Santa Monica has numerous problems that are abundantly obvious to anyone who cares to look and City leaders deserve all the criticism they get for their many failings. However, the State of the City was an unmitigated and unquestionable success this year and credit where credit is due.
Traditionally, the event is little more than an exercise in magical thinking where a parade of suited city leaders gloss over any unpleasant reality and perpetually promise success is just around the corner.
This year, the powers that be transitioned to an outdoor community festival at Reed Park improving the event in every possible way.
The attending crowd was vastly more diverse and representative of the city. Families with kids, City Hall gadflies, Department heads, local professionals and everyone in between were able to meander in and out of the event as they saw fit.
The reopening of the Miles Playhouse included a display of home photos from Mayor Lana Negrete highlighting decades of personal memories her family made in that very park. Those simple but powerful mementos anchored the event in the city’s lived history in a way no pre-written speech or faux leather chair on a stage ever could and really set the tone for the event.
Kids activities were a great centerpiece with a small T-Ball net and a corral for the more rambunctious runts to play some ball games. Those balls occasionally escaped their three-foot fence pulling blanket-sitting neighbors or speech watchers into those games.
And it was perfect. That casual interplay of interests, generations, and uses is what makes a place a community. It’s something that we rarely see in Santa Monica as siloed neighborhoods or interest-specific events draw specific audiences. In an interesting coincidence, that feeling was there in spades before the last Council meeting when the pro-parks activists rally included pizza, baseball teams and some pickup soccer on the City Hall lawn.
The inclusion of Santa Monica’s only brewery, Santa Monica Brew Works, was another great decision. Allowing grown adults to enjoy a home-town beer from one of the city’s best businesses is a shockingly recent idea at civic functions but if you have to sit through another speech by an elected official, it’s so much better with an adult beverage.
Santa Monica’s always vocal Complain About Virtually Everything (CAVER) community will no doubt find a reason to be mad about the event. It was in the wrong park or they didn't like the police presence or they weren’t given enough free stuff. But those are silly quibbles.
Is there room for improvement? Sure. There always is. Kids love heavy equipment and bringing out some cherry pickers to lift up the young’uns a few feet into the air is a guaranteed good time. The basketball court could have been incorporated with a shootout competition. I’d love to see the food vendors limited to Santa Monica businesses.
But these are nitpicking ideas around the margins. The big picture, turning a once staid and quite frankly stale event into a thriving community celebration is something the city should be justifiably proud of. Heck, just seeing Reed Park taken over by Santa Monicans instead of the normally entrenched homeless should give locals hope and hopefully resolve to push our leaders to enforce our anti-vagrancy laws and return our city to the levels of safety and cleanliness that will allow citizens, businesses and tourists to thrive again.