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# Residents relay the burrs in their saddles
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/residents-relay-the-burrs-in-their-saddles/
- Published: 2005-01-15T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T06:00:49.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Promenade, #archive-import, Homeless

This past week, Q-line asked: What’s on your mind in this city by the sea?

> “There are a lot of things in this city that need remedying. Chief among them is the resolution of the out of control vagrancy, homeless problem. Everything else depends on this. We need a clean, safe, attractive city again.” — TIMES BY LLOYD GARVER ✆

Here are your responses: ✆ “I am vehemently against forced medication of our population via fluoridation. There are no benefits to fluoridation. We actually pay the phosphate fertilizer industry to take their waste materials. Only big business wins with fluoridation, not our children or us.” ✆ “Unfortunately, I see, well I’ve known, that the people of Santa Monica lazily reelected the same crooks that were there before. Case in point, (City Councilman) Herb Katz and his special interest. And I hear that Bobby Shriver says that... he is leaving it up to him (Katz) if he has any integrity to proceed. When did the word “integrity” enter the world of politics? I’m just very sad, too, because each one of those people, except for Bobby Shriver, have a hidden agenda and it’s very, very sorry for the City of Santa Monica to be governed by people like them... very, very sorry. I’m disgusted.” ✆ “What’s on my mind is, in Santa Monica, we got a city crawling with bums. In Sacramento, we’ve got a governor who has lived in this country for 30 years and still can’t pronounce the name of the state, and all he wants to do is run for president. And we got a president that’s a bigger idiot than Homer Simpson running things, unfortunately.” ✆ “The thing that’s on my mind a lot, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in print regarding the homeless, is the unrelenting amount of homeless that go through the alleyways and pick through the trash cans. For me, it’s the single most annoying thing about living in Santa Monica, especially for people living near alleyways and apartment buildings.” ✆ “I would like to see less collusion between the City Council.” ✆ “What’s on my mind is finding somewhere to move to. I’m looking for a quiet seaside town which is not overcrowded, which is not a testing ground for social engineering, or a magnet for vagrants, which is driver friendly, as well as pedestrian friendly, which is not polarized by a highly charged political climate, whose citizens are not overtaxed and over-regulated, and which is governed by a group of people who do not throw public money away on wasteful projects. In other words, I’m looking for Santa Monica as it was 30 years ago, when I moved here.” ✆ “What’s on my mind: Affordable housing. We need to have a public review to go over again why we’re doing this — why we are making this city denser, why we are opening up our city to more people who do not live in Santa Monica. It’s time — the 1990s proposition was a long time ago — to review this, whether this is something that’s still important in Santa Monica.” ✆ “My thinking is Mr. Shriver is trying to solve the homeless problem and clean up the streets. Genser and Bloom are trying to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem. The Jan. 11 city council meeting bore this out lucidly. Genser and Bloom want to import low-income housing tenants, and build new large apartment buildings for them, with city funding for favors from low-income housing developers, like the community corporation of Santa Monica — our city’s biggest landlord. They call themselves a non-profit corporation, but everybody makes large salaries there, starting with executive director Jay Ling. I would like to see a full investigation of the Community Corporation of Santa Monica and its relationship with Genser and Bloom, who are, respectively, a development consultant and a lawyer. This is a situation that cries out for a full blown investigation of all concerning and including City Hall officials.” ✆ “We’ve got to cut out these six-and seven-figured salaries to run our schools. It’s a real joke on the homeowners in this city how six or seven people can put their ideas on a ballot, every so often, that states they need more money to run their office. Just get rid of those people with the awful salaries they’re receiving, like our superintendent of schools, who is imported from somewhere out of state. The school board should have hired one of the many local school board employees to run the job. That’s a start. There’s a lot more.” ✆ “Santa Monica Place shopping mall should definitely not be destroyed to make room for huge skyscrapers. If the mall is destroyed, the city council will regret their approval actions.” ✆ “Santa Monica is largely dysfunc-tional for its residents. There’s no normal neighborhood area with these services to serve residents: Laundromat, drugstore, hardware, Xerox, etc. The Promenade is for tourists. The parks are given over to the homeless. Soon, we’ll have the Twin Towers West to overwhelm the scale of the city. The city council has all the visibility and gets all the flack, but the people who actually run the city are invisible and largely unknown. A city manager, whom no one has ever seen and few could name, and a couple of boards whose function it is to maximize income even though it means driving out established local businesses and bringing in gas and Hooters. Maybe if we actually elected these people they would have some accountability to us.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 15, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/011505.pdf?ref=smdp.com)