Residentsoftroubledcommunityobtainpowerfulbacking
By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press
PICO NEIGHBORHOOD — After nearly a half century of waiting, residents here are closer than ever before to getting a neighborhood face on the City Council.
Maria Loya, a Pico neighborhood activist and member of the Mothers for Justice, became the first resident from Santa Monica’s most neglected community to gain the endorsement for City Council from the city’s most powerful political group. The largely Latino neighborhood has never had an elected representative on Santa Monica’s currently all-white City Council.
In addition to Loya, the Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR) on Sunday voted to endorse Pico residents Doug Willis and Ana Jara for the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees and the school board, respectively. SMRR has endorsed Willis and fellow Pico neighborhood resident and school board member Oscar de la Torre in recent years.
“Santa Monica has a terrible past when it comes to race,” de la Torre said.
The city’s original 1906 charter mandated district representatives and the direct election of the mayor. However, a 1946 charter reform set the current system in place, under which the seven council members are elected at-large. A city-commissioned study in 1992 found that the change was partially designed to exclude a growing black population in the Pico neighborhood from political power, according to news reports.
For years, the neighborhood — which runs north of the Santa Monica Freeway to Santa Monica Boulevard, south to Pico Boulevard and east from Lincoln Boulevard to Centinela Boulevard — has been plagued with shootings, drug dealing and gang activity. Although police have beefed up enforcement periodically in the area, little has been done politically to address the neighborhood’s problems.
Loya said her recent successes have been more than just victories for the long disenfranchised neighborhood where she lives.
“It’s a step forward for all working-class families, not only within the Pico neighborhood, but throughout Santa Monica,” Loya said. “It’s a step forward for increasing diversity on the council with having more women on the council, considering that 52 percent of the population in Santa Monica is women.
“I believe it’s important to have some ethnic diversity because the council is considered the face of this city, so it’s important to demonstrate that Santa Monica is a diverse city— not only ethnically, but also in terms of gender and economic status.”
SMRR also voted to include Patricia Hoffman in its four-candidate slate for City Council. If both Hoffman and Loya are elected, the council would have three female members for the first time since 1996. Councilwoman Pam O’Connor has been the only woman on the seven-member council since Asha Greenberg resigned from her post in 1998.
“There has long been an imbalance on the council,” said Denny Zane, a cofounder of SMRR and a co-chair of the group. “One woman in six years? That’s really quite inappropriate for a community with Santa Monica’s commitment to diversity and equity. It’s about time that somebody from the Pico neighborhood was represented as well.”
Loya attributed her success to her ability to build alliances with other members of the greater Santa Monica community, not just the Pico neighborhood. de la Torre, one of her strongest supporters, expressed hope with the neighborhood’s ability to mobilize.
“The only real solution to poor people’s plight is a political solution,” de la Torre said. “There are three things that have power in this country: Organized money, organized people and knowledge. Right now, in the Pico neighborhood, for the first time in a long time, we have organized people under intelligent leadership. If you combine those two, and then you wrap that around social justice, you have a winning formula. That’s why there is hope right now in our community.”
Loya’s success comes amidst controversy over the election tactic of “bullet voting,” where a candidate’s supporters only check their preferred candidate on a ballot that allows multiple selections in order to keep the number of votes competitors can receive as low as possible.
Backers of Councilman Mike Feinstein and Loya employed the tactic at Sunday’s SMRR convention, when 300 members of the group were given the opportunity to vote for four out of the five possible candidates — Loya, Feinstein, Hoffman, Councilman Ken Genser and Mayor Richard Bloom. Loya’s 43 bullet votes were enough to qualify her for an endorsement, but Feinstein’s 26 were not. Without the bullet votes, however, Loya still would have had more votes than Bloom in the first round of voting, where she netted the endorsement.
Zane, Bloom and Hoffman agreed that bullet voting didn’t change the ultimate outcome of the convention and pointed out that bullet voting has been used in previous conventions, especially more recent ones.
Loya and de la Torre attributed the votes to a group of supporters extremely intent on seeing Loya endorsed.
“I know what bullets are,” de la Torre said. “Bullets kill people in my neighborhood. I don’t call it bullet voting, I call it choice voting. I’m sure some people get upset at the bullet voting, but it comes with the territory. People who organize have to have a right. Bullet voting is the ultimate expression of patriotism and civic participation. That’s what makes this country great. That’s what makes the democratic process worth dying for.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 4, 2004. Read the original PDF.