Last Wednesday should have been a fairly routine meeting for the Santa Monica Democratic Club. Members were meeting on Zoom to vote on endorsements in the November local elections, and since political clubs tend to be, well, political, the preferred slate would typically be a pretty safe bet.
But not this time.
Only one person running for Rent Control Board earned an endorsement on the first ballot, and it wasn’t any of the three recommended by the club’s board. It was Heather Thomason, a newcomer to city politics, who seemed to win over disparate cohorts with her intelligence and empathy.
But the shocker of the evening was that none of the ten City Council candidates won an endorsement. Not even Mayor Caroline Torosis.
This was a coup of sorts from the growing number of Democrats disaffected with party orthodoxy. Up until now they’ve been largely dismissed as NIMBY or MAGA-lite barbarians at the gate, regardless of their liberal bona fides.
Councilmember Lana Negrete, a proud Latina, has repeatedly been “schooled” about racial discrimination by white male counterparts on the Council. (It takes a whole lot of progressive piety to do that with a straight face.) So she likely took satisfaction receiving the highest number of votes on the first ballot. The Mayor came in first on the second ballot.
But neither received the necessary 55% required for an endorsement, making what took place somewhere between a revolution and a circular firing squad.
It’s an embarrassment for the board of the club and for the Mayor, so, ideally, it will motivate them to embrace a broader vision of the Democratic party. But the vote wasn’t about unity. It was a stalemate with both sides seeming as committed to blocking the other’s success as bolstering their own.
That’s a zero-sum approach, which seems counter-productive to democratic goals, yet it was also present the following evening during a fiery Town Hall at Santa Monica College. The meeting was organized by Friends of Sunset Park (FOSP) and the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA), and the heat-generating topic was the relocation of the city’s homeless shelter system.
City manager Oliver Chi bravely chose to show up in person and engage with angry residents, but the collision was coming from the day he announced the city’s intention to relocate the downtown shelter. There was never going to be a positive response from the selected neighborhood, given the drugs, violence and antisocial behavior that are too often associated with the homeless in Santa Monica.
Chi pointed out that the 30-year old tent-like SAMOSHEL was built as a temporary solution, but he wasn’t getting objections to closing it down. The objections were to the city’s plan to operate a shelter out of the Palm Motel on 14th Street.
Zina Josephs, the secretary of FOSP, offered fair-minded suggestions, including a “good neighbor agreement,” which she said had previously worked with an HIV-treatment center. Maria Loya, the treasurer of PNA, seemed more interested in rabble-rousing, which wasn’t really necessary, since the rabble were already roused.
What followed was less a Q&A with the city staff than a volatile venting session. However, sometimes venting can be therapeutic, and some useful information was communicated in the process.
Loya raised a community concern that the proposed facility will permit drug use, but Chi and his staff claimed otherwise, repeatedly insisting that only people receiving treatment and support services would be eligible for placement, and, unlike at SAMOSHEL, unhoused individuals would not be allowed to check themselves in.
Local residents have reason to be skeptical about the project, but as much as they don’t want a shelter in their neighborhood, it was clear they also don’t want the homeless on their streets. There was an unwillingness to acknowledge the discrepancy, and while the problems identified were real, the solutions often relied on magical thinking—though some might say the same of the city plan.
Councilmember Negrete attempted to bridge the gap between the two sides, empathizing with her neighbors while clarifying the city’s challenges. She reminded the attendees that there are laws providing everyone, including the unhoused, with civil liberties. Loya responded, “There shouldn’t be.”
Those words would be unsettling coming from any American, but they're particularly disheartening coming from a supposed civil rights activist.
Two weeks ago, we celebrated the semiquincentennial of our country, which seemed more inevitable than remarkable. Perhaps that’s because the focus (especially by our President) was more on where we are today than where we came from. However, 250 years ago there was nothing inevitable about this country’s history. Fifty-six people signed a declaration that was far more likely to guarantee a death sentence than to immortalize them. They risked everything, which is easy to forget, and it makes me wonder, what are we risking today?
What do we risk when we complain about municipal inadequacies or when we demand litmus tests of political virtue? It’s not only the President who wants glory on the cheap. We want our dream of democracy to be manifested without a price tag. We assume that we are owed a functional and fair society, but the truth is that we have to labor—and compromise—to attain it.
Fireworks are great on the fourth of July, because they remind us how spectacular and combustible our country remains.
Devan Sipher can be reached at Devan@smdp.com.