By Richard Tuttle with serving 200 clients a day, that is approximately 145 people whose whereabouts we don’t know after 5 p.m. We don’t know if they’re going to be wandering around, being picked up (lots more traffic) or taking the bus. We’re already burdened with traffic from the Water Garden and SMCC. Enough already. 2. Criminal checks. No answer except that their client base doesn’t at this time have much, if any, criminal history. 3. They’re moving one or more current programs to the new center. No answer on why it had to be in Santa Monica except that they’re chartered to perform social service in Santa Monica. 4. Why should the Pico neighborhood, a struggling poor area of Santa Monica already bearing a disproportionate share of the social services and crime in Santa Monica, be further burdened? The director’s answer was that because of zoning they are limited in where they can look and the Pico neighborhood’s boundaries go all the way to Centinela.
“We’d love to go north of Montana but we’re just not allowed to,” was the response. 5. I understand that the salaries paid to the administration of the OPCC are quite generous. It’s strange that these people set up a foundation to do good work, suck money from the city, then pay themselves handsomely while ruining a struggling neighborhood. Something about that doesn’t smell quite right to me. The people running this foundation do not have to endure the vagrants defecating in their alleys or strewing trash all over their neighborhoods as they rummage for aluminum cans.
I feel that the Pico neighborhood is in a delicate balance. It’s fragile. It’s doing OK but it won’t take much to tip the scales. A big project such as OPCC, with a lot of unanswered questions concerning the impact of what they want to do, is too big of a chance to take with an area such as ours. At the very least, they’ve got to do a massive impact study and look at reality, not what they hope the state will do.
Interestingly enough, the woman who escorted me around to different people gave me her phone number, with a 454 prefix. I asked her if she lived in Santa Monica Canyon because I used to live there and had a 454 number. She said “Oh no, I live much further up.” There is something annoying about these well-heeled Palisades-Brentwood types doing their good works at our expense. Don’t get me wrong, my idea of hell would be living in the Palisades or North of Montana, but I don’t want to live in a skid row either.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 30, 2003. Read the original PDF.