A miracle just happened for the residents of Santa Monica that can save our city forever: Councilmember Kevin McKeown, who has served for decades in this role, just unexpectedly announced his resignation effective 2 weeks from now to a shocked Council and city. Why is this a miracle? Because Kevin had been leading the efforts to enrich wealthy developers by using “equity” and “anti-racism” as a BS excuse to upzone the entire city (including single family R1 zoned communities) for high density, multi story, multi family residential development, including UNLIMITED height and UNLIMITED DENSITY for “low income” buildings.
Imagine SM becoming San Francisco, with congested streets, no available street parking tons of noise and no safe place for kids to ride their bikes or play on the sidewalks. He’s also the guy who has championed spending $800 million of our tax money on “climate change”, DENIED homelessness and crime are a problem, and a handful of other things that would destroy and bankrupt our city.
And with Kevin unable to vote to select his appointed successor, the council now has a 3:3 tie of pro-developer to pro-resident council members. What does this mean? Unlike the last time when the council could easily appoint one of their cronies, there is no majority.
Therefore, we have a unique opportunity to save our city by pushing hard for the council to appoint a PRO-RESIDENT council member who loves our city and will do the right thing by prioritizing residents, acting fiscally responsibly, ending runaway development and free gifts of land to developers, ending upzoning plans, pushing back against the state’s insane mandate to add 9000 more units of housing to our already-dense city, and finally addressing homelessness and crime the way residents have been demanding. So I urge all of you to voice your concerns and demand that a pro-resident citizen of Santa Monica be appointed, someone who has no financial or family or other ties whatsoever to any developers or lobbyists or lawyers or any past, present or potential future city contractor and who has a TRACK RECORD of doing the right thing.
Let’s get ahead of this ASAP before the pro-developer crowd hijacks the conversation and labels residents as racist NIMBYs who have no compassion for homeless, poor, and criminals. Let’s make this happen!
Houman Hemmati
Santa Monica Resident
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