SANTA MONICA SELLS OUT VILLAGE TO DEVELOPERS
Daily picketing by Village Trailer Park residents and friends started May 10, 2012. You and all your friends are invited to this protest every weekday 5:30-6:30 p.m. in front of Village Trailer Park at 2930 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica 90404. This time has been chosen because due to the City’s numerous earlier sell-outs to developers, thousands of cars pass by going East within that hour, so many people can be informed quickly of our plight.
Kids will be selling lemonade to help pay the $1500 rent their parents will have to pay to rent an apartment if this plan goes through as the City has been pushing it, compared to $500 they pay now for space for the home they own. Drumming, cowbell and maracas playing, guitar music, marimbas, dancing, and everything else anyone thinks of to bring attention to this travesty will be used. Bring your own signs or banners or make them at the site–materials provided. It’s rumored two food trucks have already decided to park in the neighborhood since a crowd will be there. This protest is planned to continue until the threat of losing our homes is over.
Other contingents of VTP residents and their friends will soon begin picketing in the neighborhoods of the five City Council members who have repeatedly voted against keeping the last low rents in Santa Monica, so their neighbors will know not to believe and help them when asked for support in the future by these lying politicians claiming good works. (Registered Democrats received a promotion letter from Mayor Richard Bloom just yesterday claiming responsibility for “getting things done” in Santa Monica and asking to be elected to the State Assembly to do the same kind of work there. Actually, what he has gotten done is to sell out the City to developers, so our picketing will show his and his compatriots’ neighbors the truth, to counteract such implications he has served the people.) The others besides Bloom to be picketed in their own neighborhoods are Terry O’Day, Pam O’Connor, and Gleam Davis, all of whom are rumored to be running again for Council or some other office. If Councilmember Robert Holbrook announces he is running again, he will be picketed in his neighborhood as well.
The protests are then planned to spread to Mountain View Mobilehome Inn (formerly Mountain View Trailer Park, before the City bought it using tenants’ TORCA money). The City has a clear plan to eliminate all low rents in Santa Monica and turn all Pico Neighborhood homeowners into renters. We intend to stop them, by all means necessary.
Contact People: Brenda Barnes and Peter Naughton, www.occupysm.com, brenda@flashbyte.us, 2020peter@gmail.com, (310) 795-3762
Dear Editor Clifford:
I just saw how well this fits in with your call for a “wild rumpus” in Santa Monica, “now,” on Tuesday responding to the City Council meeting. Indeed, it is far past time for people to try other methods in addition to the two-minute majorly-restricted time to speak to the Council. It is insulting when we are ignored and even patronized by vocal groans when a large number sign up to speak.
Our VTP opposition team includes a professional urban planner with 30 years’ experience and a retired California real estate attorney. Nonetheless, we are ignored and what we say in voluminous writings is discounted and lied about by the staff, consistently, just as is the reaction to all other citizens’ opposition expressed in established channels. Time to cut a few new channels right through the steamroller, to mix a metaphor.
I told the Council one night that “the medium is the message” in how they treat citizens. It is clear that we are totally unimportant in their eyes compared to them, since we get two heavily-restricted minutes but they yammer on meaninglessly for an unlimited time. That yammering is even more insulting when it makes the meeting go so late that it is after midnight when one’s two minute time slot finally comes up. Having to listen to them should be classified as cruel and unusual punishment.
In solidarity and thanks,
Brenda Barnes