Last night I went to a public workshop put on by the City about the Bergamot Transit Station Area Community Benefits. This was another of their rigged charade public comment meetings–pretending to get input of the community about how development should occur, when in fact the staff and Council members just meet with developers and let them do whatever they want. This is why traffic keeps getting worse, air quality has finally gotten bad on this end of town even with the ocean breeze (now blocked by all the developments allowed along the oceanfront), the whole City is one big construction project so you can’t get anywhere without making many turns to avoid traffic jams from construction, and bicyclists and pedestrians keep getting injured and KILLED from the sorry state of the streets supposedly to encourage alternate transportation, when in fact bikes are mixed with cars and pedestrians cannot cross a street on this end of town without taking their lives into their feet.

It was all set up to direct the discussion as the City wanted it to go, as such meetings always are. There was an enormous group of shills of development there, and of course 10 or 20 staff members. You had to sign in and get a name tag to get through the door. It was all set up to make you think the City and developers were in charge and everything had been decided, but you were there to make your meaningless after-the-fact tiny contribution about what community benefits the developers should have to give us, now that their development plans had all been approved, either in fact or as faits accomplis.

But something funny happened on the way to the planned charade. The public apparently had not been given enough help in learning our lines, since we did not cooperate by playing our little part. Instead, the audience took over the meeting after the presentation by three so-called experts meant to direct the discussion to our tiny topic.

One man said what are the developers being allowed to do that we are supposedly being paid for by these community benefits; unless we’re told that, how can we know what type and size of community benefits would make up for it, he asked. Another said why are we talking about this now, when our traffic is hopeless and you have allowed all this building–community benefits should have been considered first, not last after the developments already messed everything up so much nothing could make up for it. I added when I got my turn that we don’t have to put up with this meaningless supposed community benefits making up for ridiculous development, since every one of these decisions to approve development is by a development agreement, which is a legislative act subject to referendum, so if the City is going to insist on approving these developments with no real mitigation of outrageous harmful effects, all we have to do is get organized and vote against a referendum on the approvals.

When the meeting then broke up in the row all of us had caused, and the staff tried to make it look normal that now they were going to have their little breakout groups and we were going to discuss what our two top favorite types of community benefits were–as we good little children had been instructed to do–people surrounded me, took my e-mail address, gave me theirs, suggested I run for City Council. I told everyone we had started Occupy Santa Monica about this, and to see our website at www.occupysm.com and come to our potlucks at Village Trailer Park every Sunday starting February 26th from 3-6 so by the time the referendum has to be proposed to stop this, we will have 5,000 votes in favor of it.

It was awesome. Onward and upward.

bb