This past week, Q-line asked: “How can City Hall best understand and represent the will of citizens in formulating development plans for the future of Santa Monica?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “City Hall can best understand and represent the will of the citizens by simply listening and heeding. How many ways do we citizens have to say things and express our will and concerns? The city is so overdeveloped now there isn’t much room for more development but then these devious individuals could always find a way.” ✆ “The best understanding that can represent the will of the citizens in formulating development plans for the future of Santa Monica should be: No. 1, get rid of the City Council. Why we have such people there I do not understand. No. 2, lets get rid of all the carpet stores on the Promenade and put back stores that we have had: Penny’s, Woolworth’s, and also lets have a Target store. The will of the people was a Target store but your lousy City Council, including Feinstein, voted against it. Why that City Council did that, they should have something examined which is not only their head.” ✆ “City Council and the inept staffs at City Hall must change. They are all arrogant and all ignorant and must start listening to the people of Santa Monica. For as long as I can remember the will of the people of Santa Monica has long been ignored. City Hall brings in bottom class and money-broke people from East LA and South Central LA and parks them in brand new affordable housing Community Corp. and others own. City Hall wake up. You’ve ruined the city. It’s too late to do a 180 but at least try to make a dent in the problem. Can’t Santa Monica seniors, for example, be given the affordable housing instead of nonresident, young, indigent families and criminals with long rap sheets?” ✆ “All this infuriating rhetoric that goes on and on ad nauseam in Santa Monica is sound and fury that produces nothing and it will continue until we get rid of the current city administration and start all over with people who care and know what they are doing and who listen to the will of the people, the citizens, the first time it is expressed. Not over, over, and over with their deaf, uncaring ears.” ✆ “The only way the city of Santa Monica would respond to what the residents want is to replace all the politicians in City Hall, every single one of them. All they do is listen to the developers, they do what the developers want, they worry about the bums, they worry about the big businesses. They don’t worry about the residents or the small businesses. They’re the ones that matter, not the bums or the big businesses or the developers. So replace all of the City Council, throw them all out, tar and feather them, run them out of town on a rail like they used to do in the old days and take a few bums with them.” ✆ “The city of Santa Monica, particularly those nitwit numskulls on the City Council just put up any ugly monstrosity like the new library instead of leaving the lovely older one and they just do what suits them and I certainly believe they should listen to the will of the people here but it seems like they don’t concerning everything including parking.” ✆ “City Hall could look to the largest undeveloped parcel that will be in the general plan which will be the Santa Monica Airport property once the lease runs out under the 1984 agreement with the FAA as part of the general plan consideration. I also think City Hall should collect comments from the residents over the whole city.” ✆ “They can do this by listening to the residents. The overwhelming majority of us want modest, limited growth that maintains the existing building heights. The voters
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 8, 2005. Read the original PDF.