The Northridge earthquake (6.7) hit Southern California at 4:31 a.m. on January 17, 1994. Its peak ground velocity was the fastest ever recorded. 57 people were killed, 8,700 were injured, damage topped $20 billion and included the collapse of a portion of the Santa Monica freeway.

Santa Monica suffered significant damage. Many apartment buildings were yellow-tagged and some red-tagged, leaving many residents suddenly homeless. Especially hard hit were streets, residential and commercial buildings in a rough linear corridor stretching across town between Santa Monica Canyon and Saint John’s Hospital.
Then-President Bill Clinton declared Southern California a disaster area. He knew Santa Monica, as he had been the guest of honor at Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights first fund-raiser in 1979, when he was in his first term as governor of Arkansas. He appeared at the invitation of Derek Shearer, a proponent of economic democracy and SMRR leader, who had been at Oxford with Clinton.

Having tapped into a seemingly endless stream of disaster relief funds, Santa Monica’s redevelopment agency went on a two-decade bender that ended abruptly when Governor Brown killed the state’s redevelopment agencies and folded their revenue into the state treasury. Local officials raged against the governor, were full of faux-righteous indignation. But, in fact, the Santa Monica agency had spent far more money on fancy new projects than on redevelopment.
On Tuesday night, the Council approved the Staff’s contingency plan for the wind-down of the agency.

According to the staff’s analysis, virtually everything is subject to delay, suspension or cancellation – including the Pico Library, which has been in the works since 1983 and can honestly be categorized as redevelopment. Though the library survived the first cut, if City funds flag, construction on the $10 million library will stop and its funding will be diverted to projects that are already underway, such as the $47 million Town Square and Palisades Garden Walk, which of all the capital improvements on the list, is the least important, the one we could most easily forego – without any serious consequences.

The six-acre Palisades Garden Walk is located on Ocean Avenue just south of the Holiday Inn. City Hall’s original rationale for it was that it would serve as the “gateway” to the Santa Monica Pier and the ocean. Apparently, our leaders have long worried that, over the years, countless people have missed the pier and the ocean because there wasn’t a gateway.

In the City’s fervid prose, the new park “will provide a pivotal link between Santa Monica’s Civic Center and its major natural, cultural and economic assets. The site is uniquely and advantageously situated to become a civic destination as well as the new heart and center for Santa Monica.”

A gathering of mini-hills (with names), “a water feature” (if you have an ocean, you definitely want an adjacent water feature), viewing cages and 29 aluminum poles set in the crest of the mini-hills, in the shadow of the Holiday Inn, will become “a pivotal link,” “the new heart and center of Santa Monica.” What? Why? The Civic Center is virtually on top of downtown Santa Monica. And if Santa Monica truly does need a “new heart and center,” is this overwrought park IT?

And the bad news keeps on coming. Not only has the $40-million-plus, long overdue renovation and seismic upgrading of the Civic Auditorium been suspended, the building will be closed in June 2013. Once it’s shut down, it will never reopen, of course. It will simply, sadly molder in the sun, and finally the bulldozers will be called, and we will lose a unique historically and architecturally significant landmark.

Restored and revived by the brilliant architect Brenda Levin, who has given new life, purpose and spirit to some of Los Angeles’s greatest old buildings, the Civic could have become something to conjure with, a formidable presence in our townscape, a treasure.
The City’s primary concern: “The closure would affect the staff positions that had been previously identified for retention.”

The City also suspended its agreement with the Santa Monica-Malibu Uifird School District to make improvements to the Samohi campus that would benefit residents and students.

The same night, in addition to approving the staff’s mindless “contingency plan,” the Council dutifully followed staff’s lead and reinstated a 2010 ordinance that will allow auto dealerships to expand their operations by as much as 750 square feet, though a number of residents objected on a variety of grounds.

For the record, Council members Kevin McKeown and Bobby Shriver were absent.