This past week, Q-line asked: Should City Council accept SMC’s offer to finance the building of Airport Park Here are your responses: ✆ “If there was ever a high-priced, troublesome entity, it is the Santa Monica school district. The district creates a constant stirring. It is my suggestion that the students use beach parking during the winter months when the lots are mostly empty. The lots south of the pier should easily serve their needs.” ✆ “Santa Monica College has to have more parking. There’s just no place to park, it’s all full of cars — so it’s sort of a Yogi Bear situation there. But the residents in the area say they don’t like it because the streets are full of student cars, but they have to have restrictive parking and so the solution would be to build a big parking structure in the Santa Monica Airport area and shuttle them in. Instead of getting a park, just have more parking. A park will just be taken over by the bums because the Santa Monica City Council will let the bums take it over and this way a parking structure would actually be useful to somebody instead of being useful just to the bums.” ✆ “The first thing I’d say was what they shouldn’t do is continue passing laws restricting people’s freedoms. For example: The beach and the park — you can’t smoke, and things like that. And then doing stuff or passing laws that make people clean out the alley ways from people who are able to go in and out of the alley ways and scream and shout and make all sorts of loud noises.” ✆ “I believe truly that we can build the parking structure underneath the park. There’s no reason for it not to occur. We think too much with horizontal building in Santa Monica as it is. We need to focus more on vertical building to create both a balance between the park, the airport, and the Santa Monica College students who depend on the area for parking. Parking is horrendous.” ✆ “Grab the money and run. This is terrific income that nobody predicted. This money could be utilized for other parks — for taking care of the park at 14th and Colorado, formerly the Fisher building. Great improvements, and keep it in — what would be cool — a park fund. Definitely allow Santa Monica College to utilize parking space underneath the park so it can shuttle students from its airport campus to the main campus on Pico. This is a win-win situation.” ✆ “Just one word to say: Resign.” ✆ “The City Council should see that Santa Monica College covers every cent of the cost. And that’s what the agreement should be.” ✆ “SMC is like a huge black hole sucking in taxpayer money. Another $32 million, and for what? Big is not necessarily better. Between the school district and SMC over the last 15 years, they have scammed the taxpayers out of $400 million. Are we better off educationally? For that kind of money, every student in this city should be able to navigate and pilot Starship Enterprise. Instead, we have a lot of $80,000 a year plus bureaucrats, just like that at City Hall — which is the biggest spender of all. As Mel Brooks said in his movie ‘Blazing Saddles,’ ‘We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs’ Are we better off now then we were 25 years ago? I think not.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 9, 2005. Read the original PDF.