Almost everyone I talk to in Santa Monica just shakes their head in disbelief when the subject of city government, the City Council or related topics come up.
Many Santa Monicans have horror stories about dealing with City Hall. Others in the community are unhappy and seriously disenfranchised. Problems such as homelessness, traffic, parking and other issues never get resolved. And complaints get louder and louder.
Some of you might be thinking, “How do these people keep getting reelected if they’re doing such a bad job?”
One of the reasons that government does not serve the majority of the community is because this is a “one-party town” and one organization has ruled the roost for 26 years.
Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights is a well organized, well financed and well entrenched political machine. Last election, I ran into neighbor after neighbor — renters who were going to vote the SMRR ticket because mailers and flyers told them who and how to vote. There are about 30,000-plus renters eligible to vote the “party line.”
Because the local news media, including four daily and weekly newspapers and one online news service, only reaches a small part of the total population, more than half of the people are not up on issues, haven’t a clue, or don’t care about what’s going on.
Even in local elections, money talks. If you can mail a couple of glossy, color flyers to voters (at about $40,000-plus per mailing), you can get your word out. That’s how candidates who’ve helped gridlock streets and perpetuated our vagrant population can claim “I’ve helped deal with the homeless problem” and “I’ll get traffic moving again” and still receive 15,000 or more votes. The average voter has no idea what an incumbent’s record really is.
A friend recently said to me, “This City Council has never supported a project that I wanted, or voted for anything I supported.”
The majority of our elected officials have their own agenda. Self-interests pro-pel the school board, as well as the City Council. Nowhere is this more true than in the educational community. Two years ago, school supporters with Community for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) begged City Hall to increase its subsidy of the school district. When the City Council balked and refused to take action, CEPS organizers forced the issue.
They held meetings, twisted arms and thousands of good people spent hundreds of thousands of hours walking streets and circulated petitions for a ballot measure that would bypass the City Council and change the city charter to mandate municipal support for schools.
The City Manager struck an agreement that resolved the issue. Just a few short months later, those same council persons up for reelection — Ken Genser, Richard Bloom and Herb Katz — were enthusiastically endorsed by the very same CEPS group that had bitterly denounced their lack of support for public education months earlier.
Voters didn’t know that CEPS was equally controlled by SMRR, whose co-chair, Denny Zane, was a CEPS leader. CEPS also was run by members of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee.
CEPS endorsed eight candidates for four City Council seats last year. The entire SMRR slate, including councilmen Bloom and Genser, as well as the entire Chamber PAC’s slate, including Katz and a candidate who had refused to sign the CEPS pledge of support for schools, all received their endorsement.
There is no organized opposition to the SMRR machine. While business groups, including Casa del Mar and Shutters hotel management and members of the Chamber PAC are capable of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, they’ve failed to connect with residents while offending “real” community activists.
Their inability to build bridges, connect with citizens and shed their mantra as a secretive, non-inclusive, anti-renter, special interest group has rendered them ineffective at mounting a serious challenge to SMRR for the hearts and minds of most voters — so far.
SMRR leaders know that in the end they’ll prevail. That’s why politicians backed by SMRR don’t have to answer to us or be accountable to anyone, except the SMRR steering committee.
So, onward with their own utopian agenda of a new society built on social justice, with affordable housing and mass transit for all.
Karl Marx would love it. (Bill Bauer, a Santa Monica resident, is currently volunteering his services for the Red Cross in the Gulf region.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 10, 2005. Read the original PDF.