioner and will take his seat July 1, joining another newcomer, Susan Whitin.

It wasn’t a slam dunk for McErlane, who has been a Laguna resident off and on since 1967. He was happy with the review board, and he wasn’t sure about the hassles that can go along with city planning issues.

“I knew it’s a very political process, and I didn’t want to jump into that,” he said. “Then Kelly Boyd asked me to submit my application, and I realized that there’s a lot of stuff going on that I’m very interested in.”

A former senior vice president of community planning with the Irvine Co., McErlane knows that it takes persistence and compromise to see projects through. But the private-sector, master-planned Irvine projects are a different challenge from the often messy public process.

“At the Irvine Company, we spent a lot of time educating both the neighborhoods around the projects that we were working on and also the city staff, down to members of the planning commission, making sure they had all the information and were part of the process as it evolved,” he said.

“My sense is that if people are part of something as it evolves, they kind of feel like they’re authors also. But if they’re not, if they just get something presented or shoved down their throats, that’s a different issue.”

While diplomatic and attentive to details, McErlane also brings a straightforward point of view that he’s not afraid of expressing. He often contributes essays in local media, for instance, commenting on design issues and pointing out projects that work well — or don’t.

One recent critique involved the Moro Campground addition to Crystal Cove State Park. While praising the 6,000 acres of open space, he minced no words in describing the design of the campground.

“What in the world are these terrible-looking buildings doing in a beautiful coastal setting?” he wrote. “I started at the Moro Campground visitor’s center, which could have easily been confused with a Caltrans maintenance facility.”

When I complimented McErlane on his forthright observations, he wondered aloud whether they would be his last — at least in print.

“I think I’m going to have to stop my writing sound-offs,” he said.

But it is this type of blunt, constructive criticism that should be welcomed in a progressive city with its own set of challenges.

For example, McErlane believes in the power of design to shape public spaces and enhance the quality of life. Too often, planners ignore the impacts of design standards during the early stages of projects, he said.

“I have a bias that is more physical design — what’s built and what it looks like and how it creates a sense of place,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in the quality of a place and what makes it that quality.”

McErlane, who has traveled extensively and lived for 10 years in Marin County, has seen what good design can do for a city.

“There are some wonderful things that make it work,” he said. “You know, quality of streetscape, quality of street trees, size of the street trees, a pedestrian walkway that has a sense of scale to it because of the trees and the sizes. These are not new things. These are old, traditional solutions to a beautiful boulevard or a beautiful residential street.”

He gave one simple example. Many years ago when Laguna was deciding how to create the median in Laguna Canyon Road, the officials at the time made the mistake of keeping its height at 8 inches instead of 10 inches, he said.

By limiting the median to 8 inches, only small trees, which don’t have the visual impact, could be planted there. At 10 inches, the city could have planted whatever it wanted.

“Those kinds of questions weren’t asked, so we’ve been living with a condition that’s unfortunate,” he said. “We could have had 60-foot sycamores or pine trees there that were planted way back then. Those are the kinds of things that I’m interested in: how to get the best design, a sense of place and the best quality.”

Whether it’s working on Laguna Canyon, downtown revitalization or environmental protection, McErlane says he’s ready to contribute.

“I’m wandering into new territory. I haven’t been a county planner or municipal planner, so the whole issue of private enterprise versus public is going to be interesting,” he said.

Regardless of whether a project is private or public, no one can deny that good design is a good thing.

And if you add to that a fresh perspective, straight talk and creative ideas that challenge assumptions, those are the ingredients for good city planning.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at [email protected].