By Bill Bauer

As expected last Tuesday night, City Council voted to permanently exempt 100 percent affordable housing of 50 units or less from all development review by the Planning Commission and/or Conditional Use Permits. This means that the largest and potentially most egregious residential buildings permitted can be built in the city’s multifamily neighborhoods and a couple of commercial districts, including Main Street, without any enforceable public review whatsoever.

Now, developers of public housing can build larger and uglier buildings with more units, greater massing, increased density, reduced setbacks and less on-site parking than developers of market-rate housing unabated, making City Council’s usurpation of our right to speak even more reprehensible.

The latest decree from the social engineers in City Hall is that citizens of Santa Monica must permanently “butt out” when it comes to public housing projects in multifamily neighborhoods. It’s just the latest in a series of moves wherein Santa Monica for Renters’ Rights’ socially driven agenda runs roughshod over the wishes, desires and rights of residents.

Politically, Santa Monica government is an oligarchy — defined as “government by a few.” Our “few” are a couple dozen persons in the powerful SMRR political organization. They include elected politicians who are on and control City Council, the school board, College Board of Trustees and numerous municipal boards and commissions. This SMRR-topia cabal extends to below-the-radar members on SMRR’s steering committee, former mayors and council persons, idealists, “enlightened” thinkers and political strategists.

For the record, SMRR council persons Kevin McKeown, Ken Genser and Pam O’Connor, and Mayor Richard Bloom voted last week to eliminate public review. Robert Holbrook and Bobby Shriver (both unaffiliated with SMRR) opposed it. Non-SMRR, Mayor Pro-Tem Herb Katz was absent, however, he previously voted with the majority to advance the proposal for Tuesday’s second reading and passage.

Aggressive advancement of SMRR’s public housing and homeless agenda is nothing new because the organization has reigned supreme for nearly 30 years.

In September 1994, City Council approved a set of ordinances relating to dealing with the “homeless problem.” Ordinance 2.69.010 (f) mandated that increases in expenditures relating to homeless services be prevented and, wherever feasible, reduced. The ordinance was authored by City Attorney Marsha Moutrie. Amazingly, a few years later, she set aside her own ordinance by ruling that City Council cannot restrict how future councils determine spending.

The 1994 Public Safety Act was a result of extensive community input resulting from growing citywide dissatisfaction with a vagrant population estimated at 1,000 a day and growing. After the cap on homeless services was lifted, spending and attendant programs dramatically increased. The SMRR cabal had decreed that helping the world’s vagrants and transients could continue and expand, despite complaints from the general public. We now have an estimated 2,800 vagrants on our streets on any given day.

Community Corporation of Santa Monica is the city’s largest public housing landlord. It should come as no surprise that Council’s decision Tuesday night protected CCSM, a city-affilliated corporation and the darling of the SMRR politburo. It allows CCSM and other favored public housing providers to develop — impervious to public opinion or legal review.

The cabal thwarts the will of the people by manipulating the rulemaking process and by eliminating public input — especially on their issues. Recently, we’re even being further removed from the governing process as more and more developments are allowed to be administratively approved. Or, when they do go through review such as Architectural Review Board, staff is permitted to override decisions and make a larger percentage of changes to Board-approved design

elements.

Last Tuesday, City Council instructed staff to make suggestions on expanding homeless housing, enlisting regional support, upgrading databases that track homeless services and increasing public education (public relations) among others. With the feverish solicitation of grants from federal, state and county sources, homeless services have become a major undertaking here in Santa Monica and a model of SMRR-topia thinking.

But, what about us? With public housing, the concerns range from size of buildings, traffic and overcrowded schools to potential increases in criminal activity. With vagrants, public urination and defecation, criminal and antisocial activity and public intoxication are issues that are equally ignored. Lastly, there’s always public relations to play up the SMRR-topia’s successes and demonize those of us who say they’re wrong and their priorities are ass-backwards.

Bill Bauer can be reached at bilbau@aol.com.