Evan Meyer sits down with Councilman Phil Brock on the latest episode of Meyerside Chats.
Summary:
– The power of art.
– The many opportunities for SM to be a “cradle of the arts in LA”.
– We need a “crusade of culture”.
– More art and music opportunities at our parks.
– Santa Monica’s rich history.
– Why is there distrust and how do we get rid of it?
– Embracing disagreeing parties, news and information to understand all sides
– Phil’s abundant volunteer work.
– Tons of ways to get involved. There are so many ways to help when we “act local.” | 44:00.
– Accepting change is necessary, but to what extent?
– History of Vons at Euclid & Wilshire.
– The nature of angry emails to council.
– The state of homelessness. Can we be more effective?
– Viewing constituents from a customer service perspective.
– “One Santa Monica.”
Thank you Phil Brock for your service, your commitment to Santa Monica, and for sharing this time with me.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Meyerside Chats: Evan Meyer & Phil Brock
What you were going to read is the next installment of what we’re calling Meyerside Chats, which are conversations between Evan Meyer and local dignitaries or individuals he thinks are interesting. Evan Meyer is a man about town, an entrepreneur, an artist, and generally, an all-around good guy, and he has been interviewing city council members. In this episode, he’s going to sit down with Phil Brock. They’re going to have a conversation about what it means to be on the city council, some of the issues we’re facing and where they want to go from there. Get ready. Here you go. It’s a long one with Councilman Phil Brock.
It’s nice to see you on the show. A long time ago, I was on Brock On Your Block.
You were on that because you were doing a wonderful mural right at Maine, North of Ocean Park Boulevard. We came down to film you because you were doing something extraordinary in the city, saying, “Art on the walls of the city. Let’s not have drag walls. Let’s have walls with messages. Let’s have walls that speak to people that make people smile, happy and think.”
The whole intention of Beautify is to end ugly, boring or bland wall syndrome.
There are no vaccinations for that. Only good art.
Good art is vaccination, in a manner of speaking. One of the reasons I chose art as a path here was that I thought it would be generally non-confrontational. Most people agree.
This is Santa Monica. Our sport is confrontation and discussion.
It’s not Santa Monica. That’s the world.
That’s unfortunate. That’s a sad thing.
We can change Santa Monica. We can do what we can here in Santa Monica. My way of doing it and what I expressed in the interview is this wall can change how people think. Art can do that. It’s 99% non-confrontational. It is something that most people go, “Beautiful. I love the way it looks. I love what makes you think.” Not everyone loves every piece all the time, but it’s a microcosm of what politics can be. Most people go, “I don’t really love it, but it’s beautiful.” If you don’t and do like it, you say, “This is great. What a beautiful addition to the city,” but everyone realizes it’s better than an ugly, boring or bland wall.
The reason I interviewed you years ago is because I wanted to make sure that residents in the city started thinking about more art in our city, more sculptures and artistic endeavors. To take that and also say, “How do we expose the culture in the city?” How do we expose the people who came before us in the city? How do we find ways when people go to the beach that they leave Santa Monica with more than a few grains of sand? They leave with something else here in their mind that says, “Santa Monica is a special place. Santa Monica is a cradle of art, culture and innovation.”
[bctt tweet=”Santa Monica is a special place. It’s a cradle of art, culture, and innovation.” username=””]
How do we make Santa Monica not just be, “We’re going to the peer today,” but let’s make it more than the peer? Let’s celebrate the people, art, music, writing and all the different facets here? Pre-pandemic, 41% of our working residents worked in the arts. That’s extraordinary. That may be one of the highest in the world in a city, but then we walk around the streets of Santa Monica. You mentioned before we started that there’s a sculpture by the Victorian.
That faces a tree inside of the lot. We have a sculpture that no one even knows about unless you’ve sat in the farmer’s market.
That should change. One of the things I hope you’ll partner with me on is making sure that we change that. That has a city. We join together to make sure our city becomes a cradle of the arts in LA, from theater to dance. We don’t have one sprung dance floor in the city.
There’s one by the beach on the boardwalk by Perry’s. Every time I go out there, there’s always dance lessons. It’s not really a dance floor. They’re using the area and it’s beautiful. I’m like, “There are open to people dance lessons learning.” It’s exactly what should be happening there. It’s beautiful.
We need more of that because that also in society now, nationally, statewide, and then you keep coming down to the microcosm of Santa Monica. You see ranker. One way to dispel that is through the use of the arts. Through your murals, art, sculpture, dance, music, writing and all the things that make people come together. I think what we’d like to do is for people to walk around our city, A) Feel safe and B) Feel that there’s always something extraordinary happening in the city. A lot of that is for the public to enjoy.
A few years ago, I wrote a SMart column about Olympic Boulevard and said from, “Bergman station to 11th Street, that middle divider should be in a constant changing path of sculptures of art because nobody walks an Olympic Boulevard. Change that. Put a senior walking path down that middle, have art up and down there, pads that like they do in West Hollywood. That art can be shown.” Those are things we need to do in the city.
Mainly, one of the things that I started wrapping my mind around when I started this endeavor was that art, for this art’s sake, is just art. Art has the capacity to bring people together, to think and from all walks of life, to stand together and talk and communicate. It has the capacity to increase foot traffic, business revenue and pedestrian activity. It has the capacity to keep streets cleaner, the Reverse Broken Windows Theory. There is so much that art can do. It’s almost something that I believe should become an economic conversation. It’s almost part of the economic development activities of the city. It would be worthwhile thinking of what the arts can do.
What you’re talking about is in the Middle Ages, there were the crusades. They pillaged and they burned and they decided they were going to conquer. We don’t want to do that in Santa Monica.
All those sites are now famous.
We could do a crusade of bringing art, culture, and the businesses here and gain them to expose what they do but making it public and making sure that residents are in our neighborhoods. I did Brock On Your Block. One of the last ones I did before I was elected was a walk through our neighborhoods in the city. It was extraordinary that if you look at that episode, there are sculptures and fountains on private property all through the city.
It made me happy and, especially when we were all locked down, but it made me sad that we weren’t doing any of that publicly, that our residents had more art displayed, more sculptures, more very unique things than we did as a city. That made me feel that we do need a modern crusade in Santa Monica of culture.
Here’s a quick story. A writer who lives up in the North part of the city a few years ago called me and said, “There used to be a wonderful writing room where new scripts were shown and at the Cornette theater in Los Angeles for years. It was every Monday night and people would crowd in to see Ed Asner and Denzel Washington or whoever else was on stage doing stage readings of new scripts.”
It was this extraordinary thing and it was free. He said, “Can we use Miles Playhouse?” I said, “That would be a wonderful idea.” The cultural affairs director at the time was like, “No, we can’t do that.” I thought that it was wrong that if somebody wanted to do a stage reading series at Miles Playhouse, they shouldn’t have to pay for it. They’re residents in the city. If they did, they just needed to pay the janitor to lock the door at the end. Those things, I thought, were things that could enrich people.
Someone said in the city council meeting, they called it, The Before Times. It sounded like Hunger Games or The Purge. For me, it meant something else. It said, “When residents felt they couldn’t leave their houses anymore, go to The Hollywood Bowl or Downtown, it was taking them an hour and a half each way in traffic. Why aren’t we creating culture or series of different types of programs in Santa Monica at our parks? Why aren’t we having movies at our parks, picnics, creative writing exercises, poetry readings and all these things in our municipal parks?”
There is an amphitheater, not quite, but a seating arrangement around the park. The park is beautiful. I always wondered why every Sunday, there was no activity going on there. I know there are reasons for it.
Part of the original thing was it was supposed to have different types of activities, but it needed to be a consistent effort. As time went on in that park, unfortunately, it’s been seen as a park with a lot of bad activity. Residents now have shied away from going to the park because there are not enough of those great activities.
It sounds like an opportunity.
The other part is it’s named Tongva Park. I want you to walk through the park and tell me where you can find out why it’s named Tongva Park and what it has to do with the people who lived here before. Are there any plaques? Are there any interactive displays? Is there anything that talks about the people who inhabited this land first because that was the reason for the park? You’re down the street from Hotchkiss Park. Tell me about Hotchkiss.
There’s a strange sculpture.
I don’t think it has a relation to that person. Why is Douglas Park named Douglas, which is probably the part that your child will like the most?
Kirk Douglas?
No. How long have you lived here?
Decades.
You’re almost an honorary native.
From 2005 or 2006.
Part of that crusade for art and culture in the city is also to identify and expose our history. Those things are important. Douglas Park was the first site of Douglas Aircraft. That was his factory and his original landing strip. It then became Douglas Park. There is a small plaque inside the little building by lawn bowling there, but there needs to be something out in the open that says, “This was an airfield. This was one of the aircraft pioneers. This is where he started.” In Hotchkiss, there was a mansion there. I may be wrong on this, but I think there was a very strange murder that happened there and a lot of other stuff.
We’ll have our fact-checkers investigate that murder story. Can you guys investigate that murder story?
To me, back to Tongva Park, it’s the same thing. The Tongva Indians were important to this area. The top where they cut off the history building was the top of Indian hill because the Indians could look out at the ocean and see when the boats were coming, canoes and everything back from fishing, hunting, and going to Catalina, whatever they were doing. That was the lookout. As a city, we should know those things.
As a city, I do believe it’s important to have that. For one, it builds the cultural assets of a city. It creates cultural assets that may have just been overlooked. You could do that everywhere. Buildings have a history. We could put plaques on buildings. I saw that in park city. It was beautiful. They showed the history of the building and these little plaques. I thought that’s always interesting.
We did the one, I remember, the horse latch. It’s on Hollister. By the ocean, there’s a little horse latch. I remember celebrating that, which is cool. It’s a tiny little thing, but those are kinds of tours we can put on that can enhance. I would find it hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with that. You’d have to imagine everyone on council would be like, “Sure, more culture, activity and history. That’s rich quality stuff.”
I’ve heard so many stories growing up about, “Who lived on this block?” Jimmy Doolittle lived up in that area. There was one of the members of a major comedy movie act who lived on Ocean Avenue. All these different people lived here. In LA, after the ‘84 Olympics, they started the banner program. It’d be great as you go down Ocean Avenue to have it every once in a while. Those banners hanging, not advertising banners.
Banners are saying, “This person was a resident here.” Aircraft pioneer Amelia Earhart took off on a couple of her voyages here. Lindberg took off from SMO as well. All these people that you read about in history, many of them had a connection here, which is why also I’m in favor of a museum on the beach. I wish we could have rescued the Sears building. Imagine with no windows. How great that would’ve been if it had a museum of beach culture? I think that would’ve been fantastic.
Now, it’s handling COVID. The purpose of this conversation and why the show exists is to talk about these things that bring us together. Also, talk about the things that can continue to bring us together where perhaps people are diverging, whether it’s natural or social media augmented in some way where it’s propelled and narratives get propelled. My feeling is that the stories here and the politics on both sides seem to be to emulate the same narrative problems that we have at the federal level where you can get into an echo chamber. It’s hard to find common ground if you stay in an echo chamber.
If we use art as a base, and we put that as the foundation of what’s possible, assuming everyone agrees on that, because there are lots of things we all agree on, that’s one of them. How do we start to dispel this distrust that people have in government? How do we start to dispel this concept of echo chambers, where information is one-sided? There is a polarity here. There are two sides to every story. There is a conversation that can happen whether people disagree, we can disagree in harmony at least. We can disagree in a way that people understand how do we move in this direction. Why is there distrust and how do we start to get rid of it?
For one thing, the leaders in your city have to be willing to listen to all sides of every issue and have to get down and talk to residents in all neighborhoods. That’s important. There was a perception, whether wrong or right. It doesn’t matter because there are not two sides to the issue. There are probably 3, 4 or 5 sides to every issue. There was a perception in the city for the last decade or so that the leaders of the city had stopped listening to the people in apartments, streets, city and stop listening to the business community and the residential communities. That has to be reinvigorated. People are starting to realize that they’re not locked out of the city. They have to feel that they have a voice, otherwise, there’s no reason for city government. That’s important.
You want a city government that uses common sense. You take that common sense and start to be willing to hear from all sides. Your leaders should be doing town halls and should be talking to anybody who wants to talk to them. I know it’s difficult now. I’ve only been in office one year, but I spent almost eighteen years as a recreation in parks arts commissioner in the city. I’ve been involved with a ton of nonprofits in the city. I was very used to listening and talking, hearing people who agreed and disagreed with me. We shared this a little bit. I won’t go into it, but we shared this a little bit before we started that people in Santa Monica get put into camps because development is such a big issue.
Residents love this city. They love the fact that there’s fresh air and the outdoors. They love the fact that the beach is there, even if they don’t go to it, but it’s there. They love that we have a separate identity from Los Angeles, especially long-term residents. I’ll speak for myself. When I was growing up with my grandfather, we drive downtown the city. The minute you went past 26th Street, the grass was in owed on the East side. You hit LA. You knew there was a difference. If you went down Olympic, all of a sudden pass the Pobeda. There are big buildings. You didn’t have that in Santa Monica. There was a good feeling that we were special and different.
I’ll go back to art and culture. As you look at the city, for new residents, you need them to buy into the reason they moved here that we’re not LA, Chicago or New York, that we don’t want to just be an appendage. We want to be a place where citizens and residents are empowered. A big thing is making sure that residents are empowered to help control their streets, neighborhood and city’s destiny. A general malaise set in because many people in Santa Monica felt they no longer had that voice.
They weren’t seeking it, but it felt harder for them to have an impact. One thing is for the camps to break up. Sorry, camps, but to make sure that people talk to each other. You said something, “There are not 1 or 2 sides to an issue. There are many sides that people need to come together whenever they can.” On the things they disagree with, start talking to each other and coming up with a solution, rather than, “Phil Brock is anti-development.”
Phil Brock is not anti-development. Phil Brock wants to see a city that is livable as a beachside, comfortable and special place. I’ll use that special again. To me, that’s important. We’re a place that we should be able to control to some extent the safety of our streets, knowing we’re not an island, but we can help control the safety of our streets. We can do more to solve our version of homelessness in Santa Monica, to be more effective at that.
For residents, make sure that they feel that they’re involved in every conversation that happens, that they’re not left out. An important thing is that I want people to feel that they’re part of the conversation. Part of it, even as strange as it seems, is you’re involved in the OPA Parade, Ocean Park Parade. As you go down the street on special transportation during that day on the segue or whatever comes next now, besides since segues or rollerblades.
What makes you do that is the fact that you see people smiling that day and coming together as a community. How do we bring people together? How do we get rid of the polarization? It is to remind everyone that we’re a community. We want to see that there are so many good things that happen here. How do we make those become paramount?
We are hitting on the real issue. Polarization is having these camps of people that are in echo chambers. I want to say they often are unwilling to listen to things they disagree with. It’s important, whatever news you watch, local or federal, you have to listen. At least half of the news you need to listen to is things you disagree with. You may not like it, but you have to be willing to hear it. Accept what they’re saying and try to understand where they’re coming from.
Watch a piece of Fox News, but also watch the news on all sides.
If you want to hear what people are saying, reading and listening to, you have to hear, listen and read the thing where they’re getting their information from. You can’t even have a debate. You can’t come to a solution if you’re not hearing where people are coming from. I do stand by that. I think it’s important. People should be sitting down with people they disagree with, have a coffee and not yell at them.
Say, “Let’s have coffee. Let’s talk about how our kids go to the same college or how we both love to watch Westerns. Find the common ground.” This is possible. I truly believe it’s possible and we can do it in Santa Monica, but we have to be able to set some standards as to what should be a conduct when we’re giving our two-minute public speaking.
Are you saying there has to be one standard of civility for all?
No. I’m saying if you want there to be civility, there needs to be a code of civility that you can express yourself how you’d like, but what we are requesting here, in a sense, is if in order to see the common ground is to take in as much good quality information as we can to listen, learn and understand. Put that in a matrix. We’re going to digest that. People have to be willing to communicate that in at least a somewhat calm fashion, or else you end up in the emotional aspect of the conversation. It’s hard to assess things fairly or in an impartial way without feeling like you’re attacked. Someone comes up there and says, “How could you do all these things? That’s crazy.” People call names. Who calls names as an adult?
There are people who do these days. You and I were at the same event. I met your child there. What we faced were yelling, screaming and spitting people who were very angry and wanted to make their point about vaccines. I listened to the yelling and screaming. I tried to talk to one person. You talked to one of them. I went and talked to one of the other protestors and said, “If you’ll give the speakers ten minutes to speak, I’m happy to sit down, listen to you and hear what you have to say.” That didn’t work right then, but it worked 45 minutes later. As you may have been leaving, I was in a conversation with the Bullhorn lady. She stopped yelling.
I remember leaving as she was laughing and I thought that was a good way to dissolve.
We kept talking. People stop talking to each other. You have to sometimes wait for that anger to dissipate. It’s really hard to stay angry for a long time.
[bctt tweet=”Sometimes, you have to wait for that anger to dissipate because it’s really hard to stay angry for a long time.” username=””]
You’ll run out of energy.
What you do is you listen to the vitriol and you have to learn to try not to react in a negative way because your first instinct would either be to yell back or walk away, “I’m done.” I stood there along with the city manager. I was there until 3:30 talking and listening. She didn’t necessarily change my mind. I’m a strong believer that people should be vaccinated and that we should have joined the same mandate as LA and Culver City in West Hollywood. To eat inside, you needed to show your vaccine card because that would spur more people to be vaccinated. I believe in science. I believe vaccinations work.
She wasn’t going to change my mind, but it gave her great comfort that not only did I listen but I invited her to send me information so we could keep the dialogue going. That’s what we have to do more of in the city. Find ways to keep that dialogue going. Find ways when someone’s very upset because their catalytic converter got stolen yesterday or they got a solid walking down the street to try and work on solutions.
Try and make sure that we’re hearing that we’re not just ignoring and not just shoving it under the rug. We’re saying, “We have to do better.” Working together to find solutions to work better because it comes down to the common good. How do you make sure that I want this to be a safe city for your wife and your child? I don’t care if it’s a safe city for you. You know what I mean.
Safety for everyone else. It could be a hard thing to create.
The point of that is we want the community to feel safe and heard. That is not just a we as in me. That should be we as in all of us listening and talking to each other and working to solve our problems together. That’s from development to global warming, safety on our streets to everything in our city. How do we work together to make sure our community is a better one, becomes a little bit more tranquil and becomes a community that everyone wants to be in? We know people want to be here.
That’s obvious. Real estate values indicate that.
You’re here, and you’ve stayed.
For many years.
You love the community.
I loved it enough that I decided to dedicate a lot of my life, time and heart to improve it in the way that I thought I could.
Why?
What got me going was I remember a conversation with my buddy, business partner and one of my closest friends, Jeff Chernick. We were driving. I complained about the utility box, traffic light or something. This was many years ago. He heard me complain. He is like, “You’re complaining about it. Why don’t you go do something about it?”
Isn’t that a perfect analogy for what we all want in Santa Monica? What have I been saying? I want people to feel empowered to help.
I did, and now there are over 130 murals in Santa Monica.
That’s unusual. Most people would not keep going. You had special drivers. They would’ve said in my typing class, in eighth grade, a special zeal to work harder.
I remember even it was hard to get support for it in the beginning. It felt like a rogue activity. It was legal, but it was before street art had this big, but now super popular. Everyone’s looking at street art an opportunity for urban improvement and positive messaging. That’s why I got sick of talking and not enough doing.
That’s a good thing. That’s something we want our residents to do. It’s interesting. The people will say, “How do you listen to all of them?” I turn around and say, “I want to listen to them more. I want them to talk more, but I also want action.” I’m a trustee of Elks that helps veterans and children. I’m the former President and Lieutenant Governor of Kiwanis. Kiwanis helps children worldwide. Lieutenant governor sounds like some military thing, but it’s not. I was the regional head of the clubs from Malibu to Long Beach. For one year, I traveled to every club and tried to get more people to volunteer and help out. I did a wonderful event. I’ll pat myself on the back for this.
This is Make A Mess Day! We had 550 children and their parents show up at Bergamot. I had 30 galleries at Bergamot open their doors on a Sunday. We had art projects out for the kids and the most marvelous thing was I saw fathers getting dirty with their children doing art. That was one of the most wonderful things we’ve done. That’s something we need to do more of. I’m President of Santa Monica High School alumni. We have 50,000 living alums. I used to be president of the Boys and Girls Club Council. I’m vice chair of The Salvation Army, which has a vital role to play in helping relieve the homelessness crisis in Santa Monica and throughout LA.
Preventing many mattresses from going on the street.
Your donations that you take to the 11th Street facility help their rehab facilities and get people off of drugs and alcohol. It gives them good jobs and changes their lives. It’s pretty amazing. To me, all those things are a way to get people involved in the city. My significant other is the President of Lions. She’s the event chair of something called The Breakfast Club, which, strangely enough, it’s not about breakfast. It’s about dental care for kids who can’t afford it. There are all these different ways to get involved in the city, whether it’s painting murals, being a city commissioner, helping a nonprofit, helping clean up your neighborhood or forming a neighborhood watch.
The trick is being active.
Being open being and saying, “I’m not just concerned with my own life. I’m also concerned about how I help my fellow humans.”
What’s the point of watching the news at all if it makes you anxious and angry? If you’re not going to take action to realize that you could be part of the solution and improve something, which would be meaningful change, then what you’re doing is giving advertisers money to those sponsors.
Everything we all say, “Politics is local. Life is local.” We can’t change the world, but we can change our community and our block. We can give a kid a scholarship, clothe the veterans, get volunteers from SAMHWA to help paint a mural with you. We can do all these different things that may sound small sometimes.
[bctt tweet=”Politics is local; life is local. We can’t change the world, but we can change our community.” username=””]
That is what changes the world. This concept of thinking globally and acting locally comes up every time. In business, you’d call that sometimes something like land and expand where you start in a small market. You wouldn’t try to sell your product to the entire planet, but if you can build something valuable for your community, then you can build something valuable for the community next year, your county and your state. That’s how it starts, but you can’t start by going, “Everything should be different. I’m going to hate everything and make everyone’s life miserable.”
Years ago, rotary started. All volunteer business people in their communities. Kiwanis started. All volunteer business people and people in their communities. Lions started, and they got their charge by one of their first conventions and their guest speaker was Helen Keller. She challenged them to be the eyes of the world. It wasn’t exactly her words, but all those memories started between 1915 and 1920, many years ago, and took off like wildfire. They went from community to community. There are million Lions club members around the world who help in their local communities by providing food, clothing, vision care and all those different things. Kiwanis, the same thing. The Elks started after The Civil War, 1869, in New York City.
An English actor had moved from England. They started with just a bunch of their friends. First, having drinks and hanging out. They started saying, there are all these people coming back from The Civil War who are destitute, lost limbs, and they’re injured, “How do we help them?” The Elks then took off and became volunteers who help almost every city throughout the United States.
For instance, for one of the buildings at the VA, they provide the clothing, appliances, computers and everything for building at the VA of 50 formally homeless veterans. They do it. They get no reimbursement. All they do is get the inner piece of when they go home at night saying they help someone. When you take that and magnify that and say to people in the city, “We have all these people who serve for Gratis on city commissions and boards.
They’re all thankless jobs.
Thank you have to be from yourself. The coach wouldn’t.
You have to have the determination and persistence to know that what you’re doing is important for your community and the loud voices are the ones you’re going to hear the most. You have to know that you’re going to go in. Not a lot of people are giving you a pat on the back. You know that you’re going to come in here, the loud, angry people who don’t like the thing that’s happening. You don’t get the, “You did such a fabulous job at this meeting. Thanks.”
One of my disciples, Coach John Wooden at UCLA, said, “You could never have a good day in life unless you’ve done something for someone else who will never be able to repay you. You did it because it was selfless. It wasn’t about money or anything else. It was about improving your life by improving someone else’s life.”
If you take that to our city, it’s all about taking life on this block and making it better for everybody, then the next block. That takes a lot of talking to each other. You can’t be angry when you’re trying to help somebody who needs it. You have to find a way to work with your neighbors because you have a common cause. It’s not about arguing each other. It’s about joining together toward someone else’s life. We need to do more of that in the city.
Why don’t we bring this back to camps?
The YMCA camp or the Boy Scout camp.
I want to talk about the Boys and Girls Club. We’re talking about active listening. We’re talking about how to begin to change the conversation into one where we are actively listening and one where we are not yelling at each other because that doesn’t get anything done. How do we stop name-calling? How do we stop the stuff that we learned in preschool that we’re not supposed to do that seems to be rampant at every level of politics? We all learned these lessons in preschool. What do we need to do to have conversations better at the council level?
I’ve answered that by being willing to talk to each other and to not attack first, but to listen first. There are always going to be different views of issues. You find the ones on the council that are common ground. The other issues, you try and understand the other side. You try and figure out a way to bridge those gaps whenever possible. Bridging gaps is a good way to discuss it and not to prejudge people. I walked in and immediately what I do? I prejudged you.
You’re friends with X, Y and Z.
I was jabbing you, but I did it with a smile on my face.
Based on if you associate with somebody, you can be put into a camp. Isn’t that entire premise asinine?
Take me. I was part of the SMart Group and wrote articles for many years. Someone told me during the campaign, “You’re against all development. You want the city to stay in stasis. You want us to be frozen in a little glass bubble.” That’s not true at all.
That’s impossible.
The city is the same as you, a living, breathing organism.
It’s connected to a bigger entity called Los Angeles.
Change is normal. Change can be good if it’s in proportion.
On all sides, this is another thing that people would agree on. If that was at the top of the agenda like, “Everyone agrees that change is normal. We have to accept some degree of change.”
That’s the question. Is the degree huge or small? How do you find a way to parse that terminology and find a way to work together on what different people’s perceptions of the common good of the city are?
The narratives that get told are different than what we just stated. The narratives are like person X, Y, Z hates development. It’s very binary.
If you hate all development, I presume you’re living on the street like our poor homeless humans because you would hate this apartment. You absolutely hate your fireplace. You hate everything. Everyone at some point through history, the Indians who built tipis in the Midwest, huts somewhere else, or the colonists who built their first log cabin, then you are a developer. Everyone’s a developer, theoretically. What you have to look at is the degree and how does it fit into a broader picture within your city?
That is the discussion. That’s where we cannot afford absolutes because there are always changes normal. I saw a picture. Santa Monica Conservancy posted a picture on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a lovely picture. It’s Bonz market, which was either number 2 or 3 in their chain in Euclid and Wilshire, the same location, See’s Candy and Bonz in 1940. If you look at that Bonz, I would opine that it was better Bonz then. If you look at Wilshire Boulevard, the entire store is open. You walk in anywhere. There’s produce and everything. It feels so open, welcoming and wonderful.
They turned their back. When I was young, it was probably the second incarnation of Bonz, but there were still windows along Wilshire. You could enter Wilshire all through the back and See’s Candy was there the whole time I was growing up too. You looked at it and it was still this wonderful store. They built the new Bonz. The new Bonz turned it back completely on Wilshire. There were no windows by the street on Wilshire. There are only those high windows. You only can enter from the parking lot.
They decided that automobile traffic was the way. I would disagree because there were so many people at such a dense apartment-centric neighborhood that they shouldn’t have turned their back. Obviously, they do good business. They’ve been there since before 1940. You look at that picture and go, “All the changes. They didn’t improve the store.” I would characterize the store as have you been to the original farmer’s market or grand central market in Downtown LA.
If you go there, as you walk in, there are the carnitas guy here, egg slut person here, and you just walk right in. There are no doors to walk in. It’s just open. The Bonz felt and looked like that. That’s something that people crave. I was at the grand opening of a butcher shop on Montana Avenue. As I walked up there to help cut the ribbon, stand there and do my first ribbon cutting as a city council person. What was interesting to me was thinking back that there was a market on the 10th in California and 12th in Arizona. There were butcher shops in Santa Monica when I was growing up. There were little neighborhood markets all over the city.
That went up to your corner for what we call the corner store, but they were all over Santa Monica. I’m not sure that it’s better having 3 or 4 big grocery stores. It was a lot nicer. People grow up in New York. They go to their local bodegas and butcher shops. This reminded me of what used to be in Santa Monica. There used to be four supermarkets on Montana Avenue alone. They were all individually owned markets. A butcher shop opened there. I think that’s wonderful. For me, especially because my grandfather is a former butcher who worked at the corner of 3rd in Wilshire because what you know as Barnes & Noble started off originally in the 1940s as Ralph Supermarket. My grandfather was a fishmonger there. Bristol Farms, the guys who work in the fish market part would be a fishmonger.
This is all good background. I want to start to understand because we are getting to the meat. Let me frame it this way. What values do we need to embrace? I want to talk about the solution at either a council meeting or when we’re working with people who are expressing their opinions. In whatever form or way that they’re either emailing you or they’re coming up to the council meetings and having their two minutes. What you’re talking about is a set of values where we need to listen to each other. We need to be able to hear what they’re saying, whether or not we agree and give them the opportunity to change your mind. Is that what you’re doing?
Absolutely.
I would hope. You’re not saying, “Sure. I’ll listen to whatever you think. I don’t care.” I would imagine that that’s part of what you do.
One of the things that’s important, which we didn’t see in the last president, for instance, is a willingness to have an open mind and listen to new research, data and ways of thinking and saying, “Maybe I can do that.” Instead, it was, “I formed my opinion, and I will never adjust or change my opinion.” I don’t think you can govern that way. You characterize city councils as, “What do we do to find a way to work together more?”
You’re a team.
I’m going to give you a little different opinion. We’re the board of directors for the city. As much as maybe it doesn’t feel cluttered and like we’re not all rowing in the same direction all the time, that’s actually. The reason for that is that it means there is an exchange of ideas. For a long time on the city council, 6 or 7 council people all road in the same direction, but residents didn’t feel they were heard.
Now residents feel heard and, “It’s messy. Democracy is messy,” but I think we’re getting better decisions for residents because we’re asking questions of staff. We’re not blindly accepting what our city staff is giving us. We’re still asking questions. We’re trying to make sure we get a better product. I would think that if you were at Apple in the early days, they would’ve had fierce arguments. That’s why you got better, hopefully, better iMacs and phones than everything else because while they were being creative, they also weren’t passive.
Our city council is not passive by any means that people have strong opinions and that they’re willing to question more than we have in the decades. I’m proud that we don’t come into meetings. Everything is already decided because it used to feel when I would watch council meetings that everything was decided in the back room in advance. Legally we know that’s not what happens, but you had people on the council with the same ideological feel.
[bctt tweet=”People have strong opinions and are willing to question more now than we have in the last decade or so.” username=””]
It doesn’t help the diversity of thought.
It may seem that, “Why isn’t everything a seven-nothing vote?”
Are most of the things seven-nothing votes?
Some are, but we’re asking questions. There are consent items. Calendar is where the staff is giving you items just to vote on and prove. Now we’re looking and saying, “Why is that contract so long? Didn’t we get more competitive bids? Do we have to do things the same way that we’ve done for the last 20 or 30 years? Are there new, better ways?” I think that’s positive. For the record, I’m not getting any emails that use bad language or call me the task on duly. I try and answer those emails.
Some of your colleagues?
I don’t know.
That would be a good question to ask because the goal is not to get to a 7-0 vote. If you have a 4-3, that’s fine. That means that there are real reasons that people are thinking are important here. The issue is not in trying to get unanimous posts. It’s in how things are communicated and the way that we don’t have to have a polarized space. People can feel that all sides are being considered. Maybe you don’t always get what you want every time.
You’re not supposed to get what you want every time in the art of right of business.
Everyone’s a little bit disappointed. If everyone knew that and you say, “In this one, we have a few. I won this one. This went my way.” The way that I think is important is any different vote is going to go a different way. If you’re not getting any hateful emails, that’s great. If it was me, I’d say, “I don’t want any of my team members or anyone else on my board of directors getting hateful emails because that means that what’s best for the community is not being taught. There are still people that are unhappy and they should understand the way that democracy should work.”
The email that we get and probably all of us get every day is very concerning about life on our streets and unhoused humans on our streets. They are over 1,000 here every day. They’re concerned about random assaults and the basic stuff of, “Can our police force do more? Is our city attorney doing enough? Why aren’t we doing enough? Why haven’t we magically solved those issues?”
They’re all very complex. We’re doing more now than was being done in the past. We’re making progress, but the problems, some days, look intractable. There are nights when I get an email at 10:00 or 11:00 as I’m going to bed finally, and someone’s been assaulted, hurt or stolen. All those things weigh very heavily on me. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do. Those are the things that we get mail on. We got an email. It’s a vandal. He’s doing the Cloverfield Park bathrooms. Our people scrub him down. They get rid of it. The next day he’s back and this is continuous.
Is there art on those walls?
No. If there was art, you’d be less likely to do it. You have arsonists running around our city. We have various fires springing up all over. Homeless people are acting out and not being engaged enough by daily activities. It’s a way to be heard sometimes. We need to do more. In our city, Downtown, on Main Street, all over the city, we need to find ways to be more effective at reducing that level of anger and the dependence on fentanyl and meth because that’s the anger that I get from residents and letters, is, “Why can’t you solve this? Why can’t you do more?” I’m saying the same thing.
If you watch a council meeting, I’m asking, “Where are homeless services? What are we doing? What is the effectiveness? Why can’t we do more? We must do more.” Maybe wrongly, but I’ve characterized our services somewhat as benign neglect. We have homeless services on the street, 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Monday through Friday, some Monday through Thursday. There’s nobody on the streets after 4:00 PM to help Saturday and Sundays, you notice, I didn’t mention those because we have no homeless services working, but the problem is 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
I don’t know about you because you have this great idyllic life. The old characterization is when we all go to sleep, that’s when our demons surface. I can’t get sleep because, “I got to do this tomorrow. I got to be up at this time. I didn’t get this done.” There are worries. You have a child, you got more worries. Joy too and elation. Those people on our streets suffer from benign neglect in our city at night and on weekends.
The fact that we have no homeless services every morning, east of Lincoln Boulevard in our city, yet we have people who are unhoused, who aren’t being talked to every morning that said, “How do we get you off the streets? How do we get you into services? How do we get you that new ID card, that new driver’s license? How do we find a way to go get you into rehab? If your family in Indiana would accept you back, try and give you love and get you cleaned up, would you go? If you’ll go, we’ll pay for you to go.” What can we do as a city, as a people in the city, to be more compassionate and make sure that everyone in the city, whether you’re housed or unhoused, is also accountable for their actions?
This is good common ground that we’re talking about where I can’t imagine too many people would disagree that we need to be more responsible in how we handle the situation of homelessness.
I’ve run in opposition with people who have said, “It’s okay, we’re doing as much as we can do.” We found out we’re spending $5 million a year without police or fire without those costs. My question is, “Is it effective? Even if it’s somewhat effective, what can we do better? Are there better methods? Is there something we can do?
We’re not talking about the cause we’re talking about the approach.
I’d go back to my nonprofits in schools I’d say, “When kids are small, you give them after-school facilities. You give them help. You don’t neglect a child. You don’t expect them to have the money to go to private schools or private camps. You help everyone equally at the start and as a country.” This is not local. This is as a country. If we don’t invest in the next generations, and you see so many people have dropped out and become addicted because they felt left out.
You have veterans who come back from overseas. Those veterans are left with PTSD. Back when I was a little kid, they used to call it shell shock. They’re suffering. They’ve lost limbs. They’ve seen their brothers in arms die. In wars, you and I would probably question. Yet when they come back, they’re throwing out on the streets, maybe with a drug habit because of their injuries and left to rot. As a country, we have to change that.
Most people would not disagree with that either.
We have to find ways to solve that and to do what we can in the city. At the same time, we can’t accept the issues we see here daily. My mother’s neighbor got pushed to the ground in 20th in Arizona. Luckily, a car stopped 2 inches before her head. She’s 83. She was waiting for her daughter to pick her up. We can’t afford that kind of behavior on our streets. Homeless street services, people concern in West Coast Care, Salvation Army, St. Joseph Center, whoever it is, my goal is that every homeless person in the city has a visit every morning from good people, trying to get them off the streets, not accepting their conditions. Part of this is working with the state work.
Someone to visit is something in the thousand range, like 5,000.
Conservatively.
Someone would go around and talk to 1,000 people, ultimately, you’d have a handful of a team.
You have teams from the people concerned that go out on the streets. West Coast Care covers the 3.2 miles of beachfront every morning. They’re supposed to stop and talk to people. Whether it’s offering them water and then saying, “How about services? How do we move you off the street? How do we get you somewhere? Is it time to get off drugs?” Keep going. You’re not going to get someone off the streets unless you talk to them 20 or 30 times. That, to me, can’t be daunting. We have to do it. We have to make sure that if you’re homeless at Clover Park, there’s a gentleman who’s on Ocean Park at Boulevard. There was a guy at Reed Park who had been there for many years. We can’t give up on those people. We can’t leave them on the streets. We have to find ways to help them, entice them and do what we can to get them off the streets.
[bctt tweet=”We can’t give up on people and just leave them on the streets. Let’s find ways to help them, entice them, and do what we can to get them off the streets.” username=””]
You asked what kind of mail do I get. That’s the mail I get. Those are the issues that, to me, are paramount. It’s not whether someone builds another six-story apartment house, but that has to be in an area where it’s acceptable, where it’s not going to negatively impact the neighborhood. Not everything’s going to stay one story, but we also have to make sure that we make this still a comfortable place to live, to park your car outside and to feel that you can take your child down to the beach in the morning or your wife can take a walk.
This is another one of those things where I have to imagine people at the fundamental level, completely agree with you. What approach do you take to do that? How much money does it cost? Who’s impacted by those decisions if there are people are moved from displaced and you put almost people in front of someone’s front yard that previously didn’t have them, then people whose neighborhood that is get upset, “Why is there almost people in front of my front yard now? They worry about their real estate prices.
They worry about safety. There’s that perception. It’s not always reality. Not every homeless person is dangerous, but people are worried about the overall effect. I never would think about real estate value. What I would think about is that poor soul in the street. How do we get them help? How do we get them off the street? Why isn’t the state government doing more?
The state government said, “We have $39 billion of extra money.” I’m saying, “We could use some of that. I want my state center, my state assemblymen, and the governor to not only preach that.” Look at we have this great surplus. I want them to put it into action. I want those services. I want more mental health and psychiatrists on our streets. I’m happy that we got one coming.
Real estate values are a good example. Most people probably wouldn’t want to come out and say that publicly like, “I can’t believe this is happening. My real estate values are going to get affected.” That happens with tons of things. It happens with the airport. There is all stuff that can happen that can affect your real estate value. Perhaps as a councilman, you are not going to use that as valid input. The state values are not part of the input for you.
Santa Monica real estate values are beyond belief as it is because we’re a beach community. There’s always going to be that need to come here. If you want to get into business, the question for me is different. If you are a tourist and you’re at shutters, you walk out of shutters, there are five homeless people on the sidewalk going up and someone raining, raving, and you suddenly are afraid to walk down the boardwalk in the city and you thought you were coming to this wonderful beach of LA that was going to be clean, neat and safe.
Now you walk down to the promenade at night and you’re scared rightly or wrongly. We see the decline there because the hotels tell me that they have significant issues with people checking out early. You came here to stay for one week and after two days, you’re like, “I should have stayed in Beverly Hills. I should have stayed somewhere else.” That’s an issue.
The reason I’m harping on the real estate folks is because it’s a cohort. It could be anything. A group of people who feel a certain way about why something happened they’re going to be angry about it. The transparency of the information that goes to them makes them not angry about it so that they don’t take up your time at meetings of things that you probably could have maybe in some way said, “We understand where you’re coming from, but this is why we’re voting on this situation so that they understand.”
It’s not about them being right or wrong. This would help quell a lot of the anger and vitriol that people have. They feel unheard where they feel like they haven’t been heard in a long time. It’s our time. That’s rightfully so in a lot of cases. For some of these cohorts, is there an opportunity to let them know that like, “Here’s why we did a thing? We’re speaking to you directly now to this cohort of people who may be upset about this, but the decision we had to make here was for the following reasons.” That’s laid out beautifully. I’m exploring what the possibility is.
You’re taking it to a different level. I’m going back to what I said in this interview. Do town halls communicate with the residents directly? Give them a chance to feel heard and to understand we didn’t have more money, but the minute we have more money, we’re going to add to our efforts. In the meantime, we’re going to look at more innovative ways to solve these issues. We’re going to look at ways to make sure that not only are you heard but that we react positively to what your concerns are. Those are things we’re supposed to do all the time that residents didn’t always feel were being done. We have a new administration.
How is the town hall circuit?
It’s not a circuit for me, but we have a new city manager, police chief and city attorney on deck within 60 days. We are revamping city leadership. We’re making sure that the leadership of the city will also be very responsive to all residents, whether they have money or not, they are developer or in a rent control department somewhere, they’re 30 years old or 85 years old. I want them heard, and that, to me, is significantly important.
I see where you’re coming from and I think it’s totally valid. What I believe is when communication is better, many problems get resolved. A lot of what I’m seeing is there’s a communication issue at all levels.
We gain better. The city is improving. Our new city manager is responding to residents’ concerns daily and making that effort. He is going to change the vibe and atmosphere in city hall to where all staff members in our city feel that it is their most important duties to make sure that they hear residents. For the last years, staff morale was down. They didn’t feel appreciated, but they also didn’t feel heard.
What team is doing that in the city?
The city manager and should be all departments.
It’s not a specific department.
It should be all departments from your plumbers to your electricians, the water department people, to department heads and city hall. They have to remember customer service. There was a former city manager back 2005 to 2010. Lamont had all the staff used to wear a button. It said, “We do the right things.” When I talked to staff, they believed that they were supposed to find ways to do the right things for every resident. They worked above their pay grades many times to try and solve those problems. That’s what I want. That comes from the board of directors, the city council, to your CEO, the city manager, all the way down the flow charts. Everyone who works for the city has to feel that they are empowered to solve our customers’ problems.
It’s nice that you say that, to look at it from a customer service perspective because it is exactly what it is.
One of the candidates for city manager, a couple of my city council people got upset at that terminology, but he said, “I want my city to have Nordstrom level service.” I’m not sure if Nordstrom is the standard bearer, but you always hear these wonderful stories about their service and how they go a step beyond to take care of customers. That’s what your city government should do.
There’s a prime minister, Edi Rama of Albania. This is an interesting story. He was also known for restoring a lot of stuff with beautiful art. He had like a kiosk in the middle, like a customer service booth, where he thought of it in that way. It was a good case study. It always reminded me that when people are paying, your residents are in large part, paying your salaries. When you look at it from that perspective, you say, “These are the people I need to serve.”
The real purpose in my comfort, or what I’m trying to solve is, how do we do this kindly? If we can be kinder, we can hear each other better. We give the space to breathe and listen. There’s more of that. Perhaps we can empathize and understand where people are coming from so that even when something doesn’t go our way, there’s an opportunity to say, “I get why it didn’t go my way. Maybe the next one will go in the way that I think,” but it’s a balance of that kind of thinking and behavior. The purpose of a lot of why I’m here in the first place is to have these conversations to be with you here, and to start thinking about that, as part of the day-to-day of what we need to do to, so that the board of directors has easier times, perhaps not staying up until the wee hours too often.
We can solve that in other ways. City council, as a city, we need to work on the city council meeting more often about the city council, getting more tools to prepare. City council, having those tools they need, the means that they need to make sure they’re making great decisions. That will take some time. We’ll get there as well.
[bctt tweet=”As a city, we need to work on getting the City Council the tools and means they need to make sure they’re making great decisions.” username=””]
Team building exercises.
We’re going to have a retreat sometime where we spend a whole day talking.
That’ll build trust. Thank you for being here with me, for spending the time. I enjoyed this. Hopefully, together we can all come together, get rid of the camps and understand where people are coming from.
There needs to be one camp in Santa Monica.
Talk to you later.
Important Links
- Councilman Phil Brock
- Brock On Your Block – YouTube
- Twitter – Santa Monica Conservancy
- Facebook – Santa Monica Conservancy