Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 396 - 420 of 457
Radical changes are coming to the cityscape of Santa Monica within the next three months, according to comments made at the City Council meeting December 10. The council was struggling to react to an assessment made by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) that the city would have to zone to accommodate 9,118 units by 2029. Of those units, 69 percent would need to be affordable. The current population of Santa Monica is 93,556. 9,118 is the number of units...
The U.S. Supreme Court on December 16 declined to take up a case regarding homeless outdoor sleeping. The Court's rejection of the case lets stand a Ninth Circuit ruling that governments cannot make sleeping in public a crime. The initial case involved six homeless individuals claiming the City of Boise had violated their Eighth Amendment right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Each of them had been cited and jailed under a pair of Boise statutes designed to curb...
In November, news broke that the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) had declared Santa Monica must build 9,118 housing units before 2029, 69 percent of which have to be affordable. This raised the previous demand from SCAG, which had been 4,800 units. Santa Monica's current population is 93,556. Immediate hand-wringing ensued, with the Santa Monica City Council considering various drastic rezoning schemes to enable the shoe-horning of such a large number of...
We had a nice chat with Lieutenant Bill Heric of the Santa Monica Police Department at the "Coffee with a Cop" event Tuesday morning held at the holiday pop-up substation on the Third Street Promenade. The substation is a cheerfully appointed storefront right on the promenade in the block closest to Broadway. A spiffy, polished police bicycle sits in the window as if it's for sale. Inside, a number of uniformed individuals were quick to greet all comers and invite them to ask...
Following a unanimous resolution by the Santa Monica Airport Commission opposing construction of a 'temporary' facility for the city's Public Landscape Division (PLD) at the airport, and numerous articles in local newspapers about it, the City Council directed the construction be halted. For now. Construction of an $800,000 facility for the PLD, the division that takes care of the city's parks, began at the airport over the summer, surprising and alarming nearby residents,...
The City of Santa Monica is spending over $116 million to modernize (i.e., rebuild) their City Yards near Bergamot Station, but the project, on which construction began in July, is already exposing its inadequacy. The modernization project includes demolishing thirteen buildings on the site that date from the 1940s and replacing them with six new buildings. However, missing from the plan is any sort of recycling center or space for the Public Landscape Division's (PLD) Park...
The Santa Monica Airport Commission, agreeing with the concerns of residents, voted unanimously on November 19 to oppose the city's plan to 'temporarily' move some of their services to the Santa Monica Airport. The fact the city would unilaterally and without any public process begin constructing facilities for themselves on airport land should be deeply troubling to those concerned about city officials' eventual plans for the airport, which is slated to close at the end of...
Nine schools in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have won Energy Star Certification for 2018. To be certified, a building must earn an Energy Star score of 75 or higher. This indicates the building performs better than at least 75 percent of similar buildings nationwide, taking into account different operating conditions, regional weather, and other considerations. These standards are set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA claims that Energy Star-ce...
Ralph wants your shoes. Ralph Hattenbach doesn't head any famous national charity organization. He doesn't earn a five-to-six figure income in order to devise means of persuading you to donate to any cause. He's just a guy who tries to do the right thing in his spare time. This year, Ralph is collecting shoes, in good to very good condition, in order to distribute them to the homeless during the Westside Thanksgiving dinner. His goal is at least 125 pairs. Ralph plans to...
It should be no surprise that the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has a Sustainability Coordinator. This is Santa Monica (and Malibu). Of course we would employ someone to focus on sustainability (whatever that means) in the school district. What surprised me was to learn the Sustainability Coordinator had no staff. "I'm the only one," Caroline Coster, SC for the SMMUSD told me. "And I have no budget." Without dedicated funds and, perhaps, lonely, Coster applied...
The canyon of construction that Lincoln Boulevard has become near the 10 Freeway onramp is going to receive a new addition to the mess this spring. The current surface parking lot between Santa Monica Boulevard and Broadway, once a block of one-story shops, will be demolished in turn to allow construction of a five-story mixed-use building at 1430 Lincoln Boulevard. The developer of the building is WS Communities - isn't that a nice name? Sounds so friendly. But WS...
The protesters blocking the access road for construction of a new Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii are only the latest in a long line of protests regarding the dormant volcano. All of these protests have had ample cause for frustration and anger. The volcano, designated a conservation district in 1964, has been exploited since that time with unpermitted construction, toxic waste, spilled sewage, and uncollected trash - all under...
Protesters have camped at the foot of Mauna Kea, a dormant 14,000-foot volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii for a week now, blocking the access road and demanding the halt to construction of a $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope. Mauna Kea is one of the best places on the planet, and certainly the best in the northern hemisphere for astronomical research. The shape of the volcano and its distance from urban light sources create unrivaled conditions for viewing outer space. At...
After three years of preparation, construction began this month on the modernization of the 14.7-acre Santa Monica City Yards located adjacent to Bergamot Station on Michigan Avenue. The City Yards hosts the city's maintenance and industrial services, such as water operations, street maintenance, and fire training. Until last month, the Yards also hosted a recycling center. The recycling center, operated by private contractor Allan Company, was closed by the city in June in a...
The Santa Monica City Council approved a nearly $1.6 million budget for 2019-2021 on Tuesday. This is $108 million less than the previous two-year budget, a decrease of 7 percent. While cutting 29 jobs, now vacant, allegedly lowering administrative costs, and trimming some childcare programs, the city will still be funding - or even increasing funding - on some controversial matters. Funding for homeless services will be boosted, despite a distinct lack of evidence that the...
A bill proposed by Santa Monica's State Senator Ben Allen would repeal Article 34 of the California State Constitution. On June 4, Allen's bill was approved unanimously by the California State Senate's Housing Committee. It will now move to the State Senate floor. If approved there, the proposal to change the State Constitution will be put to the voters on the 2020 ballot. Article 34 was passed in 1950 as Proposition 10. The legislation requires a local ballot referendum to...
In a third strike against Monsanto, maker of the weed-killer Roundup, an Alameda County jury awarded over $2 billion to a Livermore couple who each contracted non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The couple, Alva and Alberta Pilliod, received $55 million for compensatory damages and $1 billion each in punitive damages. Punitive damages are related to the goal of punishing the defendant for their malicious behavior rather than to the goal of compensating the plaintiff for injuries...
City staff are asking the Council to contract with an outside consultant to manage their homeless tracking system. In order for the City to receive federal funds for homelessness, they are required to maintain a standardized Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). Until 2014, the City used its own employees to man the system but then decided it would be more effective to hire outside help. The "scope of work and necessary expertise was not suited to the level of the...
Community Corp. of Santa Monica (CCSM) will be holding a public hearing this month on their proposal to build 55 affordable housing units on 14th Street, across the street from Woodlawn Cemetery. The public input hearing will be held on May 21 at 6:30 at Virginia Avenue Park. The project will demolish an existing natural pet food store, a dog grooming facility, and an automotive repair business. It is a block from the Santa Monica Freeway overpass and three quarters of a mile...
Housing prices and sales are falling in California, according to a report by the California Association of Realtors. Although the statewide median home price is up a tiny 0.2 percent, at $565,880, home prices are down in half of all California counties. And home sales across the state are down 6.3 percent. Hardest hit is Los Angeles County, where the median price of a house fell 0.7 percent from last year, to $525,520. Worse than this, though, are the number of house sales....
The Santa Monica city's blog page sought to remind us this Earth Day that our elected leaders are so good and saintly as to be constructing a "global environmental statement" in the form of a 50,200 square-foot annex to City Hall. The three-story building that will centralize all city workers is projected to open on Earth Day next year, in 2020. "City leadership has embraced the CSB [City Services Building] as an opportunity to make a global environmental statement." Okay,...
Charges have been filed against a homeless man who allegedly set a number of fires near Sepulveda Boulevard and Getty Center Drive on Easter Sunday, April 21. Steven William Adkison, 31, now faces four felony counts of arson of a structure or forest. A good Samaritan saw the defendant setting the fires and struggled to restrain him until police and firefighters could arrive. This brave citizen, unnamed in the LA County District Attorney's Office press release, undoubtedly save...
The funeral home in the style of an English country house, situated conveniently down the block from Saint John's Hospital, once prepared the remains of former President Ronald Reagan. It had been a Santa Monica fixture for 75 years. But the place has been empty for years now, with a sign announcing it's for sale. So what happened to Gates Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy, the only funeral home servicing Santa Monica and points north? Where are we supposed to go for this...
A Venice neighborhood group has initiated a legal fight against plans by the City of Los Angeles to erect a 154-bed homeless shelter on a former Metro bus yard, a few blocks from the beach. The shelter was approved by the LA City Council last December and is to be funded from Mayor Eric Garcetti's A Bridge Home initiative. The site is supposed to provide 'transitional' housing, with the residents eventually moving on to more permanent housing. Officials claim residents will...
The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to oppose a proposed bill in the California State Senate, SB 50, which would offer waivers and other encouragements to housing built close to urban railway stations. The bill would override local zoning and allow structures up to five stories tall in areas currently populated with single-family homes. It would also allow waivers for parking, with less than 0.5 parking spots required per unit. An apparently far-reaching law with...
