This past week, Q-line asked: “What is the biggest issue facing Santa Monica and how should we deal with it?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “As a tenant at the now-at-risk Territon Apartments on San Vicente, there are two urgent resolutions that I want the City Council to pursue at the first of the year. Number one: The City Council’s fixation with finding and building affordable apartments in the downtown and Pico areas must be revisited. There are people who are very much in jeopardy of losing their apartments north of Wilshire. While the Territon apartments may or may not be preserved, they might not be preserved as rentals. We understand that if the building is landmarked, the new owner who is now in escrow will ultimately convert the apartments to condos. Which means that whether we are tenants who have been here short time or in the case of a very elderly woman who participates in the City Council — who is, I estimate, well into her 80s — we will all be out on the street. The fate of the elderly woman is going to be very bleak because she will probably end up in a more expensive hotel situation. We would also urge the City Council to revisit their ordinance where city employees are able to destroy records after three years. In trying to research things about the Territon apartments, we have discovered that vital documents are missing and/or are being concealed by city employees taking advantage of three-year document destruction ordinance.” ✆ “Mainly the council members should resolve to spend less time focusing on their navels and hedges, and more on taking IQ enhancement courses. Much good can come from that. Two quick examples: their dim-witted imperial decision forcing toxic arsenic-containing fluoride chemicals on this entire community could be reversed. Secondly, hundreds of harmless ground squirrels on the Palisades slopes could be rescued from extermination resulting from another pending dumb decision by the council majority. We need a resolution for more squirrels in the park and fewer on the council.” ✆ “We want the citizens to change. We demand to stop building shelters for the transients. The freeloaders are using us as their servants to clean up after them. They are crashing our homes and using our city streets as a dumpster. Get them off the streets.” ✆ “Whenever a conflict arises that concerns pedestrians. They council should lean toward making the pedestrians happy, not the other party.” ✆ “The biggest challenge Santa Monica faces is the escalating indigent population. The city administration needs to realize that we as a community cannot absorb and care for all these sick, mental-defectives, alcoholics and drug-addicts. There needs to be a halt of funding to these profiteering, useless, homeless programs and the money better spent reopening and building facilities for them away from this center of our lives, which is now a horror.” ✆ “Get the bums, professional beggars, freeloaders, drunks, and drug addicts out of the city and clean up the filth they leave behind.” ✆ “The position of our new city manager and homeless czar reminds me of a statement the late Tom Bradley made when he was first elected to the seat of city mayor. Mayor Bradley stated that he ‘got the job of mayor because no one else wanted the job.’ Our new city manager will simply plot along and cower to the power structure of Santa Monica, which is awash in avarice. Our new homeless czar will simply fail unless he can find a solution to the main cause of homelessness, that cause being acute, stumbled-down alcoholism.” ✆ “(The transients) are not called residentially-challenged. That is the politically correct term. They are bums. Vagrants, transients, drunkards. That is the main problem of the city. You could probably get more businesses and increase the tax base if it weren’t for all the bums. They defecate in the alleys and make everything a mess. They go ranting around, yelling and screaming at who knows what. Some of these people are insane and should be put in mental hospitals and cured. The rest of them should be thrown in jails where they belong. In about 30 days the optimism of the new year will wear off and the city will go back to the way it always is, filled with bums.” ✆ “We have a problem in this country. This country is getting fatter, dumber and lazier. People want to go to places like Target and Costco and buy big fat boxes of potato chips and large cartons of chicken wings. When I heard that the mayor thinks that we want to put a Target in Santa Monica, and that it is a priority, I think he has got his priorities backwards. He’d contributing to the fattening and dumbing down of America right here in Santa Monica. He is obviously not listening to the wants and needs of Santa Monicans. When I heard that, I stood up in a popular restaurant and asked everyone the question. They all laughed and thought it was the most ludicrous thing they’d heard, putting a Target in Santa Monica.” ✆ “With even councilman Ken Genser admitting that the very place he lives on San Vicente Boulevard is in serious risk of demolition, the City Council must immediately address the progressing, speculative frenzy of flipping apartment building properties north of Wilshire Boulevard. The City Council fixates over apartment building construction in the downtown area, yet they are turning a blind eye to the prospective wipe out of middle class apartment buildings north of Wilshire as real estate vultures narrow in on the kill. We want to remind Ken Genser and his colleagues that this building could have been acquired by the Community Corporation for $6 to $7 million as recently as last year. Now that building is in escrow for $12 million.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 7, 2006. Read the original PDF.