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# Touting smart growth
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/touting-smart-growth-editor/
- Published: 2008-04-07T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T19:09:37.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Ted Winterer Santa Monica*

The Daily Press reported (”Chiefs ask for personnel,” page 1, March 13, 2008) that Police Chief Jackman and Fire Chief Hone has requested funding from our City Council for additional staff “to better respond to a population whose needs have grown in the past few decades, all the while the number of personnel has remained relatively stagnant.”

I trust our council will provide the funding the chiefs have requested. Public safety is one of the paramount missions of municipal government.

But why does Santa Monica need more fire and police personnel? We know that our resident population in 1980 was about the same as it is today.

Chief Hone notes that today his department has the same number of firefighters as it did in 1980 yet responds to twice as any emergencies as it did 28 years ago. Chief Jackman observes that while Santa Monica’s population is roughly 88,000 residents, his department serves about 250,000 per day because of commuting workers and tourism.

So what’s caused the additional stresses on police and fire services? It’s largely the explosive growth in the past 20 years of over nine million square feet of commercial space, creating twice the number of emergencies calls to the SMFD and a larger daytime population for the SMPD to serve.

How did we get into this mess? Through a vicious cycle in which commercial development required more city services, which in turn begat more commercial development to pay for those services, which begat the need for more services, etc. And you can be sure that City Hall will want more traffic-generating commercial development to fund the latest increase in police and fire staffing.

But here’s the reality: All commercial development doesn’t necessarily generate net revenues to the city once the cost of providing new services required by a project is subtracted from gross revenues. Yet currently City Hall can’t discriminate between those projects which would augment revenues and those which merely create more traffic and more government.

The Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT) would cut the growth of traffic-producing commercial development in half while providing City Hall the tools to approve only those commercial projects that substantially boosted its tax base. Does 50 percent less growth and almost the same amount of revenue sound good to you?

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 7, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/040708.pdf?ref=smdp.com)