The Feb. 14 City Council candidate forum at American Martyrs offered a lot of theatrics, with accusations, arguments, and an occasional fist thrust into the air to punctuate an emphatic point. The calm woman at the far left of the panel was the exception. Hildy Stern didn’t argue, raise her voice, or issue much in the way of sound bites — at least not until, in her understated way, she spoke at the very end of the proceedings.
“It’s quite a diverse group that we are here,” she said. “We all bring different values to our roles at City Council, and we also bring different styles…I bring a steady, deliberative style to my role working with people and representing communities. So I’m going to listen. I’m going to take my time in understanding what the issues are, and what the different stakeholders’ interests are in any issue that comes before us. I don’t have a loud voice, but I have a very steady voice, and I have a very collaborative voice, and I think that is the most important way we can work together.”
Stern has run an unusual campaign. She emphasizes listening, and running local government in a way that utilizes data, rather than easy and perhaps more memorable talking points. For example, at the Feb. 14 candidate forum, she refused the temptation to say that Manhattan Beach should definitely keep its own fire department rather than joining LA County. She noted that a County study about merging MBFD with LAFD is still underway.
“We don’t even have a report from the county yet,” she said. “When we come back to residents and say here’s our decision, you want us to be informed before we make that decision. So we shouldn’t be standing here inflexibly telling you what we want to do until we get all the information and have an informed decision about how we want to protect our citizens and how we want to protect our fire department and really understand all the factors that go into doing the right thing for our community.”
Her deliberative manner and community ethos derive from her background.
Stern grew up in a suburban village of 3,000 people on the outskirts of Detroit. She studied business at the University of Michigan, and hotel, restaurant and institutional management at Michigan State, then worked in the hospitality industry, before earning a joint law degree at Wayne State and another law degree with an LLM in taxation from Georgetown University. She then took a job with the Justice Department in Washington D.C.
“Within the first week I had a docket with more than 100 cases…It was really a privilege to get that kind of experience.”
She and her husband, Jeremy, started a family while still in D.C., then spent “the longest year and a half” in Sacramento before discovering Manhattan Beach. It was love at first sight.
“We were just looking at communities and this one spoke most to the way we grew up, which was this lovely smaller community in a suburban sprawl,” Stern said. “Manhattan Beach is so much like that. We just dove in with our everything.”
That was 24 years ago. Early on, Stern learned an important lesson in community — that has to be actively built, not just taken for granted.
“I remember not long after we moved here, Halloween came upon us and we were walking the neighborhood and met only one other neighbor,” she said. “I couldn’t believe in a place like Manhattan Beach, on our street the kids weren’t out trick or treating, and the parents weren’t out welcoming their neighbors. So the next year I started our neighborhood block party for Halloween and within a couple years we had 150 people hanging out on my driveway, and every year for about 19 years we had the neighborhood block party.”
“What I grew up with, going down the street knowing all our neighbors, I have made that here. I don’t know if you can have that in every community,
but we certainly have that in Manhattan Beach. I think it’s something that is important, preserving our neighborhood feel, that for so many of us is why we are here.”
She’s been a dedicated volunteer at every level of MBUSD schools, as well as serving on the Hometown Fair board and with the Richstone Foundation and other local charities. She’s also reentered the business world, working for an offshoot of the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore to bring authors to communities.
Her community ethos underlies her platform as council candidate. She advocates effectively enforcing the ban on short-term rentals, increasing police presence in neighborhoods, and making sure that Manhattan Beach remains at the forefront of environmental stewardship among municipalities — taking things a little further, even, by increasing stormwater capture and recycled water use, and developing a plan to protect the city from the impacts of climate change.
Tellingly, her approach to such hot button issues as homelessness is anything but hot button. She believes the city’s establishment of a homeless task force and works with surrounding agencies to directly address the problem is the right approach.
“We don’t necessarily have this big change to that problem, so there is some kind of fear that has been introduced to our community that I think is very distracting,” she said. “Because what our city is doing to address our homeless population, I really do support it — their efforts, their training, and relationship building with our homeless population, that’s the way to really address this and make a difference. I mean, we want to stay safe, and I understand that, but we also want, for compassionate reasons, to help our homeless population and get them to their next stage of housing, whatever that is.”
“It takes some patience. It’s very important to me that we are people with tolerance.”
