Last Thursday night, the Third Street Promenade was bustling with people, providing visible evidence of the progress being reported at the Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. (DTSM) board meeting.
“What I see anecdotally with my own two eyes is there is just a lot of people enjoying the late summer here,” said Debbie Lee, the CEO of DTSM, who oversaw a productive meeting that included a report on the future of the Promenade, the swearing in of Council-appointed board members, executive elections, and committee restructuring.
Lee has said she wants to make DTSM a more data-driven organization, and she started the meeting with the latest visitor numbers. According to Lee, there were 3.3 million visits downtown during the period of World Cup events, from June 11 to July 19, which represents a 26% increase over the same time period in 2025. The precise correlation with the sports events wasn’t clear, since the data wasn’t very specific. There was also a 20% increase in visits in August, when the World Cup was long over, but Lee described that as a residual effect.
“I think after the World Cup people were kind of buzzing,” she said of the response from visitors, including locals. “A lot of people came down here, not sure what to expect.” She suggested they liked what they found.
After years of diminished foot traffic, any improvement is clearly welcome, though no one would claim that the Promenade has returned to its heyday. But that’s not the goal according to Peter James, the deputy city manager and DTSM board member, who delivered a preliminary presentation of a plan to reimagine the pedestrian thoroughfare. “We don’t want to bring the Promenade back, we want to bring it forward,” James said.
He praised the Promenade’s history but said it was “designed for an era that doesn’t exist anymore,” referring to the pavement style, dinosaur sculptures and reliance on retail businesses. “We talk about reinvention, not restoration,” he said as he shared the city’s goal for the Promenade to once again be a financial engine and community centerpiece.
Several board members expressed apprehension about the city potentially excluding DTSM and other stakeholders, including residents, from the planning process, and board members Gleam Davis and John Warfel emphasized the need to balance big-picture concepts with attention to nuts-and-bolts details, such as working elevators in the parking structures.
“Infrastructure is not sexy,” Davis said, before affirming its importance.
The internal infrastructure of DTSM was the subject of much of the remainder of the meeting. On September 8, the Council voted to reappoint board members Sean Besser and Hodge Patterson, who had only served one year since the Council’s unprecedented purge of the previous board. Also appointed at that time was Judy Kruger, the former CEO of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, but the Council voted this month to replace her with Michael Dubin. All three of the newly appointed board members were sworn into office.
After two years as chair, Michele Aronson made it clear she wished to step down, but she was asked to stay on the executive committee as Treasurer. Joshua Gilman was unanimously elected as the new chair, and Besser was also unanimously elected as Secretary. They will be joined on the executive committee by three vice chairs: Davis, Patterson, and Warfel.
Additionally, the board voted to replace the two longstanding committees on placemaking and marketing with three task forces, which would focus on major events (including the Olympics), the next generation of the Promenade, and the upcoming 20-year renewal of DTSM’s business assessment district. The task forces, unlike the committees, will be informal bodies that are not subject to Brown Act or quorum requirements. Therefore, they will not be able to take any actions of their own other than making recommendations to the full board.