Gripe : ‘Let Citizens Back Into Santa Monica’

The tourism statistics prove it. Santa Monica is a terrific place for a holiday. Or a convention (a holiday that’s deductible). It’s the perfect destination for a day at the beach or a night on the town.

But more and more, for those of us who live here, Santa Monica is no longer the beachfront idyll it was.

Countless local government dollars are spent wooing tourists, shoppers, businesses and conventioneers with the premise that such activity adds countless dollars to city coffers. Refugees from the ‘burbs swarm our beaches, bringing huge picnic lunches and fast-food feasts. We give them sunshine and sand. They leave us trash strewn across our parking lots and back yards. Marina commuters hurtle Beemers and Lexii through our streets at perilous speeds, their driving skills putting equal emphasis on accelerator and horn.

Now, with the popularity of Santa Monica’s pedestrian Third Street Promenade, the city-that-can’t-say-no is planning to reduce traffic on Main Street to two lanes. And where will the cars go? You guessed it. Right down already over-traveled residential streets.

Condo developers drool at the prospect of yet another conversion or condemnation. Never mind that, on any warm weekend, those of us who live near the beach cannot find a parking spot within five blocks of home. Never mind that we have paid the city for a permit. And never mind that parking enforcement issues great numbers of citations. A ticketed car takes up as much space as an unticketed one. One more time, the city gets its bucks and the citizens get the shaft.

If the city’s goal is a picturesque seaside panoply of shops and cafes, boutiques and bistros, the bureaucrat/artists have forgotten the heart of such a portrait--the people.

Santa Monica, it’s time to let the citizens back into the city.