Just last night an SMC employee was shot in a school facility. Two weeks ago, a lunatic stole a knife in Target and seriously stabbed a policeman. Santa Monicans are naturally concerned with safety in our streets. We want to be able to shop unmolested. We want our homes and cars safe from break-ins. We want to be able to take a walk in the neighborhood after dinner unthreatened by mentally-ill individuals.
We look to our City Council to take measures and provide enough police to keep us safe. But there are SMRR-endorsed candidates for Council who think we don’t need more police and insist, contrary to what we experience, that Santa Monica is a safe city. We need to vote in the sensible Safer Slate: Mayor Phil Brock, Councilmember Oscar de la Torre, John Putnam and Dr. Vivian Roknian to stop the SMRR forces from continuing their 40-year run of bad government allowing developers to take precedence over residents.
Further, outside sources are funding SMRR candidates. The press reported that hotel workers Unite Here Local 11 has contributed $275,000 to back them in the Santa Monica City Council race. This is the union that has no regard for residents, plaguing our neighborhoods for months with drums and bugles blasting at 7am in its fight with hotels. This is the union that sent dozens of its non-residents to gum up the works with statements at Council meetings, shutting out residents’ comments until late into the night.
Why is this national union interested in funding local SMRR candidates? Most of its members don’t live here. It’s obvious the union wants to buy control over the next Council so it can dictate how its bought-and-paid for candidates vote. We can then look forward to more of the awful actions that over the past 20 years have turned Santa Monica from a low-rise beach town into what SMRR-sponsored Councilmember Gleam Davis, thanks to her and her ideological peers, calls us: "an urban center." We can look forward to more high-rise apartments (how does the proposed 34-story tower sound?), homeless wandering the streets (thanks to ex-Councilmember Pam O’Connor who had the Expo end in Santa Monica) and more pressure than our traffic and infrastructure can bear.
Keep native and long-term Santa Monica residents, not outside influence peddlers and developers, in charge. Vote for the Safer Slate: Mayor Phil Brock, Councilmember Oscar de la Torre, John Putnam and Vivian Roknian.
Harriet P. Epstein, Santa Monica
