By TED WINTERER
It used to be that one of the great pleasures of living in our town was to load up the kids and a picnic dinner, and drive to the Ocean Park beach on an early summer evening. Parking in the beach lots was free, as the city had made enough money from day trippers and sent the lot attendants home.
Thus I was dismayed to discover this past summer that City Hall had decided to charge the full daily rate in the beach lots until 7 p.m. Sure, one can park in the short-term lots for $1 an hour, but the pre-paid parking kiosks only dispense vouchers good until 7 p.m., which isn’t much help during the long days of summer, and past that time you can get a parking citation.
In a nutshell, City Hall, driven by its rapacious appetite for new revenues, decided that if you want to park at the beach to watch a summer sunset, it now costs you six bucks when it used to be free.
If I’m upset about this, what can I do? For starters, I can lament the many ways in which our local government is run like an insular big business, out of touch with the reasons we live here, when it should operate more like a not-for-profit conservator of our quality of life. I do this daily.
Then I can complain to my City Council. Maybe they can do something. Or maybe not.
So I contact my councilman with my beef. He often heeds residents, so long as their ambitions don’t conflict with the aspirations of Santa Monicans For Renters’ Rights, the police union, the Chamber of Commerce, and other power brokers which pay for the campaign flyers that keep him in office.
Now if the councilman and his council colleagues decide sunsets should be free, they can require the appropriate department head at City Hall to roll back the hours when fees are charged at the beach lot, right? Not so fast. The City Charter prohibits the City Council from giving orders to any subordinate of the City Manager, who is the de facto mayor of Santa Monica.
The City Council can direct the City Manager to make sunsets free, but if he or she really wants sunsets to cost six bucks the council’s instructions can be stonewalled or ignored. This happens all the time. For instance, the City Council told our City Manager 20 months ago to hire a noise enforcement officer and the position is still vacant.
The City Council’s only recourse if its will is disregarded is to fire the City Manager, an unlikely turn of events as the charter requires five of seven coun-cilmembers to vote to do so. In 1946, when the charter was written and city operations were modest in size, the idea was to prevent the City Council from politicizing municipal management. Now that our city government has grown so ponderous and often unresponsive, perhaps the balance of power has tipped to the City Manager. However, it’s unlikely we’ll see a ballot initiative to allow dismissal of the manager by a simple majority of four votes any time soon.
So much for government by the people and for the people. If we want free sunsets and City Hall doesn’t, you’d better start reaching for your wallet.
Fortunately, the City Council is on the cusp of hiring a new City Manager. You can with your thoughts about what traits should be sought in our new head of City Hall.
And perhaps in this civic dialogue there’s the chance for more modest reforms which would preclude the City Manager from operating with such impunity and make our government more responsive to the voters. These measures might include: • A contract with a fixed term, rather than one which runs indefinitely until the manager decides to move on. • Publicly discussed and disclosed performance, and bonus criteria and public input into the manager’s annual review. • A government oversight commission, akin to Congress’s GAO, to hear citizens’ concerns and recommend to the City Council ways to make City Hall more effective and responsive.
Finally, we need a manager who will climb down from the ivory tower of City Hall, go out into the community and meet with the people. It’s critical that our new manager understands our concerns and priorities, and assures they are implemented in city operations.
Someone suggested to me, only half in jest, that the new manager ought to be a surfer, someone who will nurture our beach town ambiance. It’s not such a crazy idea: A surfer would never charge for sunsets. (Ted Winterer is a writer who lives in Ocean Park. He)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 14, 2005. Read the original PDF.