On April 7, Matt Kilroy walked away from the City Council dais for the last time as the city’s District 5 representative. On that day, he handed the reins to his successor, Laura Emdee, accepted the key to the city from Mayor Steve Aspel, and took his leave, ending 25 years of serving the City of Redondo Beach.
Unsurprisingly, his time serving the city began with him saying “yes” — a habit that’s gotten him in trouble with his wife, he said.
This time, it was to then-District 5 representative John Parsons, who asked Kilroy to join the city’s Junior Chamber of Commerce.
“He was president at the time of the Redondo Beach Junior Chamber of Commerce, and they were putting a softball team together. He knew that I coached baseball, and played a lot of sports,” so he asked if Kilroy wanted to be a part of the team — and the JCs, as he called it.
It wasn’t long before Kilroy became treasurer, and eventually president of the organization. When he aged out of the organization at 40, Parsons asked, again, if Kilroy wanted to put in an application for one of the city’s commissions. And, unsurprisingly, he did, joining the city’s Environmental and Public Utilities Commission, which then rolled into the city’s Planning Commission.
When Parsons termed out of his seat on the Redondo Beach City Council, Kilroy summed up his situation pretty easily: “I looked around and said, ‘Who else is going to run that knows District 5 as well as I do?’”
By that time, he says, he’d been teaching at Adams Middle School for about seven years, and he had been involved in the community through teaching and coaching for long before that, giving him quite a foothold in the area. His first campaign for District 5, he says, cost him about $5,000 — including the race’s runoff. “It was literally a grassroots campaign,” he said. “I never asked for monetary support — $1,500 was donated to me, and the rest was all mine. I never felt comfortable asking for money from people.”
The key to his victory, he says, was already knowing the people of his district going into the race. That, he says, is what brought him within 150 votes of winning the mayoral race in 2013.
In that election, against Aspel, Kilroy says he spent about $25,000 of his own money, with about $10,000 collected from friends and supporters. Despite that, he says, he was outspent about 2-to-1.
“I never felt comfortable going to people and twisting their arms,” he said. “Just like my first election, i was content to finance it on my own and let the voters determine the merits.” The difference, he says, was that District 1 voters came out in droves that year, causing him to lose the race despite winning three of the city’s five districts.
And though he says that he’s looked at the race multiple times “from a number of positions, of course,” he’s not broken up about the outcome. “I think it worked out better for me,” he said. “I don’t know if I could’ve done the job correctly and taught full-time” — and given the fact that teaching is a driving force in Kilroy’s life, he’s fine with the result.
What he loves, he says, is helping kids — that he can’t stand to see kids suffer because no one is willing to step up for them.
It keeps him saying “yes” — because, he says, he knows that most people say “no.”
“I have said no to people before, but not often,” he says. “When I know something is within my abilities to do it, and I know I can add something, whatever it is, I’ll do it.
“Most of the time, people spend a lot of time sitting on their rear ends anyway. Might as well do something with that time,” he says.
Now, he says, he feels that the city is in good hands — and part of that is due to the quality of his replacement.
“What made stepping down so much more palatable is that Laura Emdee, who I’ve known for years and years, is a great person who brings a lot to the table intellectually, and who has years of prior experience and contacts within the area,” he said.
In what has the potential to be a divisive council, Kilroy says, Emdee will be a voice of moderation.
“She won’t go into any particular camp — she’ll focus on the issues and try to resolve them as best she sees them,” he said, believing that she’ll take the same sort of levelheaded approach to the city’s issues as he did.
His legacy, he feels, was that of being a watchdog for the city, and a moderate voice on the council. “I was one of the few people willing to sit down with (District 2 Councilman) Bill Brand, for instance, and work out deals where we had common interest,” he said, noting that he and Brand had worked often to put together city budgets that were passed “almost verbatim” by his colleagues on the council.
He’s also particularly proud of his work protecting the wallets of the city’s taxpayers, saying that he’s “probably saved the citizens half-of-a-million dollars” in trash fees, by digging through reports. “That’s from doing your homework and understanding facts and figures,” he said — something he feels some members of the council aren’t doing, and should be doing more of. “The citizens expect you to do your homework,” Kilroy says.
Still, he feels that the city is in good hands — that, despite concerns about overgrowth, Redondo Beach is in a good place going forward, saying that he feels the city has positioned itself very well, post-recession. “I think that we’re going to be more and more of a destination spot,” he said. “The nuts and bolts are there, and we’ll be able to start trading on positive development,” with taxes from new hotel developments and an upcoming “facelift” to the South Bay Galleria providing a boon to the city, while property taxes and the city’s aerospace industries remaining strong.
While Kilroy may be done serving on Council, he still plans to serve the community, saying that he may very well run for school board in the future, crediting his knowledge of the system as both a teacher and a key figure within city government. He’s also considering a future with the Harbor Commission, and, potentially, another run at the mayor’s office — though, he says, he won’t run against Aspel again.
“I have no interest in running for state office, or anything outside the city of Redondo Beach though, that’s for sure,” Kilroy said. “But just because I’m out of office doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to push for projects that didn’t get the attention that I feel they deserved.”
“It was a great eight years,” Kilroy said, though he has mixed feelings about leaving. “It’s almost like a divorce where you didn’t get a say in the matter,” he said, though he repeated that his confidence in his successor has made it a much easier transition for him.
“I think the greatest thing about the last eight years has been the knowledge I’ve gained and the relationships I’ve built with people,” he said. “Not just in Redondo Beach, but in other cities as well. That just doesn’t go away.”
