Withers hopes to bring hometown voice to Council

Candidate Brian Withers. Photo by Richard Podgurski Jr.

Brian Withers is the youngest candidate running in the March 5 election for City Council. At 37, he can also tout the most years in town, because he’s the only Manhattan Beach native on the ballot.

Withers is a fourth generation local whose forbearers include a former mayor, a police chief, a co-founder of the Neptunian Woman’s Club, one of the establishing members of the local school board, and the first male child born after Manhattan Beach’s incorporation more than a century ago.

But the ancestor whose actions most compelled Withers to join the civic fray was his most immediate. His father was driving the family Cadillac down Manhattan Beach Boulevard one day when he saw something that made him stop. What he did next stuck with Withers the rest of his life.

“This guy threw his McDonald’s out on the grassy median there,” Withers remembered. “And my Dad didn’t say a word. He just throws his car in park, kind of walks up and deposits the litter into the guy’s open back window, and gets back in our car and drives on.”

Withers attended dental school at USC and returned to Manhattan Beach a decade ago to take over his father’s dental practice, which has been a business for half a century.

“The first thing I noticed is people running stop signs, people littering, disrespecting our beach,” Withers said. “That goes hand-in-hand with Airbnb, people who want to come into town and behave like jerks…There is going to be a new generation getting out of school, and it’s our job to set that example for them to have respect for our community.”

He has some general policy prescriptions, but they all fall under a single theme. Withers played guard for the Mira Costa Mustangs football team and was its captain his senior year, the 1998 season (he was part of a state title in 1997). Now he wants to guard his hometown.

“I want to protect the community just like I protected the quarterback,” Withers said. “We live in a beautiful beach town and there are people who would like to do what they want with our town for their own financial gain, without considering what matters to us. And we need to have people who can guard this community, and push back.”

Withers views short-term rentals as an assault on the city’s sense of community and supports a ban. He believes the police force needs a strong boost, particularly to better get traffic under control —  specifically running stop signs, driving fast in neighborhoods, and illegal left-hand turns. And though he is sympathetic towards local homeless, partly due to outreach he has done as a dentist serving that population, he also believes laws against camping on the beach need to be more staunchly enforced as a matter of public safety.

“Safety is definitely my number one priority,” he said.

He recalled when he’d come home from college with friends, and being 19-year-old men they tended to drive aggressively.

“I would say ‘Don’t do that in Manhattan Beach because you are going to get a ticket. That’s not a maybe; that’s a definite. Officer Fletcher is out there, and the minute you cross into our jurisdiction he’s going to get a Spidey sense sensation and he’ll find you. I’ll probably lose a million votes by saying this, but we need more Officer Fletchers.”

Withers believes Manhattan Beach has kept its sense of community intact.

“I’ve had a lot of people I went to high school with telling me, ‘What are you doing Brian? It’s dead. It’s done. It’s over,’” he said. “And I think it’s definitely changed. It’s not that same small town feeling that you had in the ‘80s, but there is still a lot of that left. And I see and live that every day.”

“As a doctor here, I truly feel connected to this city, and I don’t think that the small town feeling is dead,” Withers said. “I think it’s evolved, and will continue to evolve. From what I’ve heard from citizens about what they want out of their community, and how they want to raise their kids, they are no different than my parents 20 years ago…People want a neighborhood where they can walk their dog, know their neighbors by name, and have their kids play hockey in the streets and not worry about someone coming around the corner and taking them all out.”

Withers has not taken any contributions. He’s his own campaign manager, and he has spent all of $500 —  naturally, mostly at the Copy Shop, run by a second generation owner, Adam Winfrey, who was Withers’ classmate at Costa. He acknowledges that his MCHS peer group are “unicorns” locally, as few were able to stay in town. But he’s optimistic that just enough kids who leave town for college will keep coming back, keeping the thread running to create the fabric of a real community.

“The 60 percent of the community that just arrived, they moved here because they liked what we were doing. ‘Hey, looks like a fun party, we want in.’ They didn’t move here because they wanted to change it,” he said.

“People come down here and put on shorts and flip flops and they might be worth $10 million or $30 million but you won’t know that by looking at them. They just want to be beach guys, like we do. So despite the changing of the guard, Manhattan Beach is going to be okay…That is the job I feel charged with if I get elected. So when my friends come back to visit, we still have it. People are still waving at each other down the street, people are politely pulling over letting each other go by down the streets we can no longer drive two ways down…The comradery, the neighborhoods, the community is still there. That’s what people moved into; that is what they want. Everybody just got settled in and got their kids in school and they are loving it here, and now it’s under threat of being lost.”

“The guard analogy isn’t a bad one. I’ll guard this town.”

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