SMRR Endorses Lots of Incumbents, Few Newcomers
At its convention Sunday, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR), which has dominated Santa Monica politics for three decades, endorsed a flock of candidates for the open seats on the City Council, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education, the Santa Monica College Board of Trustee and the Rent Control Board.
SMRR currently holds a majority of seats on the Council and all the boards.
SMRR incumbent Council members Richard Bloom and Ken Genser were endorsed for re-election, Genser is seeking his sixth term. Bloom his second full term.
The other two Council incumbents whose terms are ending, independents Herb Katz and Bobby Shriver, are also running, as are more than a dozen other people, including Susan Hartley, a lawyer and member of the Airport Commission, Treesavers’ Jerry Rubin, and Ted Winterer, a member of the Parks and Rec Commission and backer of the Residents’ Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT). He sought and failed to win a SMRR endorsement, as did RIFT itself.
After some discussion, the assembled SMRRs were more or less equally divided On RIFT, and so they decided to remain neutral and neither endorse or oppose It.
Longtime SMRR leader and steering member and co-chair of the new anti-RIFT group, Save Our City, Judy Abdo, proposed that the Steering Committee might take a position later on RIFT, but the membership opposed that idea.
The SMRRS endorsed fledgling candidate Ben Allen, a Samohi graduate and UC student regent, and incumbent Maria Leon Vazquez for two of the four open seats on the Board of Education. They also endorsed Ralph Mechur, who was appointed to fill the vacancy created when board member Emily Bloomfield moved out of the complete, to complete the term.
Incumbent school board member Jose Escarce, seeking his third SMRR endorsement, was rebuffed. Though he had been endorsed by the teachers’ union and had the backing of SMRR leader of leaders Denny Zane, he was actively opposed bya group of parents of special education students at the convention. PTA leader Judith Meister didn’t make the cut either.
The three SMC board incumbents — Margaret Quiñónez-Pérez, Susan Aminoff and Rob Rader – were endorsed by acclimation.
As usual, far better coverage than the DP, which for some reason focused almost entirely on the process and none of the news. Thanks!
It is difficult to imagine a more complete transformation of a once marvelously effective organization like SMRR to its current incarnation of support for over-development, density, pollution, traffic, destruction of iconic neighborhoods, selling of the shoreline and far more. Few people familiar with SMRR’s origins and it battle with similar entrenched interests 30 years ago will miss the irony. Although it is clichéd, one is forced to remember that “All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And so goes SMRR into the abyss of the once valiant, but now decayed, and pitiful.