Tag Archives: Tony Vazquez

Moving goal posts and new players: the plight of anti-development politicians

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After last night’s City Council meeting Councilmember Sue Himmelrich might understandably have a “no good deed goes unpunished” feeling. You see, Himmelrich proposed that council direct staff to prepare a ballot measure for November that would be an alternative to Residocracy’s LUVE initiative. Himmelrich, whom Residocracy endorsed when she ran for council in 2014, proposed a measure that would give voters the right to approve large projects, but one that would not be as draconian as LUVE and therefore (presumably) have a better chance of passing. Residocracy, however, slammed her and her proposal even before the meeting began.

On Monday, on Residocracy’s Facebook page, Residocracy’s Tricia Crane derided Himmelrich’s proposal, calling it “an attempt to confuse voters,” and one that showed the “desperation” of councilmembers (presumably Himmelrich) “to retain power and defeat the LUVE initiative.” Ouch. (Later Crane, I suppose to make sure her sentiments were not limited to Facebook users, forwarded the Facebook exchange to her neighborhood group, Northeast Neighbors—that email must have gone viral, because even I received it.)

Crane was right about the potential confusion. (If not about Himmelrich’s motivations, which seem sincere.) As pointed out last night by, of all people, Residocracy-nemesis Councilmember Terry O’Day, having two similar measures on the ballot would create confusion. If the anti-development vote were split, probably both would lose. The cynical thing would have been if the councilmembers opposed by Residocracy had supported Himmelrich’s motion. (Neither they nor any other councilmembers did, and the motion died without a second.)

As for Crane’s attack on Himmelrich, the first-term councilmember is not the first anti-development politician to engage the wrath of anti-development constituents feeling scorned. Even Councilmember Kevin McKeown, over many years the most consistent anti-development voice in Santa Monica politics, is now enduring nasty attacks because of his opposition to LUVE.

There’s a pattern. History repeats. (Not sure just when the attacks might have been tragic, but certainly, with the attacks on McKeown and Himmelrich, we’ve now reached farce.) For reasons that I’ll get into below, at some point anti-development politicians and their anti-development constituents tend to part ways. Consider what happened the first time Santa Monica elected a City Council majority consisting of members who had all been elected with anti-development support.

That was in 1999, when after a special election Richard Bloom joined councilmembers McKeown, Michael Feinstein, and the late Ken Genser, all of whom had been elected with anti-development support. In short order the four proceeded to replace the entire Planning Commission with anti-development activists drawn from neighborhood associations. Long-term planning in the City came to a stop, as the new commissioners, led by former councilmember Kelly Olsen, browbeat planning staff, whom they accused of being in the pocket of developers.

But the anti-development majority began to fall apart in 2001 when Genser, Santa Monica’s original anti-development councilmember, voted in favor of Target; the other three were opposed. Then in 2003 Feinstein infuriated the anti-development side by voting against reappointing Olsen to the Planning Commission. Not entirely coincidentally, Feinstein lost his bid for reelection in 2004.

As for Bloom (today, of course, Assembly Member Bloom), his views evolved as he became more involved with social and environmental issues. Although Bloom’s original political base was among anti-development homeowners in Sunset Park, by 2005 or so he had become a strong supporter of housing and economic development. By 2008, both Bloom and Genser opposed the RIFT initiative, and were on the outs with their original anti-development supporters.

So why do anti-development councilmembers and their constituents become estranged? The anti-development side will tell you it’s because all politicians are corrupt and ultimately get bought off by developers, but empirically that’s not true. The real reasons are more complex.

Briefly put, when it comes to the goals of the anti-development side, as soon as one goal is achieved, a new, more extreme goal is created. In Santa Monica, where everyone involved in politics wants to regulate development to some extent (we’re all Democrats, right?), this means that a politician elected on a platform advocating one level of regulation soon finds, after voting for regulating development at that level, that some aggrieved constituents want him or her now to adopt higher levels of regulation, levels that the politician might not be comfortable with, whether because he or she is aware of legal restrictions or simply because he or she doesn’t want to go that far in preventing change.

Consider what’s going on now. In 2004 City Council began the LUCE process, and responded to anti-development sentiment (i) by pushing nearly all new development into commercial and industrial districts comprising a small fraction of the City’s land area (a good idea) and (ii) by making nearly all significant development discretionary (not such a good idea). In 2010 the LUCE was finally adopted—with the support of the anti-development community.

But when, a few years later, City staff was drafting the new zoning ordinance, suddenly there was a new target: the largest projects allowed under LUCE, discretionary projects called “Tier 3.” Last year when the zoning ordinance finally came to a vote, the new anti-development majority (McKeown, Himmelrich, Tony Vazquez and Ted Winterer) voted to eliminate nearly all Tier 3 projects.

McKeown, Himmelrich, Vazquez and Winterer retained, however, LUCE’s Tier 2, the zoning standard that allows the continued building of the kind of housing (apartments over ground floor retail) that has been the standard in Santa Monica since the ’90s. Moreover, the four have voted several times to approve more of these apartments. These votes have infuriated the extreme anti-development element represented by Residocracy, i.e., those Santa Monicans who insist that new apartments are incompatible with the character of a city that is 70% renter. Which is why Residocracy has now brought forward LUVE, which would for all practical purposes eliminate Tier 2.

So there you have it, anti-development mission creep: limit development to commercial areas and make nearly all of it discretionary; eliminate Tier 3; eliminate Tier 2. If you don’t follow us every step, you’re a paid stooge for developers.

There’s another factor, too: the constant entry of new people into the political process from the anti-development side, people who don’t necessarily have knowledge of the anti-development battles that preceded their involvement. Ten years ago, after more than 25 years of anti-development politics (and policies, many good, to control growth), the new group in town was the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City. SMCLC, acting as if no one had ever noticed traffic before, came up with the RIFT initiative in 2008, but SMCLC now takes a backseat as Residocracy drives the agenda. It’s telling that the three key leaders of Residocracy—spec mansion developer Armen Melkonians, North of Montana realtor Kate Bransfeld, and Tricia Crane, who formerly directed her activism to the School District’s special education programs—did not participate in any significant way in local development politics until three or four years ago.

It’s this combination of shifting goal posts and new players, not developer money, that causes the inevitable disconnect between anti-development politicians and their original anti-development base.

Thanks for reading.

Housers, united by LUVE

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So far I’ve avoided writing about Residocracy’s “Land Use Voter Empowerment Initiative” (LUVE), but now that the Santa Monica City Council will be discussing its merits in a few weeks (at the council’s July 12 meeting) I’ll stop avoiding the unavoidable.

What’s most interesting to me as a political observer is how Residocracy has, with LUVE, fractured the anti-development coalition that has been so successful over the years in setting the Santa Monica political agenda. This is most clearly evidenced by the fact that Council Members Kevin McKeown and Ted Winterer, two of the most articulate voices skeptical of development in Santa Monica (and two of the city’s most popular politicians), are both strongly opposed to LUVE.

Both McKeown and Winterer were strong supporters of the “Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic” (RIFT), the measure that the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City put on the ballot in 2008. But LUVE is quite different from RIFT.

RIFT only limited commercial development, which put RIFT squarely in the mainstream of anti-development politics in Santa Monica going back to 1981 when Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) first took power in Santa Monica and the City became, to borrow from historian William Fulton (The Reluctant Metropolis), the first city to challenge the Los Angeles growth machine. In fact, there were many of us who opposed RIFT only because of its bringing ballot box government into the planning process, not because of its goal of reducing commercial (particularly office) development.

While it is true that during the ’80s SMRR-dominated city councils enacted laws making it harder to build housing (and that during that time little housing was built), paradoxically the purpose of the laws was to save housing. The idea was to preserve existing apartments by making it more difficult and less profitable to tear them down to build condominiums. When the City was sued on the basis that these impediments to building housing violated state law, and lost, the City’s response was brilliant: it maintained, even strengthened, the obstacles to building in residential districts, but satisfied state law by making it easier to build housing in commercial districts (particularly downtown).

I well remember in the mid-’90s, when the City Council was considering the new downtown zoning, listening, at a meeting of the Ocean Park Community Organization, to SMRR leader Dennis Zane try to persuade the late anti-development leader Laurel Roennau why it was good to build housing downtown. (The strategy of protecting neighborhoods by focusing development in commercial zones later became the organizing principle for the LUCE updates to Santa Monica’s general plan.)

Indeed, housing, particularly affordable housing, has always been central to SMRR’s agenda, and has always been popular with Santa Monica voters. When SMRR first challenged the growth machine in the ’80s, one of its goals was to require office developers to pay for affordable housing. In 1990 voters passed Measure R, which requires that 30% of the housing in the city be affordable to low and moderate income households. In 1999 Santa Monica became one of the few cities where a majority of voters approved the building of affordable housing.

The big battles over development since the ’80s have been about commercial development, not housing. There was the Civic Center Plan, which went to the ballot in 1994, and where most of the controversy concerned the expansion of RAND’s offices and RAND’s entitlement to build 250,000 square feet of spec offices. Then there was Target in 2001, a 100% commercial project. Now we have fights over hotels that are essentially commercial developments even though they include housing in the form of condos. Until Residocracy came along, there was little controversy (and that primarily about design issues) over the housing built in Santa Monica since the new zoning in the ’90s, nearly all of which was built downtown.

The recent Paper Mate battle is another case in point: the problem with the project was its adding hundreds of thousands of square feet of offices. At the council meeting where the project was approved, Ted Winterer made a motion to approve it if the developer turned another (the fourth) of the project’s five buildings into housing; Tony Vazquez seconded the motion. If the developer had jumped up and said Yes!, the outcome could have been different. The project might have passed on a 6-1 vote; if so, SMRR would have been less likely to have supported Residocracy’s referendum to overturn the approval. (The vote might even have been 7-0; although McKeown had not said that he would have accepted the total size of the project, he, along with other many other opponents of the project, such as Zane, had said emphatically that what he wanted at the site was housing, not more offices.)

The proponents of LUVE know that they have a problem politically with the housing issue. In their statements and writings in support, they deny that LUVE would prevent housing from being built, and claim that LUVE would protect existing housing. The measure itself is drafted to present the illusion that it supports housing development: it exempts from the 32-foot height limit 100% affordable housing projects (but only up to 50 units, and with the demise of redevelopment it’s almost impossible to build 100% affordable projects anyway), and 77 properties identified as suitable sites for housing in the City’s general plan (but only up to a floor-to-area ratio (FAR) of 2.5, which would likely mean that a landowner or developer would instead opt for a by-right commercial development flying under the 32-foot limit).

Given this history, it shouldn’t be surprising to see this break between Residocracy, whose leaders have made clear their belief that Santa Monica does not need more housing, and others who are skeptical about growth, but who nonetheless know that we need to house the next generation. They read the papers, and nearly everyday there’s an article about California’s housing crisis.

Although I often quote the Freud phrase, “the narcissism of small differences,” to explain how people largely in agreement can nonetheless have bitter disputes over the iota’s of their disagreements, it’s dismayed me that in Santa Monica people who largely share the same communal values nonetheless continually find themselves in noisy and acrimonious disputes when it comes to development. (And I’ll include myself.)

But as I said, it shouldn’t be surprising that “housers” in Santa Monica have largely united against LUVE. It’s like the Hillary/Bernie fight. At times bitter, but as Paul Begala said, “nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars.”

Thanks for reading.

Sic transit transit center

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Well, the other shoe dropped on the Paper Mate site. Hines sold the property and now the old factory’s 200,000 square feet will become offices, with another level of parking being excavated under the existing parking lots.

Turns out that the paranoia of City Council Members Terry O’Day and Gleam Davis was warranted. During the signature gathering on the Residocracy petition they warned, in an op-ed for the Daily Press, that the alternative to the plan the City Council passed was not a better version of the plan, but a repurposing of the existing building as offices, which would mean thousands of car trips, no traffic mitigations, and none of the $32 million in community benefits that were included in the Hines plan.

I’m waiting to see how long it will take for someone to accuse the developers of being greedy because they aren’t building, across from the Bergamot Expo station, plazas, streets, sidewalks, etc., accessible to the public.

Not to mention the nearly 500 units of housing we’re not getting—housing that a lot of people who work in Santa Monica could use, housing that would keep them off the streets, so to speak, during commuting hours. But housing was not a plus for many people who opposed the project, and that explains why they’re happy with the new plan.

If the paranoia of O’Day and Davis turned out to be prescient, Council Member, now Mayor, Kevin McKeown turned out to be not so good in the prediction department. In an op-ed he wrote for the Daily Press, headlined “Calling for more housing from Hines,” he said that fears that Hines would “walk away” from the deal were unfounded; that “[s]uch a walk away hasn’t happened in decades in Santa Monica.” Give McKeown his due; he’s not backing down now that Hines did walk away. Last week he told Santa Monica Next that, “[t]his project [the new one], even as adaptive reuse, will disappoint many of us, but the original Hines proposal failed in even more massive (and likely more permanent) ways to make appropriate use of a challenging site.”

I hope Mayor McKeown is right about the new plan being less permanent, but I doubt it. The “Pen Factory,” as the development is being marketed, will be around for a long time. Not only because it will take a while to amortize the considerable investment in the remodel (notably for underground parking), but also because once the offices are up and running and paying some of the highest rents in the region, the likelihood that an owner would shut the place down for the several years it would take to build a new project is slim. Expect that the Pen Factory will be there for 20 or 30 years at a minimum.

But McKeown was right that the Hines plan should have had more housing and less offices. I’ve been saying that since before the City Council approved the LUCE, which enabled the Hines plan, in 2010. The plan was flawed, and it may sound like blaming the victim, but I blame Hines as much as I blame anyone else for the plan crashing and burning. The Residocracy folks can’t help themselves, they’re going to oppose development no matter what, but Hines had a choice. Hines was warned as far back as 2010, by its friends, that if it added more commercial space and commuter traffic to the corner of 26th and Olympic, it was going to be in trouble.

Hines could have pulled its own chestnuts out of the fire. During the Planning Commission debate over the plan, Commissioner Richard McKinnon, with then-commissioner Sue Himmelrich’s support, proposed a reasonable alternative with less office and more housing. At City Council, Ted Winterer proposed much the same thing, and Tony Vazquez agreed with him. If Hines, at the commission or even at the council, had jumped up and grabbed this offer, the plan could have been approved at the City Council on a 6-1, rather than 4-3, vote.

That could have had a huge impact, because I doubt that Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) would have joined Residocracy to oppose a plan that had had that much support among the SMRR-endorsed council members. Residocracy without SMRR might have been able to gather the signatures, but they wouldn’t have had much credibility looking ahead to November.

But then . . . maybe Hines didn’t care. The local Hines people put their heads, hearts and souls into the project, for six years, but headquarters back in Dallas probably figured they could find a willing buyer at a good price if the whole thing became just too complicated. Investors can’t wait forever. And Hines did follow the LUCE development standards, and they reduced their original project by 20 percent, so they legitimately thought they were playing fair. After the referendum, they had the right to feel that they’d never get a fair chance.

So, just how bad is the new project for Santa Monica? Pretty bad. But I’ll discuss how bad in a future post.

Thanks for reading.

Aside from Me and 10 Other Candidates, who Lost that City Council Election?

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In my previous post, I wrote about what interests in Santa Monica politics “won” when Tony Vazquez won the fourth seat on the Santa Monica City Council in last November’s election. If, as I maintained, the winners were Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), labor (as represented by Unite Here), and those who want to close Santa Monica Airport, who lost?

It may be logically impossible, but the losers were both developers and the anti-development faction.

Although I didn’t enjoy losing the election, to me it was at least positive for the city that Tony Vazquez won, because he was not a hero or villain for either the developers or the anti-development faction. Neither Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future (SMURF), the developer’s PAC, nor the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), the city’s leading anti-development group, endorsed Vazquez. Nor did Santa Monicans for Responsible Growth (SMRG), the anti-development PAC put together by the Huntley Hotel.

In fact, the election showed that development is not the deciding issue in Santa Monica that so many people seem to think is. The candidate who finished in fifth place, 1,100 votes behind Vazquez and almost 3,000 votes ahead of Richard McKinnon in sixth place, was Shari Davis. Although SMURF had endorsed her, her political base was in the education community and she had little history one way or another in Santa Monica land use politics.

Or consider that the two leading candidates, Ted Winterer and Terry O’Day, each received about the same number of votes (17,714 for Winterer and 17,122 for O’Day); both candidates had SMRR’s endorsement, but on the growth/anti-growth equation, they were portrayed as polar opposites, Winterer being seen as anti-development and O’Day as being pro-development. (I’m making no judgment here about the reality of their respective and comparative views on development, only on the perception.)

Now that we have the results of the new Residents Survey, none of this should be surprising. Santa Monicans have a broad understanding of the issues and appreciate how local government works. It shouldn’t be a shock that they elected two incumbents, one former council member, and one planning commissioner.

But “losing” the election meant different things for the developers and for those who oppose development.

The developers lost not because they failed to elect Shari Davis, who, as I said before had not participated much in development politics, but because their heavy-handed involvement in the election cost them in terms of credibility and trust. By spending nearly half a million dollars, much more than any candidates or other groups spent, they offended many voters and enraged the anti-development faction. Their campaign has made it harder now for Terry O’Day and Gleam Davis to vote in favor of any development, particularly any projects proposed by developers who contributed to the SMURF campaign, because the anti-development side will accuse them of being influenced by the campaign support.

On the other hand, the anti-development faction lost any claim that they represent the majority of residents, because the election showed how few voters cast their votes based upon an anti-development platform.

The anti-development faction, in the form of the SMCLC and SMRG, supported only two candidates in the election, Winterer and Planning Commissioner Richard McKinnon. McKinnon, by virtue of the support he received from SMRG, was the first non-SMRR candidate in Santa Monica history with anti-development support who received significant financial backing. He finished with 8,039 votes.

One educated guess I’ve heard is that in this election the endorsements from SMRR and Unite Here counted for about 10,000 votes. While Winterer and O’Day have support from different factions within SMRR who may have voted for one and not for the other (some SMRR voters are strongly anti-development, and some are what in Santa Monica passes for pro-development), it’s reasonable to estimate that they each picked up about 7,000 votes on their own.

Both Winterer and McKinnon have appeal beyond the anti-development faction, but from the numbers it’s reasonable to say that 7,000 is probably a good estimate of the number of voters (including SMRR voters who voted for Winterer and not for O’Day) who cast their vote primarily on the anti-development issue.

The total number of voters this year in Santa Monica was 47,945. Do the math – we’re talking 15 to 20 percent of voters. While no candidate this year came close to receiving the votes of a majority (because many voters don’t bother to vote in the local election, and because many who do vote don’t cast votes for all four seats), it’s clear that no one can win election to the council who runs exclusively or even primarily on an anti-development platform.

That being said, 7,000 votes is nothing to sneeze at, and in 2008 the anti-commercial development RIFT initiative received 18,410 votes, about 36% of the votes cast. That number is consistent with the finding in the Residents Survey that 43% of Santa Monicans consider the amount of development to be a serious issue. (Although I have to ask, who would say the amount of development isn’t a serious issue? Not me.)

Anti-development residents comprise an important voting bloc in Santa Monica. But the agenda for the majority of Santa Monica residents is much broader than any one issue. Can we keep things in perspective?

Thanks for reading.

About that City Council Election: Who Besides the Winning Candidates Won?

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I posted Sunday about the City’s newly released survey of residents, which showed that Santa Monicans are not only happy to live here, but also generally credit our city government with doing a good job tackling a long list of important tasks.

The survey results provide a good lens for analyzing last November’s City Council election. Yes, that election, the one in which I was a losing candidate. Naturally, since losing, I have been thinking about what the election might have “meant.”

From a winner/loser perspective, the election was always between candidates who were trying to win the fourth seat on the council, since no one handicapping the election expected the two incumbents, Terry O’Day and Gleam Davis, to lose, and everyone expected Ted Winterer, a popular Planning Commissioner, who had across-the-board support and was running for the third time, also to win.

The fact that most groups making endorsements endorsed these three candidates reflected the expectation that they would win: everyone likes to back winners.

As it happened, Tony Vazquez, who had served on the council in the ’90s, won the fourth seat. In his (well-run) campaign, Vazquez ran almost as if he were an incumbent up for reelection. That was an excellent strategy in a town where, as the survey shows, 92% of the residents love to live here. In Santa Monica, it’s good to be an incumbent — the Tea Party wouldn’t get much traction here.

But winning election in Santa Monica requires getting your name out to the voters in the midst of a national election, which is not easy. It’s not just a matter of sending out mailers, which get tossed in the recycling bin fast. It requires forming coalitions of voting blocs. Vazquez put together a winning coalition, and to understand the dynamic of the election one needs to understand his coalition.

The first element of that coalition was Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), which was by any measure the big winner in November. SMRR has dominated local politics for three decades, but this was the first time SMRR-endorsed candidates won every slot in the elections not only for City Council, but also for the School, Rent, and College Boards. SMRR also passed Measure GA, which changed the method for determining rent increases for rent-controlled apartments. The election proved that among the city’s happy voters, SMRR has the most trusted brand name.

But Vazquez’s victory was not preordained; not since 1981 had SMRR elected candidates to fill all the council seats being voted on in a regularly scheduled election. True, SMRR benefited from the fact that no non-SMRR candidates with name recognition equivalent to that of Herb Katz, Bob Holbrook, or Bobby Shriver were running, but electing all SMRR-endorsed candidates was nonetheless a remarkable (and unexpected) achievement.

While SMRR’s support was crucial, Vazquez could not have achieved his victory without the other elements of his coalition, notably the labor movement and the movement to close Santa Monica Airport.

In Santa Monica, Unite Here, the union that represents hotel workers, is the primary representative for labor. Unite Here endorsed the same four candidates as SMRR; Vazquez, for his part, has strong long-term labor credentials, and this wasn’t a surprise. Working with SMRR the union staffed an extensive door-to-door campaign and Vazquez did well in all the renter-dominated precincts.

It’s worth noting that of the organizations that traditionally endorse candidates in Santa Monica, only SMRR and Unite Here endorsed Vazquez. The police and city employee unions, and the education group Communities for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) did not. Neither did the PAC that local developers and hotels formed (“Santa Monicans United for a Responsible Future”), nor did the PAC that the Huntley Hotel formed to support anti-development candidates (“Santa Monicans for Responsible Growth”). Clearly, looking back over 30 years of elections for council, the SMRR/Labor victory was dramatic.

The third element of Vazquez’s winning coalition was the movement to close Santa Monica Airport, and it was also important. This election marked a turning point for the anti-airport groups, which became more directly involved in the election than they had been previously, reflecting the fact that with the FAA Settlement Agreement expiring in 2015, the airport is becoming a huge issue.

Vazquez was one of four candidates given the highest anti-airport rating by Community Against Santa Monica Airport Traffic (CASMAT). Shari Davis, the candidate who came in fifth, lost to Vazquez only by about 1100 votes and she outperformed Vazquez on the city’s north side. But Davis was perceived to be the candidate most supportive of maintaining the status quo at the airport, and she lost to Vazquez by 863 votes in Sunset Park and Ocean Park, the neighborhoods that are “in the flight-path.”

So, if SMRR, Unite Here, and the anti-airport movement were the winning interests in the election, what interests were the losers? I’ll consider that question in my next post, but hint: they were two sides of the same coin.

Thanks for reading.