New committee seeks to address public safety
When it comes to the growing number of homeless people in downtown Santa Monica, the business community plans to take matters into its own hands.
The Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce hopes a new committee of its members will help businesses help themselves when it comes to problems associated with transients and vagrants, who, chamber officials claim, disrupt daily life throughout the city by trespassing and aggressively panhandling.
A newly formed “public safety committee” will advocate on behalf of chamber members on city safety problems and help business owners organize themselves to address issues they have.
Before, the chamber relied on the city council to take action on homeless-related problems. The new committee will now take a more proactive approach, chamber members said.
“We are the business community,” said chamber executive director Kathy Dodson. “We need to look into how we can help solve this problem by ourselves as well.”
While the chamber has a homeless task force, it deals with raising funds for local social service organizations and less with policy issues, Dodson said.
The new committee will address complaints the chamber receives from tourists and residents about homeless-related circumstances, investigate what is done in other cities in the Los Angeles area and propose new policies that could be adopted locally.
Dodson said the group receives complaints on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
At the committee’s first official meeting Thursday, Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. addressed a crowd of about 30 business owners and managers. Afterwards, Butts also fielded questions from the group.
Butts answered questions from business owners who wanted to know how they could help police enforce the laws already on the books, especially on issues of trespassing and panhandling.
Butts also said he has asked the city council to allow the police department to hire new officers in anticipation of those who are retiring, a practice that has been endorsed by the chamber and other business organizations.
“I’m not saying we should increase the table of staffing,” Butts said. “I’m saying we should be allowed to hire to keep up with our attrition rate.”
While Santa Monica has a population of about 84,000, during the day as many as 350,000 people come to the city for work and recreation, Butts said. Hiring and training new police officers can take 12-18 months, leaving a substantial gap of time between when a full-time officer retires and when the officer can be replaced.
“We need to be at full strength at all times so we can deal with that larger daytime population,” he said.
Joel Schwartz, the city’s director of homeless services, said he encourages more residents and business owners to get involved, but he said they should do so by writing letters and making phone calls to city council members.
He said city organizations and groups should wait to see what action the city council takes at its Sept. 24 meeting, when it is scheduled to make recommendations on the city’s homeless services.
“Before we have people forming posses, I would encourage people to write letters and make phone calls and make their voices heard,” he said. “And wait and hear what the council’s response is.
“Until we hear that, I don’t understand why taking action independently would make sense,” he added.
But business owners at the chamber meeting said they have tried that approach in the past but now something more is needed.
“We feel there is a critical mass and something must be done,” said Dr. Michael Gruning, the chamber’s president-elect.
And according to commercial real estate broker Barbara Tenzer, previous lobbying of the city council has not achieved the results business interests are looking for.
“The council is politically tying the hands of (city attorney) Marsh Moutrie,” she said. “I think there is an emergency down there (on the Third Street Promenade). And (council members) aren’t treating it that way.”
Richard Eichenbaum, senior manager for Santa Monica Place, said he believes chamber members should organize into “neighborhood watch” type groups. That way businesses close to each other can look out for one another and report any inappropriate behavior to the police, he said.
Police could be informed when trespassing laws are being broken or aggressive panhandling is taking place near their group’s cluster of stores, he said.
“We can’t continue to depend on the city or the police to do everything,” he said. “It’s time that we as a business community start looking into what we can do to address the problem too.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 6, 2002. Read the original PDF.