After serving Downtown Santa Monica as its CEO for over two decades, Kathleen Rawson is now leaving to assume a new leadership role at The Hollywood Partnership. In this conversation with Evan Meyer, she looks back on vastly changing the landscape of Downtown Santa Monica, which she proudly considers her life’s work. She explains how she started the Downtown Ambassador Program and now leaves a well-designed roadmap to guide her successor in continuing her efforts. Kathleen also discusses how she will bring her learnings to her new position, touching communities and people on an international scale.
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Listen to the podcast here
Meyerside Chats: Evan Meyer & Kathleen Rawson
Welcome back to Inside The Daily Press. I am Ross Furukawa. In this episode, I am here with the editor, Matt Hall. What’s going on, Matt?
How’s it going?
I am well. Folks, we have a good show for you. This is something new we’re trying. It’s called Meyerside Chats. It is hosted by a local guy that is a friend of the Daily Press named Evan Meyer. Matt, tell me a little bit about Evan Meyer. Tell me what he is up to and what he does.
He does a lot around town. If you know him, you know he’s got many irons in the fire. First off, congratulations to him because he just had a baby. He’s getting all this done while being a new parent. That’s particularly impressive.
Call it half a brain.
He might also be Cafe K’s most loyal customer on Main Street. I don’t know if he’s got stock in them or what. He’s got a company called RideAmigos. That’s his “day job.” He is in the transportation and tech industry, but most people in town will know him through many of his many passion projects and community service. He’s one of the founders of and heavily involved in Beautify Earth, which produces many of the murals around town.
He’s heavily involved in art projects beyond Santa Monica. He is doing projects at schools and blighted communities all over the place. He was also heavily involved in OPA for a long time, the neighborhood association, and continues to be a big neighborhood supporter. He does a lot of stuff around town in terms of community involvement. You’ll see him on various task forces or committees or groups. He’s a community figure.
This week, his Meyerside Chats is with Kathleen Rawson. Kathleen is the soon-to-be departing CEO of Downtown Santa Monica. Matt, tell me a little bit about Kathleen’s history here and why this is an important interview.
She has been here for more than two decades working in and around DTSM in different capacities. She’s been at the helm of that organization over almost all of the Promenade’s evolution. She is now departing. She has chosen to go and take a similar job over in Hollywood. It’s a wealth of knowledge and experience that’s leaving. He asked her why and she talks a little bit about it. It’s an interesting conversation.
If you guys are interested in why Downtown is the way it is, Kathleen was instrumental in creating the new modern version of Downtown, where we have ambassadors and where we’re doing an assessment of all the businesses that are downtown so we can keep it clean or as clean as they can. Also, assisting the regular city services and keeping trash off the streets, keeping stuff power washed, clean and nice for the tourists to come by and spend money with us. This is a good one. Check it out if you’re interested in Downtown or how it got to the way it was or why or any of that stuff. This is a good one for you. Let’s get into it.
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Is this teeing you up to run for council? Is this your version of Brock on the Block?
No.
You should be.
I supposed it wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’m not sure if I want to do that. I’ve thrown my name in. I play but I’m not sure especially now with the baby and Beautify.
It’s a big energy suck.
It’s a lot. If I was chosen and I would consider doing it, I think this is my way of contributing to the community that lets other people shine so I don’t have to go to board meetings and commission meetings on their schedule, but I could do it according to mine in this period of time.
You don’t have to read a manifesto of staff reports every week.
It’s the most creative thing that I thought I could do. I don’t think people in the community, especially ours, get enough praise for their good work just like we started this with.
We don’t celebrate our successes enough. It’s onto the next crisis. If something happens, that’s good. It’s ticking the box like, “That went well,” and then you go on to the next crisis. As a leader of a team, it’s always important to take those moments and celebrate with the community that created such a special event or program that needs to happen.
Yep, and we don’t do it nearly enough. I think this is part of that act of celebration. It’s an act of getting the good word or the good gospel of good people, what they stand for, and why they do what they do, and bringing humanity to a very polarized space. After my presidency with the Ocean Park Association, I wrote a dissertation on what I saw as the issue around us and them. I published it in The Daily Press.
I didn’t see it. I’ll look it up.
It’s on my LinkedIn too. It was called Destroying the “Us and Them” Mentality – A Vision for Efficient Civil Discourse. It’s realizing that so many adults still act like children. I think it’s what I found.
A lot of the things that happened, you would not allow your child to do in school, 100%.
Basic courtesies and common sense and things that I think we lost.
Also, mutual respect. Respect as a person and as someone who has views that are similar to yours or different from yours is so important. I’ve worked for boards for a long time. Very few of the boards are rubber stamp boards. People accuse organizations of that, but it’s not true because there are always diverse opinions around the table. If you take a moment to listen to them and listen to each other, in the end, the result is usually substantially better than what you went into thinking in the first place.
With less angry people, with some empathy, and with better solutions as you are saying. I couldn’t agree more. I guess it’s finding those points where you see things downward spiral to step back and get people in a mindset that they’re willing to breathe for a second. Look at the individual as a person and not as an enemy. There’s this instant attack thing. If you like somebody that I don’t like or you believe in a policy that I don’t believe in, automatically, you must be a soulless villain.
Early in my career or early in this job within the first couple of years of being here, I presented a staff report to my board of directors. I don’t even remember what the topic was. As a staff, I believe it’s my job to give the board all the information they need in order to make a good decision and also to give a recommendation. I did that. I felt very confident about it. I felt like this was a no-brainer. There shouldn’t have been any controversy.
The whole conversation went sideways. It was amazing. I watched it spiral into something that it wasn’t meant to be. As they were having this conversation and voices got raised and became very dramatic, I had this a-ha moment. It was like, “This isn’t about you and your ego, Kathleen. This is about what’s best for the organization. You did your best work and it’s their job to give feedback, change it and alter it. You need to step away from that and embrace that change.” I was young. I was in my mid-30s. As soon as I did that, it was just, “This is the real job. This is it.” Many people bring their egos to the table now and it prohibits people from hearing each other.
I agree. I’ll take that one step further and say active listening. With so much discourse on social media, it has reduced the amount of active listening that people even had before, which was limited. Now, with such quick interactions and everyone is typing, a lot of their ways of contributing information to the conversation are on social media. You end up typing quickly. Everything that I have to say can be spoken the moment I need to say it because that’s what we’re allowed to do now when it’s a thread on a group or whatever.
The other thing that the pandemic has helped foster is these Zoom meetings. We even recognize in our own organization that there’s a distance between you and the people you’re meeting with when you’re on Zoom. Obviously, we do that necessarily just like everybody else, but there’s a huge difference between you and me talking on the phone or via Zoom versus like this. You can read people’s body language.
It’s easier to be empathetic or sympathetic and there’s some casual chatter like, “How’s the baby, Evan?” You told me you have a terabyte of photos already and the baby is only a month old. We lost that for two years and we’re all suffering because of it. The world has become so narcissistic. We’re in a world of grievance politics now nationally anyway, but that’s trickled down here. It hasn’t been a positive thing. I think we’re all ready to emerge from that.
This year?
I think so. 2022 for me is a huge year of change which is exciting and refreshing. For a lot of people, we’re not emerging. We’re not endemic. COVID is not ending, but a year ago, you and I wouldn’t have sat here and have a conversation face to face, but now we can. We take those opportunities to be together again.
It will be interesting to see how things come back and hopefully, they do. Hopefully, we’re at the end of this. I’ve heard from various sources that lead me to think that perhaps the milder version of this virus is the one that’s going to end it.
That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that but it’s like the flu. We get flu shots every year. I think it’s going to get into that at some point.
It will be considered something to that degree, hopefully, and we’ll see how 2022 pans out. You in 2022 have a whole new journey ahead of you. Can you give me a brief recap of your experience in the last 25 years here?
Do you want the Reader’s Digest version?
Whatever you think it’s worth. Twenty-five years is tough to narrate the whole way through. That’s like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
The past 25 years have been my absolute privilege to serve this community. It’s not just a job. This has been a passion. I consider Downtown Santa Monica my life’s work. I grew up with the place. I told you, I started young. I was in my mid-30s. When I was hired, the board and the city leaders at the time who made the hiring decision said, “The 3rd Street Promenade is done. We did the capital improvement. All you need to do is market it.”
For the first several years, that’s what I did. I marketed. We did filming and promotions. Things were simpler then. It was easier to do the filming and some promotions than it is now. Over the years, the 3rd Street Promenade created a sense of place in Santa Monica that didn’t exist before. We had hotels. We’ve always had the beach and we’ve had Main Street in Montana and Pico, which have always been centers of commerce for neighborhoods, but there were no real grand plots. No real marketplace that the community could gather around.
The success of the Promenade, there are lots of heroes and there are lots of champions for the district, but we became an entertainment and dining location. That’s something that locals enjoyed and embraced. Despite some of the chatter that’s out there, Downtown Santa Monica has always had a locals-first perspective, this organization.
All the buildings are owned by individual property owners. Who they lease to is their prerogative within the use chart. The fact that for many years, this was a place that has been eclectic and real, there’s a certain amount of grit. We are not a sanitized Disneyland type of experience at all. Some of the biggest accomplishments are, “We finally got public restrooms.” You don’t think of those sorts of day-to-day needs when you are a consumer or a tourist, but in our business, it’s exactly what you have to think about. We created the Downtown Ambassador Program about thirteen years ago now. That was a huge shift.
I remember when it started.
On the international stage, Downtown Santa Monica is the best of best practices.
I brought in $3.5 million of private money into the public space that has benefited everybody who lives, works and frequents Downtown Santa Monica. The streets are impeccably clean. It’s an extraordinarily safe place because I’ve got 100 sets of eyes and ears out there for people who might be up to no good. Again, it’s not a sanitized place and that’s what I love about it. There is a realness to it.
I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. I think that’s an interesting perspective. There are a lot of those markets that feel very pleasantly. While it is more of a curated space, it does have the feeling of a downtown.
We want to preserve that. It’s amazing how many different corporate entities seek to mimic a real urban area without the urban issues of graffiti, homelessness or whatever. All of this is part of our community. The Ambassadors have been an important part. The fun stuff like creating the Downtown Santa Monica Ice Rink was a joy. I did it out of necessity. I was worried because Santa Monica Place was going to be under construction, and Downtown Santa Monica had this ping-pong history. The old Santa Monica Mall was destitute in the ’80s because Santa Monica Place had sprung up in the early ’80s. It took all the retail that was on the street and brought it into the private mall. It was the ’80s and indoor malls were the thing.
The Walt Whitman Mall in Long Island.
Was that your hangout?
I was there a lot. Drop me off at the mall. That’s what you do. You walk around the mall.
The 3rd Street Promenade had its invigoration in the late ’80s. The quality tenants that were in Santa Monica Place moved out onto the street. The idea was that Santa Monica Place was going to be doing this big remodel in 2008 and it was a Gensler design. A lot of capital was going in there. We thought we have the same ping-pong problem. Two things happened. We created the Ambassador Program to have more eyes and ears on a concierge level in the street, but then while they were under construction, I thought, “The anchor stores are going to be closed.”
Remember there was a Macy’s and Robinson’s May? Would you be thinking about holiday shopping during that year in Downtown Santa Monica or would you go somewhere else? I pitched to the board with my friend, Randy Gardner who’s an Olympian, the idea of doing an ice rink. I don’t know if you know Randy and Tai Babilonia. They live here in Marina Del Rey and we’re buddies. The city gave us the space once we started looking for it. I said to the board, “If nobody comes, if zero people skate, if it is a total dud, we’ll lose $60,000,” which is a lot of money, but then it was more like, “If you put on a big event, that’s what you’re going to spend.” The first time we did it for 4 or 6 weeks, it was a short window, but it was hugely successful.
I’ve been there once per year.
Other than the last two years, one due to COVID and the second one due to electrical problems, we had it in 2022.
It was hugely successful.
It’s a healthy activity. I grew up doing it and now I feel like there’s this whole generation of people who know how to skate. Your child is going to know how to skate and she lives in Southern California.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Central Minnesota.
There’s plenty of ice skating.
That’s right. It’s a great outdoor activity. To talk about 25 years, in a nutshell, I would say the best part of this work has been connecting people with people. Whether that’s a potential tenant with a landlord, whether it’s community members together, whether it’s the Pride celebration where we’re bringing a whole community of people to the Downtown Core, Black History Month or any of those things. Making connections is what has been the most fulfilling and rewarding part of this career without a doubt.
It’s the art of gathering.
I love it so much.
It’s going to be hard to see you go. There are many of us who are going to miss you here, but it doesn’t mean your legacy has not created something wonderful.
Thank you. I think there’s a really good platform. The organization is in solid shape. It’s a good time to make the move. During COVID, we establish the 3rd Street Promenade stabilization and economic vitality plan, so there is a roadmap for whoever comes in. If they opt to take it with the board to focus on the changing retail environment. The fact that our buildings have to change, the layout and size. There are changes that have to be made in order for us to move into the next generation, but it’s here and it’s ready to go.
Is it moving forward? Is it progressing? Does it feel like it’s growing?
Yeah. Our pedestrian counts are currently surpassing 2019 numbers. We talked about anchors and the 3rd Street Promenade, the open-air space is our biggest anchor in COVID. It’s drawing so many people locally and regionally. We’ve had night markets and lots of outdoor events, music and wonderful holiday programming. All of that is drawing a huge number of people every week to the Promenade.
How have you brought all of these learnings to the International Downtown Association, which you are the chair of which is a wonderful organization? I guess you can say acting and thinking globally would apply here as well, but not only are you thinking globally, you’re acting globally with these values and all of that you’ve learned here. You’re putting in forth something bigger. Tell me a little bit about your role there and what you’re creating for the world internationally because that’s pretty awesome.
The International Downtown Association is a wonderful group of people who do what I do, to do what we do here. It’s interesting because it’s not a city, although we do have some members that are city folks, and it’s not the private sector, even though those are our boards. It is a combination of the two. It’s a real love of creating urban spaces that are post-horrible George Floyd incident. The discussion at the IDA was about how we ensure that our downtowns remain the quintessential safe space for public dialogue. How do we ensure that everybody feels comfortable demonstrating or having a counter-protest? How do we ensure that those activities happen safely for everyone who wants to speak it? It was an amazing time.
The people that I’m surrounded with at IDA are some of the most creative, innovative, bright and funny. I don’t want to say woke because that word is not right, but I would say the read on the community is really strong for most people. The power of the International Downtown Association, as you mentioned, I’m the chair. I’ve been acknowledged by my peers to be put in that position. I hold that position humbly and with a great deal of pride because it is the epitome of our industry. In saying that, it’s so interesting when we’re talking about global actions and how they translate to local. If you watch the discourse in Santa Monica among some of the commercial stakeholders, you would think that Downtown Santa Monica had gone to hand cuts.
It depends on what media you’re watching.
I have that disease too. You gravitate towards negative comments. It’s a terrible disease. We all need to get over that.
Controversy and conflict perform better. It has better engagement.
On an international stage, Downtown Santa Monica is the best of best practices. It’s extraordinary. This organization is a leader in the industry and is thought of as a successful operation. This is how you should do it. I take credit for that. I take credit for my team. I take credit for all of those things because this community, our board, our team and commercial stakeholders have made that happen. The International Downtown Association focuses on everything. It can be transportation, micro-mobility, retail or public space management. It’s all of it because this doesn’t happen by accident. These spaces are managed. They’re just managed differently than the private sector.
It’s probably worth diving into a little bit on micro-mobility especially because a lot of that is my background as well. It’s interesting to see how different communities look at mobility, what they allow, what they don’t allow and why. There are a lot of reasons. I’m wondering how is it thought of here in Santa Monica, how it can be helpful, where we need to draw the line, and also at the IDA, how is micro-mobility being viewed at. Is it more of an opportunity or more people are leaving scooters? Where do you see the conversations happening more? How do we create more of an opportunity because there are many powerful tools under this category?
Let’s look at history. When the automobile first hit the roads, the people with the horses thought they were the worst thing in the world. They were noisy. They were all over the place. They were too fast. Every single time something is introduced to a marketplace, there are those who say, “Kid, get off the lawn.” There are also those who say, “This is exactly the way of the future.” What’s important in this work is not building for me. We’re building it for our kids.
We always have to look forward. We need to embrace micro-mobility 100%. The scooter companies and the bike companies need to do more to be better partners, but I would never ever say that they should be banned or overly regulated. We have a tendency here in Santa Monica to over-regulate. Now it seems that we’ve come to a little bit more of a happy medium with scooters with our friends at Bird being left unfortunately in the dust in my view because I think competition creates better alternatives.
They’re also the first here. It’s so interesting to see, but that’s for a separate conversation.
What I don’t like about that is that this is a homegrown startup that became a publicly-traded company. We need to understand that we were part of their testing area. We were part of them growing up, and so we’re their fits and starts. We’re their successes and failures, and all of that, but it doesn’t mean you kick out your competition.
Tim Harder has been so active here for so long. It’s a little tricky. I don’t know every decision point that was at that reading or they were doing the matrix of checkboxes, but I will give a quick shout-out to Bird being the first double kickstand or single kick like a motorcycle, which was brilliant, although Spin is now doing two wheels at the front, which I saw a couple of. That was interesting. Piaggio made those two-wheel front motorcycles. It was like that version and it was interesting. I haven’t ridden that one yet.
When those Birds first came out, the Bird Silver and Bird Platinum were the sturdiest and probably the best operating at that time that I found. They finally got the kickstand thing, which I feel like I was thinking about Bird since it came out. I’m like, “Why is someone not fixing this kickstand problem?” It seems so obvious.
It’s not like kickstands were a big deal. We have kickstands all over the place forever.
We know how to do it. Everyone’s complaining that they fall off in the middle, but they’re getting way better. The tracking on the sidewalks is getting better.
I think that we embrace these kinds of things, but we had an interesting thing happen during COVID. Because you’re a scooter and bike rider, you probably know that there was a protected bike lane put on Ocean Avenue.
I do.
During COVID, we were having trouble expanding the outdoor dining along Ocean Avenue because of its setup. We needed at least 6 feet of pedestrian passage to ensure obviously ADA access and so forth. It was an amazing opportunity to create that protected bike lane. We already had the funding for it. There was grant funding for that, and then to push the dining on Ocean Avenue all the way to the curb and create that small boardwalk that allows pedestrians to comfortably pass. That required reduction of lanes to one in each direction on Ocean Avenue
In my whole 25 years, Ocean Avenue has been a completely underperforming street. There are good restaurants along Ocean, but it was never a place for pedestrians. It’s right on the Pacific Ocean, for God’s sake. Why in the world doesn’t anybody walk there? It was because it was unpleasant. On the west side of the street, you had food trucks and buses and all these things that blocked the view. On the East side, it was a car-dominated street.
Also, the big hotels felt like larger establishments, not necessarily small stop-and-go experiences.
That’s true. I told Lane when she left because I had to arm wrestle her into coming over there and helping me solve this problem. She did but she wasn’t happy with me. She had much bigger fish to fry, but I couldn’t do what I have to do.
Change is challenging for some folks. But after a while, you will get and must get used to it.
That’s your big fish and it is a big fish.
It totally changed Ocean Avenue, 100%. Do you know how many people want it to be reversed because they can’t traverse Ocean Avenue as quickly in their car? Do you know what I say? Slow down.
How many?
More than you would hope.
I have to imagine it can’t be more than 5%. They’re just loud.
The point is that take your family. Go to dinner or walk down there and see how it has changed. Get out of your vehicle and see how it has changed. That’s the mentality about micro-mobility. Change is challenging for some folks but after a while, you get used to it. You adapt to it.
There has been a complacency now with scooters. They eliminated a handful of the big issues. There are still some people who leave their shoes in the middle of the kitchen because you look at the scooter. I’m like, “This is so obvious. This is not a scooter problem.” There’s something in the upbringing of people where they did not learn this habit where you don’t leave things in the middle of walkways. You don’t put your shoes in the middle of the kitchen. You don’t leave your bicycle in the middle of the living room. I don’t know how to shift that. I don’t know if that’s an American thing, but that’s a habitual thing that I learned as a child.
We have to do a good job of teaching the next generation. It’s the same for people who throw their trash on the ground. The tons of trash we pick up is ridiculous. Pick it up yourself. There’s a trash can every 5 feet.
Even in our home, it’s the first thing that we say, “You must throw out your garbage. That is not a negotiable thing. You have to throw your garbage out.” Don’t expect anyone else to pick up your garbage. I believe we should be teaching that to people even when they’re out to eat. If there’s a trash can, don’t expect that a waiter is going to come to pick it up for you. Look first to make sure that you can actually find a place to throw it out. You don’t have to go back into the kitchen to put it into the bus trays or whatever. Think about it. Don’t leave salsa all over your table. Wipe it up. Don’t leave it for the waiter to clean it up.
That’s one of the things that you’ll see happen with me and my team. I was on a phone call. I was walking down the Promenade and this man was standing in the middle of the Dinosaur Fountain in the water.
Was it knee-high?
I excused myself from the phone call. I said, “I’ll be right back.” I said, “Honey, you can’t be in that fountain. You’re going to have to come out.” He came out. The man clearly had some mental issue or something, but I wasn’t unkind to him. If we all take a minute and say, “Are you okay today?” or, “It’s not okay to do that here.” We’ve talked about this before. I do a lot of that too, but if we just take a minute. That’s all it took.
Also, kindness. Not everyone was taught the same lessons and it’s not always their fault. It’s their responsibility, but not necessarily their fault. We still have to treat them like people. It doesn’t mean they’re not human. At that time, they didn’t realize it. In your example, you acted with kindness to change a situation that you thought was inappropriate and it worked out well. He responded with kindness.
He did. I worried about him later because it was cold and he had wet feet. I did send an ambassador looking for him to see if he needed socks. I feel that at this moment and in this age of fast type-written responses that you referred to, what if we took as much time to be humane and say, “Hello. Good morning,” when you’re walking your dog and say something?
The easiest thing you can do is smile. This situation always amazes me when two people can in the same neighborhood who are walking their dogs or whatever or walking for coffee will pass each other and look down. They are alone. It’s just the two of them and they’re passing. Gender-agnostic or just two individuals and you’re just like, “How about a smile?” If you lift your head up and look someone in the eye and smile and say, “Good morning,” how hard would that be to do? Sometimes it’s these basic habits that we’re talking about like smiling and saying good morning to somebody who maybe hasn’t heard that in a long time.
Even in our local politics. The vitriol that’s viewed between people who should be respectable citizens of this community. We’ll not put any names to these, but if person A meets person B that they’re in a feud with on development or whatever. You see each other in the marketplace and you run into them. You think that you would still be neighbors first.
This is one of those conundrums that I guess the whole world is part of, and no one is taking that action step that I’ve seen. I want to say, there are some organizations looking to fix this, but it’s at that moment where you notice either the attack, the ad hominem attack or the vitriol in some capacity where you say, “Let me step back and be a person first.” I don’t have to respond with the same level of energy or the same emotion that was put forth towards me.
I can come back with kindness. I don’t have to come back with anger. I don’t have to come back on public record in front of everyone. Basically, what you’re showing is leadership. It is how everyone else should be. You’re endorsing what you’re doing and acting upon and how you’re being. What you’re essentially saying to the whole community is, “This is okay,” and that’s the big issue. However those conversations happen, it translates into what the community now sees as well. They do it and the leaders do it.
How is it fixable in Santa Monica?
There are a lot of ways you can approach this. Laurel Rosen, who I spoke with, believes empathy is one of the big pieces of that. I think she’s right, but empathy gets thrown around a lot and it has become overused, unfortunately, in people’s minds. I don’t think it has been overused. I think people think it’s overused because they hear it a lot. It’s more important to dive deeper into saying, “This person is an individual. If I was in their shoes, I would think exactly the way they think.”
One of the biggest problems now is the false information that’s perpetuated. It’s challenging in my position and in any position of leadership because our job is to always take the high road. You don’t see me on social media confronting people. I don’t do it because this work is also my life. It is my work and it is also my life. It’s the same. Always taking the high road is maybe not the right phrase. Maybe it isn’t taking the high road. Always deferring to the most professional position, which is non-confrontational and sometimes restating the facts are important, but the facts are so skewed sometimes.
The things that have been said about this organization over the past two years are not true. I think about if I’m a reader and I read something that isn’t true, but you think it’s true because someone in leadership has put it up or someone who is a leader in the community. They don’t necessarily have a position of leadership, but they’re a leader in the community. If you take that as fact, you’d be mad at us too.
The trouble is that we’ve stopped giving people and organizations the benefit of the doubt. It’s like, “This is always the way in 25 years I’ve acted. This is always the way that the organization has acted. These are the kinds of things they do.” Instead of saying or questioning whether something that sounds outlandish is truly outlandish, you take it as gospel. I thought about this a lot. There should be some fact-checker mechanism.
An impartial fact checker because now you got fact checkers and they have their own bias. This is crazy.
Again, we’re back to the grievance politics and not being able to trust the government and all that right now. I get it, but not everybody is out to destroy the community.
A lot of the people who are upset, it comes down to distrust. Those people are rightfully distrusting the government I believe. I don’t necessarily agree with why they’re distrusting the government in all cases, but sometimes I do understand that. I don’t act upon that energy, but they’re deciding to. Whether I agree with it or not, they have to be listened to. We have to listen and understand why they’re distrusting the government because it’s real. If many people feel that way, whether it’s local or federal, that is a real feeling at all levels of politics. We have to be able to listen to them, understand their concerns, make them feel better in some capacity, and ameliorate their worries.
They’re dealing with something real to them. I’m not here to say whether it is or isn’t. The word fact is the most largely misused word these days because if you asked someone, “What’s a fact?” Ultimately for me, it’s objective truth, but you can’t find objective truth anywhere unless you were watching an event. Even then, you’re interpreting it and then you have to explain it to someone.
There are all these levels and they have to interpret what you’re saying. It’s in writing in a news article. I think this is part of the issue. If their facts are different, their echo chamber is different from your echo chamber. Somehow those echo chambers need to merge. We need to listen and understand, and they all have to have merit. Even if we don’t like it, we have to give them merit so that we can acknowledge their feelings, have empathy and say, “Yes, what you’re saying is real and it’s legitimate. Let’s fix that perception,” because perception is reality.
It’s like the dinners with Human Relations Council. What they were trying to do was have these community dinners to get people engaged in public dialogue. One of the things that I always wanted to do, but I haven’t been able to do here in Downtown Santa Monica yet. I’m so close to getting through the city red tape, but after Wednesday’s farmer’s market, I want to keep the street closed and do one long community table right down Arizona Avenue. Have the local restaurants participate. Do fresh farmer’s market farm-to-table community dinners with music so that it becomes a local tradition where we meet, talk, enjoy wonderful food, and things like that.
That’s great. A real community round table.
One that we can bring our kids to and it becomes a local tradition.
One of the main tenets of being part of this could be some of these rules you lay out for civil discourse in how to communicate and have real conversations and acknowledge people, “Thank you for sharing.”
Potentially conversation prompts are on the table.
Give me an example of one.
I haven’t thought about it. What would be a good one? Let’s think together.
How about the “That was Easy” button from Staples?
Yeah. That’s great.
You got to have one of those because that’s a joke button that says lighthearted humor at this moment.
The more we can encourage people to meet face-to-face as soon as we’re out of this COVID bubble, that’s how we will emerge as a community. As a community in Santa Monica, we are extraordinarily privileged.
Of the highest degree.
Also, blessed.
No matter which side of town you live on.
Every side of town you live on unless you’re living under the pier or something. There’s a place for some gratitude and thankfulness that we’ve all become a little bit callous and can practice a little bit more religiously.
Another shout out to Laurel who would very much agree with that. We talked about that a bit. That needs to be part of your daily practice. Thinking about the solutions again to some of this and you brought up the community table. When you meet, a lot of people just don’t know the people. They didn’t sit with them and have coffee and talk about their history, their background, where they come from, their family or their common interests. Their introduction to each other starts with polarization on conflict.
Everyone is back to grievance politics and not trusting the government. It’s understandable at some level, but not everybody is out to destroy communities.
What side are you on.
“I don’t know who you are, but you’re on that side. You’re one of those people. You’re them and we’re us.” It’s like, “Did you know your kids went to the same college? Did you know they’re both studying Psychology? Did you know that both of you go to the same gym? Did you know that you both love to rollerblade?” Whatever it is but it’s those things. We have so many common interests. This is just one stupid thing that we disagree with and there will be plenty more. It’s almost like we should force people in the community, not to just go to the meeting and talk about the problems. You have to make one friend each time.
Also, just bury the lead.
It seems very childish. It’s like, “It’s ‘Get to know your neighbor’ time. For ten minutes, pick a stranger.” This is your icebreaker and you talk for ten minutes to get to know your neighbor. Everyone felt like they knew each other.
That’s what happens on the Promenade from time to time, especially in our heyday. People would gather around a street performer, for example. They would share common experiences with total strangers, but they had this sense of community by doing it. You were participating in something very special. I think Pride had that for us when we did it in 2019. I don’t know if you ever come down.
I was there.
Those kinds of events bring people together. The Drag Queen Bingo. We sat around and did that with 50 people up at the gallery and we now have 49 new friends. It was great.
You learn about people that way. Traveling is another solution. If you want to build empathy, gratitude and perspective, in one week of traveling to somewhere you haven’t been, you’ll get more of that than maybe you’ve had in your whole life. There’s so much that comes from that. You go to any country, city or community that you haven’t been to and stay there for a while. Whether it’s somewhere that is going to be way poorer where you’ll get a ton more perspective. You go spend time in communities and see how happy they are.
I remember when I was in Vietnam, I spent about a month there just riding around renting scooters. I went through a handful of different cities. What I realized was it’s amazing how happy some of these people are and how much less they have than what most of America has. Their day-to-day is seemingly joyful, at least the ones I spent time with, and at least from the perspective that I gathered in talking to people. You realize that the quality of life that we think is just given to us and we must have as default or the de facto, and that’s how you keep your happiness is entirely wrong, I believe. Happiness has nothing to do with that.
Nope. It doesn’t.
You can learn a lot and then maybe you can bring it home. You’re going to Hollywood.
I am. I’m following my dream.
You are going to bring all this goodness to a place that’s probably very excited to have you.
They are very excited and so am I. After 25 years, it’s time for Santa Monica to have a new leader and voice. That’s very positive for the community. I feel very confident about where I’m leaving this organization, but I have a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm to create wonderful places. If you look at Hollywood right now, it’s iconic. When I tell people in Minnesota that I’m going to Hollywood, they’re looking like, “You are going where?”
It has some of the places. It’s got Pantages. It’s got bull. It’s got some of these amazing cultural things. It’s got the sign. It’s got all of that history. It’s got a huge amount of capital investment going in. There are many apartment units that are going in. There’s a whole opportunity for fresh investment there, but what it doesn’t have is the street-level experience that we have here. I’m no fool. I know that this is a big task to address some of the issues that are chronic in Hollywood, which are different in some ways than here, but in some ways, they’re very much the same. Every new mayoral candidate in LA is going to run on homelessness. How can they not?
It feels like any candidate for anywhere in this area has to include that in their platform.
It’s everybody’s number one issue. Businesses and the community are aligned on this issue, which is another interesting point. Typically, that doesn’t happen. That’s true here in Santa Monica.
It’s worth embracing that consensus too.
It is an opportunity. We’re going in with that. In November of 2022, we’ll have a new mayor, which gives me enough time to get to know the players in Hollywood. My job is to make the organization relevant in city hall, and so to do what I do here there and play with the big kids. We’ve also got the Olympics in 2028, which is this end cap. If LA can’t get it together between now and 2028, is it ever going to happen, Evan?
No, and that’s a good reason to do it too.
I feel like it’s this magical time where I can go in and focus on what I do best, which is advocacy, policy, working with the council people in that district, and getting to know them. I know I don’t make any assumptions that going into city hall in Los Angeles is as easy as going into city hall here.
I’ve worked with both. You’d be surprised about which things you think are easier and harder, and how you can build traction in which direction.
It seems like you can close the street in Hollywood just like that because it’s closed all the time. It’s like, “How does that happen?” Here, you’ve got to move a mountain to get a street closed. There are some things that are going to be easier.
Sometimes the size of the organization means that there are certain things that are easier because they’re not controlling every little aspect. They are controlling it on a large scale. Here, everything is controlled at every aspect at every scale pretty uniformly. There’s something to do with that. I’m excited to hear how that works for you as well.
There is also a group of people who run business improvement districts in LA that meet regularly. It’s the Los Angeles BID Consortium. Because we have our own city, we’ve never participated in that. All of them that are in LA, whether it’s the Arts District or the Downtown Districts or Fashion Districts or Westwood Village all meet regularly and work together to get things done within the city of Los Angeles. That group of people is also excited for me to join the team, and move the needle somewhat on some of those hard issues.
Are you going to come in strong on homelessness right away? You’ve done a great job here at bringing art to the street in a lot of different ways.
You know that’s big for me, right?
I sure do and you’ve notably done a great job at the Promenade. Which are the few things that you want to kick things off with in Hollywood?
After getting to know the players a little bit, I’ve got to give myself a little time to get acclimated. I do know that the councilman who runs the majority of Hollywood, not 100%, his interest aligned very much with mine on art, theater and homelessness. His objectives are also our objectives. I’m going to get in and talk to him right away about alliances because his voters are the people who are renting those luxury apartments in Hollywood.
They may have a luxury apartment, but if they come downstairs and they’re not able to walk three doors down to the local Italian restaurant because it’s not a great experience, enhancing that experience helps everybody right now. I feel like there are loads of opportunities for art, for culture, bringing the Pantages down into the middle of the street, and having them do those pop-up performances. I made that suggestion in one of my interviews and they said, “There’s a union issue.” They do it in New York so it can’t be that big of an issue.
I find that a lot though with the city in general and the different cities I’ve worked with. There’s usually a “No, you can’t do that” approach. A lot of that is the risk-aversion culture, in general, which is a whole other conversation. Taking risks and why sometimes we can’t get newer things faster. Also, trying things and harmless things to try. It’s interesting to see how that plays a piece in what we can do to encourage more of that behavior in these different communities. It is an important aspect because of understanding why. What creates this risk aversion? Cities are going to get sued. It’s usually the number one thing. Something happened or one person tripped on a thing.
Nothing happened, but it might. That happens all the time.
One of the things that I take great interest in is thinking about the culture of cities yes from the top down, but also from the bottom up. How are they acting? How are they motivated? How are they incentivized to innovate? I guess part of the cool thing about your role is that you get to be in the position of encouraging innovation in different ways.
You’re exactly right. If you look at Downtown Santa Monica’s budget, for example, two-thirds of it are assessments. That’s guaranteed money, but a third of it, we raise because we’re entrepreneurial. If we’re allowed to be more entrepreneurial or even in municipal government, employees were encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, there would be a whole new dynamic. That risk would go down because people bought in on the idea in the first place.
If you look at the Miles Playhouse here in Santa Monica, it’s totally an opportunity for entrepreneurial efforts that could completely fund an Ambassador Program instead of it coming out of the general fund. Back to Hollywood. I think that there’s a great opportunity there. For me, I’ve got a decade or so more that I want to work. I feel like this window is the great crowning moment of my career. I’m thrilled.
It’s your capstone.
I’m going to take a month off because I’m tired, but then I’ll go re-energize and hit the ground running.
You have a lot to bring to the table. Everyone is excited to see what you create next. It’s a super cool thing. You’re going from one amazing place to another amazing place.
They don’t happen by accident. Seeing how you could pull the strings to make the biggest impact most economically is something that’s exciting and interesting. When I’m gone, will you please try and get my farmer’s market dinner done because that’s one thing I wish I would’ve been able to finish here.
Let’s see what we could do. Thank you for being here and actually, me being here. Thank you for having me.
Mi casa, su casa. Anytime.