Why I'm voting for Lana Negrete, Doug Trussler, and Ashley Oelsen

Well, it's that time again, when hope springs eternal: Santa Monica Council elections. Buckle up!

To me, the choice is simple: homegrown local heroes who've lived here forever, versus recent arrivals with destructive ideological plans for our city. In a council run by imported SMRR carpetbaggers (looking at you Dan Hall, Caroline Torosis), who are making decisions based on what the progressive machine demands of them for higher office, it's time for a change.

This means voting for long-time moderate residents Lana Negrete, Doug Trussler, and Ashley Olsen, who have no plans for higher office, who only want what's best for Santa Monica, and who won't forget the job entails the first two words of "Santa Monica City Council."

WE MUST HOLD SMRR ACCOUNTABLE FOR PAST FAILURES TO AVOID FUTURE FAILURES:

Caroline Torosis, who leads a slate that includes fellow LA County official Brett Morrow (great, another shill for the county) and Rent Board member Danny Ivanov (another SMRR lifer), has been a failure for Santa Monican residents. She is, at her core, anti-police enforcement and YIMBY pro-development, determined to densify a city that is already the 9th most dense in the state, and significantly more dense than the city of Los Angeles. She, and SMRR, will leverage their mailing list, lying about how the opposition wants to get rid of rent control. That's not just a lie, it's an impossibility because rent control is in our city charter. SMRR has already started attacking Doug Trussler through Susan Sheu and the Santa Monica Democratic Club. This is hilarious, because it's the same week that Trussler received the "Humanitarian of the Year" award from Hope the Mission, which operates 3,300 homeless beds in California.

But it's SMRR's (and Torosis') inability to see clearly that is my biggest problem. Leaders must wipe their eyes of ideological blinders to see reality, and be able to see what's coming. Caroline regularly fails this basic test. I'll never forget or forgive her takeaway from Santa Monica being looted and burned. When our cops, outnumbered and told to stand down, forced to watch our city burn, were subjected to Caroline's solution: the urgent need for a police oversight commission! Because, you see, Santa Monica has a police brutality problem. The opposite of a leader, Caroline could only parrot the shibboleths of the National far left, which at the time meant: defund the police because they're the problem!

Meanwhile crime downtown, where I live and have been a victim of three times, has doubled. Yes, our electric bikes, our main source of transportation were stolen out of a locked garage. Yes, I was attacked twice, once with a pipe. Yes, almost daily I had to escort the teachers in our building to their cars to chase out a meth addict defecating in their carport. But Caroline, living in a single-family home far from downtown, refused to hear any of this. Despite a recent sea change around police enforcement, brought on by our competent city manager Oliver Chi and new police chief Darrick Jacob, I'll never forget how many meetings I took and letters I wrote, begging the SMRR wing of the council to increase the number of police to full capacity so our tourism industry can recover. This bit of common sense was not only ignored, but gaslit by progressive ideologues stubbornly ignoring reality. I'm not just holding a grudge. The inability to see reality doesn't disappear with the progressive fad of the moment (NOBODY is saying defund the police nowadays). No, this blindness merely finds a new mantra, whether it is "care in place" (handing out needles to drug addicts in our parks) or "housing first" (putting active addicts in housing that they destroy), or YIMBYism that wants to turn Santa Monica into Vancouver and has started by destroying density and height restrictions that have kept Santa Monica a charming place to live and visit.

This lack of understanding of what makes Santa Monica special, what is worth preserving, is the core of the problem. Even when liberal cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Portland have seen the light and changed their policies, SMRR continues promoting their braindead ideology.

SMRR DESTROYED OUR ECONOMY (and still calls it "recovering from COVID"):

According to a recent Rand report:

In 2019, Santa Monica drew 8.41 million visitors. In 2025, it drew nearly 3.9 million. That's less than HALF!

Santa Monica's economy declined more than in Beverly Hills, Culver City and West Hollywood over the last decade, the study found.

From 2015 to 2025, clothing and accessories sales fell 75% and food services sales fell 24%.

Day visitors made up 88% of 2025 visitors but generated only 27% of spending. Ground-floor occupancy on the Promenade was 75% on April 30, 2026. Santa Monica Place went into receivership in early 2025, and its Nordstrom closed that August.

Aggravated assaults and robberies have roughly doubled since the early 2010s, peaked in 2018 and remain elevated, the study found. The increases were overwhelmingly downtown. Half of aggravated assaults and 71% of robberies occur in the 5% of the city with the most crime, mostly downtown. Or, as I like to call it, my front yard. Business owners told researchers "that unsheltered people with significant mental health problems or untreated substance use disorders make it harder to attract and keep customers." No kidding, and here's an award for understatement of the year! How about this: nobody wants to be around crazy. Local and international tourists voted with their feet and went to the Century City Mall (or the Palisades before it burned), reminiscent of the collapse of Westwood after gang violence made it unsafe.

It's no coincidence that most of the crime is downtown, with a pipeline of addicts being mainlined into our downtown on the crime train. Danny Zane, still active behind the scenes, can be thanked for that bit of genius that was the beginning of the end of downtown. We need a council who have lived here long enough to remember what it was like before the train, the looting, the rioting, the permanent meth addicts, and the arrogant business regulations that destroyed the golden goose through neglect and stupid ideology.

I briefly had a moment during the World Cup finals when town was overrun with foreign tourists and you could hear Italian, French and Spanish spoken freely on the promenade. This used to happen EVERY weekend 15 years ago. It was normal to avoid the promenade on weekends because it was so crowded. It made me sad that it is now an abnormality in a moribund promenade, a shade of its former self, managed by SMRR, who was arrogantly way too late to recognize the decline which metastasized into an emergency. Again, what are they missing now that will challenge us in the future? I don't trust them to see it, and I don't trust them to care about the residents of Santa Monica over their own pet ideologies.

NEGRETE, TRUSSLER, AND OELSEN CAN BE TRUSTED TO PUT RESIDENTS FIRST:

Residents First is my core philosophical mantra. SMRR will sneer and call this "nativist" or "xenophobic" or most laughably "MAGA." As if the moderate Dems running against the ideologues ever voted Republican in their life. The only response to those insults should be to call it what it is: Total Bullshit. Torosis, Hall, and their like, have aspirations for higher office, so they will sell out Santa Monica every which way, including densifying it beyond recognition. While we seem to have hit bottom, we have not meaningfully turned the corner on the economics. There is much to do and we need the financial expertise of Doug Trussler, the courage of Lana Negrete, and the wisdom and experience working with large systems of Ashley Oelsen. We need a resident focused council who will aggressively attack the following problems:

The Train: The steady flow of desperate, addicted, and/or mentally ill people who use the train as a moving homeless shelter and wake up in Santa Monica late at night must be stanched. As the Rand study revealed, it's the source of the violence and crime downtown. This means playing hardball with LA and the County.

Care in place: This is a bankrupt ideology born during the AIDS epidemic when clean needles meant saving you from death from HIV. Well, HIV is tamed, but addicts are dying from stronger and stronger drugs. LA County, and the Venice Clinic, must be barred from the city. It's not helping, it embeds the addicts here, and it's not compassionate.

Close Samoshel: It's been promised, but when is it going to be shut down? This doesn't mean just doing the obvious of moving a homeless shelter out of our tourism district (can you believe SMRR put it there?!!). It doesn't mean building shelters in other neighborhoods in the city. It means accepting the reality that Santa Monica didn't create this problem and as a small town we can't solve it. Demand accountability from the County, and disburse the daily inflow out to the County.

Curb Development: Get legally creative. Wrest control back into the hands of local planners. Sue the state on environmental and water usage grounds. We are the 9th most dense city in California. As somebody who actually lives in dense housing, I'm appalled by the shadows cast downtown by huge, overpriced, apartments blocking the wind, sun, and space that is an outlet for all of LA County. Build starter condos in small 3 story blocks instead of dense 8 story (and higher coming) apartments. This will elp working class people buy into the American Dream. Do not buy into the socialist paradise as Torosis et al see it, where you own nothing, pay rent forever, and build zero generational wealth. All while they live in single-family houses.

I could go on, but you get the big idea: bring the council under control of residents who care first about saving Santa Monica. This means voting as a BLOCK (very important not to dilute your vote despite other good candidates), for Negrete, Trussler, and Oelsen, who have police and fire endorsements. The city literally can't afford the "leadership" of Torosis, Hall, Zwick, and SMRR, who through ideological idiocy and a lack of common sense have destroyed Santa Monica.

Arthur Jeon