By any measure, Santa Monica City Hall’s most significant accomplishment In 2007 was vetoing the residents.

It has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars staging “community workshops” that are run by visiting “facilitators,” who know little about Santa Monica but a great deal about rigging the workshops and manipulating participants to get the responses the City wants.

The responses are further diluted or adjusted when they are run through the City filter, interpreted, summarized and inserted into staff reports.

At the last City Council meeting of the year, another $350,000 was allocated for another round of workshops.

The City also spends enormous sums of money on consultants, an unusual number of whom seem to be from San Francisco, and, more often than not, accepts their assessments as gospel.

Residents’ opinions. ideas, complaints and critiques – spontaneous, unrigged, unmanipulated, unfiltered, uninterpreted, unabridged and occasionally downright brilliant – are presented to the City Council free of charge at every Council meeting. but they are almost always ignored by the powers-that-are.

Though City Hall has made a big show in recent years of soliciting “community input” and engaging in “community outreach,” it has paid less and less attention to the residents who show up at Council meetings, and this year it has hit a new low – vetoing residents’ wishes on virtually every major issue.

The state mandates that every town revise its General Plan every twenty years. Santa Monica’s General Plan was last revised in 1984. The City didn’t begin work on the 2004 revision until 2004, which meant that Santa Monica. would be in planning limbo until the revision was complete and approved. At the outset, residents said that, after two decades of accelerated growth and the proliferation of outsized commercial developments, they wanted the restoration of the small scale, low key beach town they cherished.

Three years later, Santa Monica is still in planning limbo, out of compliance, and choking on traffic, and City Hall has predicted that the revision won’t be complete until 2009.

Three years ago, we called on the City to put all major commercial projects on hold until the new General Plan was complete. The state permits towns to declare a moratorium in these circumstances, and the City has previously declared moratoriums in all sorts of situations, and residents have repeatedly asked the City to declare this moratorium. Most recently, the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City and representatives of all the neighborhood organizations asked for the moratorium, but were rebuffed by City staff and the Council.

At the same time, staff and Council decided to enter into development agreements on new projects, over the repeated objections of residents.

For a number of years, residents and the City’s own Environmental Task Force have asked that the City adopt a more comprehensive traffic measuring methodology, but they were ignored. Now that the town’s traffic congestion has escalated to gridlock, the City has hired a traffic consultant – from San Francisco.

One of the most controversial projects now on the boards is the City’s own so-called “Village” in the so-called Civic Center. From its inception, the 360+ housing complex that combines affordable housing with $2 million “luxury condos,” has drawn fire from residents on innumerable many counts, but the City has ignored all of the criticism, though the project violates residents’ basic precepts for the General Plan revision.

And then there are the trees – the 50 ficus tress that the City wants to remove from Second and Fourth Streets in downtown Santa Monica as part of an $8 million “lmprovement” Plan.

The plan had been in the works for several years, but when the Council approved its final iteration, and residents learned that the plan included the removal of healthy trees residents immediately protested. Scores of them expressed their objections to the Council, but it was unmoved. The protests grew in kind and number. An organization, Treesavers, was formed. There were vigils, a rally at City Hall/

Then–Mayor Richard Bloom told Surf Santa Monica that it was unlikely that the City would change its mind, adding that “When a decision is made, it must be respected.” Treesavers disagreed. It went to Court and won a restraining order to prevent the City from removing the trees on the appointed day. It then applied to the Landmarks Commission for landmark designation for the trees, which would block their removal.

Another Treesavers’ vigil is planned this week (see story below), and the Natural Resources Defense Council has now entered the fray.

To date, in its usual autocratic fashion, City Hall has remained mute and has not given an inch. And so as 2007 ends, it’s City Hall 7, residents 0. And that’s just the big stuff.

In the now tragically ironic words of the late Benazir Bhutto, “Democracy is the best revenge.”