“The will of the city will ultimately prevail.”

The man who said it was tall, distinguished. He had just concluded a statement to the Santa Monica City Council about the intrinsic value of the Village Trailer Park.

It was the July 24 City Council meeting, 104 people had signed up to speak. Most of them, including the tall, distinguished man, urged the Council to preserve the trailer park. It was not only a rare and authentic relic of a crucial vanished age, it was the longtime home of several dozen people – some of them frail, most of them old, but nearly all of them articulate, and angry. They owned their trailers, which were under rent control, and now a developer wanted to “relocate” them and build a large, ungainly, unneeded, mixed use commercial development on the site.

In his view, the park is just a commercial site ripe for development. In its residents’ view, it’s home, paradise – a sylvan oasis in the midst of the city with over 100 healthy trees, exotic birds, including a family of hawks, a swimming pool, a small library. HOME.

The laws governing it are not complicated, but there are a couple of jurisdictions involved, which gives the City attorneys an opportunity to vamp. Here and now, it’s an anomaly, and the City doesn’t like anomalies.

The Planning Commission devoted three sessions to its attempt to “fix” the proposed development, and protect the tenants and preserve their rights. The staff report was about 550 pages, setting a new record for municipal mumbling, but managed not to include some crucial material that Planning Commissioners Ted Winterer and Richard McKinnon had requested, as they told the Council.

Ultimately, not all the 100-plus people who’d signed up to speak spoke. Still, the session ran beyond midnight, and the Council grumpily opted to continue the meeting until August 28. But that meeting was canceled. Now the
developer has a new proposal, which he claims would save ten tenants’ trailers from the wrecking ball, but he has yet to present this latest variation, and indicate which trailers would survive, and why, or what would happen to the family of hawks?

“The will of the city will prevail.” Yes. No question.The tall man who made the statement was speaking of the will of the people of Santa Monica, but for some time the power of City Hall has rolled right over the will of the people. Still, the people’s anger is growing, and there are four open seats on the Council and election day is November 6.