"It's as if we are getting eight parks in one," Neil Carrey, president of the Santa Monica Airport2Park Foundation, said back in February when the city unveiled its draft framework for the airport site's future. Seven months later, at a Founder's Meeting on a Monday morning, a group called SMFC stood up in front of Mayor Caroline Torosis and pitched something that looks nothing like eight parks. It looks like a 20,000-seat stadium with lights, turf, and parking, built on the same runway the city had spent two years mapping into quiet nature trails and soccer fields.
Nobody voted on anything that morning. But if you live near the Santa Monica Airport, the pitch is worth understanding, because it exposes a gap between what most residents think has been decided about this land and what has actually been locked in.
What the Eight Districts Were Supposed to Settle
The city's Framework Diagram, released in February after nearly two years of outreach, divided the roughly 192-acre site into eight districts, each with its own character. Immersive Nature anchors the west side as a calm ecological landscape built around native habitat and biodiversity. Active Sports takes the east side as a structured athletic destination. Arts & Culture organizes around food and performance. Urban Edge extends the park into the surrounding neighborhood through adaptive reuse of the site's existing buildings. The Stroll serves as a green entrance from the Clover Park side. The Lawn works as a flexible central gathering space, described in city materials as the park's living room. The Meadow and The Heart round out the eight.
City planners described a "calmer neighborhood character" emerging on the west side of the site and a "more active, regional character" on the east, a split that shaped where quieter uses landed versus where louder, higher-traffic ones did. That distinction matters if a stadium is ever seriously on the table, because a 20,000-person venue is not a neighborhood-scale amenity. It is regional infrastructure, and the framework never contemplated one.
The One Date Nobody Can Move
Here is what the stadium pitch cannot change. Under the city's 2017 consent decree with the FAA, Santa Monica has to keep operating the airport through December 31, 2028. That closure date is fixed by federal agreement, not by city preference or community sentiment. Whatever ends up on the land, it does not start until 2029 at the earliest.
What is not fixed is everything that happens after. Measure LC, the ballot measure voters approved in 2014 with more than 60 percent support, restricts new development on the land to parks, open space, and recreational facilities unless voters authorize something else through a future ballot measure. That is the mechanism residents have been told protects the park outcome. It is also the mechanism a stadium proposal would eventually have to get around.
Why a Pitch Isn't a Plan, But Still Isn't Nothing
The city's own planning documents from earlier this year included language stating that no uses requiring a new vote are being considered as part of the current framework process, a restriction that follows directly from the City Council's direction on July 8, 2025, to move forward with a Measure LC-compliant, park-only plan. That direction is why the eight-district framework reads the way it does. It is also why a stadium, as currently proposed, sits outside the process entirely rather than as a competing option within it.
The Airport2Park Foundation and the Santa Monica Great Park Coalition, a group founded in late 2024 that now counts more than 75 member organizations and over 25,000 represented participants, have built their case around that framework. John Fairweather, the coalition's president, has pointed out that the funding this project has already attracted, including a $499,149 planning grant from the Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District in March and a $10 million Proposition 4 Climate Bond grant secured in June with help from state Senator Ben Allen, only expands from here. Fairweather has noted that future construction grants for projects like this one typically run from $1 million to $4 million each, meaning the current money is a down payment, not the full budget.
None of that funding is contingent on a stadium. It was awarded against the park framework that already exists.
What Happened in the Room
The account of the Founder's Meeting that circulated afterward describes a room that split the moment the SMFC pitch landed. Some people leaned in. Others crossed their arms. The pitch promised revenue, regional attention, and a use for the land more ambitious than open lawns. Park backers in the room countered that a venue at that scale would swallow the open space residents were told they were getting and add traffic to streets already stretched thin.
Torosis did not endorse the idea from the podium. She also did not shut it down. In a city where planning meetings are often more consequential for who shows up than for what gets formally decided, that kind of silence tends to get read as an opening rather than a dismissal. A pitch delivered in front of the mayor rarely stays just a pitch, even when nothing was signed and nothing was voted on.
What to Actually Watch This Fall
For anyone living near Airport Ave, Bergamot Station, or the streets that back up against Clover Park, the useful move right now isn't picking a side in the park-versus-stadium argument. It's tracking where the process actually sits. The framework diagram is not a final master plan. City project materials describe Phase 4 as the stage where the Framework Diagram becomes a fuller Framework Plan, with phasing, implementation, and rough cost estimates layered in. That phase was expected to run through the second half of 2026, which puts it happening right now.
The neighborhood councils most directly adjacent to the site, Mar Vista and Venice, have had the framework on their agendas this year, and city surveys tied to the process have drawn more than 12,100 responses so far. If the stadium idea is going to resurface as a formal proposal rather than a Founder's Meeting pitch, it will most likely show up first in one of those public meetings or in a future council agenda, not in a press release.
The land itself isn't going anywhere new for at least two more years. What's actually in motion is the argument over what fills it, and that argument just picked up a much louder voice than it had in February.
If you're trying to make sense of what the airport site's next chapter means for a specific block or property near it, The Alligood Group is happy to walk through what we're tracking.
