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June 9, 2006
Peggy Clifford
Open Letter To the City Council:
Truth be told, I have probably enjoyed my 12 weeks of silence almost as much as you have.
For one thing, screenplays are more fun, though no easier, to write than editorials – especially since I can concoct exquisite punishments for the corrupt City officials who turn up in my scripts.
But I am compelled by my love for this gorgeously idiosyncratic beach town and the accelerating rate of profoundly wrong-headed City moves to break my silence and return to the arena.
A century and a half ago, Thoreau and De Tocqueville each warned against what they saw as democracy’s principal pitfall: “the tyranny of the majority.” Their warnings were ignored, of course, and, as a result, this country and its people have periodically been forced to endure the tyranny of the majority.
Ironically, the much-bruited “people’s republic” of Santa Monica is currently suffering from what can only be seen as the tyranny of a minority, with the will of a handful of people in City Hall regularly prevailing over the wishes of the many residents.
Here and now, the tail is definitely driving the dog.
As ironically, the chief architects of this rising municipal maelstrom are the residents’ elected representatives, the City Council, YOU.
Like nature, government abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum overtook City Hall when, singly and collectively, you (excluding Mayor Pro Tem Bobby Shriver who has only been on the Council for two years), failed to forge a long-range and comprehensive master plan for Santa Monica that would preserve and refine its extraordinary assets – natural and man-made, intang- ible as well as tangible, address its needs in a substantive way, and put the means of achieving it in motion.
In the years that you, as a body, have presided over Santa Monica, you have never even managed to define this singular community.
When you stalled out, City staff filled the vacuum, and City Hall devolved from an agency charged with managing and maintaining Santa Monica on behalf of its residents to a staff-driven operation whose primary purpose seems to be to generate ever-increasing revenue for the City.
That endless pursuit of revenue has put City Hall on a collision course with residents whose principal priorities are the preservation and well-being of this legendary beach town.
It gets worse. Just as an increasing number of City officials seem to see themselves not as public servants, but as executives in a highly lucrative business called the City of Santa Monica, you all seem to see yourselves not as representatives of the people, which is your sole reason for being, but as a board of directors that regularly rubber-stamps staff initiatives and occasionally indulges in manic micro-managing.
The frequent reference to you in recent months as “policy makers” is particularly piquant. With the exception of Mayor Pro Tem Shiver’s policy initiatives on homelessness, I can’t recall any of you actually making any significant policy. You hector and lecture and make occasional suggestions, but staff makes policy and you all simply okay it, even when it conflicts with your constituents’ expressed wishes.
It may be in the best interests of City employees to do those things that will generate more revenue for the City, but it is not in the best interests of the community and its residents. Indeed, our most vexing current problems derive directly from City policies.
Your wholesale abdication of responsibility is as bizarre as it is disturbing. All of you but Shriver have served multiple terms. Why do you remain on the Council, if you are unable or unwilling to faithfully represent Santa Monica residents and do the things that they want done?
And why have you willingly surrendered your authority to City staff anyway? Are you under the misapprehension that the staff knows better than residents what Santa Monica needs? Have you fallen prey to the Stockholm Syndrome, or ODed on City Hall KoolAid? Or are you simply too lazy or too busy to do your homework?
Some recent actions vividly demonstrate the co-optation of the Council by the Council, the corporatization of the City of Santa Monica and the apparent triumph of the minority.
1. You have allowed City planners and consultants to hold the General Plan revision hostage while they seek some means of short-circuiting residents’ stated priorities, because they run counter to City Hall’s desire to continue the bigtime development that has worked like a tsunami on this irreplaceable beach town and caused so many problems.
The General Plan is, as former Planning Director Suzanne Frick said, our Constitution. As it will determine what this community is, what it values, and what it will be in the next two decades, it is of vital importance, and should be your top priority.
Virtually all the problems that now plague us have been caused or exacerbated by the staff-driven building boom. The revision of the land use and circulation elements in the General Plan can and should be an antidote to the boom, but City Hall seems determined to amplify on and extend the boom rather than adopting the major course changes that Santa Monica needs and residents want.
Interim Planning Director Andy Agle recently estimated that the revision would not be completed until 2008, Yet, at the behest of staff, you continue to approve significant policies, such as the new downtown design standards, and major projects, such as the Civic Center Specific Plan, that should follow the revision and be of a piece with it, rather than going forward now, independent of the revision.
It seems likely that other major projects, such as the redevelopment of both Santa Monica Place and the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, which, together with the Civic Center Specific Plan, will drastically alter downtown Santa Monica, will also go forward before the General Plan revision is complete.
This isn’t planning, it’s anti-planning, and it’s guaranteed to sabotage the General Plan revision, rendering it obsolete before it’s approved, and, not incidentally, betraying the residents you’re pledged to serve.
2. By now, everyone, including you, knows that City Hall and its consultants habitually skew their much-vaunted community surveys to get the answers they want. Countless residents have documented and condemned the practice, but you all have remained mute, rather than ordering that the surveys be unskewed or abandoned.
3. Putting things in the wrong places is another form of anti-planning, and another City Hall specialty.
By any measure, Santa Monica has a shortage of parkland, and the shortage is especially acute in our residential neighborhoods. But the City’s newest park is being constructed hard by the Santa Monica Airport runway -- far from any neighborhood, and thus inaccessible to most children, but directly in the path of unhealthy, possibly toxic jet fumes and noise.
You have also okayed an array of costly additions to the downtown Big Blue Bus yard.
The Airport Park should be scrubbed, and the expanded bus yard should be installed on the airport site. As it is on the eastern edge of the City, moving the bus yard there would materially reduce downtown traffic congestion, allow the addition of an efficient park-and-ride operation and resolve the parking and traffic problems associated with Santa Monica College’s Bundy campus. At the same time, it would make the large downtown parcel available for affordable housing and/or parking, as well as a park that would be accessible to everyone.
4. Traffic is a major problem, but you have allowed Staff to continue using outdated and inadequate traffic measuring tools, though you and the staff have been introduced to a more comprehensive, sophisticated, accurate and sharper methodology and asked by residents to allocate funds for it.
In the same inane vein, City Hall bombards residents with cute slogans designed to shame them out of their cars, and its award-winning Big Blue Bus runs all over L.A., but you have failed to add a simple convenient shuttle bus that would run all over Santa Monica.
5. The City is about to spend over $4 million “improving” Second and Fourth Streets. The alleged improvements will include the removal of most of the healthy trees on the two streets -- apparently because City Hall agrees with the merchants on those streets who think their removal will be good for business.
In fact, it’s the overwhelming impact of the Third Street Promenade that’s bad for business on adjacent streets, as well as businesses in other parts of the city. It would make much more sense for the merchants and the business community as a whole to cut the Promenade down to size in order to restore some balance rather than cutting down more healthy trees.
6. You have apparently not questioned the staff decree that 77 eucalyptus trees are “dangerous” and must be removed – without holding a public hearing or seeking a second opinion.
7. Having prematurely approved the misbegot Civic Center Specific Plan, you are now compounding the problem by proceeding with work on the 325-unit “Village” in the Civic Center. Barely half of the units will be “affordable,” it will make an already congested area more congested, and its height and mass will overwhelm what is arguably the most beautifully situated publicly owned open space in the city.
8. You merely stood by while City staff refused to turn over certain public documents requested by the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City. Subsequently, the Coalition sued and won, requiring the City to turn over the documents and pay legal fees of $36,000.
For over two decades, Santa Monica’s population has remained constant at around 85,000, 69 percent of the residents who are employed do not work in Santa Monica, and 70 percent of residents are renters. Though the number, habits and pattern of residents remain virtually unchanged, the town has been radically remade around them, and the city’s daily population now triples to an estimated 250,000 people.
Since this eight-square mile city wasn’t designed for and can’t accommodate 250,000 people on a daily basis, problems have proliferated, and the City’s only response to date has been more growth and development, and bigger problems.
You all have front row seats at the debacle, but, having long since abdicated and apparently having no more interest in listening to residents than you have in representing them, you have become the chief impediment to real progress.
In the mid-1880s, this was paradise unbound --– a vast Spanish land grant, a pristine wilderness on the ocean. Five generations of weather, chance, deals, circumstance, accidents, breaks – good and bad, dreamers, rogues, pioneers, geniuses, idols, beach bums, greathearts and ordinary people made the Santa Monica that residents cherish, and made it unique, invaluable, irreplaceable… paradise found.
An unusual number of iconoclasts of every stripe has always been present and has inevitably added snap, curl, mystery and color to the mix. Among them have been the first surfers on this continent, a platoon of women tennis champions. radical skateboarders, track stars, film makers, moguls and stars, aviation pioneers, old radicals, ‘60s and anti-Vietnam war activists, Cold Warriors, and, always, major artists in all media.
Santa Monica resides on the line where the Los Angeles basin and the Pacific Ocean converge. Ocean haze infiltrates its soil, and it is the moist air, not the flimsy soil that makes Santa Monica gardens so prodigal. Here, in the heart of what writer Hamlin Garland called “the fortunate coast,” bougainvillea riots and palm trees outgrow the ground they are set in.
In short, Santa Monica is quite simply a masterpiece of a place, a legendary beach town, an icon, but, in lockstep with City staff, you all seem determined to make it merely mediocre and profitable.
Messing with masterpieces is a fool’s game, because they can’t be improved, or even changed, they can only be destroyed.
Conclusive proof that City Hall is out of synch with this glory of a place and its residents came a couple of months ago.
When he announced the auction of the first lots in Santa Monica in 1875, Tom Fitch said, “At one o’clock, we will sell at public outcry to the highest bidder, the Pacific Ocean, draped with a western sky of scarlet and gold; we will sell a bay filled with white-winged ships; we will sell a southern horizon rimmed with a choice collection of purple mountains, carved in castles and turrets and domes; we will sell a frostless, bracing, warm, yet languid air, braided in and out with sunshine and odored with the breath of flowers. The purchaser of this job lot of climate and scenery will be presented with a deed of land 50 by 150 feet. The title to the land will be guaranteed by the owner. The title to the ocean and the sunset, the hills and the clouds, the breath of the life-giving ozone and the song of the birds is guaranteed by the beneficent God who bestowed them in all their beauty.”
Late in March, Fitch’s would-be heirs and successors, i.e., visiting spinmen and local boosters, convened Santa Monica’s “First Destination Brand Summit” at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
According to a story in Surf Santa Monica, three “BrandPromises” were proposed by the City’s Convention and Visitors Bureau consultants, BelievableBrands and BrandStrategy: “Santa Monica – The Best Way to Discover L.A;” “Santa Monica – The Essence of the California lifestyle;” and “Smile – You’re in Santa Monica.”
How far we have fallen, and how low, in 131 years – from Fitch’s “the Pacific Ocean, draped with a western sky of scarlet and gold… a frostless, bracing, warm, yet languid air, braided in and out with sunshine and odored with the breath of flowers…” to the spinmen’s “Smile – you’re in Santa Monica.”
It was the proverbial last straw, the final insult, but the Convention & Visitors Bureau and its consultants’ nitwit notions were not rejected, or laughed out of town, but lauded.
Surf Santa Monica quoted Mayor Bob Holbrook as saying that the “BrandPromise” had “the potential for catapulting Santa Monica into the forefront of brand marketing.”
Try as I have, I can’t imagine a more ignominious or grotesque goal for this peerless beach town.
Despite City Hall’s best efforts over the last two decades to break this place to harness, and remake it along more docile and profitable lines, the grand unruly paradise that Fitch caroled in 1875 is still largely intact, visible and quite gorgeous, so, in what can only be seen as a fully perverse move, City officials now propose reducing it to a “product” (their word, not mine) that can be packaged and sold – like cheese, or tee shirts, or, heaven help us, latte.
Apart from the sheer grossness of the proposal, “branding” Santa Monica is approximately as smart as “branding” Porsches “Road Bullets” to increase sales.
Santa Monica does not need marketing, much less witless marketing. Nor does it need grooming, or packaging, or “branding,” or selling. Like all masterpieces, it simply needs intelligent, sensitive management, which it has not had in some time.
Peggy Clifford
June 9, 2006