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# The 2006 ‘Sammys’: And the winners are
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/the-2006-sammys-and-the-winners-are/
- Published: 2007-01-01T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T22:57:01.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import

It’s time to award the “Sammys” — my annual dubious achievement awards for things accomplished “Santa Monica style” in 2006.

The “Butt Ugly” Sammy goes to Community Corporation of Santa Monica for their low-income building at 15th Street and Broadway. A future slum in the making, it’s big, clumsy and boxy — complete with exterior metal fire-escapes. The decorative (?) scaffolding and sheet steel is particularly harsh and uninviting.

Macerich Corporation takes the “Excellent Idea” Sammy. The owners of Santa Monica Place wisely scuttled ill-conceived plans to expand and totally rebuild their downtown shopping mall and fell back on an earlier proposal to just extensively remodel with an open-air center court and new food service areas.

The Sammy for “Screw-up of the Year” goes to the Slatkin brothers’ Edward Thomas Management Company, owner of Casa del Mar and Shutters on the Beach hotels, and Tim DuBois, ETMC CEO, for their political campaign sandbagging City Council incumbent Kevin McKeown in the Fall election. The disastrous campaign orchestrated by Seth Jacobson and other public relations geniuses on the payroll was mean-spirited, divisive and ineffective — and made many enemies.

The “Neighborhood Activist of the Year” goes to John Petz, who was so angered by the hotel’s “Get Kevin” campaign, he burned up the phone lines and e-mails and, literally overnight, got more than 100 citizens to picket Casa del Mar and Shutters hotels. Petz’s strategy garnered tons of sympathy for McKeown, who easily won reelection and even led the vote tally.

The Sammy for “Best Civic Group” goes to Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City, which has been on top of local planning issues and is an effective watchdog and community voice for responsible development.

The “Junk In, Junk Out” Sammy goes to the planning department for foot dragging in acquiring state-of-the art traffic methodology. Years of using outdated traffic estimation methodology has resulted in grossly inaccurate measures of present and future traffic conditions. It’s just another reason why traffic is so screwed up.

The “Best New Street to Play Chicken On” Sammy goes to Yale Street, between Wilshire Boulevard and Montana Avenue. To accommodate trees, the city widened parkways and dramatically reduced traffic lane width. Traffic still flows in two directions, resulting in a dangerous dodge-ball course (like Pico Boulevard) with no room for error — nor an opening car door.

Hardened vagrants from downtown Los Angeles are here in greater numbers, say my contacts in City Hall. Efforts to get other communities to “share the burden” seem to be unproductive, so Santa Monica continues to add and expand facilities and increase spending. This year’s “Free Lunch” Sammy goes to the City Council for continuing to roll out the red carpet for more and more vagrants and transients.

In October, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education tentatively approved a 5 percent pay raise for teachers with no money available to pay for it. The three year, $7 million shortfall was kept hushed-up until after election so that the “bad news” would not harm board incumbents seeking reelection or the school bond proposal. So, the district’s ongoing fiscal problems continue unabated. The “Who’s in Charge” Sammy goes to the SMMUSD School Board, hands down.

The “Best Fiction Writing” Sammy goes to “Friends of Santa Monica College,” controlled and financed by the Santa Monica College Faculty Association. FSMC was the front for misleading propaganda smearing former SMC business manager Tom Donnor, who ran unsuccessfully for the college’s Board of Trustees. Their campaign mailers falsely blamed Donnor for policies and actions of former SMC President Piedad Robertson and minimized the state’s role in SMC’s budget cuts in 2003.

The “Save the Environment” Sammy goes to the city of Santa Monica. Despite “green” pretensions, the new parking lot at Virginia Avenue Park slopes so that rainwater runoff pours into Virginia Avenue gutters and out into the ocean instead of being stored and diverted to landscaping and green space uses.

Lastly, the “Lamest Holiday Decorations” Sammy goes to the Bayside District Corporation. The Third Street Promenade’s shabby, non-holiday decor and tired, leftover plastic trees may be politically correct, but are decidedly non-festive. “Doesn’t look like the holidays to me,” a visitor told me, “and, what’s with the blue tree lights?”

Happy New Year, everybody!

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 1, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/010107.pdf?ref=smdp.com)