Massey finds his balance in Hermosa Beach council run
Justin Massey in front of The Spot restaurant in South Hermosa. Photo
In 2015, when Justin Massey was running for a seat on the Hermosa Beach City Council for the first time, he asked an Easy Reader reporter to walk with him on Eighth Street, saying he wanted to provide an example of the kind of infrastructure fixes the city needed. He pointed out portions of the sidewalk that were uneven, too narrow for a wheelchair to pass along, or missing altogether.
Four years later, Massey is again running for council — this time as an incumbent — and Eighth Street has indeed been redone, with sidewalks 12 inches wider than the figure mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The project wrapped up recently, not long before next week’s election, in which voters will choose two among three candidates for five-year terms.
It’s evidence of what Massey says is a four-year record of acting on the priorities of the city’s residents. That it took as long as it did is also reflective of the character of Massey’s candidacy and time in office: a passionate, knowledgeable and energetic person who has been occasionally forced to check or scale back his ideas in the face of opposition from residents, the reality of living in a town where people have it good enough to be perpetually worried about moving too quickly away from the status quo.
“Compromise is the nature of the business. And ultimately, government at any level is a human enterprise, something that involves trial and error. All you can do is strive to account for all the information available, make the best decision for the community as a whole and, if you need to correct course, do so,” Massey said.
Massey entered Hermosa politics during the battle over oil drilling. An environmental lawyer, he emerged as one of the most articulate voices in opposition to Measure O, which would have lifted the city’s ban on oil drilling. In November 2015, eight months after a high-turnout special election in which voters decisively rejected oil, Massey was the top vote-getter of five candidates running for council.
The 2015 election transformed Hermosa politics, empowering a new group of city leaders, many of whom, like Massey, placed strong emphasis on environmental issues.
“A lot of people, myself included, got engaged because of that campaign and remain engaged,” Massey said.
But before long, Massey and the council sounded the limits of residents’ environmental commitment. Early drafts of PLAN Hermosa, the city’s updates to its General Plan, called for achieving city-wide carbon neutrality by 2040. Massey, in response to state environmental laws requiring public entities to consider “project alternatives,” helped sway his four council colleagues to vote to examine achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 as well.
Documents released in the run-up to public meetings on PLAN Hermosa forecasted that significant changes could be needed to meet the carbon neutrality deadlines, including possibly requiring environmental upgrades to homes when they were sold. The plan produced a vocal and intense opposition, some of it from people who, eighteen months earlier, had been working alongside Massey in the battle against oil drilling. Chastened by the outpouring, the council ultimately lowered its sights, changing the plan to call only for meeting the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets required by the state.
Massey similarly worked his way to compromise on other environmental issues, most notably on the Greenbelt Infiltration Project. A different council, before Massey was elected, agreed to site a large regional stormwater project beneath the Greenbelt between Second and Herondo streets. The project, when built, would have helped the city meet Clean Water Act goals by limiting runoff from the Herondo Drain. But it produced an uproar from residents living nearby, including those in the Moorings townhomes that abut the Greenbelt. In several public meetings after the controversy emerged, Massey defended the project. But he eventually relented, signing on to the council majority’s decision to abandon the Greenbelt plan and pursue smaller projects that better reflected the city’s contribution to the regional issue.
Resident Ira Ellman said he was impressed with the way Massey handled the Greenbelt project issue, feeling that it embodied both the candidate’s detailed grasp of the issues and his willingness to sit down and listen to people’s concerns.
Recently, Ellman was out walking when he bumped into Massey. They began discussing Community Choice Aggregation, a proposal under which cities purchase power from alternative sources that are carried over the existing grid. Massey has identified joining a CCA as one of his priorities if re-elected. Ellman had been initially against the proposal, but found himself inching closer to being won over.
“My opinion was, I didn’t want our city to be the first one on the block. But Redondo, Manhattan Beach, San Diego, they’ve done it. Now that we’re not the first guy in, Justin’s position is a lot stronger,” Ellman said. “But I still want to see the financials.”