Diana Gordon, co-chair of the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), will be the featured speaker at a meeting of the North of Montana Association (NOMA), one of the city’s neighborhood organizations, Monday night at 7 p.m. in the Martin Luther King Auditorium in the Santa Monica Main Library.

According to a press release, “Gordon will speak about the tsunami of new development projects planned in our city and what residents can do about it.” The meeting is open to the public.

Four years ago, SMCLC put a measure on the ballot (Prop T) that would have put a cap on new commercial development. With a war chest of over $700,000 provided by developers, an instant group, chaired by Terry O’Day and former mayor Judy Abdo, launched an intense anti-Prop T campaign that claimed passage of Prop T would “destroy” our schools.

There was no evidence that Prop T would have any effect on the schools, but O’Day and Abdo’s claim was seconded by such local leaders as former State Senator Sheila Kuehl, most of the
members of the City Council and leading City officials, and the measure failed.

Earlier this year, SMCLC called a press conference at which Santa Monica residents, joined by West L.A., Brentwood, Venice, Mar
Vista and other neighboring communities’ residents, protested spreading and chronic traffic gridlock whose principal source was Santa Monica’s commercial building boom.

Santa Monica currently has over 2 million square feet of new commercial development in the works.

NOMA has also battled City Hall. Several years ago, it stopped the wave of “McMansions” that threatened to overrun the neighborhood, and more recently it saved dozens of elegant palm trees that the City had targeted for extinction.

Currently, as the 2012 election campaign moves into high gear, there is a plethora of commercial development proposals in contention; the Miramar Hotel wants to double its size, increase its height and add 200 condos; a developer wants to wipe out a portion or all of a historic trailer park, and remove its mostly
elderly and/or fragile residents; the City is investing $44 million in a six-acre “gateway” park across Ocean Avenue from the Pier,but has canceled plans to renovate the historic Civic Auditorium; and it wants to replace Chez Jay’s, one of the great bars on the coast with a “nice” restaurant. And that’s just the beginning.

The list of affronts is nearly endless.