That smell residents may have gotten a whiff of this week wasn’t the Proposition Y after-party, but the air of complacency. Like the old Palmolive dish soap commercial used to state: “You’re soaking in it.”
For all the campaign rhetoric over the past several months; for all the money spent on what had become a surprisingly aggressive, and oftentimes nasty little campaign; for all the vitriol thrown at candidates from both voters and one another, residents decided in the end that things, well, just aren’t so bad.
Just one incumbent — the school board’s Shane McLoud — was bounced from office amid Tuesday’s elections, and that’s also including races for City Council, the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees and the Rent Control Board. And it wasn’t for a lack of competition. In the council race alone, newcomers such as Terry O’Day, Gleam Davis and Jenna Linnekens would seem to have a future place of prominence in city government ... just not now.
With each of those candidates sent back to get a bit more seasoning, voters decided the old guard is just all right by them.
And while it would be tempting to attribute the incumbent sweep to name familiarity and voter apathy, the handful of measures on this year’s ballot prove quite telling about constituent wants and needs:
More taxes to clean the city’s beaches and water? Check.
More taxes to repair school infrastructure? Check.
More accountability for department heads? Check.
Easing restrictions placed on elected officials to guard against corruption? Nuh-uh.
There is an old colloquialism that states: If you always do what you always did, then you’ll always have what you always had. Maybe in Santa Monica, where the sun shines year-round, where individual expression is embraced, and where most complaints derive from a want of others to live and work here too, then the same ol’, same ol’ isn’t such a bad thing.
Indeed, things here can be so chill that we enact legislation to allow us to get our ganja on.
