> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Sizing up the City Council
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/sizing-up-the-city-council/
- Published: 2007-11-10T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T03:54:20.000Z
- Author: Kevin Herrera
- Tags: Government & Politics, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homelessness

*More pay, more meetings among talking points*

The City Clerk’s Office is studying other municipalities with similar characteristics as Santa Monica to see if the City Council should hold more meetings, hire more staff and be paid more money for serving in public office.

Currently, the seven council members meet, on average, twice a month and hold special meetings throughout the year to discuss complex issues such as the budget or homelessness.

It has become extremely difficult in the last few years to adjourn the meetings prior to 11 p.m., as called for in the council rules. Elected officials and residents have complained that this hurts the democratic process for the simple fact that people get tired at the end of a long day and are not as able to make decisions or give input as they would be if they were more alert.

To address this, it was suggested by Mayor Richard Bloom that the council and city staff do some research to see if having meetings every week would help, along with hiring an additional staff member or two to handle the council’s correspondence, prepare reports and provide other assistance.

“We are a much more complex city than we are sometimes given credit for,” Bloom told his council colleagues last week during their regularly scheduled meeting, which ended at 12:17 a.m.

Few cities of Santa Monica’s size have a thriving downtown, a robust tourism industry, a municipal pier, public beach, airport, bus company and police and fire departments, in addition to the wide range of recreational programs, social services, housing and educational support, Bloom said.

That is in part why Santa Monica boasts a budget of nearly $500 million annually, the third largest in Los Angeles County, only behind the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 10, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/111007.pdf?ref=smdp.com)