Tag Archives: Change Slate

It’s the zeitgeist, stupid

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There has always been a dance between local and national politics, a dance that can appear to take place in a maze of funhouse mirrors. That’s how Santa Monica politics in 2024 look to me. The electorate here is much different from that of the nation, but to a great extent I can’t differentiate between what I’m seeing on the local candidate mailers and the political commercials interrupting the baseball playoffs and the analysis that the national commentariat is producing.

Let’s begin with realignment. Nationally realignment of the political parties has been underway since the “Reagan Democrats,” but it accelerated when Donald Trump came down the escalator. In Santa Monica, realignment came abruptly with the 2020 City Council election, picked up steam in 2022, and this year was fully realized.

Realignment in Santa Monica means that the anti-development side, epitomized by Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), is no longer allied with its previous great benefactor, Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR). SMRR enabled candidates supported by SMCLC, such as Kevin McKeown and Sue Himmelrich, to get elected to City Council. But now after realignment, SMCLC has joined with business groups supporting candidates under the “Safer Santa Monica” banner (namely, incumbents Phil Brock and Oscar de la Torre, and newcomers John Putnam and Vivian Roknian) against the SMRR-backed candidates.

As a longtime participant in and observer of Santa Monica politics, the most, may I say, amusing manifestation of this break between SMRR and the anti-development crowd has been the dispute between McKeown, still a SMRR-loyalist, and SMCLC over the question about who is responsible for the housing development that’s coming to Santa Monica after the Change Slate-controlled City Council failed to file a compliant Housing Element. After McKeown wrote a letter to the Lookout blaming Changer Slaters Brock and De la Torre, Diana Gordon responded with one slamming McKeown. Breaking up is hard to do.

Meanwhile SMRR has formed an alliance with traditional liberal/progressive groups (the Santa Monica Democratic Club, Santa Monica Forward, Unite HERE Local 11, and Community for Excellent Public Schools) to support a “United Slate” of Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, Barry Snell, and Natalya Zernitskaya.

Much of the national realignment – the part where working-class whites joined with hedge fund billionaires and military-adventurist neocons – never made sense to me, but there is a logic to the realignment in Santa Monica. Fundamentally, local politics changed when California largely took over planning for housing from cities. The development wars, which defined most of Santa Monica politics for 35 years, are over, or at least no longer have any reason for being (regardless of any residual rhetoric). There is nothing SMCLC can do now to stop housing development in Santa Monica, and they know it.

It is logical that a realignment occurs after fundamental issues change. What is uncanny to me is how Santa Monica’s quintessentially local, fine-grained, often personality-based politics reflect, even through a funhouse mirror, the national zeitgeist. I want to be clear that I am not saying that anyone running for City Council this year is a Trump supporter; so far as I can tell, all the candidates are Democrats who stress their Democratic credentials and support Kamala Harris. But consider these parallels when it comes to the rhetoric, if not the issues, of this election.

Crime and crisis. From the very name of the slate Brock and De la Torre put together after their former Change Slate running mate Christine Parra decided not to run for reelection, the “Safer Santa Monica” slate, you know that they are simultaneously feeding on and stoking the public’s fear of crime and disorder. In Santa Monica this includes feeding frustration about homelessness and stoking anxiety that Santa Monica is a failed city — much as Donald Trump describes every city north of Richmond or west of Ft. Worth.

(Side note: since the Change Slate has more or less had majority control of the City Council since McKeown quit the council in 2021, to be replaced by Change Slate-adjacent Lana Negrete, Brock and De la Torre might have thought that continuing with “Change Slate” would have caused confusion. Better to play the crime card and blame someone else. “Safer Santa Monica” indeed. Meanwhile, you can’t live in today’s zeitgeist without someone invoking “take back the city” rhetoric.)

Yes, there is crime in Santa Monica. There always has been crime – Santa Monica has every characteristic, good and bad, of American cities. Crime is significantly less frequent now than it was in 2019, but has steadily (but slightly) increased since the pandemic. Coincidentally that increase occurred during the years the Change Slate has been in control, but I am not blaming them. Honestly, the City Council has little to do with how much crime there is Santa Monica. Fortunately crime is rare enough here that when there is a violent act, it is still newsworthy, which of course is what sticks in one’s mind. Think of how Trump reduces the complex issue of immigration to isolated cases of violence perpetrated by immigrants.

But is Santa Monica a hellscape like the Safer Santa Monica candidates and their supporters would have us believe? I don’t think so.

Folks enjoying themselves on the Promenade on a recent night.

In at least one important respect Santa Monica is safer now. It wasn’t that long ago – I wonder if Oscar de la Torre ever reflects on this – that there were gang shootings here every year. In those days De la Torre believed in using social services, as opposed to heavy-handed policing, to end gang violence. He and the police union were foes. I remember that time well: I almost didn’t receive the union’s endorsement when I ran for City Council in 2014 because of a column I’d written in support of De la Torre when the police were investigating him in 2010. Now – talk about realignment – the police union has endorsed De la Torre and he is running on a law and order platform.

Homelessness is the shame of California, of our “civilization.” However, is it worse in Santa Monica because Santa Monica has been a leader in creating programs and, to some extent, in building supportive housing, to address homelessness? Absolutely not. Do the Safer Santa Monica people ever cross the border into Los Angeles? Where encampments are all over the place? We don’t have them in Santa Monica. Why? Because as I understand it, the Grants Pass Ninth Circuit case did not affect us, because we could offer shelter to unhoused people who would try to camp on our streets.

Does tougher policing reduce homelessness? The police in Santa Monica arrested twice as many unhoused people in 2023 (1840) as they did in 2021 (981); have you noticed any impact? Both crime and homelessness are societal problems that can only be solved with social change. Reactionary sloganeering will not generate beneficial change.

Young people on a recent night enjoying life on Main Street

As for the economy, sure, there are empty storefronts on the Promenade. Much of Santa Monica’s economy is based on hospitality and retail, sectors that the pandemic hit hard. Retail here and around the country is reeling from the disruption of e-commerce.

However, today Santa Monica is a magnet for hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. Look at all the cranes around town, with more on the way. Large apartment buildings, now permitted under state law, are planned or under construction. Google is bringing one of its first brick and mortar stores, and the first in the L.A. area, to the Promenade.

One of the first Google stores in the world coming to the corner of Broadway and the Promenade.

One of our major Ocean Avenue hotels has been undergoing a huge upgrade, and another, the Miramar, received its final approval for its complete upgrade Monday night at the Landmarks Commission.

Workers putting finishing touches on the renovations at what will now be the Regent Hotel on Ocean Avenue.

Failed cities don’t attract investments like these.

And Cirque du Soleil is coming back to the beach.

Governmental competency. Switching over to an argument from the other side, the “United Slate” candidates charge that Brock and De la Torre, and their “Change Slate” colleague from 2020, Christine Parra, are not serious when it comes to governing; that they come to council meetings unprepared, not having read the staff reports, and waste everyone’s time in meetings that go on to the wee hours. Unfortunately, this is true. City Council meetings have become a mess. Instead of legislating, the Change Slate councilmembers like to grandstand, bringing to the vote hot button issues that the council has no power to act on, like distribution of clean needles. The obvious parallel is to the current Republican-controlled (meaning “controlled-chaos”) and unproductive House of Representatives.

The ”Deep State”/the “Establishment.” The MAGA universe uses the “Deep State” the same way it attacks journalism as “fake news.” There is a parallel in Santa Monica when the Change Slate candidates, now running under Safer Santa Monica, and their supporters like SMCLC refer to the United Slate candidates as the “Establishment.” This is consistent with decades of attacks on city staff from the anti-development side of Santa Monica politics. Experts are to be distrusted; only the wisdom of an imaginary consensus of “residents” counts (even if real residents consistently vote contrary to how the imaginary residents are supposed to vote).

I get it that since SMRR-endorsed candidates have usually had a majority on City Council for the past 45 years, and since during that time these majorities have molded City government to reflect a set of (liberal) values, that it is tempting to call SMRR and anyone it supports, or even other groups representing local institutions, like the School District, as the establishment. Sure, go ahead.

But using “establishment” as a political pejorative in 2024 in Santa Monica misses the point; doing so ignores who the candidates are. The candidates running this year with the endorsement of SMRR – Hall, Raskin, Snell and Zernitskaya – are insurgents within SMRR. They don’t consider themselves part of any establishment.

Other than Snell, who has served as an elected School Board and College official for years, the three other candidates are all a generation (or two?) younger than the leadership of SMRR. The four candidates could only get the SMRR endorsement after the collapse of the SMRR alliance with SMCLC and other anti-housing types, which effectively controlled the City Council for most years since the early 1990s. (The collapse was complete two years ago, when SMRR endorsed Jesse Zwick, Caroline Torosis, and Raskin.)

As younger Santa Monicans, the 2022 SMRR candidates and the candidates this year are running “post-development wars.” They take the need for more housing as a given, since they and their generational cohort need more housing options. They are in sync with the national zeitgeist on that, too: Kamala Harris has made building three million homes a major plank in her platform. These candidates represent a new generation of liberals, with high ideals about making Santa Monica work better for everyone.

I guess you know for whom I am voting: Hall, Raskin, Snell and Zernitskaya.

However, let me conclude on a less confrontational note. Sure, there is overheated rhetoric in this election – again, matching the national zeitgeist. But as Kamala Harris might say if she lived in Santa Monica rather than in Brentwood, we Santa Monicans have more in common with each other than we have differences. Santa Monica voters are going to vote overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. There is a lot of “narcissism of small differences” going around. As someone who has been involved for more than a decade in turning Santa Monica Airport into a great park, it is good to know that all the candidates running in the two slates support closing the airport and building the park. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to complete the current survey on the future of the airport land. It’s accessible here, and needs to be completed by Sunday the 20th. Be advised that the survey is a little complicated, but give yourself 15 or 20 minutes and you will be able to get through it.

Thanks for reading.







































































Time to settle this thing?

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About a year ago, after seven years of litigation, the California Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in the case the Pico Neighborhood Association and Maria Loya brought under the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) to challenge Santa Monica’s at-large voting for City Council. This was the first time the state’s highest court had ruled on the CVRA, and the decision clarified the meaning of certain significant undefined terms in the law.

I discussed the case and the court’s decision in detail in three blogs last summer. (Here and here and here.) To summarize, the court made it more difficult for a plaintiff to prove discrimination (i) when it held that plaintiffs must show that a current situation was discriminatory not in the abstract, but in comparison to alternatives, and (ii) because the court was skeptical about the use of new or revised voting districts to remedy discrimination where the population of the protected class is dispersed. The court, however, expanded the potential remedies available to plaintiffs to include remedies not as extreme as districts, so as to give plaintiffs reasonable alternatives against which to judge an existing system.

The court sent the case back, not to be retried, but to the California Court of Appeal for more action. That is where I thought the case would be adjudicated, and hopefully quickly, but the Court of Appeal sent the case back to a trial judge for more fact-gathering. The case’s original judge has since retired, and recently the new judge, Daniel M. Crowley, presided over his first hearing in the litigation.

According to press reports, Judge Crowley urged the parties to settle, predicting that if they don’t, the case will continue for another five to seven years. A sticking point in reaching a settlement is that if the City is found to have been in violation of the CVRA, the City will be obligated to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs, which according to papers filed in the case already totaled more than $20 million years ago. The City has not disclosed how many millions of dollars it has spent fighting the case, but the legal costs for both sides increase with every motion, every brief, and every hearing.

Given that I believe, as I have discussed in my blogs, that the plaintiffs cannot prove a crucial element in their case, namely that Santa Monica suffers from “racially polarized voting,” and that breaking Santa Monica into districts will not increase Latino voting and political power in Santa Monica), I have always supported the City’s defending the at-large system in court.

My views in favor of the City’s position have been reinforced by the fact that the plaintiffs have demanded, and apparently continue to demand, that the remedy must be to break Santa Monica up into voting districts. Plaintiffs stick to this position even though the California Supreme Court ruled that districts would not be an appropriate remedy in Santa Monica. Districts would not increase Latino voting power, but would mean that every voter here would lose the right to vote for all seven councilmembers over two years. Instead, voters would only get to vote for one councilmember every four years.

Nevertheless, it could be time to reach a settlement. The court decision opened up possibilities for settlement, provided that both sides would be willing to give something up. The court ruled that alternative remedies can be considered in CVRA cases where districts are not an appropriate remedy. These include ranked choice voting (RCV).

What makes sense is for the City to investigate how RCV would work in conjunction with citywide at-large elections. I want to give a shout-out to former mayor Michael Feinstein, a longtime proponent of RCV, for alerting me to an RCV variant called “Proportional Ranked Choice Voting” that has been used in at-large elections, including in voting rights cases. A public process to analyze how RCV would work would allow the public, including the plaintiffs or their supporters, to be informed and to weigh-in. The analysis would necessarily include what would be required legally to institute RCV: for instance would the change require a charter amendment, or could a judge order it? If RCV is workable and popular, then the City, for purposes of settlement and without admitting liability under the CVRA, could include it in a settlement proposal.

Such a settlement would require that the plaintiffs drop their demand for districts, but I hope that they would, given the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The parties would still need to work out a financial settlement over the legal fees. As a taxpayer in Santa Monica, what I would propose is that the City estimate what it would spend on its attorneys over another five to seven years of litigation and offer that amount as a settlement. If I were the plaintiffs’ attorneys, and considering the obstacles they face in the case after the California Supreme Court’s ruling, I would accept it.

Of course, a settlement and what it contains will depend on who is on City Council. The politics of the CVRA case have always been intriguing, particularly after Oscar de la Torre, husband of plaintiff Maria Loya, was elected to the council in 2020 as part of the Change Slate. De la Torre, of course, has always wanted the City to throw in the towel and agree to districts.

One recent news item that caught my eye was that, according to an article in the Lookout, at a Sept. 8 candidate forum all four Change Slate candidates (incumbents De la Torre and Phil Brock, and newcomers Vivian Roknian and John Putnam) indicated that they support changing from at-large elections to district elections. Wow; frankly, given the Supreme Court’s decision on districts, this would be a classic example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Voters have a lot of reasons for the choices they make when they vote; everyone has their issues and it’s probably usually a mistake to be a single-issue voter. But for me it will be hard to vote for anyone who wants to take away my right to vote for all seven councilmembers, which is what I have under at-large voting, given than my right to do so is not discriminatory. If district elections come to Santa Monica, my right and your right to vote for City Council will be reduced to one vote every four years.

Thanks for reading.