by John Burry
Local democracy is an interesting construct. Very often, local elections are decided with a low voter turnout. It can often seem residents don’t care enough about local issues to use their voice and their vote.
Here in Hermosa Beach, we have just been through a City Council election that coincided with a presidential election. That’s unusual for us, but it meant voter turnout was historically high. Two results stood out. The first was that a proposed sales tax ballot measure was emphatically defeated (a similar measure passed easily in neighboring cities). Secondly, there were three candidates (Michael Keegan, Elka Worner and Brian Sheil) who all campaigned on clear platforms of wanting to see significant change in the culture and operation of our City management. Those three candidates gained a clear majority of the votes in this historically high turnout. One of them was duly elected to the council, and there has been a noticeable shift in the dynamic since then. Local democracy in action, it seems clear.
Roll forward a few months, and those results are being forgotten by a small group of city activists who are fiercely loyal to City Manager Suja Lowenthal and her administration. Opponents are being described as a “vocal minority,” and even more bizarrely as “city saboteurs”.
To mischaracterize long term residents, property, sales and business tax payers in this way fundamentally misses the point. People who are prepared to speak up against what they see as mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility do so because they love their hometown, not because they want to tear it down. They do it because they hope things can be better, and they believe that we should aim higher. To deliberately ignore the mistakes of the last few years also ignores the chance to learn from them.
I was part of a group of residents who campaigned last year against the sales tax increase ballot measure. We did so in an attempt to create a ‘circuit breaker’ in a cycle of wasteful spending that saw residents being asked to pay for mistakes that our City Manager continually attempted to gloss over. When she spent $70,000 of taxpayer money on the ballot sales tax measure to ‘educate’ those very taxpayers on why they should pay more… well, that added salt to the wound.
During that campaign, we were contacted by scores of residents who told us they care deeply about the future of their town. Many of them told stories of being unable to navigate a City administration where the default answer was “no.” We heard from far too many business owners who were fearful of speaking up in opposition, and they all had some experience of punitive action by city staff, often in the form of permit issues or code enforcement threats.
In addition, they felt local government had lost sight of priorities. They understood budgets were tight, because that was true of their own household finances. What they couldn’t understand was a focus on new civic facilities that brought them little benefit when basic infrastructure was being neglected. They were tired of overspending and late delivery – things they couldn’t afford in their own lives.
Business owners were angry that little had been done to help to revitalize an ailing downtown commercial district. Talk of an “Economic Development Strategy” seemed to them to be just empty words. Little focus on real output, and little understanding of the pressures of private business. We heard about unending permit delays, heavy-handed bureaucracy, and a lot about the uncertainty that created for investment. We heard from entrepreneurs who had simply given up and had decided to invest elsewhere.
During all of this, the tone inside the Council chambers was dismissive. Opponents were attacked and insulted from the dais. Public comment was curtailed. Even this newspaper was described as “not being interested in the truth” when it dared to publish unfavorable or inconvenient articles. Not exactly the best way to foster broader engagement.
And so, to the present. It seems this week our City Council is faced with a decision as to whether to terminate the contract of City Manager Lowenthal. That is their prerogative, as clearly laid out in our Municipal Code. They need to decide whether Lowenthal has the skills and experience to navigate a new set of challenges, as the budget tightens further and the threat to us from Sacramento increases. That’s the Council’s job.
Wherever that decision takes us next, we should try to learn the lessons of the last year. At the very least, I hope we finally see a set of published performance measures for our City Manager. We should aim to engage more people in our local democracy, not less. And yes, elections really do have consequences. ER
