The city held another one of its “Community Voices” events last Saturday at John Adams Middle School. Attendees were told they would be addressing various social issues within the community.
High on the list were the homeless, affordable housing, senior services and a host of subjects near and dear to the city’s heart. What most participants expected to be a thought-provoking and spirited town hall meeting became a series of theatrical acting exercises, role playing and sensitivity training before it became the usual public relations event essentially designed to curry public favor with the city’s social services agenda.
I guess some people enjoyed the role playing and psychological mumbo-jumbo, but many others thought it all was a waste of energy and severely limited time for meaningful public input on important issues.
So what else is new? Most city meetings that “invite public input” end up being a rant session where those upset with the status quo can vent and let off steam after which it’s still business as usual.
“We gave you an opportunity to be heard,” they’ll tell you. But nothing changes. Most neighborhood and community meetings seem to sell the city point of view as opposed to finding out what the people want.
Neighborhood meetings on traffic calming, for example, are nothing more than an opportunity to convince you that all those speed bumps, medians and traffic circles are a good idea. A community forum a couple years ago on homeless issues became one big propaganda event designed to promote even more homeless services.
Sometimes, when it comes to dealing with issues, one has to grab the bull by the horns. Take John Quigley, for example.
John Quigley is the man who had been sitting in an old oak tree in Stephenson Ranch since early November. He was trying to save a 400-year-old oak tree from a developer’s bulldozer. He has become the stuff of legends.
It all started when developer John Laing Homes got approval to build some 20,000 homes in Santa Clarita. The developer and Los Angeles County agreed that an existing road should be widened for access to the mega-development. However, the old oak tree was in the way.
Because the canyon wasn’t wide enough to accommodate both the tree and four lanes of traffic, the oak, dubbed “Old Glory,” was earmarked for the woodsman’s chainsaw — until John Quigley climbed into its branches and dared them to cut it down.
This tale has all the ingredients of a classic movie script. There’s the good guy in the white hat: John Quigley. Then there are the bad guys in the black hats: Developer John Laing Homes and L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, in whose jurisdiction the condemned tree grows.
Mike “the developer’s best friend” Antonovich wouldn’t step in to save the tree paving the way (no pun intended) for the inevitable showdown with the law. Last weekend, L.A. County Fire and Sheriff’s deputies removed Quigley from the tree and his appeals to the courts were denied.
Proving that big developers aren’t totally evil, John Laing Homes promised to relocate the tree out of harm’s way. Conservationists say that the tree won’t survive the move. Only time will tell whether “Old Glory” will live or succumb.
John Laing Homes’ image still comes off as rapacious, greedy and uncaring while Antonovich cemented his reputation of being an “enemy of the Earth.”
Where’s the environmental movement? I’ve followed this story very closely, and I never saw news of support from the Green Party or the Sierra Club.
This seemed like a natural cause for Greenpeace, but, alas, they kept a low or no profile, too.
I wouldn’t expect any of our local environmentalists to become involved. Perhaps our Green councilmen, Messrs. McKeown and Feinstein, weren’t interested because this was all happening in Canyon Country or maybe because there were no hotel workers involved.
I can’t help but thinking that if this were occurring here, both Santa Monicans and our city government would have insisted the tree stay put. We’d have a landmark oak tree and a traffic island, thus satisfying two fervent obsessions of our city politicians — landmarks and traffic calming. (Bill Bauer is a longtime Santa Monica resident and freelance writer.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 17, 2003. Read the original PDF.