Community building is more than just doing acts of charity or being a law-obedient individual. At its more profound level, it is about creating a solutions-oriented public discourse between leaders and citizens. Evan Meyer explains how to achieve this common ground with Councilwoman Gleam Davis of Santa Monica. She discusses why politicians and people can make their cities a better place by setting aside differences, improving community feedback, and eliminating distrust of the political systems. Gleam also shares how they vastly improved housing projects, public transportation, healthcare, and education in Santa Monica through highly transparent and deeply democratic methods.
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Listen to the podcast here
Meyerside Chats Gleam Davis
This is a project we are working on with Evan Meyer, who, if you don’t know, is a man of a man about town. He does a lot of things. He’s got a transportation company. He’s involved in Beautify Earth. He does a lot of work to get out generally, meet people, say hi, and try to make the world a better place. Part of that project is this show, where he sits down with folks around the fireplace, sometimes usually when he can, and talks to them. See what their life is like their motivations, and how they are doing things. This episode is with Councilwoman Gleam Davis.
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Nice to see you, Gleam.
It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Neighbor.
It was a long two-block walk.
It was very far. That’s probably the convenience and the beauty of being here in Ocean Park but part of the Santa Monica community.
I have lived in a lot of different places in Santa Monica. Most of them have walkable components. You can stop off, grab a coffee, and see your neighbor. It is always a good thing to do.
You got the Kafe K latte. They got the best coffee. I’m always promoting Kafe K.
It’s right down the street from us. It’s a standard in our household.
They have some of the best coffee in town. We are excited to be here on the show. The purpose of being here is to talk, not necessarily about getting in the weeds on every issue but to talk at a high level about politics in general, the State of Affairs and how we can make things better, how we can all work through problems together.
A lot of this stems from the idea of something we have discussed before, which is distrust. That happens at every level. That happens at all levels of politics but in local politics, do you believe the same thing is happening? Do you believe there is something we can do about it? How can we start to explore? What are the solutions to create a more cohesive and less polarized space?
Let’s start at the back of your question. We clearly are in a polarized space here at the local level, and we have a tremendous amount of distrust in local government. There is distrust in government at all levels, which extends to local government. We are not immune from whatever it is that is causing that distrust and the situation with COVID, which causes people to become more isolated and crankier, in all honesty. There is a COVID crankiness. We all suffer from it. That distrust has only been exacerbated by what we have been going through over the last couple of years.
How do we solve it? I wish I had a magic wand. At its most basic level, the important thing to do is recognize that people can disagree with you, and it’s an honest disagreement. We tend to say, “If you don’t agree with me, it must be because you have been bought off. You are corrupt. You are stupid.” To say, “No rational, well-thinking person could disagree with me. Therefore, there is something wrong with you.”
When you come from that position where I have the righteous position and no one else can be honest and disagree with me from an equally in their mind righteous position, we are never going to be able to talk to each other because it’s easy to say, “You are corrupt. I dismiss what you think.” Of course, you would say, “You were bought off, whether by the developers or by the police, the fire unions. You were bought off by the unions.” Whoever it is that you are not in sync with, it’s too easy to dismiss other people’s opinions as having some validity, and if you assume that they are coming from a not well thought out place and not an honest place.
One of the things we need to do is recognize that reasonable people can disagree about very controversial matters. For example, housing is an issue. There is a whole range of opinions people have about housing. If you accept that the people with those varying opinions come to it from a place where they are in their own minds saying, “This is what I believe. This is what is best for the community.” You can have that discussion. It’s that simple. It’s thinking better of people, not the worst of people, that will help us get over that distrust problem.
Sometimes I have to imagine they have examples in their head that perhaps they project onto everybody. There have been cases probably in the past that they are thinking about somewhere somehow, maybe they are projecting federal politics onto local politics. Maybe they think that all people in politics are the same. I don’t know exactly but I’m wondering if we start to understand what those reasons are, we can make them better and soothe them a bit.
Politicians at every level, including the local level, have not done themselves any favor. It’s rare now not to open up a digital newspaper. I’m old enough to think about paper newspapers. It’s rare not to hear about this, that or the other scandal, whether it’s at the local level. The City of LA seems to be in the midst of having a scandal-a-day contest. It’s not just here in Southern California. It’s certainly at the federal level if you turn on the news.
Politicians have not done themselves a lot of favors by embroiling themselves in situations where they become suspect, and that helps create that suspicion. We also live in a constitutional democracy where people are innocent until proven guilty. Assuming that someone disagrees with you because they are corrupt when you have no evidence of corruption is problematic.
If we can start to put that aside and say, “I hear what you are saying. I may disagree with you but I trust that what you are saying is something that you firmly believe in an honest, forthright manner. If you need to listen to me in the same way, we can at least start to nibble around the edges of that trust issue but we will have to see.”
It would be interesting to figure out how to collect that information.
Part of the problem, and you and I have spoken about this before, is that we don’t have a lot of good structures for having that interchange. City council meetings are open to the public but because there are meetings, they have long agendas, and things need to be accomplished. Public input is if you are a member of the public, relatively limited. You get your two minutes to speak, and that’s it.
You can send emails and ask to speak to any of the council members or anyone else, whether it’s a school board member or rent control board member. They are constituents, and we should speak with them. The opportunities for honest public discourse are limited. When we have things like these public meetings, whether it’s about a development project or a proposal for this, that or the other thing, people come to them with agendas. Sometimes that agenda is to be disruptive.
One of the challenges we have is how do we better increase public discourse, which something like this can help. You and I can have a conversation, and there may be people out there going, “Ugh.” If they bear with us for a bit, they will start to say, “We can have that conversation.” Anything that gets that public discourse in a more tempered, rational, less fighters going to their corners and more people coming to a table trying to collaborate matter will make a big difference.
Seeing that there are people behind that day. They are humans with families.
As human beings, we all can pass the capture test and identify the cones and the squares. That’s a good thing.
If you come from a righteous position where no one else can be honest and disagree with you from an equally righteous position, you will not be able to talk to each other.
Is the capture test a requirement when you join the council?
It isn’t but maybe it should be.
Sometimes I think about what it takes to be on the council, and there should be some requirements like, “We need to be able to solve problems, come here together, work together, and solve problems. That’s the purpose.” There is a board here. This board of directors, in a sense, needs to be able to work together. We need to be able to hear all sides of the story. We need to be able to listen to community feedback.
I found this with every aspect of life once it gets into an emotional yelling match, wherever that’s coming from or if people are digging their heels in without active listening, the conversation doesn’t end up moving forward easier. It takes longer, is harder, and is more emotionally driven. I’m wondering, to some degree, what can we do to keep that objective and a solution-disoriented approach?
You identified it at the beginning of that question, which is, “Can we all agree that our job here is to do what is best for the city?” People have questioned many of my votes in the years I have been on the council, “How did you do that? Why did you come to that decision?” I always say the same thing, which is when I’m deciding how I’m going to vote on whatever the issue is, and I listen to everybody, “Is this best for you? Is this best for the neighborhood? Is this best for this group of people or that group of people?” I try and take it up to a higher level and say, “Is this best for Santa Monica as a whole?”
My reasoning for doing that is that we are going to move forward in the most beneficial, prosperous, and meaningful way if we all think about us in the larger community. I can’t tell you, unfortunately, how many times when there has been a project, a proposal or a ballot measure, and people have said, “What is in it for me.” Sometimes the answer is nothing but it’s good for the community.
If we can all agree that doing what’s best for the community is what we have been sent there to do by the people, and we all come from different constituencies. It’s like anything else. Some people voted for some people and didn’t vote for others. At the end of the day, now that we are all on the council, every single person who lives, works, and visits Santa Monica is in some way our constituent. Even the person who hates my guts, who would never vote for me in a million years, who thinks I am the evilest satan-worshiping person in the world, that’s my constituent.
Once we say, “This isn’t about settling old scores or writing old wrongs. This is about making decisions about what our best for the community as a whole, not this neighborhood versus that neighborhood or this person versus that person. Does this benefit the community as a whole?” If we start with that fundamental premise, we can find more common ground but I’m not sure we are all starting from that fundamental premise.
When it comes to thinking about the community as a whole, that means the most amount of good for the most amount of people. The utilitarian approach is one word to describe it. There is so much we all agree on. Everyone here, I believe 99% of the people in Santa Monica agree that we live in one of the best communities in the world. We are privileged to be in a place called Santa Monica that has a beach close to us. That has wonderful main streets, promenades, a great education system, great hospitals, everything. It’s a wonderful place for a million reasons. It has got plenty of problems like any community. Those problems are relative to the community that you live in and what you are dealing with at the time.
On the other hand, we all agree that homelessness is a big issue. We all understand the issue of housing, whether we agree that the approach is the right approach to take and the specific way that it’s done. Most people would agree that people need places to live. Everyone wants their children to have a good education and likely go to college. They care deeply about their children. They care about the well-being of their community in their own way.
If you have children, you care about building a community for your children. If you have grandchildren, you care about them. Even if you don’t have children, you care about building a better community for yourself. The people that will come after you, I’m bad with adages but it’s the old saying, “You plant the seeds now for the tree that grows tomorrow.” Sometimes, what we do is get too shortsighted about, “If you do this, this bad thing is going to happen to me tomorrow but maybe if you do this in 5, 10 or 15 years, something wonderful will come from it.”
I will give a completely non-Santa Monica example so that way, people won’t yell at me too much. There is a place where I used to live near Arlington, Virginia, when I worked at the Department of Justice. They embarked on a 25-year plan to reduce traffic, secure economic prosperity, and do this whole series of things that this part of Arlington, Virginia wanted to do because they had a new metro stop coming. They wanted not to say, “There is a metro stop. That’s nice but embrace it, build around it.”
They came up with a 25-year plan, and it took 25 years. At the end of that plan, I followed it because it was of great interest to me. They found that because they had billed a little more densely around the Boston, Virginia stop, traffic went down. In the short term, traffic went up because you were building more densely, and more people were driving.
As you got to that tipping point where people realized they didn’t need two cars in the family or didn’t even need one car, maybe they could use a zip car. They could use the Metro more often. There were more amenities close by, so they didn’t need a car to get to the grocery store, the pharmacy or whatever. They built this complete community. Over time, traffic went down but it took time because they were thinking forward, not what will this do tomorrow, but what will this do 5, 10 to 15 years down the road. That’s hard for people to do. We are all into immediate gratification like, “What is this going to mean for me?”
It’s also how you look at it if that’s not conveyed for something, whatever the thing that you are building, doing, not building or not doing, it’s hard to look at it a year later and go, “I’m seeing effects of something now. That doesn’t mean the long-term effect. I’m rooting for the long-term effect of why people made a certain decision to get either way.”
No matter where you are, whatever point of life you are at or whatever news you read, it’s momentary. There is usually a strategy. Maybe a good takeaway is that a forest from the trees, in a sense, is not always looked at when people are walking down the street and pointing things out about problems.
That’s important that you think about the larger picture. That goes back to the good for Santa Monica as opposed to this corner. It’s a forest for trees. It’s not today but tomorrow. I always tell people that as I’m analyzing what we are doing in Santa Monica, I always say, “We are not trying to recreate the Santa Monica of 1950 but build the Santa Monica of 2050.”
You always have to be looking forward because whether you like it or not, change is inevitable. The question is, “How do we manage that change to our own benefit and the benefit of the community as a whole?” If you try and stop change, all that happens is you make a mess. We have seen communities that have tried to stop change, and it makes a mess. You have to accept the inevitability of it and say, “How are we going to manage that?”
You need to emotionally embrace it. Lots of times, these are emotional decisions, “Is my corner store going to be there? Is my neighbor going to be there?” You have emotions tied up in that. It’s good that people are passionate about things. I never want to discourage people from being passionate but they also have to be able to take a step back and think about it dispassionately and say, “This isn’t best for me in the short-term because there will be a construction next door to me. I don’t like construction. It’s noisy and dusty.” What will be there at the end will be a much better building that will service more people, provide better services or something.
It’s hard to step back, think about the future and accept that there might be some short-term disadvantages that will lead to long-term betterment but we all can do that and struggle with it every day. I want to emphasize what you said, which is, “We are lucky to live in Santa Monica.” We have some problems, the problems of our unhoused neighbors and certain types of crime, which are problems not unique to Santa Monica. I don’t say that as an excuse but to point out that it’s not as if we are doing something in particular that is causing them. They are societal problems. They are regional problems.
This is a particularly favorable place to be.
I did another ride-along with Ron Hooks, who does West Coast Care and does the outreach on the beach. We were talking about this issue. He does ask people, “How did you end up in Santa Monica?” He is trying to reconnect them with their families and things like that. 9 times out of the 10, they say, “It’s where the bus line ended. It’s where the ten freeway ends.”
If you are in Downtown Los Angeles and you want to head West because it’s cooler out here, it’s nicer, and the air is fresher, at some point, you run out of room, and you run out of room in Santa Monica. That is our blessing in our curve. It’s our blessing because we have this beautiful beach and wonderful environment, and yet we are still connected to our region. I can hop on the expo train and see a play at the Ahmanson Theatre or see a hockey game at Crypto.com Arena without having to use my car, which as if I lived in some of the other beach communities, specific Palisades or Manhattan Beach. It’s much harder to do that.
It’s the benefit and the curse. The benefit is that we can be part of the larger regional environment without having to necessarily incur, “I got to get in my car and drive two hours.” By the same token, it does make it easier for people to get here. On the 4th of July weekend, a lot of people in the region come here and spend the day with us.
If you try to stop change, you will only make a mess. It is an inevitable thing that you have to accept and manage.
I have heard different comparisons around, “Why don’t we do it as Beverly Hills does it?” I’m sure you have heard this one, which has different ways of looking at their community of things that they allow and don’t allow. There are comparisons to us with cities like Santa Barbara. Geographically population-wise, there is some sister city type behavior there. How do you look when we are solving these? What cities do you look at as good examples? Are those some that are to do or not to do based on how their approach to things? Are there a few point cities that you use as an example to help make decisions?
There is no one city I look at and go, “They are doing everything right. Let’s copy that.” There is no one city that’s doing everything right. That doesn’t somehow crack the nut on all these problems. We are like many cities but also different. Our geography is unique to us. It’s funny you think, “There is another city down the road, El Segundo or Manhattan Beach. They don’t have any of the same problems.” They also don’t have as much transit. They don’t have as much walkability. They are smaller cities. They are more homogenous cities.
Are they doing things that maybe we can borrow from? Sure. Beverly Hills is a perfect example. They have a lot of tall buildings in Beverly Hills. When development issues come up, I get a lot of, “We don’t want to be Beverly Hills by the sea.” Yet, when people say, “They don’t have the same degree of people living on their streets as we do. We want to be like Beverly Hills.”
You want them for some things but not for other people.
There are differing reasons. Beverly Hills does have a problem with unhoused people. They are surrounded on all sides effectively by the City of LA. They have somehow figured out a way to make that LA’s problem, not their own.
I have seen them, at least on the border.
That was one of the reasons they didn’t want public transit. They didn’t want the subway to come through Beverly Hills because it would bring those people. They fought very much and continue to fight for bus rapid transit. They don’t want bus rapid transit lanes in Beverly Hills because people might get off at those stops.
If you want to isolate yourself and say, “The only way I’m going to get out of my city is to get in a car,” that probably will make it harder for people who don’t have cars to come to your city. If that’s a value judgment that you as a city make, that’s okay. What we need to always focus on is understanding the Santa Monica values. That is a good area to find some common ground.
I believe that most people in Santa Monica look at our unhoused neighbors and think, therefore, by the grace of God, go high. These are human beings. For whatever reason, they have ended up in a situation that none of us would want to be in. You don’t ask five-year-old kids and say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” They say, “A homeless person.” People don’t become homeless because that’s their goal in life.
If we start, 1) From the recognition that these are human beings, 2) That whatever failures we want to attribute to them, some people look at homeless people and think, “They fail.” Those are societal failures. Those aren’t individual failures. We failed them. Our social safety net didn’t catch them before they fell into deep mental illness, addiction issues or economic issues. We have a lot of people on our streets who are economically homeless. They can’t afford the rent.
If we start that our Santa Monica values are that these are human beings and that it is going to take a collective effort to address their issues, we can’t say, “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” It’s because they don’t have any boots. It’s going to take a collective effort on our part. If we say we are not going to do this in a humane and legal way but in a way that is designed to solve the problem rather than move it out of our site because that, to me, is the biggest challenge with homelessness.
I know you don’t want to get in the weeds but a lot of people are, “I don’t want to see it. I live in Santa Monica. I pay good money on my taxes. I don’t want to see homeless people on the streets.” I am sympathetic to that. I don’t, either. None of us want to because it’s soul-crushing but is the solution to say, “Let’s move them all out to the inland empire?” People have, in all seriousness, said, “At least I don’t have to look at them. Maybe someone else does.” Whereas the solution is to solve homelessness, to get them home. That is what homelessness is, by definition, the lack of a home.
If we can say that one of our values is not to make it someone else’s problem or move it out of our site but instead to solve the problem. I tell people it’s like cleaning your house. You are going to clean your house or take the musk, shove it under the bed and deal with it another day. We want to solve the problem, not move it and make it someone else’s problem or move it out of our side because that is the humane thing to do. It’s the morally right thing to do. It’s the only effective thing to do.
I guarantee you. You can’t, but if you could legally put people on a bus and say, “You all live in Chino Hills now.” They will be back because we are at the end of the way. You are not solving their problem. You are not solving our problem. Let’s focus on solutions. It goes back to short-term fixes. Short-term fixes maybe make us all feel better but in the long-term don’t solve the problem.
On that note, while we are here on this topic, something that always occurred to me is how we make sure that housing doesn’t become a short-term problem. You could see how eventually, if you don’t solve the root of the problem, you need more housing forever. It’s like building more freeway lanes.
I think two things. I had this discussion with someone. They said they were opposed to building this proposal we have for where parking structure three is to build restricted affordable housing and permanent supportive housing performance. They said, “We don’t want those people living Downtown.” I said, “They already live there. They live there without homes. Let’s have them live in homes, which will be better for them, our businesses, and the community.”
We need to understand that there isn’t this induced demand. There is this concept of induced demand. If you build another lane on the freeway, people go, “More lanes on the freeway. Now I can drive, and I didn’t drive before.” That doesn’t work quite well with housing because most people only need one home. Maybe the ultra-rich have many homes. Most of us only have one home. Once someone gets housed, they are not going to say, “More housing. Let’s build it so I can have a second home.” That’s not the issue.
What the issue is the recognition that we can’t build a wall around Santa Monica. We can’t build a wall around Southern California, nor should we. I don’t know what your background is. My parents came to California after World War II and were welcomed with open arms. What if the people in 1946 California said, “We don’t want those people from Michigan coming here?” Why shouldn’t we be any different now when people say, “I grew up in Nebraska but want to go live in California?”
One of the things that make the state vibrant is that we have such a diverse population, and we have been welcoming people from everywhere. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. We don’t want to build walls. We don’t want to say, “This many and no more.” I’m not a native of Santa Monica. I have lived here for a long time but I’m not native. In 1986 when I moved here, should they have said, “I’m sorry, no one from Washington, DC can come here?”
Around the issue of housing, what we need to recognize, especially for something that is expensive to build like housing, is that you are almost never going to build too much of it. No one is going to build housing and say, “Let’s build a ton of it and see if people will move into it.” It’s because it’s expensive to build but they will build to meet the need.
One of the things that we have to do as a community and as a region is to recognize, “Nope, it’s not as if everyone can live in Santa Monica. That’s not going to happen. No more than everyone can live in Culver City or Beverly Hills.” We do have to recognize that we are, as a region, a job center. People not only want to but should be able to live near their jobs. They won’t have to be on the freeway for two hours, filling gas out the back of their tailpipe and missing time with their family. You are a new father. Believe me. You want to want every second with that.
Imagine if you had a two-hour commute. You will be, “I’m missing two hours with my baby now.” We need to come up with regional strategies. I have heard people say, “Let’s move the jobs out to the Inland Empire.” I’m sorry. We are a tourist community. We have been a tourist community for 100 years. Unless you are going to pick up the whole dug on the beach and move the beach to the Inland Empire, the jobs are going to be here. People are going to need to live in this region. We need to figure out how to do that. I believe that we can.
It’s interesting. The world has changed. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, it used to be that large corporations would establish their headquarters in places, and people would go there for the jobs. A classic example being IBM established this huge campus in Armonk, New York. Who knew where Armonk was? All of a sudden, it became this boom town. Everyone who worked at IBM moved to Armonk.
With technology, you don’t need to do that now. Smart people like you, young people getting out of college, don’t say, “I got a job. I have to move to where my job is.” They try to decide where do I want to live and then find a job that lets them live there, whether it’s working remotely or it’s a job nearby. Desirable places like Santa Monica are always going to be popular. We need to accept that in the Westside of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Manhattan Beach, including Santa Monica, and Pacific Palisades, people are going to say, “I want to live there.” We are going to need to accept the fact that we are going to have to provide housing.
Some people look at the homeless and see them as failures. However, it is society’s safety net that failed to catch them.
You brought up something else that’s interesting, which is in terms of cities working together. This is something even at the micro-mobility level that I have experienced, and I’m a huge scooter fan. They are important. My background is in transportation, as you know, although most people know me as the art guy.
You can be the art and the transportation guy.
I have so much background in that. When scooters came out, they had issues like everything does when it first comes out. The one thing that is going to be harder to fix other than better kickstands, not riding, and turning it off when you are on the sidewalk is things when you are riding a scooter from Venice to Santa Monica, and your scooter dies when you have to get to your home in Santa Monica or your job.
You have a mode of transportation that only worked part of the way, and you now have to stop and get a new mode of transportation. Hopefully, a scooter is right there where it died, and you can pick it up and go but it’s often not. Usually, you have to back it out so you can park it in the right place. That’s an example at the micro-mobility level. That happens in many ways. I’m wondering about your thoughts on that. What can we do to communicate better between cities so these types of things can be addressed more productively?
Imagine if you only could ride the big blue bus to the city line, and then you had to get off and catch a metro bus. You go, “I need to go five blocks into LA.” Interoperability of the systems, whether it’s a scooter system or a bus system, is key. I didn’t win this vote. That happens in a democracy. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. For me, we should at least be included in our pilot of those companies that also are able to operate in LA because we are connected three times to LA. If they live in Venice and work in Santa Monica, the idea that they can’t ride a scooter from Venice to Santa Monica because that scooter company isn’t authorized to operate in one or the other doesn’t make any sense. That’s something we need to work on.
It’s the interoperability of all transit systems. This happens for two reasons. One is that we are still thinking like car-centric people. In other words, if you had a car, we said, “Your car can only operate in Santa Monica. The second you go to LA, you must get a different car.” People would go, “You are crazy. We’re not going to do that.” Yet, we are willing to do it with scooters because we don’t think of scooters as valid transportation. One of the things I’m trying to do in my own life is to get rid of this notion of, “That is alternative transportation.” Somehow our main form of transportation is cars, and everything else is secondary.
That’s interesting. The language hasn’t been updated.
No, it’s all transportation. It should all stand on an equal footing, have equal rights to public space, and operate within our public space. That is part of getting away from this idea that cars are the end-all and be-all. I have a car and drive but I’m conscious about trying to drive as little as possible. One of the reasons we moved to Ocean Park is because it’s so much more walkable.
Over time, people will discover that maybe you go from being a 2-car family to a 1-car family or maybe you drive the 1 car you have 2/3 less than you used to. It’s not about getting rid of the cars. I understand. You need to go to the grocery store, the dry cleaner or whatever. If you can drive less, that’s good for the environment. It’s good for the community. It’s less traffic and pollution. In all honesty, the more you walk, the more you use these other more human-level types of transportation, and the more you interact with human beings, which is always a good thing.
More human-level activity means better well-being.
It’s good for the economy. The people who drive down the main street in Santa Monica are not paying attention to the stores that are on Main Street because they are in a 2,000-pound metal machine, and they need to be paying attention to where the pedestrians are. Someone who’s walking by can stop and go, “Look at that. Let’s go to that store. That’s interesting.” It’s better for the economy.
They have done studies in Europe and New York that show that when you get people out of the cars and in other forms of transportation, whether it’s scooters or even buses, because when you are in the bus, you are not the one driving it. They notice more about what is on the street. They become intrigued by it and begin to interact with it. That’s important. One thing I would say is that we need to stop thinking about scooters and these other alternative forms of transportation. If we wouldn’t do it for cars, why are we doing it for that?
It’s a good takeaway. Maybe we can think about how to even begin that language shift in Santa Monica. It’s not alternative transportation. It’s transportation. You have different modes. Cars are one of them for certain activities.
The second thing and this is a little harder for people to wrap their heads around but we will over time, is it goes back to my personal versus community responsibility discussion, in which it’s more convenient for me to get in a car and drive. My car is at my house. I don’t have to wait for my car like I would have to wait for a bus. I get in my car. I drive to exactly where I need to be. I don’t have to walk. It lets me off right in front of where I need to be. I park my car, and it’s there when I’m coming out. I don’t have to wait. It’s more convenient.
One of the things the government needs to do, not just the Santa Monica government but all governments everywhere needs to do, is make all sorts of transport more convenient. Whether it’s making sure there are scooters readily available, the buses come more frequently, and people feel safe when they are on the bus. One of the things I keep trying to do is figure out a way, and I call them the coconut shuttle, those little electric shuttles that go up and down the Main Street to the hotels and up in Montana.
Is there a way to maybe make them citywide so that someone in the Pico neighborhood says, “I want to go see a movie downtown?” They have an app. They hit the app and say, “Come get me.” They don’t operate there now. How do we expand people’s options so that they don’t have to drive and it’s equal but it’s convenient for them? One of the reasons people say, “I don’t ride the bus. I don’t want to stand there and wait for it. It’s not convenient.” We need to elevate. We need to make that calculus different.
One of the things that I always said is that we need to get rid of monthly parking fees, and you should have to pay by the day. If I pay $200 a month for parking and get up in the morning, I’m like, “I already paid for the parking.” I might as well drive. If I haven’t already paid for the parking, it’s a nice day. I wouldn’t mind walking a little bit. I wouldn’t mind waiting for the bus for a few minutes. I don’t have anything pressing, so I can have it take ten minutes longer for me to get to work. We need to change that calculus that people are making in their minds about it.
We have an obligation to make a transit at all levels more convenient for people. It will never be as convenient as driving but if it’s more convenient, more people will use it. The other thing we need to do is change that economic calculus. One of the interesting things is that people don’t understand how expensive it is to own a car. It’s not the price of the car. It’s the insurance, wear and tear, the money you pay for gas, repairs, and the land you have to set aside to park your car, whether it’s taking land on your property to build a garage, which has value to it. It is expensive to own a car. A lot of people could find housing to be more affordable if they didn’t have the additional expensive owning a car.
It’s the second biggest expense most people have.
We need to get people to rethink the economics of transportation and the convenience of transportation. The city region has an obligation to make transit more effective but we also have to educate people about the cost that they are paying for that convenience. Are that extra five minutes worth an extra $500 a month?
When automated cars become real for all of us, they will start to force the hand of policy because that’s a reality, which is both scary and exciting. You can’t implement something of that drastic change until it is ten times safer than what people are used to doing and are familiar with. It’s not even just that. Let’s say you get the car, and the infrastructure around what that is going to create is crazy. What do you do with parking garages? People are making money on their cars.
My crystal ball doesn’t work any better than anyone else’s but it goes back to my argument that there are people who are going to go, “I don’t want autonomous vehicles. Stop the autonomous vehicle.” You can’t stop them. Let’s manage it. It’s changed. That change is inevitable. Let’s manage it in a way that’s the most beneficial for the community. By making the argument about whether to change or not to change, we miss that opportunity.
It’s the same way you can’t tell, “We can’t turn off Silicon Beach.” You can’t say, “Are you fit into this tech company type? You can’t do business here. If you have friends who are also doing tech companies, they can’t come here and do business either. We have to turn off Silicon Beach. Certain things are the way they are.”
Let me give you a different example because I know technology is controversial but healthcare. In Santa Monica, the largest employer, besides the local government, is the healthcare industry. We have two wonderful hospitals here. What comes with those hospitals? Medical offices. Medical offices are huge traffic generators because, in any given hour, you have 3 or 4 people going into each individual office. A lot of them are getting there by driving. It’s one of the most intense traffic generators you can imagine.
If you really want to solve a problem, do not simply make it someone else’s problem.
You have a lot of people coming into town. We have doctors and nurses. It’s interesting that people think, “They are all doctors and nurses.” Most of the people who work in hospitals are people who are doing administrative work and cleaning the rooms. These are not people who can afford to live in Santa Monica unless we do something about our housing prices. People say, “We shouldn’t have the healthcare industry. We shouldn’t have hospitals in town.”
Let me tell you this. If it’s your loved one who’s having a heart attack and is in an ambulance, you want that hospital five blocks from you. You don’t want to have to cross the 405 Freeway to get to UCLA. That is what we need to get people thinking about it. It goes back to, “What’s in it for me?” What’s in it for you is when you need that hospital, you are going to be glad it is close.
That is like any public service or private service. Insurance is a similar concept, where no one likes paying insurance but it’s there when you need it, and you don’t know when that is. That’s the whole purpose, and you are glad you had it when you do.
For me, it’s about doing a little more critical thinking about these things and saying, “There are trade-offs with every decision we make. Some good things come from it. Some bad things come from it.” Overall, what’s best for the community as a whole is a fabulous asset in that Santa Monica has two world-class hospitals within our relatively small borders.
As someone who had a son who played all games and participated in athletics, I was in those emergency rooms quite frequently, and I’m glad they were there. We get the same conversation, something completely different about the college. When the college was in session, all these people came to classes at the college and were not even Santa Monicans. They are coming from the region or internationally. They are international students. Isn’t that awful? I’m like, “No, that’s great.”
We have this incredible resource that generates all this programming that is available to Santa Monica. On any given night, pre-COVID and hopefully post-COVID, you can go to Santa Monica College, and there is an interesting lecture, play or dance theater. There’s something interesting going on there. That is happening in our community because we have this vibrant educational institution. Does it create inconvenience for us? Of course, it does.
Traffic used to be a huge issue pre-COVID. I would say, “There are two ways to solve traffic.” One is congestion pricing in cities like Santa Monica, London, Singapore, and Helsinki. A lot of cities have done congestion pricing. It has alleviated traffic to some extent. The other thing is the economic down term. If you want to be in Detroit, we can get rid of traffic.
If you are going to have vibrant institutions and an exciting city with options to grab a coffee, get dinner, and go to the theater, when you have a vibrant, desirable city, people want to come to it. Until we figure out better ways to move people around, they are going to come in cars, and that’s going to create traffic.
Everything in governance is about choices. The question is, “How do we make those choices?” I keep circling back because I’m a boring person, which is, for me, analyzing those choices is what’s best for the community as a whole. I tell people, “I would gladly sit in ten minutes more of traffic every day of my life for the rest of my life if, by doing so, I knew that every person who lived in Santa Monica had secure housing, access to good healthcare, secure access to food, a wonderful education and the opportunity to thrive. I will take ten minutes out of my day and sit in traffic for that.”
When I see people vote on policy or anytime you have to pick one thing over another, you are always giving up one thing. It’s a cost-benefit. We are doing some risk analysis to determine what we are going to put forth here that is going to create a great thing for people. What are the risks and alternatives? Can we pursue those alternatives?
If you looked at the matrix of that decision-making, you had to put that in a table, and view it down and be like, “This is the reason they said yes, and this is the reason they said no. That’s why the policy is done the way it is.” You may not like it but you should understand the rationale. Often things are never that clear. There’s never a table. You were like, “Those are the reasons, yes.” Think about those if you’re either upset about a decision or whatever.
It always occurred to me that even when you are voting on something, and if I have to make a decision, I know that there are alternative choices, and I may not be 100% in love with the choice that I made. Given a lot of people that were weighing in on it, you have to balance certain things. That was the outcome that happened. I’m okay with that outcome. I was okay with giving up some of those things. It doesn’t mean I love the exact thing all the time but that’s the way it ended up. That’s what democracy created, and we have to accept that.
To me, that takes a radical acceptance approach to sometimes be able to do that. It’s hard to do but it feels that there’s a gap that instead of looking at that approach, there tends to be this idea that corruption is the reason. They made that decision. To what degree that happens in politics? I don’t know and at which level that starts becoming serious. I’m sure it happens at some level. If that information was provided, I have to imagine people would go, “That’s interesting.” If in that table, we highlighted the things we all tend to agree on, “We all agree that we can’t draw a fence around Santa Monica.” That’s part of the decision-making process, given that consensus.
I suppose what I’m thinking is how can we make that more clear to people that these choices are hard and that there is a lot of work and thought. It’s not all selfish. It’s not all corrupt. There’s a matrix of the decision-making here. If that is the case, what do we need to do to convey that to make people feel better and make a trustful place for people and families?
I wish I knew the answer. We have certain structures that are designed to make governance more transparent. The Ralph Brown Act, not that anybody else brown act or the color Brown Act, it’s The Ralph Brown Act. It says that we have to do the public’s business in public with certain limited exceptions, and that’s key. You have city council meetings where the hope is that people are discussing why they are voting in a particular way. I have been on the short end of some 6-1 votes, and that’s okay.
One of the important things that we can, as council members, do to try and restore that to us is to give reasons for why we vote the way we do so that people can see that we thought it out. In other words, you say, “Here’s why I’m voting this way. Here are the reasons why.” At least you go, “They have given me some arguable rationale. They may not be reasons I agree with.”
We talk about cost-benefit analysis that is not Black or White because both costs and benefits are always valuing. What may be a benefit to you is incredibly valuable to me. I’m like, “I don’t care.” You can never create an objective standard and say, “This is the way to do it. This is what we should do.” There’s always going to be room for disagreement, which is fine. I am perfectly happy being on the short end of 6-1 votes but I have the opportunity to stay in public while I’m voting the way I did, and that’s important.
If each of us explains, “This is why I’m voting the way I did,” people can go, “I don’t think that’s a good reason. Now that you put it that way, it’s a good reason.” People can see the process. The cost-benefit analysis is happening at the institutional level, maybe not at the individual level. In our institutions, we file a lot of forms.
It’s Form 700 season, which means we all have to file our forms and say where we get income from. Those forms are public, so people can look at our forms and see who is my employer. I work for AT&T. When anything that comes up relating to telecommunications, I recuse myself, even if it’s not an AT&T question. If it’s a Verizon or a Frontier question because whatever policy we are making inherent in that decision may somehow benefit AT&T somewhere down the road. I don’t want to get caught in that.
We do a lot of disclosure when we are doing quasi-judicial hearings. We are required to disclose any ex-party out of the public’s eye conversations we had with the parties. Quasi-judicial would be an appeal of a landmark decision or certain land use planning. There are a lot of processes and opportunities for us to tell the public, “Here is who is giving us money. Here is who is not giving us money.” All of our campaign donors are disclosed in the election process. We have the opportunity to explain ourselves from the dais. We should avail ourselves of all of those.
The bigger problem, I don’t know how to say this nicely, maybe I will be a little not nice is that we all think not invented here problem, “If I didn’t think this and invented this idea, it can’t be good.” If you say, “This is what I believe, and this is the only thing an irrational person could believe,” by definition, you are saying the person who disagrees with you is irrational or corrupt. That’s what we need to get off. We need to get off the idea that there is one right answer, and there is only one way that any “good person” could come out on an issue. There are some things where it is very Black and White voting rights. Everybody should be able to vote. We should do nothing to impinge on people’s ability to vote.
It is something that most people would agree with.
Things relating to the well-being of people. I feel very strongly and have been doing some work with some people about the proliferation of weapons in our society and how it breaks my heart. When I was young, I was old enough to remember doing earthquake drills and nuclear drills, getting under my desk because somehow my little kindergarten desk was going to protect me from a nuclear bomb but we did them. Now they are doing active shooter drills. That’s heartbreaking.
There are some things we can agree on but whether or not that building across the street should be torn down. If you say it should not be torn down but if you think it should be torn down, the only reason that you can think it should be torn down is that you are on the tape, there’s nowhere for us to go because you can’t negotiate with corrupt. If you say, I’m stupid because you can’t negotiate with stupid.
Civility is not just about making yourself feel better. It’s also about having a better discourse about different issues and speaking to each other in a more civilized manner.
If you say, “You see some merit to that building, I don’t see the merit.” Let’s agree to disagree. As Obama said, “Let’s disagree without being disagreeable.” We will have a vote on the council. Someone will win. Someone will lose. The people who lose can’t be resentful about it. They can’t go, “I lost that. the next time I get a chance, I’m going to stick it to those people.” You have to say that’s democracy in action. Sometimes the people I vote for president don’t win. I don’t say, “I’m moving to Canada.” I say, “It’s democracy in action. My job is to continue to be politically active and hope that in the next election, the person I want wins.”
If we can accept that, we can disagree from a rational place. We can both be rational actors, non-corrupt actors, and have an honest disagreement. We may never get to an agreement. That’s okay but democracy provides for a vote. We will have the vote. The person who loses says, “I lost that vote. Maybe I will win the next one.” The person who wins doesn’t go, “See, I was right. I won that vote. Maybe I will lose the next one.” All of a sudden, we are talking in a much more civil and professional.
Our mayor, unfortunately, has been taking some hits for asking people to be civil as though somehow being uncivil is a good thing. I am a First Amendment person. I have done a lot of work in my day job as a First Amendment lawyer. I believe people have a right to come to counsel, and they can call us any name they want. They can say whatever they want. We knew the job was dangerous when we took it. They have to understand that when you are uncivil to people, it varies your argument.
I always tell people, “It’s amazing how people will come to you.” I have had this happen many times, “You are corrupt. You are on the take. So and so has bought you. You only care about this. Now I would like you to vote with me on this issue.” I’m already in my little human brain going, “I’m not here in the second part. If you want to persuade me that you are in the right, calling me stupid or corrupt.” In the first instance, that is the best way to get there. You are certainly entitled to do it, and I am required to take it. If your goal is to try and accomplish something rather than insulting me, you are not doing it the best way. You catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar.
At our housing commission meeting, someone used a horrible epithet on one of our commissioners from the public. He screamed it out. I’m sure they were upset, which caused them to do it. They had a right to do it. When that person comes and takes their two minutes to speak, what do you think that commissioner is going to think about what they say? No matter how well thought out it is. No matter how meritorious it is, they are going to be looking at the person and go, “You are the one that called me that horrible epithet.”
No matter how objective you can be, the fact that that happened makes it challenging for anyone to be like, “You are the person who called me that.”
We are all human beings. We are not a ton of tons. If people call us names and accuse us of things, we can’t help but have it color or what they say. Someone could say something incredibly rational, incredibly well thought out but we are still thinking, “You are the one that called me that terrible name. You are the one who accused me of being corrupt. Civility is not about making me feel better but it’s about having a better discourse about the issues.
If we can speak to each other in a more civil manner, we can take all that extraneous stuff, that name-calling, out of it. I’m listening to what you have to say from a substantive level and not focused on, “You are the person that thinks I’m a moron.” I’m not trying to censure anybody. They can use whatever tactic they want.
The reality is that if you yell at people, that people are less likely to listen to you. First, they have to absorb your yelling.
My family has been attacked in my time on the council. Horrible things have been said about my son and my husband. I always tell them both, “I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. Unfortunately, you are stuck with me.” It’s okay to be uncivil. We had Martin Luther King Jr Day. He wrote about the need to be uncivil. When he was talking about being uncivil, he meant things like civil disobedience. In other words, “You say I can’t sit at that lunch counter. I’m sitting at that lunch counter.” When you read his writings and listen to his speeches, he never debated himself, diluted or obscured his message with name-calling. That’s the difference.
You have the absolute First Amendment right to call people names. I had someone, and I will use this word because this is the word they used, call my son retarded. “He’s your son. He must be retarded,” someone told me that. They had an absolute First Amendment right to say that. When they come to me and say, “Here is how I want you to vote on this issue.” What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to process that? You have a First Amendment right to do it but if you are trying to be an effective advocate, think about, “Is that the effective way to do it?”
When we talk about civility, that is a shorthand way of talking about this conversation you and I are having. We are not trying to censure anyone or tell them they can’t be upset. They want to elevate their voice. That is fine, but understand that’s the effect you are having. We can be done with the name-calling, unsupported allegations of corruption, and the things that make it difficult. These are barriers to having that conversation. I think we can go far.
There’s an emotional intelligence factor to this. If you come in with that attitude, there’s something that’s missing there that’s saying, “I’m trying to get something done here.” What you said was powerful, and I want to breathe into that for a second but I suppose it feels there’s an opportunity in the council to take some of these values and perhaps start with that.
What you said was real about how people think in the reality of decision-making. If people would know before they stepped up there to come to communicate that, first of all, calling people names is childish. I don’t know if anyone would disagree with it. If you probably raise your hand and say, “Is it childish to call people mean names?” You probably say, “Yeah.” Most people would probably agree. Do you think it would be helpful to, at the beginning of controversial issues, lay out some of these principles potentially? Maybe start by opening the dialogue with, “Here are the things we all agree on.”
Our mayor has tried to do that and has been criticized quite heavily for it. It’s one of the saddest days on the council. Kevin Mckeown and I didn’t agree on everything but when he left and we thanked him for his service, we had people who called in and spent their two minutes insulting him. They are certainly entitled to do that but why? What was the point? There is this meanness and ugliness.
I will be honest and say, “Each and every one of us as council members need to do a better job of modeling good behavior, both on the dais and off the dais.” I will try and work on that. I am imperfect, more thick-skinned, and a little more respectful in dealing with people. As you say, “Avoid the quick and easy temptation of name calling and things like that.”
We need to model better behavior. We can ask people to follow that model. One of the things we need to tell, not just our board members and commissioners but the people who are civically engaged, is that we want to make Santa Monica not a model city from an infrastructure, a built environment or a mobility standpoint. Let’s make it a model democratic society. We talk so much and hear it on the news every day. These pundits get on and talk about, “Democracy is dying. Democracy is threatened. There was an attempted coup. There’s going to be another attempted coup. They are trying to keep us all from voting.”
What if we took our little 8 square miles and said, “Let’s be a model for what they can’t be? Let’s have respectful, honest discourse, which will include disagreements but show that this is how democracy can function.” It isn’t about trying to keep people from voting. It isn’t about insulting people. It isn’t about creating an environment where people are polarized. You are in your corner. I’m in my corner, and never the twain shall meet.
If we said, “This is our goal. We are going to try and make Santa Monica a model for the way that democratic processes can work in its admittedly on a small local level.” Sometimes it’s those small local things that catch fire. If people say, “If Santa Monica can do it, we can do it too.” A lot of the well-being work we did, which got nipped in the bud by COVID, sadly, came from the fact that a lot of people who are thinking about these issues think that we are not going to make our society better from the top down. It’s too polarized.
We have 24/7 news media that are looking for disputes and disagreements. We have social media, and that’s a whole other hour to talk about. We are never going to be able to reconstruct that golden age of democracy, if you want to call it that, from the top down because there’s too much at stake at the top. If we can do it in small pockets like Santa Monica, maybe some small town in Alabama or Illinois, if we can start to see it and it becomes a groundswell, and it builds from the ground up, maybe there’s hope for us. There is hope for democracy. The interesting thing is that you can accomplish the most at a small level and scale up. It’s much harder. It’s more daunting to attack it at the larger level. We can do some work there.
It would be hard to imagine that it’s not possible. That, to me, would be hard to imagine. There are things that have been done in a society that seems way more impossible. Automated cars are one of them. Self-driving cars, satellites, things that are marvels, and technology that we all take advantage of, talking to someone face to face across the world in real-time.
This seemed impossible several years ago. To think that on a small level, we can create a place where people can actively listen to one another, hear each other and appreciate the disagreement. Even though you are not always going to get what you want. Taking some of those values and putting them forth feels like it is possible. I’m hopeful.
We all have to be hopeful because the minute you lose hope, then what’s the point? Pete Buttigieg said, “Running for office is an act of optimism, hope, and faith that things can get better.” He was right. If you went her politics, whether it’s running for office or being an engaged member of the community, you are at some fundamental level expressing your hope that things can get better.
If you didn’t think things needed better, you would disengage completely. Maybe that’s the common ground we all find. The reason we are all at this table, yelling at each other, calling each other names, and being rude is that we all care, and we all think things can be better. If we agree on that fundamental thing, maybe we can incrementally start to build.
If people can talk about issues without name-calling, unsupported allegations of corruption, and unnecessary barriers, we can go far.
Start there and get to the next layer.
There are people in this community I know who have never voted for me for the city council and think that every decision I have made is wrong. There was a famous quote from William O Douglas, who was probably the most liberal member we ever had in the US Supreme Court. At the end of his service, he sat on the court with William Rehnquist, who was conservative and appointed by Nixon.
Justice Douglas was getting on in years, and some people thought he was losing some of his faculties. Someone confronted him about that and said, “These are complex issues. How do you know how to vote?” He said, “I find out whatever Rehnquist is thinking, I vote the opposite way.” At some point, you are like, “Woo-woo.” At another point, you are like, “Okay.” They were both on the Supreme Court.
Maybe that’s it. There are people in this town who I know go, “Whatever Gleam Davis thinks is a good idea, I think the opposite.” I want to make it clear. That’s okay. If we can understand that you and I both care and you can accept that I’m not corrupt, I’m not doing this because I’m making some money. Trust me. If I were making money off of being on the city council, I would live in a nicer place. I would drive a nicer car.
If you can accept the reason I’m doing what I’m doing, you are doing what you are doing, and everyone else is doing what they are doing again at this large table, to use a metaphor that will call the public square. We are all in the public square because we care. Maybe that’s the first place we find common ground. Acknowledge that I’m here because I want to make Santa Monica better. You are here because you want to make Santa Monica better. We may not agree on anything else. If we can at least both agree that we want to make Santa Monica better, that’s a start.
Before they even speak to acknowledge that and go, “We are both,” I’m going to come to you with a different approach. It’s usually not the thing that people disagree with the thing itself. It’s the approach. Everyone wants everyone to be healthy from COVID. No one wants anyone to die but people think there are different approaches to how it has been handled, and whatever it is, everyone wants homelessness to be solved. People think there are different ways that this should be done on top of that fundamental. You laid it out perfectly that we both care. I will tell you my approach. Now you tell me your approach, and we can weigh the approaches.
If you are looking for common ground, which is sometimes hard to find, and maybe it’s that most fundamental level, for me, the promise of Santa Monica is that we have tremendous assets in this city. Some of them are natural, the beach and the fact that we have mountains. We can go hiking close to that we have this beautiful weather.
I moved to Santa Monica because I grew up on the East Side of town. My memory of growing up had air you could see. The smog was so bad. I always wanted to move to Santa Monica because of the ocean breeze. You didn’t have that issue. We have these tremendous natural assets. We also have this tremendous set of assets we call our people. We have an artistic community that is unparalleled anywhere in the nation.
You have people say, “Cows in New Mexico, or Sedona.” I’m like, “Come to Santa Monica.” We have an artistic community. We have a tech community that is working on building the future. We have a healthcare community that is working to make us all healthier and live longer. We have this tremendous group of people who are all trying to make something better, which if you think about it, it’s amazing.
You layer on top of that a Santa Monica culture that says, “We are willing to be on the leading edge. We are willing to take the shot to the chin.” To be the person who sticks our chin out there and says, “This is important.” Whether it’s the work, we are going to do to try and protect the environment or create a better education for our kids.
There is no community that I know of in the United States of America that takes their general fund revenues from their city and gives more than $2,500 per pupil to every kid in our public schools. That’s amazing. That isn’t something people do because, “It makes me look good.” They did it because they understood that investing in education is key. Key to making this a stronger community and giving us a better future. Every kid that’s going to a Santa Monica, public school, we are investing in them in a way nobody else is.
When you take those natural assets, the people assets, and that culture that says, “Everybody should have a secure home. For people who aren’t as economically well as others, we should take care of them. We should create our own local safety net.” We have done this through our pod program, which subsidizes older people who are spending a disproportionate amount of their money and rent, and through our other programs, which provide subsidies to the Virginia Avenue Food Pantry for people who are food insecure.
When you look at every day, we are doing things that are an expression of our culture. If you start to build on that and are going, “Look at all of this. This is great.” The thing I want to remind people about is that more than 90% of the votes we take at the city council are unanimous votes. We spend 90% arguing about the other 10%. Ninety percent of our time is spent about the other 10%, and that’s okay. That’s how it should be.
What that tells you is that we do have some fundamental agreements. Whether it’s, “Let’s buy that backhoe. It’s the best backhoe. That’s the right thing to do from a sustainability standpoint or whatever,” 90% of our votes are unanimous. We are not disagreeing about every little thing. We are disagreeing about some of the big stuff, and that’s okay. That’s where our time is spent.
When you think about the natural assets, the people, the culture, would you want to live anywhere else? No matter what you think about Santa Monica and what you have to complain about, we all have things that we would like to see change within the city. At the end of the day, where else would you live? This is, to me, a place that is unparalleled. I had the fortune of traveling around the world. I have lived in various parts of the country. This is where my heart is.
That was lovely to read. It was beautifully said. That should cap now. That was perfect. Anything else after this would not be nearly as good as that.
Thanks for having me.
It was good seeing you.
It’s always great talking to you, and I hope to have these conversations. One conversation never solves everything but many conversations will.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for being real with everything going on.
I showed up in my workout clothes. How much more real could I be?
Thanks, Gleam.
Thanks, Evan.
Important Links
- Gleam Davis – LinkedIn
- Beautify Earth
- Kafe K
- West Coast Care
- AT&T