This past week, Q-line asked: “What kind of qualities and abilities would you like to see in the next City Manager?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “Since the people who already run Santa Monica are the ones who will interview and select the new city manager, it is doomed from the outset. What we will get is more inefficiency and self-serving action with the usual deaf ear to the real needs of the community and will of the citizens.” ✆ “The main quality of the new City Manager will be to have the agility and care and whip equipment of a lion trainer. They will need it.” ✆ “Enumerating what we as citizens would like to see in the new City Manager is pointless. He or she must first be able to speak with forked tongue and smile all the while. Second, be a total ‘yes’ man or woman to the incumbents, and God forbid the person should have a mind of their own, or even a functioning mind.” ✆ “For City Manager they should get someone who actually lives in Santa Monica and knows what the city used to be like before the idiots got in charge and ruined it. So they need somebody who will listen to the people of the city, not the big chains, not the idiots on City Council, and not the bum advocates. We don’t need those people here, get rid of them. What they should have is someone who actually has a brain and knows how to use it. So again, that leaves out everyone on the City Council, as well as the people in the Bush administration.” ✆ “I can almost guarantee the next City Manager will be a woman, probably from a progressive state back east. She will have a string of letters behind her name signifying her brainwashed educational ability to further destroy this town with her elitist vision of urban planning. Have you ever noticed how many women work for City Hall? The Mayor, the City Attorney, the City Manager, the City Clerk and every time your paper quotes someone from some patronage, taxpayer-subsidized City Hall department, it’s a woman. Smells like affirmative action to me. A strong City Manager would need to deal with this and recent plans for building a six-story apartment building next to the post office. Also, over-the-hill actors with minuscule donations to start taxpayer funding of supposed cultural theaters for the elites in our time. Do you notice the City Council seems like old women making decisions? We need a visionary. I would cast my four votes for Denny Zane. Who could be better, a father in this town to low-income housing, affirmative action, extorting money for the school district, traffic problems, parking problems, bicycle riding. Mr. Zane could bring millions into this town by advocating his college passion of a nude beach. We could become the Riviera of the Pacific. Thousands of progressives would travel to Santa Monica to spend money and shed their clothes. Even our City Council could go to the beach for cultural enrichment. Yes, Mr. Zane could lead us backward into the future allowing us to contemplate our shadows, thinking they represent the light of the future rather than the darkness of socialist failures.” ✆ “I think that the job of City Manager should go to a very well qualified individual from an Ivy League college or maybe from a California state college. Somebody who thinks about what they are doing unlike most of the (expletive) that sit on the City Council now.” ✆ “For City Manager I would like somebody who cares about the quality of life of the people who live here. Not some who wants to just build, build, build and make more and more traffic and ruin it for everybody that’s here already.” ✆ “In my opinion, anyone with any ability or quality would not be in the city of Santa Monica to run it. Santa Monica, in my opinion, has its own set of rules and regulations for everything. So it’s quite a moot point.” ✆ “The candidate should be uncorrupt-able, honorable and honest. The person must have the ability to say ‘no’ to special interest groups, ‘no’ to personal interests, ‘no’ to some decisions made by some of the corrupt members of the City Council and you know who you are. A ‘yes’ would be in order only to make Santa Monica a better place to live.” ✆ “It should be somebody who believes in what Henry David Thoreau once wrote which was ‘a government that governs best, governs least.’ We need somebody in Santa Monica that believes that small government is better, that less regulation is better and that the community can take care of itself.” ✆ “What I would like to see is a City Manager who works and responds more to the residents as opposed to the staff departments and supporting the staffs and creating their own bureaucratic empires. One way for the City Manager to know what the residents want is to simply read the letters and the editorials in the Santa Monica Daily Press. That way they can get a good idea on what the residents want in terms of dealing with the chronic homeless problems, gang problems, over development, fiscal responsibility, conflict of interest, and issues with the City Council. So it’s not so complicated that the City Manager can’t figure out what the residents want, and the residents are supposedly who the City Manager works for.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 15, 2005. Read the original PDF.