Tag Archives: SMCLC

Election analysis: LV lost big, bigger than you think

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I haven’t written here for a while. It’s easy for a little hiatus to become a long vacation, especially over the holidays, and especially, if you write a column about local news, when national news is all consuming. Yet given a national election where the electorate divided along the spectrum from urban to rural, has it ever been more evident that “all politics is local?”

Here in Santa Monica the November results are still resonating. The sensitivities of the losers of the election over Measure LV are raw, as evidenced by Tricia Crane, one of the authors of LV. Last week Crane, who is active in both Residocracy and Northeast Neighbors, criticized City Manager Rick Cole for identifying in an email “longtime vocal critics of city government, particularly on the controversial issue of development” as “longtime vocal critics of city government, particularly on the controversial issue of development.”

As reported in the Lookout News, Crane objected to Cole’s characterization of longtime vocal critics as longtime vocal critics because, “As one who believes that democracy depends upon the free exchange of information and ideas, I find the label ‘longtime vocal critics’ to be troubling.” This coming from someone who personally and through her organization has never found it troubling to call anyone who supports building anything in Santa Monica to be, if a politician, corrupt and, if not a politician, a tool of developers.

But wait, there’s more. Crane then told the Lookout that, “Measure LV was supported by 45 percent of Santa Monica voters.” This, as anyone who has studied the election results knows, is false. While LV received the votes of 45% of those voters who voted on the measure, a trouncing in and of itself, about 17% of Santa Monica voters did not vote on LV. As a result, far fewer than 45% of Santa Monica voters supported LV.

The numbers? The total number of ballots cast in Santa Monica in November was 51,662. The number of Yes votes for LV was 19,786. Divide the latter by the former and you get 38.3%. Yes, I know, only the votes cast for or against a measure count when it comes to victory or defeat, but consider the rhetoric that we’ve heard from the anti-development crowd over the years, about how they are the residents, and about how unhappy the residents are. Given that that’s been their mantra, and that’s why they put LV on the ballot, isn’t it their burden to show that that is true? (If you want to review the numbers yourself, click here to access a PDF of all the Santa Monica November results.)

To repeat: only 38.3% of Santa Monica voters supported LV. (By the way, the figures for RIFT in 2008 were about the same.)

About now LV supporters will tell you LV lost because of the money developers spent against it, but go ask the aviation industry whether money wins elections in Santa Monica.

Getting back to the results, there were only two precincts in the city where LV won, but even in those precincts (which are on the eastern edge of the city between Wilshire and Montana) the Yes vote was less than 50% of the total number of ballots cast.

What about self-appointed neighborhood associations that supported LV? They didn’t reflect their residents. Two of the most anti-LV neighborhoods were North of Montana, the home of historically anti-development NOMA and the base for the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), and the neighborhood between Wilshire and Montana west of 20th Street, the home of the WilMont Neighborhood Coalition. LV lost also in Sunset Park.

But the LV numbers tell only half the story. Any measure will get a certain number of votes just for being on the ballot, particularly one that promises to solve traffic congestion. Thirty-eight percent of Santa Monica voters voted for LV, but how many are truly up in arms about development?

We received an answer to that question in November, courtesy of Residocracy’s founder, spec-mansion developer Armen Melkonians. Melkonians ran for City Council on a hard anti-development platform. In past elections most serious candidates running on an anti-development platform (and all of them who have won election) have run with the endorsement of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR). Melkonians, however, was an anti-development candidate who ran a strong campaign without a SMRR endorsement. Not only that, but (future write-in candidate) Phil Brock cleared the decks for Melkonians by not filing papers to run for council, and SMRR left an open seat by not endorsing incumbent Terry O’Day.

How did Melkonians do? He received 12,603 votes. Divide that number by 51,662, the total number of voters, and Melkonians’ tally was 24.4%. Meaning that not even a quarter of Santa Monica voters were angry enough about development to pay attention to local politics and then vote for the candidate who channeled that anger.

That doesn’t mean government shouldn’t continue to regulate development. Government regulates lots of businesses and industries. But we shouldn’t let the most extreme “vocal critics” set the agenda and control the debate.

These election results are, by the way, consistent with data from the City’s surveys over the years about the attitudes of residents. Most are happy to live in Santa Monica, and when asked (open-ended and unprompted) to name issues that concern them, only about a third mention traffic (and many fewer mention development).

Yet we have a political class that runs for cover whenever Residocracy or SMCLC say they speak for the residents.

Thanks for reading.

The local vote: preliminary post-mortem

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Shell-shocked after the presidential vote, I’ve been slow putting my thoughts together on the local election. In fact, when analyzing local elections it’s a good idea to wait a few weeks until the final results are certified. The results rarely change (except occasionally in a close City Council race, as Ted Winterer will ruefully acknowledge), but until all the absentee and provisional ballots are counted, one can’t speak about important matters like total turnout, or how different neighborhoods voted.

But in the meantime I can make a few points.

The defeat of Measure LV. Again, the final numbers aren’t in, but it looks like LV, the “Land Use Voter Empowerment Initiative,” performed the same as its predecessor anti-development initiative, the “Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT) did in 2008. RIFT got 44% of the votes cast on it, and right now LV is also at 44%. RIFT got about 36% of all votes cast—we won’t know that number for LV until we have the final returns.

While there are Santa Monicans who want no more development, and many residents who will vote yes on anything that promises to do something about traffic (and in a certain sense who can blame them?), there is a solid majority that does not want to plan by ballot box and/or will not arbitrarily restrict future development based on arguments about traffic or community character.

The vote was consistent not only with RIFT, but also with past votes to allow the development of affordable housing (in 1999) and to adopt the 1994 Civic Center plan. The last time a measure aimed against development passed in Santa Monica was the 1990 vote on Michael McCarty’s beach hotel. In the meantime, despite opposition from some elements of the anti-development side, Santa Monica voters have passed many bond issues and taxes, including this year’s Measures GS and V.

They want to manage change intelligently, but most Santa Monicans are not afraid of it.

The LV side has already blamed their loss on the big money spent against LV. But the 2014 vote on the competing airport measures showed that massive expenditures do not persuade Santa Monica voters. The aviation industry spent almost a million dollars, outspending the anti-airport, pro-park campaign by about six-to-one, but still lost overwhelmingly.

Santa Monica voters are sophisticated. Once they have enough information to make up their minds (which takes a campaign because most residents don’t pay attention to local politics), they make up those minds. The anti-development side can’t have it both ways – they can’t claim repeatedly and vehemently that only they represent the residents, and then consistently lose elections. Not, in any case, without implying that residents are ignorant dupes.

Perhaps Residocracy and the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City will take these results to heart and start describing themselves as speaking for “many” residents, which is powerful enough. I doubt it. Speaking for others is a hard habit to break. One might also hope that they would stop describing people who disagree with them as corrupt, but what was startling in this campaign was how viciously the LV’ers attacked opponents who had long been slow(er)-growth standard-bearers. All of a sudden stalwart controllers of growth like Kevin McKeown and Ted Winterer were the tools of developers, on the take. I tip my hat to them for taking the abuse; I hope that they are aware that they were only getting in the back what opponents of the no-change mindset get thrown in their faces everyday.

As for the City Council election, it was no surprise that the four incumbents won easily. The shocker was that Terry O’Day came in first. I assumed that since he was the only incumbent running without the endorsement of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), he would be the trailing winner. In my recollection, neither Bob Holbrook nor Herb Katz, the council’s longtime non-SMRR members, ever finished first. O’Day also voted for the Hines project. He came in first nonetheless.

This year SMRR didn’t endorse O’Day and two years ago SMRR didn’t endorse Pam O’Connor. Both were elected. But for elevating the development issue above all other issues affecting Santa Monica, SMRR would now be in a situation where all seven members of the council owed their election to SMRR, or believed they did. Instead, now SMRR is back to where it was when Holbrook and Katz were the two independents.

I’ll have more when all the votes are counted.

Thanks for reading.

 

Hueston: you have a problem

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In my post last week I wrote about certain aspects of John Hueston’s report to the Santa Monica City Council on the Elizabeth Riel firing and the Oaks Initiative. Last Tuesday evening Hueston presented his report to the council. There was a public hearing where members of the public gave their views, mostly about O’Connor’s culpability in the firing of Riel or, alternatively, her virtues as a longtime councilmember and regional leader.

As for Hueston’s report, he makes some good recommendations. For one, Hueston recommends that the City use, except in unusual circumstances, a formal interview process when hiring “at will” (i.e., non-civil service) employees, and identify ahead of time whether a position is politically sensitive, to allow questions in the interview process about applicants’ histories of political activities specifically relating to councilmembers with whom they may need to interact. The latter recommendation more or less tracks the law as Federal District Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell described it in her rejection of Santa Monica’s motion to dismiss Riel’s complaint; she said that if political history (or lack thereof) is going to be factor in whether someone is going to be hired, that has be made clear as part of the job description.

Moving onto the Oaks Initiative, Hueston made an excellent and common sense suggestion that enforcement of the law be entrusted to an attorney in the Criminal Division of the City Attorney’s office. Although under the City Attorney’s purview, the Criminal Division nearly always operates independently and in any case does not give legal advice to the City Council. Having a designated attorney in the Criminal Division, who would not report to the City Attorney on Oaks matters, would seem to solve the problem of the City Attorney having conflicts of interest when investigating councilmembers.

In last week’s post about Hueston’s report I wrote about how Hueston was able to interview City Attorney Marsha Moutrie and shed more light on the interplay between her and City Manager Rod Gould preceding Gould’s decision to fire Riel. Hueston also interviewed people who had been involved in the Riel hiring process, but who had not given depositions in the lawsuit. Information from them has given us a better understanding of what Riel’s mindset might have been when, in the fateful phone call of May 23, 2014 with Gould, he asked her to explain why she had not revealed her past political activities in the interview process. It was her answer to Gould’s question, namely that she had disclosed her political past, that angered him and led to her being fired.

Why did Riel answer that way? The answer now seems to be that Riel had in fact disclosed her past political activities, or had at least disclosed enough to believe in good faith that she had been open about them. On page 13 of his report Hueston recounts testimony from a member of the panel that interviewed Riel for the job (a panelist who requested anonymity) that this panelist supported Riel for the job precisely because Riel had been upfront about her past involvement in Santa Monica politics (and that this showed she was comfortable with politics). Although the panelist could not recall if Riel’s disclosures extended to disclosing that she had worked on campaigns for councilmembers (or against them, as in the case of O’Connor), this could easily explain why Riel had in that phone call with Gould told him that she had disclosed her political activities.

It’s too bad that Gould did not know about what Riel had disclosed in the interview process. If he had, he might have been able to diffuse O’Connor or at least not become angry himself. As it is, again this is evidence that rule number one should be that if there is a process, then trust it.

One gripe I have about Hueston’s report is that he didn’t interview Riel, who would have been able to tell Hueston what she disclosed during the hiring process. The reason Hueston gives is that Riel requested compensation for her time, as well as that her attorney be paid to attend the interview. In Hueston’s opinion he already had enough testimony from Riel from her lawsuit deposition and the City didn’t need to spend the money. In my opinion, Riel’s requests were perfectly reasonable, and I don’t understand why Hueston (or if he didn’t have the authority, whoever did) didn’t authorize the expenditure. The City is paying something like $400,000 (or more) for Hueston’s investigation; it would have been worth a few thousand dollars more to hear from the person who was at the center of the controversy, particularly with respect to questions that didn’t come up in her deposition.

Alas, the upshot is that Riel comes across as mercenary, which is unfair. As I said, her requests for compensation and for her lawyer’s presence in the interview were reasonable. After enduring litigation, even if you prevail, there’s no reason to be philanthropic with the other side, and you certainly shouldn’t talk to them without your lawyer. I haven’t agreed much with Diana Gordon, of the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City, about the Riel controversy, but Gordon was 100% correct when she spoke Tuesday night about how in all the uproar about O’Connor and Gould, we tend to forget what a victim Riel was.

While I would never call City Attorney Marsha Moutrie a victim, she is being victimized by a growing meme that she was grossly incompetent in not advising Gould that he would violate Riel’s First Amendment rights if he fired her. As I said in my post last week, Moutrie’s advice that Gould could fire Riel because she was an at-will employee turned out to be bad advice when Judge O’Connell rejected, mostly on First Amendment grounds, the City’s motion to dismiss Riel’s complaint. There’s nothing, however, in O’Connell’s ruling, the only legal ruling on these questions I know of in the case, that indicates that the issue was cut and dried.

But that’s not according to how the story is being spun. At Tuesday’s City Council meeting a resident said that according to the ruling any “first year law student” should have known that Gould would violate Riel’s free speech rights if he fired her. That was just the start. By the time, a little later in the evening, that Councilmember Sue Himmelrich was giving her two cents, she said (quoting from the Daily Press’s coverage), “I agree that the federal court did say that even a first grader would know this was a violation of her federal rights.”

I know that all first graders in Santa Monica are brilliant, but this seems to take hyperbole to a new level. In fact, Judge O’Connell had to use 19 closely reasoned, single-spaced pages to conclude that notwithstanding the basic rule that in public employee First Amendment cases public employers have “wide discretion and control over the management of their personnel and internal affairs,” the ultimate burden of proof, after Riel had satisfied a preliminary threshold, was on the City to prove that Riel’s rights had not been violated and the case should go to trial. Even following the rule that on a motion to dismiss everything in a complaint must be viewed in the plaintiff’s favor, O’Connell’s decision was not a slam-dunk. (For more on Judge O’Connell’s ruling, see my post from Oct. 16.)

I word-searched O’Connell’s ruling for “first year” and “first grader” and didn’t come up with any hits. Someone please tell me if there is another ruling in the case I don’t know about, and I’ll correct myself, but until then I’ll attribute Moutrie’s bad advice to human fallibility and the complexity of the law, rather than to not having the legal knowledge of a six-year-old.

Thanks for reading.

Riel Politics, Part 5: When you have a process, trust it

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My intention a month ago when I wrote my fourth installment of “Riel Politics,” my series of posts on the firing of Elizabeth Riel, was to wrap up the series with a fifth post in which I drew some conclusions. Other matters came up, however, I got distracted, and I am only now getting to it. In the meantime there’s been more grist for the mill: two weeks ago the County District Attorney’s office wrote the City declining to investigate whether Councilmember Pam O’Connor had committed a misdemeanor by improperly influencing then City Manager Rod Gould when he fired Riel, and then Tuesday night the City Council voted to engage attorney John Hueston as an independent counsel to, among other things, review the Riel matter.

The D.A.’s decision not to investigate O’Connor has been reported as if O’Connor escaped prosecution because of the statute of limitations (for instance, the Daily Press’s headline ran, “Statute of limitations prevents criminal charges in Riel case”), but that’s not accurate for two reasons. For one, based on the letter the D.A.’s office sent to the City it’s clear that the prosecutors didn’t consider this a criminal matter. As reported in the Daily Press, the letter from the D.A.’s office said, before getting to the statute of limitations issue, that “the hiring and firing of employees is a civil matter left to the sound discretion of the City of Santa Monica and, when necessary, the civil courts.” For two, the statute of limitations would prevent an investigation, but not necessarily the filing of charges, which the D.A. would file only if there was evidence to do so.

In fact, if I were O’Connor, I would be asking if I could waive the statute of limitations: the D.A.’s refusal to investigate was a godsend to O’Connor’s accusers, since the D.A. was so unlikely to file criminal charges. Aside from whether the matter was civil rather than criminal, there is nothing in the exhaustive record unearthed in Riel’s civil action against the City that indicates that O’Connor had any intent to have Riel fired. Intent is a necessary element of a criminal case, and even assuming O’Connor had intended to cause Gould to fire Riel, unless anyone expects O’Connor to voluntarily confess such an intent (remember that in a criminal matter O’Connor could not be required to testify against herself), the D.A. would have had no case.

As I wrote in Riel Politics, Part 3, I assume the difficulty of proving a criminal case is why the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC) hedged on its claim that O’Connor was criminally liable when it gave the City a long list of questions for an independent counsel to investigate.

As for the hiring of Hueston, the council appears to have retained someone with the right credentials. The council hired Hueston to do a preliminary analysis, for no more than $25,000; after that, Hueston will advise the council on how much deeper he believes he should go.

One unknown at the present time is whether Hueston will uncover more evidence than what was discovered in Riel’s civil action. Except for one possible new source of information, I suspect that that is unlikely. I’ll discuss that possible source in a moment; in the meantime, here are the conclusions I’m prepared to make based on the existing evidence.

As I said, there is nothing in the evidence that shows either that O’Connor pressured Gould to fire Riel or that Gould did not make the decision independently. Based on the emails, O’Connor’s goal was always not to have to work with Riel. As we know from the Levy case (a/k/a, the “playhouse” case), councilmembers have First Amendment rights to speak to staff members. Looking ahead, it’s unlikely that Hueston is going to recommend that councilmembers cease communicating with the city manager and other staff, because that’s part of a councilmember’s job.

As for what went wrong, the one clear lesson that emerges from this fiasco is that when the City has an extensive and formal application process (for, in this case, a job, but this applies to any kind of process), city staff, and in particular a city manager, needs to think more than twice before making a decision that subverts the process.

In a short period of time, from the afternoon of Friday, May 23, to the morning of May 24, 2014, Gould decided to fire Riel. Riel had been hired only after a thorough and formal process. Instead of trusting that process, from the emails it appears that Gould based an impulsive decision primarily on one answer Riel gave him to a question in a phone call late Friday afternoon. While Riel might have answered the question better (less defensively), the phone call had blindsided her: Gould had told Riel that he had a “gnarly” political issue to run by her, but he had given her no indication that the issue involved her. I would have been defensive, too.

It was the afternoon heading into a holiday weekend. In hindsight, the thing for Gould to have said to Riel was: “This is a problem. But have a good weekend, and let’s get together next week to discuss. Let’s try to find a way to make this work.” It’s possible that Gould felt badgered by O’Connor, but it’s a manager’s job to filter that stuff out.

What we don’t know, based on the evidence we have, is the role of City Attorney Marsha Moutrie in Gould’s decision-making process. From the emails it appears that Moutrie advised Gould on May 23 that Riel’s position was not protected by civil service, i.e., that she was an “at will” employee. As we know, however, from the ruling rejecting the City’s motion to dismiss Riel’s complaint, even at will employees cannot be fired wholly without cause or in violation of their constitutional rights. We don’t know if Moutrie gave Gould advice along those lines or what other advice she may have given him. It appears that Gould decided to fire Riel that Saturday morning without having had another conversation with Moutrie (he says in an email to O’Connor, Moutrie, and his deputy Elaine Polachek, that he “will” (future tense) consult with Moutrie), but we don’t know for sure.

The legal advice that Moutrie gave Gould is the one area I can see where Hueston may uncover more information, but this would require Gould, and possibly the City as a whole, to waive the attorney-client privilege. I don’t know if this can or will happen.

Thanks for reading.

Riel Politics, Part 3: Going beyond the record?

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In the wee hours last Wednesday, after a long City Council meeting dealing mostly with the crucial issue of the minimum wage, the council spent more than an hour agreeing to hire independent counsel to review the firing of Elizabeth Riel. This is well and good, as the episode was a costly fiasco, and one hopes the independent counsel will identify lessons to be learned to avoid such calamities in the future. (The counsel will also make recommendations about how to enforce the Oaks Initiative, the law that restricts what relationships city officials may have with persons or entities that they bestow benefits on.)

The independent counsel’s review will take place concurrently with a review by the L.A. County District Attorney’s office to see if any criminal laws were broken. According to City Attorney Marsha Moutrie violations of the City Charter are misdemeanors, and if the D.A. determines that there is evidence that then-Mayor Pam O’Connor violated the charter by directing then-City Manager Rod Gould to fire Riel, O’Connor could face a criminal charge.

While these reviews and investigations might have occurred anyway (and at least the City review should have), they stem directly from charges that the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC) started making in July after the City settled with Riel for $710,000. Give SMCLC credit, they were the first to obtain the relevant documents through a document request to the City, and for a while they were the only outside parties with the documents. In August, not long after receiving the documents, SMCLC announced its conclusion that O’Connor had “relentlessly pressured” Gould to fire Riel.

By the time the City Council voted last week to authorize the outside review, more people had had the opportunity to review the evidence, however, and SMCLC started hedging. (For my review of the evidence, see Riel Politics, Part 1.) For instance, the Lookout quoted Diana Gordon of SMCLC as saying the outside review would have to “go beyond the record in the Riel lawsuit,” because it (the record) “was developed for a different purpose.” I.e., SMCLC was admitting that the record unearthed so far did not show that O’Connor had told Gould to fire Riel.

Similarly, last week when SMCLC presented the council with a list of nine questions that the group wanted the independent counsel to review, only one of the questions directly concerned O’Connor. The phrasing of that question, which included another caveat about the criminal investigation (“Did Mayor Pam O’Connor improperly intervene in and attempt to influence the City Manager’s decision to fire Elizabeth Riel? (This differs from the criminal matter concerning whether she violated [City Charter] Section 610 beyond a reasonable doubt.)”) is further indication that SMCLC has doubts that the evidence will show a violation of the charter.

But it turns out O’Connor is just an appetizer. The other eight questions (in fact, counting sub-questions, there are at least 14 other questions) concern the conduct of staff—not only Gould, but also “senior staff whom Mr. Gould sought advice from” and City Attorney Moutrie. These questions extend to, among other things, the process used for the hiring of Riel’s replacement, the quality of Moutrie’s legal advice to Gould, and highly speculative questions like whether the matter could have been settled sooner. (For that last question, does the SMCLC intend that Riel and her lawyers be put under oath to tell the independent counsel what they would have settled for and when?)

If words like “fishing expedition” or “Benghazi” are coming to mind, there’s an irony to that. Riel’s association with SMCLC, which ultimately sank her employment by the City, began in 2006 when the then newly-formed SMCLC launched a fishing expedition against City staff. This was in connection with the plans of Macerich to re-do Santa Monica Place with three tall buildings. The plans never had a chance to be approved (for various reasons, including that the City would have had to spend too much money on new parking), but SMCLC feared the worst and assumed that the plans could not have been developed without improper connivance between the developer and City staff.

SMCLC made a big deal about suing the City to get copies of emails and other documents. The city ultimately not only produced the documents but also had to pay the group’s $36,000 in legal fees. After all that, however, SMCLC never released any documents showing the malfeasance they assumed had been committed. Apparently there were none.

As I’ve written before, SMCLC has been all about power. Its well-heeled and sophisticated leadership condescends to the political process in Santa Monica and acts as if everyone involved (or nearly everyone—they do have their favorites) must be incompetent and/or corrupt. The group has always had a special animus against O’Connor, who culturally—she’s the daughter of a Chicago cop, and doesn’t hide it—must epitomize everything that the SMCLC’s fastidious and pious leadership doesn’t like about government.

O’Connor, who has no money of her own, hasn’t helped herself by having to finance her campaigns with contributions from business interests, including developers. She doesn’t suffer fools too well, either. All this has made her prone to attack, but for 20 years O’Connor has been one of the most respected political leaders in Southern California, serving on and often chairing numerous powerful regional boards that you can’t get elected to unless you have the respect of officeholders from other cities. It’s ludicrous that she gets picked on by a group of self-appointed watchdogs like SMCLC.

Having said that, the City didn’t have the right to fire Elizabeth Riel, and I’ll discuss why not in the next installment of Riel Politics.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Are we there yet?”

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With the Santa Monica City Council’s action last week approving the new zoning ordinance, leaving only a pro forma second reading to finalize the new law, it looked like eleven long years of planning would soon come to an end. The light at the end of the tunnel was finally more glare than glimmer.

Slow down. We’re not there yet. Just when you think it might be safe for Santa Monica government to spend more time and resources on something other than responding irrationally to bad traffic, the anti-development group Residocracy is contemplating, dare I say threatening, a referendum on the zoning ordinance.

That glare that looked sunny turns out to be oncoming headlights.

According to a Lookout article headlined “Santa Monica Slow-Growth Groups look to Public Vote on Development Issues,” Residocracy is polling its members on whether they want to take to the street to gather signatures to overturn the new zoning law, and the group’s founder Armen Melkonians expects they will say yes. (Who’s going to say no?)

Melkonians told the Lookout that the new zoning, though approved by the council’s anti-development majority, “‘still creates density.’” “‘Are we going to grow Santa Monica,’” he asked, “‘so it doubles its population?’”

Well, the answer to that question is no, or at least not until a few generations or even centuries have passed. I mean, even if Santa Monica adds all of the 4,955 housing units predicted under the LUCE by 2030, that’s only about a 10 percent increase in the city’s stock of housing units. That’s unlikely even to result in a 10 percent increase in population, however, because for decades the average number of people living in each housing unit in Santa Monica has been in decline.

Even if—as Melkonians fears—Santa Monica should add more than 4,955 units, say, twice that many, by 2030, a 20 percent increase, and even if each percentage point increase in units translated into a percentage point increase in population, well, can someone do the math? How long would it take to double the number of housing units if there was a 20 percent increase every 20 years?

In any case a while, but any significant population increase is unlikely. To give some perspective, Santa Monica’s population in 1970 was 88,289. In 2010, after decades of purported “massive overdevelopment,” it was 89,736. (I know that estimates since the 2010 census have added a few thousand more residents, but the history of those population estimates is that they get debunked when the decennial census comes around. The estimates focus on the number of housing units, but historically haven’t take into account how many young Santa Monicans leave town each year rarely to return.)

Okay, I get it—surely Melkonians was being rhetorical. But that’s what happens when you start asking people to sign petitions. If the first casualty of war is truth, then the first casualty of a local referendum campaign must be any sense of reality.

Residocracy isn’t the only group talking about going to the voters. The Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), Santa Monica’s more establishment, less populist, anti-development group, is considering a Version 2.0 of the “Residents’ Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT), their unsuccessful 2008 initiative. SMCLC wants to give voters a veto over “large projects.”

Based on an open letter to supporters that SMCLC leadership published last week, it does not appear, however, that SMCLC wants to join in an effort to overturn the zoning ordinance. For now at least, based on the letter it appears that SMCLC leadership is celebrating the new law, and especially the reductions in the scope of the LUCE, as the product of the anti-development majority SMCLC helped elect last November.

This makes sense, since the SMCLC leadership has long ties to councilmembers Kevin McKeown and Ted Winterer and they view the new zoning law as an achievement.

But indications are that SMCLC wants to bring back a new version of RIFT. SMCLC has never trusted the City Council or planning staff, and according to the letter to supporters, “large projects must be subject to a resident vote.” SMCLC’s co-chair of SMCLC, Diana Gordon, told the Lookout that the group would support a measure like RIFT. SMCLC touted the fact that RIFT garnered more than 18,000 votes in 2008. (The problem for SMCLC was that nearly 51,000 Santa Monicans voted that year.)

Of course, as Melkonians acknowledged to the Lookout, the point of having votes on developments is to scare developers away. While according to him, “only the best projects would go through,” the opposite is true. Developers and landowners will build to the lowest common denominator, slicing and dicing their projects to slip under whatever the voter-approval threshold is. It’s strange to hear a group like SMCLC, which I believe honestly wants better projects to be built, promote voter control as a way to get them.

SMCLC blames RIFT’s loss in 2008 on, as Gordon told the Lookout, its being “‘outspent in a deceptive opposition campaign.’” “Deceptive” is in the eye of the beholder, but the last several elections, notably the votes in 2014 on Measures D and LC, if anything show that money doesn’t mean much in Santa Monica elections. Beyond the merits of any thing or person on the ballot, endorsements are what count. In 2008 most of the well-respected elected officials in and around Santa Monica opposed RIFT, and SMRR was neutral.

Promoters of new anti-development referendums, whether to overturn the zoning law or to make developments subject to popular vote, would no doubt base their campaigns on their conviction that the views of voters have changed.

We’d find out.

Thanks for reading.

Santa Monica, post LUCE: slicing and dicing ahead

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About 25 years ago laws designed to protect existing housing from demolition had made it difficult to build new housing in Santa Monica. Housing developers sued, complaining that Santa Monica was violating state laws designed to encourage housing. They won and the City had to revise its housing policies.

Santa Monica still wanted to protect existing housing, and the City devised a brilliant solution. City Council retained protections for housing in the neighborhoods, but enacted new zoning that allowed and encouraged housing in commercial districts downtown. It took a while for the new policies to have an impact because of the economic troubles of the ’90s, but by the end of the decade downtown developers were building significant numbers of apartments.

While most council members were happy with the new housing, some were not thrilled with the form it was taking. The developments were typically five-story buildings with ground floor retail, built with wood-frame construction above a first floor of concrete. Council members wanted more varied architecture and design elements such as courtyards that were open to the street.

The late Ken Genser was particularly concerned with these issues. He acknowledged that to allow for better design projects would need to be bigger; in fact the focus of his complaint was that developers were “slicing and dicing” projects to make them small enough not to be subject to discretionary development review, which then made amenities like courtyards difficult to provide.

I was reminded of this history as I watched the City Council’s hearing Wednesday night on the new zoning code. With planning staff and the council majority joining to reduce drastically the geography for Tier 3 developments, and to eliminate “activity centers” (on Wilshire today, everywhere tomorrow), expect to see more slicing and dicing.

It was only five years ago, with the approval of the new Land Use and Circulation Elements (LUCE), that staff and the council were trying to encourage better developments, developments that would include public serving open-spaces, shared parking, grocery stores and other neighborhood serving retail, and other public amenities. To get these amenities (not to mention more affordable housing), the LUCE counted on developers to use Tier 3 and activity centers, because those larger projects would require development agreements. Development agreements get a bad rap, but it’s through them that the City can get more from developers.

I’m not one of those who believe that abandoning Tier 3 means no housing will be built. So long as interest rates are low and tenants will pay monthly rents of $4 per square foot, developers will find ways to build. But with the elimination of Tier 3 and activity centers, forget the public spaces, shared parking, etc.

Imagine you’re the owner of the property underneath a big grocery store or shopping centers on a boulevard. When the day comes when you want to turn the property over, what do you think you’ll do? Try to build something big, with a public plaza, shared public parking, and a supermarket? Or slice and dice your land and build boxes?

In much of the city, there is no longer even that choice. In the post LUCE environment, the rule will be “make no big plans.”

• • •

I also get the feeling that staff and some members of the council expect that by eviscerating the LUCE they will mollify the most vociferous voices against any development that doesn’t conform to idealized mid-20th century suburbia. Dream on. As these council members approve developments that fit the new standards, they will become the new targets of anti-development wrath.

Which makes me think of Ken Genser again. Genser was the original and most creative of all anti-development politicians in Santa Monica. Strongly protective of neighborhoods, instigator and supporter of various down-zonings, Genser nonetheless made distinctions. He supported the two most contentious developments that arose during his time on council, the original Civic Center Specific Plan and the downtown Target.

Genser never wavered in his belief in a low-scale city, but he ultimately concluded that those who were most adamant against development could never be satisfied. Each reduction in development standards only moved the goalposts. Near the end of his life Genser even opposed Measure T, the “Residents’ Initiative to Fight Traffic,” that the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC) put on the 2008 ballot.

The goalposts continue to move. For more than 30 years most Santa Monicans have agreed that Santa Monica should closely regulate development and the City has responded by restricting development. (We all know the facts, that there has been little development in Santa Monica.) But every few years a new crop of anti-development activists rise up and act as if they are the first people to notice that traffic is bad. How else do you explain that the LUCE, which anti-development groups, such as the SMCLC, lauded when it was passed, has now become, five years later, the embodiment of evil to the new group, Residocracy, and other new, anti-development voices?

As cities evolve, change is disorienting. But we wouldn’t have neighborhoods we love, like Ocean Park, Pico, or Wilmont, or now downtown, and tens of thousands of Santa Monicans wouldn’t live in those neighborhoods, if change hadn’t happened.

Change can enhance what we have already. Main Street is not even a boulevard, but consider what’s happened north of Ocean Park Boulevard. Various groups of residents opposed the apartments and retail that replaced the Boulangerie, the CCSM affordable housing at Main and Pacific (with its local-serving shops), and the Urth Cafe. But they all got built and they’ve turned those blocks into a better neighborhood center than what was there before.

Sometimes the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Thanks for reading.

The pipes, the pipes, are calling: “Maintain us!”

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I can’t guarantee that I heard every word uttered during Tuesday night’s City Council hearing on water rates, but two words that I didn’t hear were “deferred maintenance.” Too bad, because that’s what this is mostly about. Yes, we are doing good by using less water, and yes, that paradoxically causes a cash crunch for the Water Division that means we need to pay more for the water we do use. That loss in revenues, however, only accounts for a portion of the deficits the Water Division is facing.

The fundamental reason we need to raise water rates is that our system is aging and needs fixing. Even if we weren’t conserving water, rates would need to increase substantially to pay the costs of deferred maintenance.

The numbers are that with only rate increases equal to inflation (the baseline), the projected loss in revenue from 2013 levels over the next six years (through fiscal year 2020) is about $14.3 million. Over the same six years, the Water Division’s capital needs are projected at about $37 million. (The data comes from the Kennedy/Jenks “Water Rate and Revenue Plan” presented to City Council this month.) If you review the Water Division’s $37 million capital budget for fiscal years 2015 through 2020 (Table 4 in the Kennedy/Jenks report) you’ll see that relatively few bucks are for special projects, like a new booster pump station. Most of the expenditures are for maintenance, such as water main replacements and similar improvements, along with routine costs like vehicles and sidewalk repairs.

As has been typical with public infrastructure in America for the past 40 years, Santa Monica’s water system has been starved for maintenance because voters don’t want to pay for what they’re wearing out. Cast iron pipes are now nearing a century of use and need to be replaced. We shouldn’t be surprised. Santa Monica had a major water main break in 2002 and a serious sinkhole in 2007.

City of Santa Monica photo

City of Santa Monica photo

Unfortunately I wasn’t surprised, watching the video of Tuesday’s hearing, to hear members of my own Baby Boomer generation complain about having to pay more, and call for a bond issue to pay for this catch-up maintenance. They said it wasn’t fair that they might have to pay for a system that future generations would use. But then we boomers have never worried about getting a cheap ride on investments preceding generations paid for, without paying to maintain them and without making investments for the future. Hey, we’ve saddled the next generation with student loan debt; why not give them some water debt, too?

Speaking as one boomer, I don’t want my water rates to include interest on a bond for work that we can and should finance as we go if our rates include reasonable amounts for maintenance and replacement, and I’d like to invest reasonable amounts of money (piggybacking on state money that might be available, not to mention the settlement money the City receives from polluters) to increase our flow from wells and the reuse of gray water so that we can reduce the relatively costly (but still cheap!) water we buy from the MWD.

Of course, no one likes to pay more for anything, especially for something we all take for granted. The monthly increases are going to be trivial for a middle-class family (according to Table 8 in the Kennedy/Jenks report, the increase after five years will be about $11 per month for a typical single-family house, assuming a 20% reduction in usage and the 9% annual rate increases the City Council adopted), but certainly there are low-income people for whom even a small increase would be painful. The problem is, however, that you can’t build high-quality infrastructure if one requirement is that the actual cost must be affordable to people with the lowest incomes. You need to find another way to subsidize their water, or, even better, find a way to increase their incomes.

The rate increase naysayers did make some good points, however. One was that with everyone trying to reduce usage, both by investing on water-saving improvements and changing behaviors, it’s going to get harder in the future to respond to droughts by lowering consumption. This causes frustration from people who, after all, are doing the right thing. What it means, however, is that we’re going to need more investment, both public and private. In gray water systems, for instance. The good news is that if people make investments to reduce water usage, their usage will remain lower even when the drought is over, and they will not feel the full impact of higher rates.

Another point I agreed with, one made by Diana Gordon from the SMCLC and others, is that the City’s goal of achieving water self-sufficiency by 2020 is artificial and should not drive any policies. The goal is admirable for both ecological and financial reasons, but it is artificial not only because of the arbitrary date, but also because “self-sufficiency” is an artificial concept. What does self-sufficiency mean when much of the City’s “own” well water doesn’t lie under Santa Monica? Even to the extent it does, the water is part of a regional pool of groundwater that is replenished by regional surface water.

Santa Monica’s water needs and resources, now and in the future, are part and parcel of the water needs and resources of a still growing region. It’s artificial to think that Santa Monica could be self-sufficient in water or anything else.

Thanks for reading.

When history repeats as farce it’s not always funny

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“If the slow-growth movement … has been explicitly a protest against the urbanization of suburbia, it is implicitly—in the long tradition of Los Angeles homeowner politics—a reassertion of social privilege.” —Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990).

In an attempt to remind myself of the historical context behind the anti-development politics I’ve been writing about, I went back and reread the famous 60-page chapter, called “Homegrown Revolution,” that Mike Davis wrote in City of Quartz 25 years ago about the homeowner movements of the ’70s and ’80s. Davis, if you haven’t read the book, takes no prisoners. He’s equally rough on Anglo homeowners, enriched by the rapid increase in property values of the late ’70s, who banded together to enact Prop. 13 and keep apartments (and not incidentally minorities) out of their neighborhoods, and the Growth Machine developers and their kept politicians whom the would-be “sunbelt Bolsheviks” so feared.

At a certain point Davis refers to Karl Marx’s essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” to make the point that for all their fervor, and with the notable exception of the Prop. 13 campaign, the slow-growthers were usually disorganized, like the peasants whose potential for revolution Marx dismissed. Reading this reference 25 years later I found a retrospective irony. Notwithstanding what Marx said about the peasants the most famous line in Eighteenth Brumaire is the one where he, in comparing the Emperor Napoleon and this nephew Napoleon III (Louis Bonaparte), says that history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” When you compare the issues that provoked anti-development activists in the ’70s with those that fuel anti-development fires today, farce is what comes to mind.

So many people newly involved in anti-development politics in Santa Monica, and I’m thinking of many in Residocracy and the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City, act as if they’ve discovered things that no one else knew about. Did you know that traffic is congested and that developers want to make money? What a shock!

I hate to play the old baby boomer card, but we’ve been through this before. There’s a reason that freeways don’t cut up the Santa Monica Mountains, and that was because in the ’60s Marvin Braude and others formed the Hillside Federation to stop them. There are reasons that downtown Santa Monica doesn’t look like downtown Glendale, that there are only two apartment towers on the beach in Ocean Park, and that thousands of apartments have been saved from destruction, and that’s because when Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) took power in 1981, Santa Monica became, as described by William Fulton, another great chronicler of L.A. (in The Reluctant Metropolis), the first city to confront the Southern California Growth Machine.

SMRR arose because of a real crisis, not something ginned up. The reason analysts label today’s regional housing crisis as the worst in decades is because the crisis of the late ’70s was even more dramatic. L.A. housing prices, which early in the decade were slightly lower than the national average, increased 30 to 40 percent a year, and rents exploded, too. Oh, and by the way, people complained about traffic back then, too. Locally developers had big plans to turn industrial areas into office parks, as had happened on Ocean Park Boulevard with the Douglas Aircraft site, creating many more jobs per acre, which would mean more commuters. And let’s not forget other serious problems, like homelessness and gang violence, and decaying infrastructure.

Not everything worked out—there was the matter of the approval in the ’80s of twice the office square footage predicted in Santa Monica’s 1984 land use plan—but the worst damage was averted and there were many positive achievements. I’m tempted to say that there were giants in those days, but in any case movements against genuine ills create big ideas and powerful language. The tragedy comes when those ideas and words are applied to more trivial circumstances. Then they become farcical.

That’s not to say we don’t have problems today, they’re just not the ones complainers in Santa Monica complain about. They’re still acting as if Santa Monica is a “Leave It to Beaver” suburb, when in fact it’s part of the central core of a megalopolis. Longtime residents (the only ones who are supposed to have standing to complain) have a lot to be thankful for—high property values and low, Prop. 13 taxes if they are homeowners, rent-controlled rents if they are renters, convenient access to whatever services they need, shorter commutes than average. What drives them crazy is traffic, but traffic is bad all over, it’s been bad for a long time, and it’s not necessarily getting worse. The reality today is not about how to preserve a suburb, even an industrial suburb like Santa Monica once was, but about how to make a city work.

Here’s a fact to chew on from the Housing Element of Santa Monica’s General Plan: in 2013 82.8% of all housing in the city was more than 30 years old—built before 1983. The development that the anti-development crowd should actually be complaining about took place in the era they have the most nostalgia for. But if nearly 30,000 units (of 50,000 total today) hadn’t been built in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, most Santa Monicans wouldn’t have a place to live.

Thanks for reading.

 

Following some money

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The headline in the Lookout for the article about the final financial reports for the 2014 City Council election was “Himmelrich Spent $160,000 of Her Own Money to Win Santa Monica Council Seat,” but even though $160,000 was a record for self-financing a City Council campaign here, I was less interested in how much money Susan Himmelrich spent to win election and more interested in how she spent some of it.

What the article did not report was that Himmelrich paid nearly $30,000 to Dennis Zane and to PZ Associates, an entity that Zane formed. Here’s the breakdown: Himmelrich paid Zane $15,000 for political consulting, plus $4,475 for office expenses, including one flat $3,000 payment. She paid PZ $9,255 partly for consulting services and partly in a category called “campaign paraphernalia/misc.” (PZ is known for running door-to-door campaigns.)

These payments are not out of line for these kinds of services. Why am I focusing on them? For one reason: the payments were breaches of Zane’s fiduciary duty to Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR). As a member of the SMRR Steering Committee, Zane was guilty of self-dealing, by taking money from a candidate seeking the SMRR endorsement. Self-dealing cannot be made good by disclosure or recusal (not that Zane in fact recused himself).

The SMRR endorsement is crucial to getting elected, especially for anti-development candidates, as no candidate for City Council running on an anti-development platform has ever been elected without the SMRR endorsement. As a follow up to my post in January where I wrote about how Himmelrich finally got the endorsement from the Steering Committee (in a deal where Himmelrich got the committee votes she needed in return for her supporters voting to endorse Andrew Walzer for College Board), I can report that I received a message from Walzer the next day defending the “trade off in voting for [him] and Sue.” Apparently, according to Walzer, it was “complicated,” which naturally made me feel better about it. But in case you had doubts, it did happen.

I’m not the only one still taking a look back at the election, although not everyone has the same motivations. The Santa Monica Democratic Club (SMDC) had a panel discussion last week about it. I didn’t go, but according to the Lookout, the gist of the meeting was that the election of the anti-development Himmelrich had, in the words of SMRR Co-Chair Patricia Hoffman, “‘flipped the balance of power on the City Council.’”

Apparently, though, the struggle continues. Hoffman went on to say that “‘[w]e have a lot more work to do . . . . If we can work together and spend the next few years selecting candidates, that, I think, can make our City Council even better.’”

“Even better.” Given that all seven city council members were elected at least initially with the SMRR endorsement, I guess Hoffman is saying that the old SMRR, the one that based its progressive politics on issues beyond blocking development, is history. And I expect that if the Steering Committee, given its demographics, continues to make the endorsements, the old SMRR will be history.

That’s right, let’s throw out all those bums we supported before who care about housing for all, including the middle-class, and good union jobs and city and social services and childcare and public transportation, etc. You know the ones who understand that Santa Monica is not an island. They’re not sufficiently deferential to our new friends in the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City and Residocracy.

* * *

Given the record-breaking $160,000 Himmelrich spent on her campaign, one might wonder why her husband, Housing Commissioner Michael Soloff, had to make campaign contributions, each of $10,000, to SMRR and the SMDC. Why didn’t Himmelrich make the contributions herself? The reason is based on campaign finance law: SMRR and SMDC were running independent campaigns on Himmelrich’s behalf, and because there is a contribution limit for City Council races, the campaigns could not coordinate with Himmelrich. Otherwise, contributions an individual or company might make to SMRR and the SMDC could be counted against the contributor’s limit. Giving money to an independent campaign is a form of coordination, and so Himmelrich couldn’t write the checks. Both she and Soloff are attorneys, and so one expects that they did legal research (but separately, not coordinated!) to satisfy themselves that it’s not coordination if the money comes from a spouse. But let’s face it—even if it’s legal, it’s a dodge. I wonder if the Santa Monica Transparency Project will investigate?

There’s another aspect to this. The old SMRR prided itself on a policy of rarely accepting individual contributions that were more than the limit for council races, which is now $325. The new SMRR not only accepted Soloff’s $10,000, but also $10,000 from the Huntley Hotel, the primary bankroller of anti-development campaigns in the city. Back in July, before the SMRR convention where she’d be seeking the SMRR endorsement, Himmelrich herself gave $1,000. There is no law limiting the amount of contributions to SMRR, and the limit was voluntary, but the limit was once a point of pride. So much for that.

* * *

One footnote: the Lookout piece I quote from above about campaign expenditures got the numbers for my campaign wrong. The article said that I contributed $20,000 and my total campaign expenditure was $75,000, but those numbers are incomplete. The reason the reporter was mistaken is that my campaign accountant had us wrap up our finances in 2015, and the final numbers are in a statement for the period Jan. 1-5 that we filed a few weeks ago. The complete numbers are that I contributed $36,920.90 to my campaign and the total expenditure was $96,128.90. I understand the Lookout will be running a correction, but I wanted the record to be correct.

Thanks for reading.