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# Santa Monica The selfish by the sea
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/santa-monica-the-selfish-by-the-sea-editor/
- Published: 2007-09-20T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T02:54:30.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Pier, #archive-import

*By Michael Jondreau*

I’m proud to live in Santa Monica, but it’s certainly not a case of my city, right or wrong. In visiting Mar Vista in past weeks, for instance, I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed, to hear residents there complain about our close-fisted dog park policy. Now that the (Airport Dog) Park is open to all qualified LA County dogs, the City Council is touting its own big heart — without mentioning the income increase from park fees for the auslander dogs or the grabby policies behind such fees.

Santa Monica is a small city with an enormous commercial and property tax base, yet is relentless in squeezing revenue from resident and visitor — from 2 a.m. parking meters to overpriced pier rides. The city has long been running with the permit parking pack — another income boon (and a practice that a liberal city might have rejected as unfair to the rest of the people in the state who pay for our streets).

And they just keep coming. Recently, I inquired about admission to the Memorial Park skateboard facility only to find that, in order to test to see if my creaky joints could hold the turns, a $15 registration fee was required — no tryout permitted, not even for the per-entry fee of $5.

Yet it remains that despite these medieval revenue structures and despite our tax base, many Santa Monica parents wonder why the city continues to maintain a single overcrowded and often-troubled high school, with kudos to its grade and middle schools, some of the best in the nation.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 20, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/092007.pdf?ref=smdp.com)