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# Rocky has made tenants the underdog
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/rocky-has-made-tenants-the-underdog-editor/
- Published: 2006-06-20T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T18:26:26.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Laura Burns Evicted Lincoln Place tenant*

So City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s spokesman Jonathan Diamond says of the Lincoln Place tenants,“We don’t think we’ve turned our backs on them at all.” He should try telling that to the 90 households who have eviction judgments against them and the 56 who were thrown out of their homes by the sheriffs in the biggest mass lock-out in LA history.

In numerous meetings, we begged Rocky’s office to intervene and enforce project conditions of approval, or at the very least to confirm in writing to the eviction judges that the tract map project was passed by the City Council in 2002 is “active” and that it does contain conditions which protect the tenants. The City Attorney absolutely refused to do so — with the result that one of the eviction judges ruled, mistakenly, that there was no such project and that those conditions were from an earlier project “application” which had been replaced by a different project. On May 30, the City Attorney confirmed to the City Council that the project map is indeed “active.”

Despite the ruling of the Court of Appeals in a published opinion that conditions must be enforced even if a tentative subdivision map has not been finalized, the City Attorney continues to assert that conditions are only “tentative” as long as the map is “tentative” and thus “unenforceable.” Rather than calling sessions with the City Council, the planning and building and safety departments to explain how this ruling mandates a total change in the way the city enforces conditions on all projects, including subdivisions, the City Attorney, instead, has sent out a non-compliance green-light to all developers with the message that as long as they hold off on filing the final map, the City Attorney will let them do any part of the project without holding them to conditions. They just need to go down and file for a modification and will get the help they need.

Why the City Attorney has taken such a hard line against the tenants is a mystery to me. I would hate to think it had anything to do with the tens of thousands of dollars attorneys from the law firm Lathan & Watkins donated to his campaign, which represents Lincoln Place owner AIMCO. But that fact alone gives at the minimum an appearance of a conflict of interest. It is time for the City Council to seek a second opinion as to whether the City is acting illegally by refusing to enforce conditions. As Councilmember Janice Hahn said at the May 30 hearing, “We’ve gotten bad advice on Lincoln Place from the City Attorney before.”

At least the state of California has been spared Rocky’s style of “enforcing” the law.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 20, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/062006.pdf?ref=smdp.com)