Business improvement districts, which for decades have helped spruce up business centers in downtown and other portions of Los Angeles, have finally come to the city’s coastline.

The Los Angeles City Council last week green-lighted the formation of a business improvement district along the famous Venice Boardwalk – the first for the beachside community. The vote came after decades of failed attempts and despite vociferous objections from some residents.

The approval comes in the wake of the January launch of the first business improvement district in Pacific Palisades, straddling Sunset Boulevard. In both cases, merchants and property owners have long complained that the business centers have suffered from a lack of city services.

In Venice, city services have been stretched thin by an exploding homeless population. Business owners, their customers, and tourists have all faced highly publicized attacks in recent years. What’s more, tensions have been rising between merchants and property owners on one side and the homeless, their advocates, and longtime residents on the other.

New BID push

The escalating problems prompted a group of property owners to propose a business improvement district, or BID. After months of behind-the-scenes talks, they agreed to include the Oceanfront Walk and buildings along Main Street in the district – 468 parcels stretching from the Santa Monica border south to Venice Boulevard. The BID would take in some Silicon Beach tech businesses, including several properties leased by Snapchat Inc. and the famed Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars building now home to Google Inc.

“We need additional security and we need cleanup crews,” Mark Sokol, co-owner and partner of the Erwin Hotel, just yards from the boardwalk, told the City Council’s economic development committee last week. “We need to supplement the insufficient resources we get from the city.”

The BID passed its first hurdle earlier this year, winning preliminary approval from property owners. Now that the council has given its initial approval, another property owner election will be held, where each property owner’s vote is weighted according to square footage. If property owners representing a majority of the fee assessments cast “yes” votes, the ordinance would come back to the council for a final hearing and vote later this year.

For a 2,700-square foot-commercial building along Oceanfront Walk, the fees would total roughly $5,000 a year; further inland, the fees for that size building would total about $3,000.

According to a report filed with the City Clerk’s Office, the BID would have a budget of $1.8 million, among the top 10 in the city. As with most districts, the focus would be on hiring security patrols and cleanup crews. There would also be a marketing component.

A BID in Venice has been a long time coming. Over the last two decades, various attempts have sputtered, largely because not enough property owners or merchants could agree to tax themselves.

Indeed, in two other commercial corridors – Abbot Kinney and Washington boulevards – business and property owners decided to form BID-like organizations, but without assessments. Instead, they arranged for other revenue sources. The Abbot Kinney Merchants Association struck a deal with Film L.A., which issues film production permits, to impose an extra fee on movie shoots along the boulevard; that fee, along with revenue from a monthly food truck festival, raises about $40,000 a year for sidewalk cleaning and limited security services.

“We don’t have quite the scale of homeless problems that the beach has, so this works out just fine for us,” said association Chairman Don Novack, co-owner of Hal’s Bar & Grill and restaurant Casa Linda.

Yet while the oceanfront BID does seem to be gaining traction, it faces stiff opposition from another quarter: longtime residents concerned about the gentrification of the neighborhood.

“This is Venice, where everything is controversial,” Councilman Mike Bonin, whose district encompasses the proposed BID zone, told his fellow council members on the economic development committee.

Several residents did speak out against the BID effort at the committee hearing. Their complaints centered around the lack of opportunity for public input and on what they termed the greed of commercial and multifamily property owners.

“Who is going to pay for this?” asked longtime resident Ira Koslow. “Rents will be raised and we will lose more affordable housing.”

Debbie Dyner Harris, Bonin’s district director, said the city was trying to balance the competing interests.

“We want to make Venice the best it can be and still retain its quirky nature,” she said.