Pico puts four residents on ballot, but they all fail
(Editor’s note: This is the first article in a series examining how local neighborhoods voted in the Nov. 2 Santa Monica City Council election.)
By John Wood
Daily Press Staff Writer
PICO NEIGHBORHOOD — Bobby Shriver’s decisive victory at the polls Tuesday didn’t extend to every neighborhood in Santa Monica.
Though Shriver won more votes than any other City Council candidate in 90 percent of local voting precincts, he dropped to third place among voters living in the crime-plagued Pico neighborhood, precinct voting results show.
Beating Shriver at polls in the eastside neighborhood were activist Maria Loya, a Pico resident, and Mayor Richard Bloom. City Councilman Ken Genser and past school board president Patricia Hoffman tied for the fourth slot, according to an analysis of election returns from Pico’s five key voting precincts.
Citywide, Shriver led the polls with more than 20,000 votes, or nearly twice what he needed to win one of four open seats on the Santa Monica City Council. Incumbents Bloom, Genser and Herb Katz also won seats.
Shriver won all but eight of Santa Monica’s 66 precincts, usually by a wide margin. Those precincts where he didn’t win, he either tied or was beaten by a few votes. Not so in the Pico neighborhood, where Loya won four of the five key precincts, and fell just two votes behind in the fifth. In one of the precincts, Loya beat out Shriver by nearly 250 votes. In two others she led by 90 votes.
Loya, who placed seventh citywide with 10,010 votes, worked hard to become the first-ever Pico resident elected to the City Council. Her campaign phone banked for five weeks, dropped Pico-specific literature in the area, sent special mailers and tirelessly knocked on doors throughout the area, Loya said.
“We feel that there’s a good number of voters in the Pico neighborhood that in the past haven’t voted because they haven’t felt that their issues were being heard, so there’s a factor of disillusionment that we want to address,” she said on Thursday afternoon. “The whole point of the campaign was to inspire and motivate people... We feel that this campaign is part of a bigger movement. It’s a progression, where we’re getting more and more people involved.”
The Pico neighborhood is defined as the area east of Lincoln Boulevard and west of Centinela Avenue, south of Colorado Boulevard and north of Pico Boulevard. County voting precincts don’t match those boundaries exactly, and the precincts examined by the Daily Press focus on the heart of the troubled neighborhood.
Perhaps one reason Pico residents didn’t back Shriver as enthusiastically as other areas of town is because of the unique challenges the community faces, said Oscar de la Torre, a school board member who heads a youth center in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has more minorities and low-income residents than any other section of the city. Since 1989, it has seen 29 homicides.
Shriver, a California parks commissioner and nephew to the late John F. Kennedy, entered the local political fray when officials at City Hall demanded he and more than 100 other residents cut their hedges or face steep fines.
451,“People were concerned,” said de la Torre, who declined Shriver’s request for an endorsement. “Here we’re dealing with shootings and economic development, and basically marginalization. Those are the issues that propelled Maria Loya’s candidacy. On the other side, you have hedges propelling Bobby Shriver’s candidacy. That issue was not going to resonate with people in the community.”
Still, de la Torre said there were some commonalties with Shriver, adding “the issue of disrespect, of City Hall’s disconnect and outright neglect of residents, that issue did resonate with the Pico neighborhood.”
Four people from the Pico neighborhood ran for elected office this year and all of them failed to garner a seat. City Council candidate Kathryn Morea and Loya both ran for seats on the City Council. Pico resident Doug Willis ran for a seat on the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees and Ana M. Jara of the Pico neighborhood ran for a seat on the board of the Santa Monica-Malibu school district. Their losses leave de la Torre as the only Pico resident on Santa Monica’s three main governing boards.
“The next step (for Pico), to me, is to go and get from the people there their ideas,” Shriver said. “They have their own police thing there already, but they want more community-based policing. I asked them at one point if they’d like (City Manager) Ms. McCarthy to come down there every six weeks. They said ‘yes.’ I think that’s a good idea.”
Shriver sounded surprised he placed third in votes from the Pico neighborhood, saying he canvassed there heavily and held five meet-and-greet events. Asked if he thinks the Pico neighborhood historically has been overlooked by City Hall, Shriver said, “I don’t like the question. The real question is what to do in the future, and I think people down there have a lot of good ideas and they should be acted on. What happened in the past nobody can do anything about. We can only look to the future.”
Maria Loya
Former candidate for City Council
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If Pico decided...
The Pico neighborhood has never had a representative on the City Council. Here’s how the votes added up in the troubled eastside neighborhood:
Maria Loya 1,120
Richard Bloom 899
Bobby Shriver 875
Ken Genser 712
Patricia Hoffman 712
Herb Katz 530
Michael Feinstein 415
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 5, 2004. Read the original PDF.